Japanese Landscapes: Where Land and Culture Merge

From the busy streets of Tokyo to the secluded shores of Kyushu, from the volcanoes of Hokkaido to the temples of Kyoto, the treasured landscapes of Japan are brought to life in this concise visual guide. Drawing upon years of observation, Cotton Mather, P.P. Karan, and Shigeru Iijima explore the complex interaction of culture, time, and space in the evolution of landscapes in Japan. The authors begin with a discussion of the landscape\u27s general characteristics, including paucity of idle land, scarcity of level land, and its meticulous organization and immaculate nature. They then apply those characteristics to such favorite subjects as home gardens, sculpted plants, and flower arrangements, but also to more mundane matters such as roadside shoulders, utility lines, and walled urban areas. This unique blending of physical and social sciences with humanities perspectives offers a unified analysis of the Japanese landscape. Cotton Mather is the author of Beyond the Great Divide. P.P. Karan, chair of the Japanese Studies committee and professor of geography at the University of Kentucky, is the co-editor of The Japanese City. Shigeru lijima is professor emeritus of cultural anthropology in the Tokyo Institute of Ethnology. The comparison of current landscapes with what might be called traditional landscapes is instructive in a much larger context. -- Allen G. Noble An elegantly produced short book, of which about half is taken up by a series of black and white photographs of the Japanese landscapes. -- Geographical Journal Puts Japan’s renowned urbanization within a broader cultural and national context. -- Journal of Urban Design Will provide a valuable starting point for the study of Japanese landscape. -- Landscape Research A large part of the enjoyment of this book comes from the chance to compare notes with the authors about what is essential in Japan’s landscape, and to engage them in a quiet, one-sided debate while reading. -- Pacific Affairs The book excels in explaining and categorizing the faces of Japan through physical environmental constraints interwoven with cultural attitudes. -- Todd Stradford The authors draw on years of observation and experience to explore the interaction of culture, time and space in the Japanese landscape. -- UK Newshttps://uknowledge.uky.edu/upk_asian_history/1001/thumbnail.jp

The Future of Abandoned Big Box Stores : Legal Solutions to the Legacies of Poor Planning Decisions

Big box stores, the defining retail shopping location for the majority of American suburbs, are being abandoned at alarming rates, due in part to the economic downturn. These empty stores impose numerous negative externalities on the communities in which they are located, including blight, reduced property values, loss of tax revenue, environmental problems, and a decrease in social capital. While scholars have generated and critiqued prospective solutions to prevent abandonment of big box stores, this Article asserts that local zoning ordinances can alleviate the harms imposed by the thousands of existing, vacant big boxes. Because local governments control land use decisions and thus made deliberate determinations allowing big box development, this Article argues that those same local governments now have both an economic incentive and a civic responsibility to find alternative uses for these “ghostboxes.” With an eye toward sustainable development, the Article proposes and evaluates four possible alternative uses: retail reuse, adaptive reuse, demolition and redevelopment, and demolition and regreening. It then devises a framework and a series of metrics that local governments can use in deciding which of the possible solutions would be best suited for their communities. The Article concludes by considering issues of property acquisition and management

The Future of Abandoned Big Box Stores : Legal Solutions to the Legacies of Poor Planning Decisions

Big box stores, the defining retail shopping location for the majority of American suburbs, are being abandoned at alarming rates, due in part to the economic downturn. These empty stores impose numerous negative externalities on the communities in which they are located, including blight, reduced property values, loss of tax revenue, environmental problems, and a decrease in social capital. While scholars have generated and critiqued prospective solutions to prevent abandonment of big box stores, this Article asserts that local zoning ordinances can alleviate the harms imposed by the thousands of existing, vacant big boxes. Because local governments control land use decisions and thus made deliberate determinations allowing big box development, this Article argues that those same local governments now have both an economic incentive and a civic responsibility to find alternative uses for these “ghostboxes.” With an eye toward sustainable development, the Article proposes and evaluates four possible alternative uses: retail reuse, adaptive reuse, demolition and redevelopment, and demolition and regreening. It then devises a framework and a series of metrics that local governments can use in deciding which of the possible solutions would be best suited for their communities. The Article concludes by considering issues of property acquisition and management

Detroit in Decline: An investigation into the dynamics of two urban neighbourhoods

Urban decline is often understood as the opposite of urban growth, yet this conceptualization is oversimplified, obscuring a genuine understanding of the social and spatial realities of the city today. Through the study of Detroit and, in particular, through a close reading of two residential neighbourhoods, this dissertation investigates the complexities of decline. It examines the development of decline over time, as well as how it has differentially affected social and spatial patterns and practices within the city. This dissertation approaches the topic by engaging with theoretical work on decline, as well as combining historical analysis with empirical evidence through extensive on-site research. This work traces the historical development of Detroit from the beginning of the twentieth century through to the present day, focusing on the role of public policies, land-use patterns and infrastructural development in laying the foundations for urban decline. It challenges the accepted narrative of the cycle of ‘boom-bust-boom’, which views the city in terms of ‘growth-decline-recovery’, by illustrating how Detroit’s decline today is a resumption of various structural changes that were made during the city’s critical period of physical, economic and demographic growth. This dissertation then investigates two contrasting neighbourhoods to illustrate the dynamic ways in which different areas of the city have been affected by, and responded to, decline: Brightmoor, the epitome of widespread decay and abandonment, and Grandmont Rosedale, a community of five neighbourhoods that has maintained relative stability. This analysis demonstrates how urban decline transforms the city—dismantling and disassembling existing spatial and social networks and infrastructures—while simultaneously creating new ones. It deviates from much of the current research that romanticises Detroit’s ruination by focusing instead on everyday urban life. This dissertation argues that decline is not simply the opposite of growth, and therefore current scenarios speculating full recovery appear problematic

Sustainable Community Redevelopment: A Plan for Detroit's Lower Eastside

In the city of Detroit, decades of discrimination, unrest, and disinvestment have left scores of vacant and abandoned property and thousands of impoverished residents. This is clearly apparent in Detroit’s lower eastside, located just inside the city limits and bordered by affluent suburban Grosse Pointe Park. Here, in the heart of the lower eastside, the Jefferson East Business Association (JEBA) works to restore economic vitality as a means of revitalizing the overall conditions of the neighborhood. To aid JEBA in their strategic planning process, we developed a replicable model of sustainable community redevelopment and delivered a set of tailored suggestions for the lower eastside. Our research began with a review of national case studies relevant to six core topic areas critical to redevelopment: Economic Prosperity, Human Health & Well-Being, Vibrant Communities, Energy Systems, Material & Resource Flows, and Ecosystem Services. Through the course of our research, common principles emerged and informed the creation of the sixstep REPAIR model for sustainable community redevelopment. In this report, we demonstrate the model through application to the lower eastside, provide our resulting assessment of the neighborhood, and suggest detailed next steps for JEBA and the community. While specific guidance is provided for Detroit, the key findings are universal: First, a data-driven approach is essential in guiding proper resource usage and investment. Second, there is often a plethora of organizations working for the betterment of hard-hit urban areas. It is essential that these disparate stakeholders collaborate on a common plan to avoid redundancy and while accelerating community redevelopment. Stakeholders must rally behind a strong leader to most effectively assemble crucial resources and increase the likelihood of success. Third, a truly sustainable community will need to prepare for future challenges through mitigation and adaptation strategies. These methods must be established to increase resilience and realize true sustainably. We highlight a process of continual improvement in which metrics and indicators are regularly checked for both changes in trends and continued relevancy.Master of ScienceNatural Resources and EnvironmentUniversity of Michiganhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/69234/1/SCR-Paper.pd

Brownwood Comprehensive Plan 2012

The City of Brownwood‘s Comprehensive Plan is the chief tool to enable the management of growth and the delivery of public services in a timely and efficient manner.Three courses were devoted to the assessment of past and current community conditions and made recommendations of projected growth in the following areas: economic development, housing, land use mapping, zoning mapping, transportation and infrastructure, and facilities management.Texas Target COmmunitie

“TO NURTURE SOMETHING THAT NURTURES YOU”: CARE, CREATIVITY, CLASS, AND THE PRODUCTION OF URBAN ENVIRONMENTS IN DEINDUSTRIAL MICHIGAN

In this dissertation I investigate how gardeners and beekeepers in a small, deindustrial city in Michigan used their activities to produce their environments. Drawing on fourteen months of ethnographic fieldwork, I consider what kind of labor gardening is. For residents of Elmwood, gardening was a way to care for households, communities, and ecosystems. Furthermore, this care was performed through a type of creative, material labor that served to address forms of alienation experienced by these individuals. While all sorts of Elmwoodites gardened, they did so in ways that were specific to their experiences of race and class. These experiences, in turn, were directly shaped by Elmwood’s particular history. Legacies of racial tolerance and discrimination, industrialization and the resulting in-migration of rural Southerners, and the differentiated impacts of deindustrialization have all contributed to the production of social and spatial inequalities based on differences of class and race. I thus examine the ways race- and class-based inequalities shape the kinds of environments gardeners produced through their caring, creative labor. Employing the lenses of social reproduction and environmental gentrification, I discuss the ways gardeners worked to address sociospatial inequalities, as well as they ways their practices maintained them. I conclude that while ongoing racial inequalities and processes of class formation present challenges to gardeners’ desires to produce nurturing multispecies environments, these desires also motivated gardeners to engage with the ways they were entangled with other human and nonhuman beings, engagements that present possibilities for producing more socially equitable and ecologically urban environments

Casco Bay Weekly : 13 July 1995

https://digitalcommons.portlandlibrary.com/cbw_1995/1028/thumbnail.jp