The Saving Power of Community Creativity: Highlights of Arts, Culture, and Creative Placemaking Responses to COVID-19

For several years, the Center for Community Progress (Community Progress) and Metris Arts Consulting have explored how arts and culture organizations are revitalizing communities that have been hit hard with vacancy and abandonment. In mid-2020, as we began to understand the pandemic's devastating health, economic, and social impacts on communities and the policy demands surrounding the calls for racial justice, we also began hearing how community-based organizations using arts and culture had shifted their work to provide critical community support. This resource highlights the efforts of creative leaders during the pandemic and also seeks to inspire others trying to address acute needs.

The Revitalization of Economically Depressed Cities: Engaging Youth in Urban Agriculture and Vacant Lot Beautification

Large urban areas across the country have fallen deep into poverty while the surrounding ring of suburban areas continues to prosper. Vacant houses and lots, few shops and restaurants, and poverty-stricken residents are predominant features in major cities. But what can be done to improve life in these economically depressed areas? Focusing on youth is crucial; urban-based civic engagement programs designed specifically for youth can have the dichotomous effects of providing young people with new interests while showing them the possibilities of their actions. Not only can actively engaging youth in their communities attempt to break the cycle of poverty by inspiring them to achieve, but it can improve blighted cities as well

Blueprint Buffalo Action Plan: Regional Strategies for Reclaiming Vacant Properties in the City and Suburbs of Buffalo

Over a period of about nine months, the NVPC team conducted interviews and gathered insights that have resulted in this report. During the study period, Buffalo–Niagara emerged as a region broadly challenged by decades of disinvestment and population loss, but also as a close network of communities singularly blessed with a wealth of historic, transit-friendly, and affordable neighborhoods and commercial areas. Building on the City of Buffalo’s “asset management” strategy first proposed in 2004 by the Cornell Cooperative Extension Association—and now formally adopted by the Buffalo Common Council as part of its comprehensive 20-year plan for the city—the NVPC team sought to reexamine how the revitalization of Buffalo’s vacant properties could actually serve as a catalyst to address the region’s other most pressing problems: population loss, a weak real estate market in the inner city, signs of incipient economic instability in older suburbs, quality-of-life issues, school quality, and suburban sprawl

Building Healthy Places with People and for People: Community Engagement for Healthy and Sustainable Communities

Over a 25 year period, residents of the El Sereno  community in Los Angeles have opposed efforts of  investors seeking to build luxury homes on the area  known as Elephant Hill.  After years of community  organizing—canvassing door to door, developing a  broad-based coalition and mobilizing supporters to  attend public hearings—residents declared victory after  the City Council agreed to settle a lawsuit with the  developers by buying the 20-acre site for $6 million to  create a future park.  Residents are glad that a chunk of one of Los Angeles' last undeveloped hillsides  will remain open space in this park poor, working-class Latino community.  Opposition efforts reignited  in 2004 not only to preserve open space, but also to encourage public safety and counter threats to  gentrification.  Elva Yañez, the El Sereno resident who led the most recent efforts to preserve Elephant  Hill, hailed the settlement as a victory for environmental justice: "After a long and hard fought struggle,  the residents of this community have been afforded the environmental protections that are rightfully theirs.   We are pleased that this poorly planned project is not moving forward and environmental justice has  prevailed." [Contreras & Sanchez, 2009; Yañez, personal communication, 2010

Online/offline preservationists. The material engagement in Syrian cultural heritage between Facebook and offline life

This article follows the activities of a group of Syrian preservationists, that take place both in Facebook and offline. The virtual dimension of social media doesn’t entail the abandonment of the offline dimension of their activism. The latter often involves a struggle against the material changes of structures and the risks the use of forbidden materials (mainly concrete) entails in the heritage sites. The destructions provoked by the current war add to the causes that led Unesco to list the Damascus medina among the heritage sites at risk. The debate about safeguard and transformation of heritage shows the influential role of civil society in Syria and the existence of an area of criticism, admitted by the regime, though in a non-democratic Middle Eastern countr

The Reactivation of the Public Space

Wireless fidelity, or better known as "wi-fi" emerged during two movements that occurred in cities throughout the United States over the past two decades, the rise of wireless technology in public places and revitalization of many older city centers. Both movements are extremely important with regards to how public places are utilized in cities today and in the future.Master of City and Regional Plannin

Eating your greens: community gardens and gentrification in Oakland

The issue of gentrification is paramount to the viability of poor and at risk communities in Oakland. Literature on gentrification has historically focused on larger societal and economic movements, but little has been studied about the role planned green space and gardens play in the spatial transformation of the urban environment. In this case study of two gardens in West Oakland, I explore questions of community involvement in the gardens, the role of garden aesthetics in attracting development and new residents to the neighborhood, the unique relationship between the City government and the gardens, the larger symbolic significance of green space in contemporary urban society, and the use of urban gardens as sites of resistance against gentrification. Through interviews, participant observation, analysis of City planning documents, and a social constructivist, grounded theory approach to this qualitative case study, I find that while the two gardens are organized around different concepts of citizenship, resistance, and approaches to community resilience, they have both been used by the City in advancing its development plans, demonstrating the vulnerability of radical political and cultural movements to recuperation by capital and the state. However, the gardens and adjacent green spaces still serve as places of community and belonging for some residents, and at night are transformed into sites of resistance at night for houseless residents and sex workers. This has implications for the strategies of food justice and anti-gentrification organizations, and opens up the potential for future research into new tactics of resistance and community building as the onslaught of gentrification continues to displace marginalized residents in Oakland

Carbon Free Boston: Social equity report 2019

OVERVIEW: In January 2019, the Boston Green Ribbon Commission released its Carbon Free Boston: Summary Report, identifying potential options for the City of Boston to meet its goal of becoming carbon neutral by 2050. The report found that reaching carbon neutrality by 2050 requires three mutually-reinforcing strategies in key sectors: 1) deepen energy efficiency while reducing energy demand, 2) electrify activity to the fullest practical extent, and 3) use fuels and electricity that are 100 percent free of greenhouse gases (GHGs). The Summary Report detailed the ways in which these technical strategies will transform Boston’s physical infrastructure, including its buildings, energy supply, transportation, and waste management systems. The Summary Report also highlighted that it is how these strategies are designed and implemented that matter most in ensuring an effective and equitable transition to carbon neutrality. Equity concerns exist for every option the City has to reduce GHG emissions. The services provided by each sector are not experienced equally across Boston’s communities. Low-income families and families of color are more likely to live in residences that are in poor physical condition, leading to high utility bills, unsafe and unhealthy indoor environments, and high GHG emissions.1 Those same families face greater exposure to harmful outdoor air pollution compared to others. The access and reliability of public transportation is disproportionately worse in neighborhoods with large populations of people of color, and large swaths of vulnerable neighborhoods, from East Boston to Mattapan, do not have ready access to the city’s bike network. Income inequality is a growing national issue and is particularly acute in Boston, which consistently ranks among the highest US cities in regards to income disparities. With the release of Imagine Boston 2030, Mayor Walsh committed to make Boston more equitable, affordable, connected, and resilient. The Summary Report outlined the broad strokes of how action to reach carbon neutrality intersects with equity. A just transition to carbon neutrality improves environmental quality for all Bostonians, prioritizes socially vulnerable populations, seeks to redress current and past injustice, and creates economic and social opportunities for all. This Carbon Free Boston: Social Equity Report provides a deeper equity context for Carbon Free Boston as a whole, and for each strategy area, by demonstrating how inequitable and unjust the playing field is for socially vulnerable Bostonians and why equity must be integrated into policy design and implementation. This report summarizes the current landscape of climate action work for each strategy area and evaluates how it currently impacts inequity. Finally, this report provides guidance to the City and partners on how to do better; it lays out the attributes of an equitable approach to carbon neutrality, framed around three guiding principles: 1) plan carefully to avoid unintended consequences, 2) be intentional in design through a clear equity lens, and 3) practice inclusivity from start to finish

The Paint Marks the Place: The Mural Art of Resistance in Oakland, California

In the context of both historical and current urban redevelopment schemes in Oakland, California that displace black, brown, and indigenous peoples, businesses, and communities, I examine the work of mural artists and activists to resist erasure and mark belonging. Specifically, this research explores the relationship between the practice of intentional community mural-making, projecting narratives of culture and resistance, and geographic concepts of place-making, and sense of belonging. The research was conducted through a critical feminist anti-colonial methodological process of artography. Through semi-structured in-depth interviews with artists, residents, and community activists, photography, archival media analysis and a case study of the Madre Maize (2012) mural by the Community Rejuvenation Project crew, I uncover how the process of mural-making is a means of place-making by allowing some of the most societally marginalized to author the landscapes in which they dwell, work, and live. This thesis argues that intentional community mural art is a means of counter monument, community justice, and an act of decolonization through embedding a decolonial aesthetic in the fabric of urban landscapes, uncovering hidden black, brown, and indigenous geographies and contributing to larger movements of social justice making

Interpreting Code Enforcement Complaint by Complaint: A Hermeneutic Phenomenological Experience in Document Analysis

The current hermeneutic phenomenological study was completed to provide direction for the content analysis of code enforcement complaint documents by municipal code enforcement agencies. This hermeneutic interpretive research was conducted using qualitative content analysis of greater than 500 code enforcement complaint documents submitted to a municipal code enforcement agency over 12 months. The phenomenological research was guided by the following research questions: 1.What indicators are identified by content analysis in a complaint document received from the community of shareholders of a municipal code enforcement agency? 2. What manner of delivery of a complaint document is most frequently exercised by the shareholders of a municipal code enforcement agency? 3. What may the frequency of violations recognized in complaint documents inform a municipal government of a community and its needs? 4. How may a municipal government advance the results of a content analysis of code enforcement complaint documents towards promoting improvements in a community? The theories of symbolic interactionism and Actor-Network Theory (ANT) were used within the methodological paradigms of hermeneutics and phenomenology to understand the function and experience of a complaint document within the code enforcement system and its shareholders. The findings of this research identify how the content analysis of code enforcement complaints can reveal and prioritize the needs, threats, and trends that impact a community and lead to municipal programs that focus on those community issues with collaborative conflict resolution programs that can improve the sense of community for its shareholders, its government and the field of conflict resolution