Daylighting equity : evaluating efforts to daylight lower-income and minority areas in El Cerrito, California

In recent years there has been a push to bring nature and its benefits back into the built environment. Urbanized areas are seeing the revitalization and restoration of once buried urban waterways. This growing trend is known as daylighting and has become an increasingly popular method of bringing nature back to the city. Although nature is making its way back into the built environment, the benefits of nature have been excluded from low-income and minority communities. Park space for the lower income residents has been an issue in the environmental justice arena for years, and in these low-income areas, the lack of green space for the city’s most vulnerable is a problem that has yet to be solved. This report examines urban green planning, daylighting specifically in the City of El Cerrito, California to explore whether daylighting projects present EJ concerns in a California community and the use of analysis tools under the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) to explore social justice issues. The PR draws on the California Department of Transportation (CalTrans) desk guide for EJ analysis under NEPA and CEQA (California Environmental Quality Act). That adopts the same definition and criteria of evaluation as NEPA. Smaller regional planning organizations also use this method. Using this evaluation process, I located communities of concern at the census tract and block group level in areas that were not located near daylighting projects in the City of El Cerrito. Although NEPA is primarily used for highway and transportation projects, this report demonstrates the potential of NEPA EJ tools to examine social justice issues for green amenity planning.Community and Regional Plannin

Aging in Place - Solutions to a Crisis in Housing and Care - An Issues Update

The issue of how people can age in place in a safe, healthy and dignified manner is a front-burner issue, especially for the poor, frail elderly who live in communities served by the NeighborWorks network and by other community-based housing and health-care entities. The Southern District office of Neighborhood Reinvestment convened practitioners in the fields of housing, healthcare and supportive services to address this issue

Sky Garden Graduate Student Housing

This thesis presents an on-campus graduate student housing project that aims to revitalize its Downtown Atlanta neighborhood, contribute to Georgia State University’s academic goals and campus development plans, and address aspects of the housing problem that GSU’s graduate students currently face in Atlanta, Georgia. The literature review and data collected from the graduate student survey informed the design process by understanding the urban context history and identifying graduate students’ needs and preferences. The project aims to reposition a vacant office building located on-campus and convert it into student housing serving an age-diverse population offering common areas that contribute to students’ academic and social life and restaurants/coffee shops to help generate a sense of neighborhood community. The “city in the woods” concept inspired expanded interventions with natural vegetation and greenery, a natural and neutral interior color palette, and literal open-air punctuations through the building

Culture and Urban Revitalization: A Harvest Document

Advocates have long argued that the economic benefits of the arts and culture provide a firm rationale for public support. Recent scholarship on the "creative class" and "creative economy" is simply the latest effort to link cultural expression to community prosperity. In contrast, the social benefits of cultural engagement have received relatively little attention, even though -- as we shall see -- they provide a stronger case.We need to avoid a simplistic either-or choice between the economic and social impacts of the arts. People who live in our cities, suburbs, and countryside are simultaneously consumers, workers, residents, citizens, and participants. Culture's role in promoting community capacity and civic engagement is central to its potential for generating vital cultural districts. To separate the economic and the social impacts of the arts makes each more difficult to understand.This document provides an overview of the state-of-the-art literature on culture and urban revitalization. In Part 2, we place the creative sector in contemporary context with a discussion of three social dynamics. The "new urban reality" has restructured our cities by increasing social diversity -- fueled by new residential patterns, the emergence of young adult districts, and immigration; expanding economic inequality; and changing urban form. Shifts in the economic and political environment have changed the structure of the creative sector. Finally, the changing balance of government, nonprofit, and for-profit institutions in social policy development -- the shift to transactional policymaking -- has profound implications for cultural policy and the creative sector broadly defined. These three forces -- the new urban reality, the changing structure of the creative sector, and the emergence of transactional policy-making -- define the context within which culture-based revitalization takes place

The Potential for Public-Private Partnerships: Philanthropic Leaders Considering Housing as a Platform

Explores foundation leaders' approaches to housing as a platform for layering programs and services to improve quality of life, views on funding partnerships with the federal government, and suggestions for targeted collaborations. Includes case studies

Going Comprehensive: Anatomy of an Initiative That Worked -- CCRP in the South Bronx

Traces the story of the Comprehensive Community Revitalization Program (CCRP), a model approach to neighborhood redevelopment in the South Bronx that operated in concert with local nonprofit community development corporations

Campus Connection, May 5, 2000, Vol. 1 No. 10

CSUMB Celebrates Earth Week -- International Program Takes Off at CSUMB -- Staff/Faculty Profile: Meet Pat Coffey -- CSUMB Honors High School Seniors -- Study at Sea Sails Out of Bay -- NEWS BRIEFS -- CALENDARhttps://digitalcommons.csumb.edu/campusconnection/1009/thumbnail.jp

Revitalization 17:1

https://place.asburyseminary.edu/revitalizationrevitalization/1008/thumbnail.jp

A Philadelphia Story: Building Civic Capacity for School Reform in a Privatizing System

Following the 2001 state takeover of the School District of Philadelphia, a new governance structure was established and an ambitious set of reforms went into effect, generating renewed public confidence in the district. Despite this, maintaining reform momentum continues to be difficult in Philadelphia. This can be traced to on-going challenges to civic capacity around education. Defined by Stone et al (2001), civic capacity involves collaboration and mobilization of the city's civic and community sectors to pursue the collective good of educational improvement. Using interviews conducted with over 65 local civic actors and district administrators, and case studies of local organizations involved with education, the authors examine civic capacity in the context of Philadelphia. The authors find that while many individuals and organizations are actively involved with the schools, there are several factors that present unique challenges to the development of civic capacity in Philadelphia. Despite these challenges, the authors conclude that there are many reasons to be optimistic and offer several recommendations for generating civic capacity -- the kind that creates and sustains genuine educational change