616 research outputs found
Restoring Prosperity: The State Role in Revitalizing America's Older Industrial Cities
Presents a five-part agenda and organizing plan to reinvigorate the nation's older industrial cities, and aims to mobilize governors, legislative leaders, and local constituencies toward advancing urban reform
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
The W Life Cycle Model and Associated Methodology for Corporate Web Site Development
The last few years witnessed the increasing internal and external use of the Internet by organizations. Web sites grew in sophistication from conventional sites composed of a simple collection of Web pages for public relations or marketing to complex Web information systems dealing with business-to-customer transactions or business-to-business networks. However, most organizations still do not have a formal process of Web site development, and corporate Web sites are often developed in an unorganized and uncoordinated fashion. The results of this chaotic situation include slow delivery, conflicting standards, discrepancies with respect to corporate objectives, and redundant development efforts. To help alleviate this situation, this paper presents the W software life cycle model for corporate web site development along with an associated methodology to guide Web development groups in their endeavors. The proposed process model and methodology are based on insights gleaned by studying development projects for three types of corporate Web sites: intranets, Web-presence sites, and transactional sites. However, because Web information systems are more complex, the article also provides recommendations for how the methodology can be adapted to handle these types of applications better
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Routes To the Renaissance for Pittsfield, MA
The goal of the Master of Regional Planning Studio is to develop a student’s techniques for collecting, analyzing, and synthesizing spatial and non-spatial data and then presenting that collective data in a manner (i.e., report, video, presentation, and charettes) that is understandable to academics, professionals, and the public. Planning Studio allows students to integrate knowledge from coursework and research, and apply such knowledge to resolving representative planning problems. At UMASS Amherst, these problems are found in neighborhood, rural, urban, and/or regional settings.
In the fall of 2015, the City of Pittsfield contracted the MRP Studio to create a vision plan to connect the goal’s of its Master Plan in 2009 to current development regulations that encourage development and redevelopment of an appropriate size, scale and design that meets the short term and long term vision of the community. The vision plan encompasses the following: Spatial and Physical Boundaries of Major Gateway Corridors: Analyze the major gateways and develop tools to make them more welcoming. Permitted Use Table and Definitions: Review, clarify, and consolidate the land-uses listed in the table to assess deficiencies and unclear definitions. Design Guidelines: Create a manual to guide architectural aesthetic standards for new retail developments. Sign Ordinance: Implement a streamlined regulation that improves sign quality. Site Plan Review: Develop thresholds to create clearer processes for review of development projects. Resolution for Split Parcels: Identify all properties that fall within two zoning districts and develop a mitigation tool. Pro Forma and Multi-Family Housing: Develop a financial model that will estimate the construction and maintenance cost of multi-family housing units and make projections for new development’s financial return
The Last Remnant: Pentecostal Salvation, Desire, and Queering the Holy Ghost Experience in the Rust Belt
Iconoclastic parishioners who gather at a Pentecostal church in Rust-Belt Indiana envision their movement to be the final piece of a reconfigured eschatological prophecy; this is a last-day revival that evangelicals have been anticipating for over two thousand years. Having been estranged by intolerance and misunderstanding of scripture, as the narrative goes, God\u27s gay children are returning to the Shepherd\u27s fold. The predominately white and working-class congregation seeks a redefinition of what it means to be homosexual in the United States: persons not thought of simply for sexual desire but a shared normalcy with other moral Christians. Mainstream Pentecostals demonize the dubious movement as a perversion of the sacred, as evidence that they are living in the End of Days. In this dissertation I explore the innovative ways in which believers negotiate and coalesce their queer and Pentecostal identities as they entertain a spirit world and prepare for the Second Coming of Christ. Amidst the homophobia of mainstream evangelicals and the perceived moral dangers of queer America, the reconciled Pentecostals negotiate identity dissonance as they speak in tongues, cast out devils, become slain in the Spirit, and dance as a Holy Ghost mounts their born-again bodies
Forming Cleveland: A Visual Arts, Craft and Design Industry Study: Executive Summary
“The purpose of art is washing the dust of daily life off our souls.” - Pablo Picasso
Art, as illustrated by Picasso’s quote, possesses the unique ability to cleanse our souls of everyday monotony. Given the transformative capabilities of art, we wondered how the arts could help revitalize a city, and, perhaps, revive an entire region. Can the same then be true for the “souls” of our cities, or even the collective soul of a region?
The Visual Arts, Craft, and Design (VACD) sector, encompassing a wide spectrum of creative endeavors, has an impact on all of us in often surprising ways. When we speak generally of the “visual arts,” names like Rembrandt, Cassatt, Warhol, and Bearden may come to mind; however, the Cleveland VACD sector, including all of Cuyahoga County for the purposes of this study, reaches well beyond conventional definitions of art to encompass a variety of consumer products such as jewelry, furniture, and even homes
Forming Cleveland: A Visual Arts, Craft and Design Industry Study: Executive Summary
“The purpose of art is washing the dust of daily life off our souls.” - Pablo Picasso
Art, as illustrated by Picasso’s quote, possesses the unique ability to cleanse our souls of everyday monotony. Given the transformative capabilities of art, we wondered how the arts could help revitalize a city, and, perhaps, revive an entire region. Can the same then be true for the “souls” of our cities, or even the collective soul of a region?
The Visual Arts, Craft, and Design (VACD) sector, encompassing a wide spectrum of creative endeavors, has an impact on all of us in often surprising ways. When we speak generally of the “visual arts,” names like Rembrandt, Cassatt, Warhol, and Bearden may come to mind; however, the Cleveland VACD sector, including all of Cuyahoga County for the purposes of this study, reaches well beyond conventional definitions of art to encompass a variety of consumer products such as jewelry, furniture, and even homes
To Polish or Demolish? : The Resurgence and Reimagining of American Rail
American railway stations stand tall among other buildings for reasons other than their physical size. These stations were born out of the monumental school that commanded buildings to serve higher purposes, to represent the ideals and aspirations of the people who built them. To accomplish this grand vision stations were built to artful extremes; bell towers, Doric columns, and waiting rooms the size of football fields were not uncommon features. Due to their elaborate forms, these stations have not weathered the tests of time as have smaller, simpler buildings. After a few tumultuous decades of reckless destruction, planners today have begun to embrace the power of urban renewal, and railway stations have been their laboratories. The following research concludes that stations are ideal specimens for modern-day reuse when they are unable to fulfill their original purposes. I attempt to uncover which environmental conditions are most hospitable to renewal, and find that collective action and institutional advocacy are the most important factors keeping these icons alive
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Volatile photovoltaics: green industrialization, sacrifice zones, and the political ecology of solar energy in Germany
The development of solar energy has been depicted as a paradigmatic break in unsustainable global growth, largely because it is framed as an innovation with minimal carbon emissions. On the contrary, drawing on literatures from spatial justice and political ecology, including on authoritarian populism, this article analyzes the rise and fall of the solar industry and the associated failures of “green industrialization” in Bitterfeld, East Germany—an area that is characterized by political, economic, and social peripheralization, marginalization, and the rise of the far right. The development of solar energy, we argue, is merely the latest iteration of an industrial growth model that is rooted in a similar modernist mode of development. Based on original mixed methods field research in eastern Germany, it argues that many of the same inequalities that characterize fossil fuels and “gray” (de)industrialization—undemocratic and unsustainable industrial processes, the concentration of corporate power and profits, and externalized waste and pollution—are replicated by solar energy. What is distinct is the fact that such contemporary “green” manufacturing processes appear to negatively affect a wider and more dispersed range of spatial locations, also denying these locales the benefits of accumulation, production, and consumption. This unevenness reflects the reconfiguration of global supply chains over the past thirty years and the nature of green production processes that depend on a wider range of inputs that invariably produce localized sacrifice zones. We offer a spatial justice framework for solar energy, zooming in at the manufacturing stage, to explore the multiple sacrifice zones at the different stages of solar energy. Finally, we highlight the politics of resignation that is the product and foundation of capitalist realism that serves to dispossess communities around solar energy manufacturing sites in eastern Germany and might feed into the rise of the populist far right. The article contributes to the emerging critical literature that analyzes the dark side of renewable energy and, in doing so, reveals the social and ecological costs of energy transitions that continue to be underresearched yet deserve heightened attention
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