Resident Participation: A Community-Building Strategy in Low-Income Neighborhoods

Resident participation has been an area of community development aimed at increasing involvement of tenants in housing development, management and community-building. The precise roles and mechanisms of resident participation are not well understood, however. This paper explores the role of resident participation and its interaction with other factors that drive community revitalization. By understanding the necessary conditions, factors and other variables that strengthen resident participation, public policies can help low-income populations manifest their power and make a difference in their communities. The research presented here (1) describes the challenges and benefits of resident participation; (2) identifies examples of residents successfully contributing to the development and management of their homes; (3) details the conditions necessary for success; and (4) addresses the issue of assessing effectiveness. For those seeking to encourage resident participation, the are three major challenges include time and money; limited options due to economics; and limited community capacity. Examples of successful resident participation are presented, such as the Demonstration Disposition in Boston -- one of the most notable examples of resident participation in development in the past 10 years. Building management has also been an arena for various levels and types of resident participation, and many community development corporations have developed creative ways of involving residents in community-building efforts. The interplay of external and internal factors together creates conditions for resident participation. This paper identifies four major factors: impetus, politics, resources and values, describing the internal and external resources affected by each. To connect these external and internal resources, bridging resources of trust, community organizing, strategic partnerships and organizational capacity are necessary. Community planning and education make up a noteworthy bridging resource that allows for the necessary learning process to take place. Community education and planning happen in three phases: building a foundation, teaching skills, and following through. While there is general support for resident participation in housing development, management and community-building, measuring its effectiveness has received limited research attention. This paper describes the effectiveness of resident participation looking at the individual, building and community levels. These testimonials will be strengthened if hard measures of resident participation are developed and used to study its effects

Chiral Symmetry Breaking in an External Field

The effects of an external field on the dynamics of chiral symmetry breaking are studied using quenched, ladder QED as our model gauge field theory. It is found that a uniform external magnetic field enables the chiral symmetry to be spontaneously broken at weak gauge couplings, in contrast with the situation when no external field is present. The broken chiral symmetry is restored at high temperatures as well as at high chemical potentials. The nature of the two chiral phase transitions is different: the transition at high temperatures is a continuous one whereas the phase transition at high chemical potentials is discontinuous.Comment: RevTeX; talk presented at the 2nd Latin American Symposium on High Energy Physics, San Juan, Puerto Rico, April 199

Conformal Invariants of Manifolds of Non-positive Scalar Curvature

Conformal invariants of manifolds of non-positive scalar curvature are studied in association with growth in volume and fundamental group.Comment: 12 pages, Latex Forma

Dynamic building envelopes

Chris Leung explains his recent research into deployable external insulation: dynamic facades which use paraffin wax and passive environmental technology to move between open and closed states and allow what has until now often been mutually exclusive – daylight and minimal heat loss

Neutrino Oscillations from String Theory

We derive the character of neutrino oscillations that results from a model of equivalence principle violation suggested recently by Damour and Polyakov as a plausible consequence of string theory. In this model neutrino oscillations will take place through interaction with a long range scalar field of gravitational origin even if the neutrinos are degenerate in mass. The energy dependence of the oscillation length is identical to that in the conventional mass mixing mechanism. This possibility further highlghts the independence of and need for more exacting direct neutrino mass measurements together with a next generation of neutrinoless double beta decay experiments.Comment: 7 pages LaTE