Unhealthy Neighbourhood “Syndrome”::A Useful Label for Analysing and Providing Advice on Urban Design Decision-Making?

Even before the COVID-19 pandemic, there was growing interest in designing healthier neighbourhoods. Adopting this perspective brings attention to how conditions in neighbourhoods (directly and indirectly) affect their inhabitants’ physical health and mental wellbeing. However, considerably less attention has been paid to how to alleviate such conditions through integrated interventions designed to operate specifically at the neighbourhood scale. To address this gap, this paper introduces the term “unhealthy neighbourhood syndrome” (UNS). The conceptual clarity and practical utility offered by using this term are critically examined. The paper contains a rigorous review and critical analysis of academic and grey literature on what are held to be the relationships between key features of the built environment and people’s health and wellbeing. It also examines literature offering advice on how urban designers should make neighbourhoods healthier. It illustrates the complexity of the range of issues involved and the complicated web of top down, bottom up and middling out actors that need to be involved in making decisions about them. Despite having inherent weaknesses, the term “unhealthy neighbourhood syndrome” is judged to be useful. It illustrates how seemingly separate issues operate in urban design, promoted for tackling specific symptoms of ill health, need to be addressed jointly through an integrated programme of parallel work streams operating at the neighbourhood scale. The paper is innovative in identifying the wide cluster of symptoms used to describe unhealthy neighbourhoods in the literature as being a “syndrome”. Its significance lies in its injunction that this syndrome needs to be tackled through integrated streams of remedial action drawing on experience and expertise that lie beyond those offered by the traditional membership of urban design teams

So close, yet so far away? the effects of city size, density, and growth on local civic participation

Recent studies in the U.S. context have suggested that political participation is a function of the size and concentration of a city’s population. Most of this research focuses on the idea that there is an optimal size and concentration of population that favors active political participation in terms of a higher propensity to vote in local elections, contact local officials, and attend community meetings. The conventional argument suggests a negative relationship between city size and political participation that is mitigated to some extent by the deeper social interactions generated by increased population density. We extend this research by also investigating the influence of population growth on the broader concept of civic participation. Civic participation is a multidimensional concept that requires the use of a broad set of indicators. We expand the number of measures to gauge civic participation at the local level by including data on the formation of volunteer associations, volunteer fire brigades and not-for-profit organizations as well as voter turnout. We test the hypotheses derived from extant research using aggregate data collected from Portuguese cities and discuss the implications of our findings for the literature on local civic participatio

Alignment and theory in Corporate Real Estate alignment models

This paper deepens the understanding of Corporate Real Estate (CRE) alignment through a meta-study of twenty existing alignment models. A qualitative hermeneutic method interpreted the models and their articles. This holistic analysis found alignment to be more complex and pluralistic than the individual models assumed. Four dimensions operating simultaneously were evident – a multi-valent relationship, multiple alignment forms, multiple cognitive objects to align and alignment in multiple directions. Alignment theorisation had positive and negative aspects. Positive is that good science was evident and had improved over time. Negative is that model theorisation had occurred mostly in isolation and was constrained by simplifications required to make modelling tractable. The research makes a meta-theoretical contribution through a more complete theorisation of CRE alignment as a phenomenon. This addresses a disordered sense to prior theory thereby representing a major conceptual improvement. A new alignment model is not proposed; rather through developed understanding a basis is provided to examine alignment in both theorisation and practice

Seeing Polycentrically: Examining Governance Situations Using a Polycentricity Lens

Because many types of governance can be polycentric, an observer faces a challenge in trying to identify and understand polycentric governance in actual settings. This chapter adopts the perspective of thinking about polycentricity as a lens through which to view governance situations. We take an inquiry approach, considering how one might determine whether and in what ways a given governance situation demonstrates the characteristics of polycentric governance. We proceed through a series of questions an observer could pose as part of 'seeing polycentrically', i.e., looking at the aspects and dimensions of polycentric governance introduced in Stephan, Marshall, and McGinnis as a way of building an understanding of a governance situation. We attempt to describe why these queries are important and how posing and answering these questions helps in examining and understanding the situation. We close the chapter by considering the challenges of assessing the operation of polycentric governance arrangements