A Tale of Three Northern Manhattan Communities: Case Studies of Political Empowerment in the Planning and Developing Process

This article reviews three development proposals in Northern Manhattan communities, how community boards responded to those proposals, and how the responses affected the outcome of each development. The article begins with a broad overview of the history of community boards\u27 role in urban planning in New York City. It finds that boards have become increasingly influential in new development plans, empowering the communities they represent. The Article goes on to analyze three recent proposals in turn (an expansion of Columbia University in Morningside Heights, a residential development in Central Harlem, and a comprehensive rezoning of East Harlem) according to zoning, community reaction, and result. It concludes that by proactively pushing for rezoning and hiring Civitas Citizens, Inc., an urban design, community advocacy organization to oversee a rezoning plan, the community board of East Harlem was able to take control of preserving the character of its neighborhood

Gentrification or...? Injustice in large-scale residential projects in Hanoi

Large-scale residential developments on expropriated lands in periurban Hanoi resemble forms of gentrification seen elsewhere. But is it gentrification? Current debate over the definition of gentrification has focused on whether the term has become too broad to be useful in different institutional and spatiotemporal contexts. While some push for a generalizable definition based in capitalist development, others argue that the term harbors Western assumptions that fail to usefully explain unique local circumstances. The paper first identifies one such conceptual assumption that must be made explicit since it provides the term’s politicizing thrust: displacement generates an experience of social injustice. Then, drawing on surveys and interviews with residents as well as interviews with real estate agents, government officials, and academics conducted in Hanoi between 2013 and 2017, the paper evaluates five types of displacement on the city’s outskirts. Because displacement only occurs in marginal cases and generates limited feelings of social injustice, the term “gentrification” is of little use. Instead, the paper suggests that in a context of rapid urbanization and relatively inclusive economic growth like that of Hanoi the terms “livelihood dispossession” and “value grabbing” may better capture the experience of social injustice and are therefore more likely to generate political traction

THE STATE OF THE ART Regional economies, open networks and the spatial fragmentation of production Socio-Economic Review Socio-Economic Review Advance

In this article, we review recent developments in the extensive literature on territorially embedded production systems in the developed world, with a particular eye towards changes that have (or have not) occurred over the last decade. Improvements in transportation and communication technologies and the advent of global production networks have put newly into play the degree to which industrial communities must be located in specific and discretely bounded territories. What had been a relatively territorially circumscribed, and thus fundamentally organizational, fragmentation of production has acquired a more pronounced spatial dimension in recent years. This has raised new questions for regional economic governance that require new study of links not only within regions and sectors, but also between them. In particular, there is a need to understand whether and how local sources of competitive advantage can be transposed to include global dimensions. Keywords: agglomeration, economic geography, economic sociology, globalization, outsourcing, regional economies JEL classification: O18 regional, urban, and rural analyses, O57 comparative studies of countries In this article, we review recent developments in the extensive literature on territorially embedded production systems in the developed world, with a particular eye towards changes that have (or have not) occurred over the last decade. We do so because improvements in transportation and communication technologies and the advent of global production networks oriented increasingly towards the ever more sophisticated production capabilities available across the low-wage world have combined, some fear, to undermine-or at least to alter-the relevance of spatial proximity in such systems. To foreground ou

A Tale of Three Northern Manhattan Communities: Case Studies of Political Empowerment in the Planning and Developing Process

This article reviews three development proposals in Northern Manhattan communities, how community boards responded to those proposals, and how the responses affected the outcome of each development. The article begins with a broad overview of the history of community boards\u27 role in urban planning in New York City. It finds that boards have become increasingly influential in new development plans, empowering the communities they represent. The Article goes on to analyze three recent proposals in turn (an expansion of Columbia University in Morningside Heights, a residential development in Central Harlem, and a comprehensive rezoning of East Harlem) according to zoning, community reaction, and result. It concludes that by proactively pushing for rezoning and hiring Civitas Citizens, Inc., an urban design, community advocacy organization to oversee a rezoning plan, the community board of East Harlem was able to take control of preserving the character of its neighborhood