School Closures and Their Impact on Local Communities

Due to a number of factors, traditional school closings and consolidations have become very common in cities across the United States. Many forces at play cause a public school district to shut down or merge neighborhood schools. The reasons most commonly cited are significant reductions in enrollment or underutilization, market competition from newly formed charter schools, and poor academic performance. School closures also tend to affect students of color, low-income students, and students with special educational needs disproportionately. Since the beginning of this phenomenon, a significant amount of attention has been placed on the impact of school closings on student performance for obvious reasons, yet little work has been done to analyze the impact of such neighborhood school instability on communities as a whole

InternaUonal Urban Design Studio 2016: Shanghai – Disney

A Studio Project of the Georgia Tech School of City and Regional Planning, 2016The Georgia Tech studio team, consists of urban planning, architecture, and environmental engineering students. The team is assisting the Shen-D Corporation with the creation of evaluative tools and guidelines for integratively designing a near net zero energy community just south of the forthcoming Disneyland theme park in Shanghai, China