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In ten global cities, residents facing displacement from redevelopment and gentrification mobilized creatively to impact policies.
"In 2006, a group of residents in Yungay, a working-class neighborhood of lowrises in the center of Santiago, attended a public hearing organized by city officials. The neighbors had expected a perfunctory event, and attended somewhat by chance. Instead, to their surprise, officials informed participants of a plan to change zoning laws that would have dramatically augmented the construction of high-rises in their neighborhood. Residents knew that the threat was real. They had already observed waves of high-rises being built throughout the city, as the mayor pursued flagship projects and infrastructure modernization to position Santiago as a competitive center for international investment. This was taking place in the heart of a country considered the historical hotbed of neoliberalism: unions were weak, and the fiscal, planning, and taxation environment had traditionally and strongly favored developers"--
"This book offers insight into how redevelopment policy is implemented on the ground, articulates the political and social benefits of collective skepticism for communities of color, and critiques the partial perspectives dominant in social capital and community development studies"--
On March 1, 1966, the voters of Tucson approved the Pueblo Center Redevelopment Project—Arizona’s first major urban renewal project—which targeted the most densely populated eighty acres in the state. For close to one hundred years, tucsonenses had created their own spatial reality in the historical, predominantly Mexican American heart of the city, an area most called “la calle.” Here, amid small retail and service shops, restaurants, and entertainment venues, they openly lived and celebrated their culture. To make way for the Pueblo Center’s new buildings, city officials proceeded to displace la calle’s residents and to demolish their ethnically diverse neighborhoods, which, contends Lydia Otero, challenged the spatial and cultural assumptions of postwar modernity, suburbia, and urban planning. Otero examines conflicting claims to urban space, place, and history as advanced by two opposing historic preservationist groups: the La Placita Committee and the Tucson Heritage Foundation. She gives voice to those who lived in, experienced, or remembered this contested area, and analyzes the historical narratives promoted by Anglo American elites in the service of tourism and cultural dominance. La Calle explores the forces behind the mass displacement: an unrelenting desire for order, a local economy increasingly dependent on tourism, and the pivotal power of federal housing policies. To understand how urban renewal resulted in the spatial reconfiguration of downtown Tucson, Otero draws on scholarship from a wide range of disciplines: Chicana/o, ethnic, and cultural studies; urban history, sociology, and anthropology; city planning; and cultural and feminist geography.
American cities are increasingly turning to revitalization strategies that embrace the ideas of new urbanism and the so-called creative class in an attempt to boost economic growth and prosperity to downtown areas. These efforts stir controversy over residential and commercial gentrification of working class, ethnic areas. Spanning forty years, Latino City provides an in-depth case study of the new urbanism, creative class, and transit-oriented models of planning and their implementation in Santa Ana, California, one of the United States’ most Mexican communities. It provides an intimate analysis of how revitalization plans re-imagine and alienate a place, and how community-based participation approaches address the needs and aspirations of lower-income Latino urban areas undergoing revitalization. The book provides a critical introduction to the main theoretical debates and key thinkers related to the new urbanism, transit-oriented, and creative class models of urban revitalization. It is the first book to examine contemporary models of choice for revitalization of US cities from the point of view of a Latina/o-majority central city, and thus initiates new lines of analysis and critique of models for Latino inner city neighborhood and downtown revitalization in the current period of socio-economic and cultural change. Latino City will appeal to students and scholars in urban planning, urban studies, urban history, urban policy, neighborhood and community development, central city development, urban politics, urban sociology, geography, and ethnic/Latino Studies, as well as practitioners, community organizations, and grassroots leaders immersed in these fields.
Picture your downtown vacant, boarded up, while the malls surrounding your city are thriving. What would you do? In 1974 the politicians, merchants, community leaders, and business and property owners, of Ithaca, New York, joined together to transform main street into a pedestrian mall. Cornell University began an Industrial Research Park to keep and attract jobs. Developers began renovating run-down housing. City Planners crafted a long-range plan utilizing State legislation permitting a Business Improvement District (BID), with taxing authority to raise up to 20 percent of the City tax rate focused on downtown redevelopment. Shaping a City is the behind-the-scenes story of one developer’s involvement, from first buying and renovating small houses, gradually expanding his thinking and projects to include a recognition of the interdependence of the entire city—jobs, infrastructure, retail, housing, industry, taxation, banking and City Planning. It is the story of how he, along with other local developers transformed a quiet, economically challenged upstate New York town into one that is recognized nationally as among the best small cities in the country. The lessons and principles of personal relationships, cooperation and collaboration, the importance of density, and the power of a Business Improvement District to catalyze change, are ones you can take home for the development and revitalization of your city.
This book examines how cities suffering from poor government made a transition to brand politics to break a cycle of inertia.
Effective urban governance is essential in responding to the challenges of inequality, migration, public health, housing, security, and climate change. Reclaiming Democracy in Cities frames the city as a political actor in its own right, exploring the city’s potential to develop deliberative and participatory practices which help inform innovative democratic solutions to modern day challenges. Bringing together expertise from an international selection of scholars from various fields, this book begins with three chapters which discuss the theoretical idea of the democratic city and the real-world applicability of such a model. Part II discusses new and innovative democratic practices at the local level and asks in what way these practices help us to rethink democratic politics, institutions, and mechanisms in order to move toward a more egalitarian, pluralist, and inclusive direction. Drawing on the Istanbul municipal elections and the Kurdish municipal experience, Part III focuses on the question of whether cities and local governments can lead to the emergence of strong democratic forces that oppose authoritarian regimes. Finally, Part IV discusses urban solidarity networks and collaborations at both the local level and beyond the nation, questioning whether urban solidarity networks and alliances with civil society or transnational city networks can create alternative ways of thinking about the city as a locus of democracy. This edited volume will appeal to academics, researchers, and advanced students in the fields of urban studies, particularly those with an interest in democratic theory; local democracy; participation and municipalities. It will also be relevant for practitioners of local governments, NGOs, and advocacy groups and activists working for solidarity networks between cities.
A look at the benefits and consequences of the rise of community-based organizations in urban development Who makes decisions that shape the housing, policies, and social programs in urban neighborhoods? Who, in other words, governs? Constructing Community offers a rich ethnographic portrait of the individuals who implement community development projects in the Fairmount Corridor, one of Boston’s poorest areas. Jeremy Levine uncovers a network of nonprofits and philanthropic foundations making governance decisions alongside public officials—a public-private structure that has implications for democratic representation and neighborhood inequality. Levine spent four years following key players in Boston’s community development field. While state senators and city councilors are often the public face of new projects, and residents seem empowered through opportunities to participate in public meetings, Levine found a shadow government of nonprofit leaders and philanthropic funders, nonelected neighborhood representatives with their own particular objectives, working behind the scenes. Tying this system together were political performances of “community”—government and nonprofit leaders, all claiming to value the community. Levine provocatively argues that there is no such thing as a singular community voice, meaning any claim of community representation is, by definition, illusory. He shows how community development is as much about constructing the idea of community as it is about the construction of physical buildings in poor neighborhoods. Constructing Community demonstrates how the nonprofit sector has become integral to urban policymaking, and the tensions and trade-offs that emerge when private nonprofits take on the work of public service provision.
Authored as a result of a remarkable collaboration between indigenous people's own leaders, other social activists and scholars from a wide range of disciplines, this volume explores what is happening today to indigenous peoples as they are enmeshed, almost inevitably, in the remorseless expansion of the modern economy and development, at the behest of the pressures of the market-place and government. It is particularly timely, given the rise in criticism of free market capitalism generally, as well as of development. The volume seeks to capture the complex, power-laden, often contradictory features of indigenous agency and relationships. It shows how peoples do not just resist or react to the pressures of market and state, but also initiate and sustain "life projects" of their own which embody local history and incorporate plans to improve their social and economic ways of living.