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The work described in this report represents an effort to better understand the link between urban form and travel behavior and to evaluate the potential effectiveness of land use policies as a strategy for reducing automobile dependence. This work builds on previous research in this area but attempts to go beyond it by exploring the motivations for travel as well as the patterns of travel. Travel surveys and focus groups were used to study the travel choices of residents of six case study neighborhoods in Austin, Texas. The results suggest that the role urban form plays in travel behavior is not entirely straightforward, sometimes influencing travel choices directly, sometimes indirectly, sometimes influencing choices in the short term, sometimes in the long term, and sometimes not having any measurable influence on choices at all. In the end, it appears that certain land use policies can help to provide alternatives to driving, but that the reduction in driving is likely to be small.
A sweeping new look at the unheralded transformation that is eroding the foundations of American exceptionalism. Americans today find themselves mired in an era of uncertainty and frustration. The nation's safety net is pulling apart under its own weight; political compromise is viewed as a form of defeat; and our faith in the enduring concept of American exceptionalism appears increasingly outdated. But the American Age may not be ending. In The Vanishing Neighbor, Marc J. Dunkelman identifies an epochal shift in the structure of American life—a shift unnoticed by many. Routines that once put doctors and lawyers in touch with grocers and plumbers—interactions that encouraged debate and cultivated compromise—have changed dramatically since the postwar era. Both technology and the new routines of everyday life connect tight-knit circles and expand the breadth of our social landscapes, but they've sapped the commonplace, incidental interactions that for centuries have built local communities and fostered healthy debate. The disappearance of these once-central relationships—between people who are familiar but not close, or friendly but not intimate—lies at the root of America's economic woes and political gridlock. The institutions that were erected to support what Tocqueville called the "township"—that unique locus of the power of citizens—are failing because they haven't yet been molded to the realities of the new American community. It's time we moved beyond the debate over whether the changes being made to American life are good or bad and focus instead on understanding the tradeoffs. Our cities are less racially segregated than in decades past, but we’ve become less cognizant of what's happening in the lives of people from different economic backgrounds, education levels, or age groups. Familiar divisions have been replaced by cross-cutting networks—with profound effects for the way we resolve conflicts, spur innovation, and care for those in need. The good news is that the very transformation at the heart of our current anxiety holds the promise of more hope and prosperity than would have been possible under the old order. The Vanishing Neighbor argues persuasively that to win the future we need to adapt yesterday’s institutions to the realities of the twenty-first-century American community.
The "livable city," the "creative city," and more recently the "pop-up city" have become pervasive monikers that identify a new type of urbanism that has sprung up globally, produced and managed by the business improvement district and known colloquially by its acronym, BID. With this case study, Susanna F. Schaller draws on more than fifteen years of research to present a direct, focused engagement with both the planning history that shaped Washington, D.C.'s landscape and the intricacies of everyday life, politics, and planning practice as they relate to BIDs. Schaller offers a critical unpacking of the BID ethos, which draws on the language of economic liberalism (individual choice, civic engagement, localism, and grassroots development), to portray itself as color blind, democratic, and equitable. Schaller reveals the contradictions embedded in the BID model. For the last thirty years, BID advocates have engaged in effective and persuasive storytelling; as a result, many policy makers and planners perpetuate the BID narrative without examining the institution and the inequities it has wrought. Schaller sheds light on these oversights, thus fostering a critical discussion of BIDs and their collective influence on future urban landscapes.
Given the media attention and research focus on big cities with large minority populations, people have grown accustomed to associating violence with these attributes. Violence in the Heights counters that narrative to provide a fresh perspective on inner-city violence with a close look at violence and associated social disorder in a cluster of neighborhoods in a mid-sized, predominantly White city. Eileen M. Ahlin studied 42 residents and their perceptions of and responses to violence to give voice to their experiences. Ahlin provides a historical overview of the neighborhoods and highlights a series of pivotal violent events, and discovers how they differentially impacted residents and their perceptions of safety. Residents reveal how institutional and demographic shifts reduced interpersonal connections and weakened the community's social fabric. A unique take on inner-city violence, Violence in the Heights also details why residents move to other communities when violence increases or, if they remain, adapt to changing conditions. This book will interest mainstream readers interested in learning about urban affairs and the human-interest story as it will track why inner-city residents stay in their neighborhoods or move to other communities when violence increases. This book will also serve as an academic text to outline the changes in violence and community disorder in a mid-sized city that is predominantly White, an understudied aspect of urban violence.
In 2004, journalist Bill Bishop coined the term "the big sort." Armed with startling new demographic data, he made national news in a series of articles showing how Americans have been sorting themselves into alarmingly homogeneous communities -- not by region or by state, but by city and even neighborhood. Over the past three decades, we have been choosing the neighborhood (and church and news show) compatible with our lifestyle and beliefs. The result is a country that has become so polarized, so ideologically inbred that people don't know and can't understand those who live a few miles away. How this came to be, and its dire implications for our country, is the subject of this ground-breaking work. In The Big Sort, Bishop has taken his analysis to a new level. He begins with stories about how we live today and then draws on history, economics and our changing political landscape to create one of the most compelling big-picture accounts of America in recent memory.
A landmark volume about the importance of housing in social life. In 1947, the president of the American Sociological Association, Louis Wirth, argued for the importance of housing as a field of sociological research. Now, seventy-five years later, the sociology of housing has still not developed as a distinct subfield, leaving efforts to understand housing’s place in society to other disciplines, such as economics and urban planning. With this volume, the editors and contributors solidify the importance of housing studies within the discipline of sociology by tackling topics like racial segregation, housing instability, the supply of affordable housing, and the process of eviction. In doing so, they showcase the very best traditions of sociology: they draw on diverse methodologies, present unique field sites and data sources, and foreground a range of theoretical approaches to elucidate the relationships between contemporary housing, public policy, and key social outcomes. The Sociology of Housing is a landmark volume that will be used by researchers and students alike to define this growing subfield, map continued directions for research, and center sociologists in interdisciplinary conversations about housing.