Bursa is one of the cities with high disaster risk and a quality housing problem in Turkey. Urban transformation activities are carried out in order to improve quality of life and create safe living spaces for sustainable urban development. Quality housing production does not signify merely a need to be satisfied quantitatively. Housing and its environment, where physical and social needs of the users are satisfied, should be designed considering local conditions and in a way that they will be suitable for users&#x2019; life styles and cultural habits. In this study, the selected study area comprises neighborhoods which are under disaster risk, have been determined as urban transformation areas, and have residents with similar socioeconomic characteristics. With the purpose of improving user satisfaction, this study investigates users&#x2019; experience with physical, social, and cultural features of housing and its environment, which identify the quality of housing, and their preferences of new housing units to be produced. Nonprobability sampling method was selected for the field study, and a survey study was conducted. SPSS 17.0 (Statistical Package for Social Sciences) was employed for data entry. In order to generate data for quality housing production, relationships between variables were analyzed with Pearson chi-square test.

Murat Ta&#x15f;

Nil&#xfc;fer Ta&#x15f;

Zehra Berna Ayd&#x131;n

Production of Quality Housing in Urban Transformation in Areas under Disaster Risk: Osmangazi and Y&#x131;ld&#x131;r&#x131;m, Bursa, Turkey

The middle of 2007 saw the beginning of a worldwide financial crisis that led to a sharp reduction in investment based on construction and urban development. This new situation is generating a new process, characterised by a slowdown that has almost reached a standstill when compared with the frenzied development of previous decades. In order to analyse these processes, this study examines urban land use changes and the urban growth rate and spatial dynamics of the metropolitan region of Madrid. The analysis has been carried out on a large scale between two periods (2000&#x2013;2006 and 2006&#x2013;2009) using a regional land use geodatabase. The results show the changes in the urban land use dynamics that took place over these two periods that could characterise the cities of Mediterranean Europe, where contrarily to the general pattern in Europe built-up areas are combining scattered built-up areas with new aggregated compact developments.

Jaime D&#xed;az-Pacheco

Juan Carlos Garc&#xed;a-Palomares

Urban Sprawl in the Mediterranean Urban Regions in Europe and the Crisis Effect on the Urban Land Development: Madrid as Study Case

To inform a city-wide youth Violence Prevention Initiative, we explored youth narratives about their exposure to violence to gain insight into their understanding of the causes and effects of violence in their communities. At-risk youth were recruited through street outreach for individual interviews and focus group sessions. Types of experiential violence identified included (1) street, (2) family/interpersonal, (3) school, (4) indirect exposure (e.g., neighborhood crime), and (5) prejudice/discrimination. Reactions ranged from motivating positive effects (resilience, determination to escape) to negative effects (fear, paranoia, and aggression). For some, experiences with violence motivated them to pursue educational achievement and positive lifestyles. Causes of violence were described by participants as existing at a number of different levels (societal, neighborhood, interpersonal, and individual), reflecting a social-ecological perspective. Our findings highlight a need for violence prevention efforts that focus on a broad definition of violence, as well as on the poly-victimization of children and youth. At the same time, our findings highlight the challenges of conducting effective community-based prevention programs in urban settings characterized by spatial inequalities and social exclusion of community residents.

David Seal

Annie Nguyen

Kirsten Beyer

Youth Exposure to Violence in an Urban Setting

This paper examines the dynamics of economic change in the City of Paterson, New Jersey, from the time of its founding in the late eighteenth century to 1990, with emphasis on the post-1945 era. Analysis shows that from the time of its founding to the first half of the twentieth century, Paterson experienced a period of economic growth followed by economic decline in the 1960s, characterized by major changes in its principal industries of cotton, locomotives, and silk. Economic growth in Paterson up to the early part of the twentieth century is attributable to several locational factors, including the availability of water resources, transportation, labor supply, and markets. Its decline in the post-1945 era is attributable to a combination of local, national, and global economic factors including periods of depression, labor discord, product substitution, decentralization of economic activities, and deindustrialization. Economic decline resulted in a high rate of unemployment, poverty, and urban decay. The most significant effort to reverse urban decline in the city is the urban enterprise zone (UEZ) program. The impacts of this program on economic growth in the city, however, remain inconclusive.

Thomas Y. Owusu

Economic Transition in the City of Paterson, New Jersey (America&#x2019;s First Planned Industrial City): Causes, Impacts, and Urban Policy Implications

This study explores urban planning office and community influence on land-use decision making in two poverty-stricken but redeveloping neighborhood areas in Chicago. The Department of Planning and Development in this study had marginal impact on land-use decisions due to administrative limitations. Community influence is moderated by the degree to which low-income housing advocates can act directly as developers and produce housing units. The research findings indicate that land-use decisions intended to benefit the low-income resulted not from community-based political conflict but more so from community organization cooperation with political actors.

Yan Dominic Searcy

Planning Office and Community Influence on Land-Use Decisions Intended to Benefit the Low-Income: Welcome to Chicago

The Housing Choice Voucher program (HCV) is a federally supported demand-side housing subsidy. According to HCV, eligible households are encouraged to secure affordable housing in favorable neighborhoods, including suburban neighborhoods. To what extent, however, is the supply of affordable rental housing located in suburban communities that offer favorable amenities meeting the increased demand? Using the <i>Geography of Opportunity</i> as a framework, this study examines the mobility results of traditional HCV households who moved from the city of Chicago to surrounding suburban neighborhoods to reveal characteristics of destination communities. Findings indicate that HCV households tend to move into suburban renter neighborhoods that have high poor, African American, and female-headed household populations. Policy makers are encouraged to consider findings to improve life outcomes of suburban HCV program participants.

Adrienne M. Holloway

From the City to the Suburbs: Characteristics of Suburban Neighborhoods Where Chicago Housing Choice Voucher Households Relocated

Recent research has elucidated the role of talents to explain urban growth differences but it remains to be shown whether urban dynamics, such as human capital and a mixed local population, can be linked to intraurban employment growth. By use of a unique longitudinal database, we track the economic development through the lens of intraurban employment growth of a number of primary urban areas (PUA) in G&#xf6;teborg, Sweden. Regarding factors influencing employment growth, we find that relative concentrations of human capital protect areas from rising unemployment during severe recession (1990&#x2013;1993) and recovery (1990&#x2013;2000) while the composition of skills is beneficial during recovery (1990&#x2013;2000) and long-term growth (1990&#x2013;2008). Our findings suggest that neither too high concentrations of creative occupations nor too low ones are beneficial. Thus, human capital drives much of the employment changes in relation to the recession and early transition from manufacturing to service but composition of skills is more relevant for explaining long-term intraurban employment growth.

Jonathan Borggren

Rikard H. Eriksson

Human Capital, Skills, and Uneven Intraurban Employment Growth: The Case of G&#xf6;teborg, Sweden, 1990&#x2013;2008

Neighborhood income and social capital are considered important for child development, but social capital has rarely been measured directly at an aggregate level. We used Canadian data to derive measures of social capital from aggregated parental judgments of neighborhood collective efficacy and neighborhood safety. Measures of neighborhood income came from Census data. Direct measures of preschoolers&#x2019; school readiness were predicted from neighborhood-level variables, with regional indicators and household/parental characteristics taken into account. Our findings show that (1) residing in Quebec, being Black, and having a parent who was born outside Canada are positively associated with children&#x2019;s living in disadvantaged or low collective efficacy neighborhoods as well as with their living in low-income households. (2) Children&#x2019;s odds of residential mobility were reduced when the origin neighborhood had higher collective efficacy but increased when the family rented rather than owned. (3) Both neighborhood collective efficacy and children&#x2019;s ever having lived in a poor neighborhood were correlated with receptive vocabulary scores, but results were mixed for other cognitive dimensions. Children of younger mothers scored worse on receptive vocabulary. There were similar patterns for demographic predictors related to visible minority status, sibship size, and birth order. Neighborhood average income had no effect on cognitive outcomes when the region was controlled.

Charles Jones

Jing Shen

Neighborhood Social Capital, Neighborhood Disadvantage, and Change of Neighborhood as Predictors of School Readiness

This paper offers a critical review and interpretation of gentrification in Latin American cities. Applying a flexible methodology, it examines enabling conditions associated with societal regime change and local contingencies to determine its presence, nature, extent, and possibilities. Questioning the uncritical transfer of constructs such as gentrification from the Global North to the Global South, the paper advocates analyses of mediating structures and local conditions to determine their applicability and possible variations. Overall, the review questions the feasibility of self-sustained, large scale gentrification in central areas of the region&#x2019;s cities today tying it to each city&#x2019;s level of incorporation into global circuits and the role of local governments. Rather than an orthodox hypothesis testing, this is an exercise in interpretation that calls for nuanced approaches to the study of urban restructuring in cities of the global South.

John J. Betancur

Gentrification in Latin America: Overview and Critical Analysis

This study posits and tests the viability of a new unit of analysis for local public goods in metropolitan areas: overlapping government combinations (OGCs). Counties, municipalities, school districts, and other special districts operate simultaneously within the same space, each providing their own set of local public goods. Residents of the same city can live within the boundaries of different counties, school districts and other special districts and thus receive (and pay for) very different quantities and qualities of public goods. Though there is a great deal of literature devoted to the variation of local public goods in a fragmented metropolitan region, there is none that cumulates the different local government types into units that represent the true bundles of local public goods that are provided to citizens and property owners. This study tackles this problem through the application of geographic information systems (GIS) to stack counties, municipalities, and school districts in the Dallas-Fort Worth-Arlington CMSA into unique OGCs. The unique OGCs are compared to their underlying component governments with respect to property tax rates and school performance and are found to be statistically distinct.

Samuel B. Stone

A More Accurate Measure of Local Public Goods: Overlapping Government Combinations as Units of Analysis

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Urban Studies Research