Citizen Participation in New York City Government

1982 ◽  
Vol 108 (1) ◽  
pp. 11-14
Author(s):  
Bernard Haber
1977 ◽  
Vol 159 (1) ◽  
pp. 7-22 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marilyn Gittell

The demand for community participation in education has resulted in many school systems adopting some form of decentralization. In many cases, this “participation” has been illusory. The decentralization which occurred did not result in increased decision making power being allocated to the community, but rather in merely physically decentralizing the existing school bureaucracy. The current situation in New York City provides a number of insights into what can be expected as school budgets are cut as a result of fewer resources and decreases in school enrollments. The community school boards, which had no input into the collective bargaining process, are now pitted against the professional educational establishment — the Board of Education and the United Federation of Teachers. Both in New York City and elsewhere, those who control the school bureaucracy have excluded the community from playing a significant role in the policy-making process. The governance structure of American education must be changed so that the community will have greater control over its educational institutions. Properly instituted, community control is an instrument of social change. If adequate provision is made for the technical resources to carry out this new role, citizen participation has the potential for providing new insights into our concepts of professionalism and our general theories of educational expertise.


2011 ◽  
Vol 24 (1) ◽  
pp. 13-14 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jon Wool

New Orleans in 2011 finds itself facing many of the same problems New York City faced in 1961 when the founders of the Vera Institute of Justice launched the Manhattan Bail Project: Too many people are held in pretrial detention who could be released without risk to public safety; the reliance on bail results in disparate outcomes based on financial ability; and the unnecessary detention of thousands of defendants each year imposes excessive costs on the city government and taxpayers, as well as on those needlessly detained. Vera is now working with New Orleans stakeholders to develop a comprehensive pretrial services system. Following in the footsteps of the Manhattan Bail Project, the work will create a carefully conceived and locally sensitive pretrial services system, one that will result in a fairer and more efficient criminal justice system and a safer community.


2017 ◽  
Vol 46 (6) ◽  
pp. 1261-1289
Author(s):  
Marci Reaven

The practice of city planning in New York City was transformed in the decades after World War II. At the start of this period, the system was characterized by little citizen involvement and no transparency. By the mid-1970s, citizens had become accepted participants in land-use decision-making, and formal procedures for involving citizens in planning had been written into local law. This article explores how this turning point in citizen participation came about by focusing on the Cooper Square Committee—an ambitious practitioner of neighborhood activism on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. Setting the Committee’s quest in the participatory context of the times uncovers a groundswell of voluntary groups who used the city’s neighborhoods as forums for democratic action. Along with government actors, planning professionals, and civic and social agencies, such groups contributed to the transformation in planning, which developed not by premeditated campaign but by a cumulative process of public problem-solving and social innovation.


2021 ◽  
Vol 12 (3) ◽  
pp. 21
Author(s):  
Anna Gu ◽  
Hira Shafeeq ◽  
Ting Chen ◽  
Preety Gadhoke

Background: A key to an effective Coronavirus 2019 (COVID-19) Community Intervention is to understand populations who are most vulnerable to it. We aimed at evaluating characteristics of New York City communities where rates of confirmed COVID-19 cases were particularly high. Methods: The study outcomes - neighborhood-specific confirmed COVID-19 cases, positive tests, and COVID-19 attributable deaths were calculated using data extracted from the New York City government health website, which were linked to results from Community Health Survey. Distributions of study outcomes across New York City community districts and their associations with neighborhood characteristics were examined using Jonckheere-Terpstra tests. Results: As of May 21, 2010, rates of confirmed cases ranged from 0.8% (Greenwich Village and Soho) to 3.9% (Jackson Heights), and the rates of attributable death from to 0.6‰ (Greenwich Village and Soho) to 4.2‰ (Coney Island). Higher percentages of black, Hispanic and foreign-born populations, lower educational attainment, poverty, lack of health insurance, and suboptimal quality of health care were all factors found to be correlated with increased rates of confirmed COVID-19 cases.  Conclusions: The epidemiology of COVID-19 exhibited great variations among neighborhoods in New York City. Community interventions aimed at COVID-19 prevention and mitigation should place high priorities in areas with large populations of blacks and Hispanics and economically disadvantages areas.


2021 ◽  
pp. 107808742110671
Author(s):  
Elizabeth M. Marcello

Since the late 1960's New York State's Urban Development Corporation (UDC), now operating as the Empire State Development Corporation (ESDC), has been leveraged by New York City government to pursue large-scale projects. This paper examines two cases from New York City in which the city borrowed a state-controlled public authority's power to accomplish projects initiated at the local level: the case of Queens West, a development in western Queens, proposed in the early 1980s, and the case of Columbia - Manhattanville, an expansion of the Columbia University campus into Harlem, announced in 2003. These cases highlight how cities might, at times, embrace state involvement rather than lament its restrictions or rue its indifference. The study concludes by suggesting a theoretical path for incorporating such a city-state dynamic.


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