scholarly journals Together, We Can Make This Place Our Home: Civic Engagement Among Asian Immigrants

2020 ◽  
Vol 4 (Supplement_1) ◽  
pp. 99-99
Author(s):  
Cindy Bui ◽  
Kyungmin Kim ◽  
Qian Song ◽  
Yuri Jang
Keyword(s):  
Social Network ◽  
Civic Engagement ◽  
Asian American ◽  
American Culture ◽  
City Council ◽  
Asian Immigrants ◽  
The City ◽  
The U.S ◽  
Acculturation Factors

Abstract Civic engagement is an important dimension of age-friendly communities but has been understudied among Asian immigrant groups. While research has attributed greater civic engagement among immigrants to acculturation factors, the influence of acculturation may be conditioned upon Asian immigrants’ social network and place attachment to their city. We used data from the Asian American Quality of Life survey to analyze civic engagement activity (e.g., City council meeting, voting in a City election) among a diverse sample of middle-aged and older Asian immigrants in Austin, Texas (N = 994). 34.5% of the sample had participated in at least one civic engagement activity in the past 12 months. We examined how such civic engagement is associated with acculturation factors, and further examined whether one’s friend network and perception of their city moderated the association. We found that number of years lived in the U.S., familiarity with mainstream American culture, and number of friends in one’s social network were positively related to civic engagement activity. Furthermore, we found that the association between years lived in the U.S. and civic engagement was more pronounced for immigrants with larger friend networks; the association between familiarity with American culture and civic engagement was more pronounced for immigrants with more positive perceptions of the city. These findings highlight that acculturation may not operate alone in civic engagement among Asian immigrants. Rather, it may also be important to create opportunities for Asian immigrants to feel connected to their community and build meaningful friend networks to encourage civic engagement.

Weakening the Strong Mayor: Partisan Division and Presidential Intervention in Istanbul

2021 ◽  
pp. 0160323X2110453
Author(s):  
İhsan İkizer
Keyword(s):  
Civic Engagement ◽  
Central Government ◽  
City Council ◽  
Government Agencies ◽  
Local Elections ◽  
Nationalist Movement ◽  
Central Government Agencies ◽  
Mayoral Leadership ◽  
The City ◽  
Ruling Party

Istanbul, the leading city of Turkey, is a good case for analyzing the conflictual relations of the mayor with the city council and the central government. Istanbul had been governed by the mayors from the ruling party, the Justice and Development Party ( Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi; AKP) and its predecessor parties since 1994. In the local elections held in March 2019, which was repeated only for Istanbul after two months with a highly suspicious decision by the Supreme Election Board, the AKP lost this city. Ekrem İmamoğlu, the mayor of Istanbul, has harsh relations with the city council, which is dominated by the AKP and its alliance party, the Nationalist Movement Party ( Milliyetçi Hareket Partisi; MHP). What exacerbates this situation is the partisan intervention of the increasingly authoritarian central government that weakens the mayor's position. The mayor tries to counterbalance the power of the city council and central government agencies through livestreaming the city council meetings and attracting civic engagement on his side. This article is expected to contribute to the literature on mayoral leadership, partisan constraints to mayoral powers as well as the mayor's strategies against the authoritarian intervention of the central governments. Mayor İmamoğlu's strategies and measures adopted for overcoming the efforts of blocking his agenda by both the council and central government might inspire other mayors experiencing similar partisan constraints.

scholarly journals The People’s Voice, The People’s Choice: An Overview of Participatory Budgeting in the United States

2020 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 25
Author(s):  
Marilyn Marks Rubin ◽  
Wendy M. Nicholson
Keyword(s):  
High School Students ◽  
The United States ◽  
City Council ◽  
Participatory Budgeting ◽  
School Students ◽  
Young Voters ◽  
Local Budget ◽  
Available Information ◽  
The City ◽  
The U.S

Participatory budgeting was launched in the U.S. in 2009 in Chicago, Illinois, by a member of the city’s Board of Aldermen (the city council) who used $1 million of his discretionary funds to bring his constituents directly into the local budget decision-making process. By 2018, there were 23 more U.S. jurisdictions with a PB process in place: 12 with PB in selected areas (districts); six with a citywide initiative; five with an initiative to allocate specific pots of money, e.g., CDBG funds (see Table 1); and six with an initiative to bring young voters or high school students into budget decisions. In this descriptive paper, we provide a synopsis of PB initiatives in the U.S. based on publically available information and personal interviews with individuals involved in the PB process. Our paper adds to the literature by providing a review of PB initiatives across the U.S. that will be particularly useful for readers who are looking for a quick purview of the topic or who have limited knowledge of PB. 

scholarly journals State Opera House - upgrading

1983 ◽  
Vol 16 (2) ◽  
pp. 175-178
Author(s):  
John Christianson
Keyword(s):  
Local Government ◽  
Bond Strength ◽  
City Council ◽  
Masonry Buildings ◽  
Seismic Capacity ◽  
Detail Design ◽  
Full Compliance ◽  
Opera House ◽  
The City

The Local Government Act allows local bodies to take powers requiring building owners to upgrade masonry buildings to a reasonable level of seismic capacity. The State Opera House is one such building. The theatre was built in 1913 and allows for seating for 1300 patrons
 on three levels. The building is of
 brick construction with walls up to 685mm thick and 23,000mm high without intermediate support. Although the Wellington City Council generally requires buildings to achieve two thirds of the standard
laid down by NZS 1900 Chap. 8:1965 the
 City Engineer requested that the Opera House be upgraded to full compliance with that standard. As a preliminary to
detail design, tests were made on brick beam samples to determine what quality
of brickwork existed within the building and what levels of stress could be
reliably used in panel configurations.
 From these tests we determined a bond strength of 0.1MPa in mortar joints
and F’c (Brick) 10MPa. This investigation was coupled with an extensive structural survey to supplement the meagre amound
 of information from drawings and original specification.

scholarly journals Jasmine’s Travail from Widowhood to Selfhood in Bharati Mukherjee’s Jasmine.

2020 ◽  
Vol 8 (5) ◽  
pp. 185
Author(s):  
Shukla Saha
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Asian American ◽  
New World ◽  
American Culture ◽  
The United States ◽  
Identity Crisis ◽  
Asian Immigrants ◽  
Bharati Mukherjee ◽  
Indian Village ◽  
Shifting Identities

Bharati Mukherjee happens to be a prominent Asian American writer who has in her works vividly represented the experiences of Asian immigrants and the evolution of their migrant selves in America.Her works reflect both, her pride in her Indian heritage and also her earnestness for embracing the new world, America. Mukherjee’s much acclaimed novel Jasmine depicts the story of a young Punjabi woman who dares to rebel against the norms of patriarchy since her childhood. Her stifling experiences of leading the life of a widow in a small Indian village of Hasnapur doesn’t dent her spirit as she dares to sail on her own as an illegal immigrant to the United States on a mission to perform ritual Sati on the campus where her dead husband had enrolled to study. The problems of acculturation drags immigrants like her into an identity crisis. But it does not deter her, as she continuously strives to refashion herself to fit into the mainstream American culture. In this context, the paper attempts to explore how the feminist protagonist, Jasmine, through her shifting identities rediscovers her own independent self by assimilating into the land of opportunity, i.e., America.

scholarly journals Recife, City of People? A study based on the archeology of Foucault

2020 ◽  
Vol 18 (50) ◽  
pp. 24-40
Author(s):  
Duarte Raab Pires ◽  
Maria Luciana De Almeida ◽  
Lilian Soares Outtes Wanderley
Keyword(s):  
Social Life ◽  
City Council ◽  
Social Significance ◽  
Discursive Formation ◽  
Political Discourses ◽  
The People ◽  
Knowledge Perspective ◽  
The Government ◽  
The City

This article aims at analyzing the discourse involved in the city council program called “Recife, city of the people”, from Foucault's archeology of knowledge perspective. The corpus of this research consists of six videos available on the Facebook® page of the city council of Recife in 2014, when government agency released the slogan "Recife, Cidade das Pessoas”. The study is justified by the need of understanding how the political discourses are spread and how these discourses have no explicit assumptions. We believe that a better design of the influence of discourses, along with further clarification of social significance exercised by them, can contribute to a more democratic social life, which will be accessible to the entire population. For the present study, no theory was previously defined. The option for this construction enables the non-interference of external factors guiding the analyses. Data was analyzed without theoretical influences, so that the theoretical constructs emerged from the analysis rather than the reverse. However, the vision of authorship in relation to the concept of speech interferes with the analysis and serves as a theoretical lens through which data will be displayed. For results, two discursive formations were found: (1) the protection of the Government and (2) healthy lifestyles practices, with includes social, cultural and physical. This discursive formation is founded on the pillars of bio-politics and sustainability, quality of life and social change. It was noticed that the program has a goal it is to influence people's opinions about public spaces and mobility in a municipality.

City of Second Sight

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Justin T. Clark
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Social Order ◽  
American Culture ◽  
Art Galleries ◽  
City Life ◽  
Reciprocal Influence ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Spectator ◽  
The City ◽  
The U.S

In the decades before the U.S. Civil War, the city of Boston evolved from a dilapidated, haphazardly planned, and architecturally stagnant provincial town into a booming and visually impressive metropolis. In an effort to remake Boston into the "Athens of America," neighborhoods were leveled, streets straightened, and an ambitious set of architectural ordinances enacted. However, even as residents reveled in a vibrant new landscape of landmark buildings, art galleries, parks, and bustling streets, the social and sensory upheaval of city life also gave rise to a widespread fascination with the unseen. Focusing his analysis between 1820 and 1860, Justin T. Clark traces how the effort to impose moral and social order on the city also inspired many—from Transcendentalists to clairvoyants and amateur artists—to seek out more ethereal visions of the infinite and ideal beyond the gilded paintings and glimmering storefronts. By elucidating the reciprocal influence of two of the most important developments in nineteenth-century American culture—the spectacular city and visionary culture—Clark demonstrates how the nineteenth-century city is not only the birthplace of modern spectacle but also a battleground for the freedom and autonomy of the spectator.

scholarly journals The Importance of Stakeholders in Managing a Safe City

2021 ◽  
Vol 14 (1) ◽  
pp. 244
Author(s):  
Wioletta Wereda ◽  
Natalia Moch ◽  
Anna Wachulak
Keyword(s):  
Labor Markets ◽  
Urban Space ◽  
Personal Development ◽  
Public Management ◽  
Local Communities ◽  
City Council ◽  
City Development ◽  
Scientific Institutions ◽  
The City

Contemporary cities are complex systems in which there are many interactions and dependencies in relation to the environment. Currently, the development of cities and their safety are among the most important international socio-economic processes. The movement of people to larger agglomerations from smaller towns creates a variety of relationships between actors and often leads to very complicated lives in urban space. Features of contemporary cities include urbanization, personal development opportunities, labor markets, and infrastructure, as well as technological and cybernetic networks that optimize all the processes taking place in agglomerations. It should be emphasized that the main goal of public management in urban space is to create various solutions in the field of safety and thus to improve the quality of. In this respect, the role and influence of stakeholders on the processes of smart and safe city development are important. At each stage of activity, the City Council, local communities, economic entities, scientific institutions, and municipal enterprises are important for a city’s safety. This article emphasizes the importance of stakeholders in the process of managing a safe city. The article presents a literature review, as well as research results based on the example of Polish cities, presenting the importance of stakeholders in managing safe cities.

Spiritualist Angels, Masonic Stars, and the Douglass Temple of Universal Brotherhood

2018 ◽  
Vol 95 (2) ◽  
pp. 2-26
Author(s):  
Sharon Hartman Strom
Keyword(s):  
Los Angeles ◽  
World War I ◽  
Civic Engagement ◽  
Religious Practice ◽  
City Council ◽  
Los Angeles Times ◽  
Progressive Reform ◽  
Protestant Churches ◽  
Free Thought ◽  
The City

Between 1900 and 1930, Los Angeles attracted thousands of white and black migrants from the Midwest and the South. Many had attachments to Protestant churches. But they also arrived with commitments to Freemasonry, Spiritualism, and social reform causes. This paper argues that these religionists in Los Angeles covered a broad spectrum of faiths, including Free Thought, innovative versions of Protestantism, and Freemasonry, and that traditional accounts of religion in the city have ignored these aspects of religious life and civic engagement. As World War I ushered in conservatism in every aspect of public life, the Los Angeles Times, the City Council, and the Protestant churches combined in an effort to squash these challenges to orthodoxy. In profiling two prominent Spiritualists, African American George W. Shields and white midwesterner Cynthia Lisetta Vose, this article illustrates the wide ranging civil and religious engagement of two committed Spiritualists. By the end of the 1920s, the fragmentation of Los Angeles neighborhoods and the growing racism of the city had nearly destroyed what had been a vigorous religion and a thriving commitment to progressive reform. Segregated white women's clubs and Freemasonry organizations turned the worship of California into a replacement for older forms of religious practice and civic engagement.

scholarly journals The Quality of Participatory Processes in the Urban Redevelopment Policy of Madrid City Council

2018 ◽  
Vol 16 (4) ◽  
pp. 841-872 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gema Sánchez Medero ◽  
Gema Pastor Albaladejo
Keyword(s):  
Citizen Participation ◽  
Urban Redevelopment ◽  
Analytical Framework ◽  
City Council ◽  
Successful Development ◽  
Participatory Processes ◽  
The City

The local sphere is the participatory space par excellence. However, there are few academic studies on citizen participation in urban polities, and even less on the quality of participatory mechanisms. This article analyses two participatory processes of urban reorganisation led by the City of Madrid, based on the development of an analytical framework designed to evaluate its quality, with the objective of knowing which initiative enjoys the higher quality, and of proposing a series of recommendations that would contribute to ensuring the successful development of these processes.

Libraries as Contested Community and Cultural Space: The Bruggemeyer Memorial Library of Monterey Park, California

2007 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 33-57
Author(s):  
Clara Chu ◽  
Todd Honma
Keyword(s):  
Los Angeles ◽  
Predominantly White ◽  
Asian American ◽  
Public Library ◽  
City Council ◽  
Political Struggle ◽  
Demographic Shift ◽  
The Public ◽  
The City ◽  
Business Sectors

In the City of Monterey Park, a sleepy city, east of downtown Los Angeles, the late 1970s and the1980s marked a dramatic demographic shift from predominantly White to Asian American. Who had economic and political power was publicly played out through struggles between the city council and the business sectors. An unlikely locus for political struggle was the Bruggemeyer Memorial Library. In the late-1980s, what many might consider to be a neutral agency that collects, organizes and disseminates information, the public library became the battleground to (re)claim community, access and representation of Asian Americans in Monterey Park. By contextualizing the library as civic space, this paper explores dominant U.S. hegemonic ideologies and political agendas reproduced in cultural institutions, such as libraries.

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