Urban Growth Machine

Sociology ◽  
2021 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
The United States ◽  
Public Infrastructure ◽  
Growth Machine ◽  
Public Benefits ◽  
Exchange Value ◽  
Capital Spending ◽  
Construction Activity ◽  
Infrastructure Investments ◽  
Modes Of Governance ◽  
The City

Whatever else organizes city politics, economies, or modes of governance, dedication to growth is the main political force at work—according to the widely influential “growth machine” thesis. Growth interests, it argues, especially dominate in countries like the United States, where land and buildings operate as private markets, rather than held in common by government or some other entity; most studies have been US based but many commentaries and analyses have followed on from research elsewhere. Researchers describe pursuit of growth in payrolls, capital spending, or construction activity. As in the classic Marxian framework, such would enhance “exchange value.” In the political sphere, growth interests form up at nested scales where they pressure for advantageous zoning and public infrastructure investments at relevant administrative levels—in roads, sewer lines, and so forth. They lobby and help finance campaigns. Opposition forms up, in turn, from those whose interest in the city is primarily for home life or shared enhancements—represented by civic groups or, increasingly, environmental organizations. They strive for gains, again from the extended Marxian lexicon, in “use value”—substantive public benefits, as in health care, libraries, schools, safety, and parks. The resulting debates, studies, and applications are subjects of hundreds of articles, reviews, and books.

Quantifying changes in bicycle volumes using crowdsourced data

2022 ◽  
pp. 239980832110661
Author(s):  
Ali Al-Ramini ◽  
Mohammad A Takallou ◽  
Daniel P Piatkowski ◽  
Fadi Alsaleem
Keyword(s):  
Machine Learning ◽  
The United States ◽  
Crowdsourced Data ◽  
Machine Learning Approach ◽  
Bicycle Infrastructure ◽  
The Difference ◽  
Infrastructure Investments ◽  
Using Data ◽  
The Impact ◽  
The City

Most cities in the United States lack comprehensive or connected bicycle infrastructure; therefore, inexpensive and easy-to-implement solutions for connecting existing bicycle infrastructure are increasingly being employed. Signage is one of the promising solutions. However, the necessary data for evaluating its effect on cycling ridership is lacking. To overcome this challenge, this study tests the potential of using readily-available crowdsourced data in concert with machine-learning methods to provide insight into signage intervention effectiveness. We do this by assessing a natural experiment to identify the potential effects of adding or replacing signage within existing bicycle infrastructure in 2019 in the city of Omaha, Nebraska. Specifically, we first visually compare cycling traffic changes in 2019 to those from the previous two years (2017–2018) using data extracted from the Strava fitness app. Then, we use a new three-step machine-learning approach to quantify the impact of signage while controlling for weather, demographics, and street characteristics. The steps are as follows: Step 1 (modeling and validation) build and train a model from the available 2017 crowdsourced data (i.e., Strava, Census, and weather) that accurately predicts the cycling traffic data for any street within the study area in 2018; Step 2 (prediction) use the model from Step 1 to predict bicycle traffic in 2019 while assuming new signage was not added; Step 3 (impact evaluation) use the difference in prediction from actual traffic in 2019 as evidence of the likely impact of signage. While our work does not demonstrate causality, it does demonstrate an inexpensive method, using readily-available data, to identify changing trends in bicycling over the same time that new infrastructure investments are being added.

The New Civic–Sacred: Designing for Life and Death in the Modern Metropolis

Design Issues ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 34 (1) ◽  
pp. 29-41
Author(s):  
Karla Rothstein
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
Public Space ◽  
The United States ◽  
First Century ◽  
Public Infrastructure ◽  
Life And Death ◽  
Family Culture ◽  
Funerary Rites ◽  
The City

The environmental and social imperatives of twenty-first century cities require a rethinking of mortuary practices. Cemeteries across the globe are nearing capacity, and the number of deaths annually in the United States is increasing as the post-World War II generation ages. Despite their depletive and harmful environmental effects, casketed burial, cremation, and embalming have informed perceptions and policies, truncating access to alternatives. Although today's increasingly secular urban populations, for whom the health of the planet is paramount, are disconnected from “traditional” funerary rites, the importance of transitional mortal ritual endures. Through two design projects—one in an existing Victorian cemetery in Bristol, England, and the other augmenting iconic public infrastructure in New York City—this article argues for the potential of new disposition methods and enhanced public space. Countering the conventional dissociation of cemeteries from daily life, these new spaces of remembrance connect with the vitality of the city to promote intergenerational associations to family, culture, and environmental stewardship.

Death in the City

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kathryn A. Sloan
Keyword(s):  
Scientific Inquiry ◽  
The United States ◽  
Violent Death ◽  
Special Relationship ◽  
Intimate Friend ◽  
Counter Narrative ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
European Heritage ◽  
The City ◽  
The Temple

Popular culture has long conflated Mexico with the macabre. Some persuasive intellectuals argue that Mexicans have a special relationship with death, formed in the crucible of their hybrid Aztec-European heritage. Death is their intimate friend; death is mocked and accepted with irony and fatalistic abandon. The commonplace nature of death desensitizes Mexicans to suffering. Death, simply put, defines Mexico. There must have been historical actors who looked away from human misery, but to essentialize a diverse group of people as possessing a unique death cult delights those who want to see the exotic in Mexico or distinguish that society from its peers. Examining tragic and untimely death—namely self-annihilation—reveals a counter narrative. What could be more chilling than suicide, especially the violent death of the young? What desperation or madness pushed the victim to raise the gun to the temple or slip the noose around the neck? A close examination of a wide range of twentieth-century historical documents proves that Mexicans did not accept death with a cavalier chuckle nor develop a unique death cult, for that matter. Quite the reverse, Mexicans behaved just as their contemporaries did in Austria, France, England, and the United States. They devoted scientific inquiry to the malady and mourned the loss of each life to suicide.

Bringing the Real World of Science to Children: A Partnership of the American Museum of Natural History and the City University of New York

2008 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Anthony G Picciano ◽  
Robert V. Steiner
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
New York ◽  
Natural History ◽  
Local Governments ◽  
Compulsory Education ◽  
Development Program ◽  
The United States ◽  
American Museum ◽  
The World ◽  
The City

Every child has a right to an education. In the United States, the issue is not necessarily about access to a school but access to a quality education. With strict compulsory education laws, more than 50 million students enrolled in primary and secondary schools, and billions of dollars spent annually on public and private education, American children surely have access to buildings and classrooms. However, because of a complex and competitive system of shared policymaking among national, state, and local governments, not all schools are created equal nor are equal education opportunities available for the poor, minorities, and underprivileged. One manifestation of this inequity is the lack of qualified teachers in many urban and rural schools to teach certain subjects such as science, mathematics, and technology. The purpose of this article is to describe a partnership model between two major institutions (The American Museum of Natural History and The City University of New York) and the program designed to improve the way teachers are trained and children are taught and introduced to the world of science. These two institutions have partnered on various projects over the years to expand educational opportunity especially in the teaching of science. One of the more successful projects is Seminars on Science (SoS), an online teacher education and professional development program, that connects teachers across the United States and around the world to cutting-edge research and provides them with powerful classroom resources. This article provides the institutional perspectives, the challenges and the strategies that fostered this partnership.

China's Western Horizon

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daniel S. Markey
Keyword(s):  
Political Influence ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Political ◽  
Regional Politics ◽  
National Wealth ◽  
Long Run ◽  
Political Implications ◽  
Foreign Policies ◽  
Belt And Road ◽  
Infrastructure Investments

This book explains how China’s new foreign policies like the vaunted “Belt and Road” Initiative are being shaped by local and regional politics outside China and assesses the political implications of these developments for Eurasia and the United States. It depicts the ways that President Xi Jinping’s China is zealously transforming its national wealth and economic power into tools of global political influence and details these developments in South Asia, Central Asia, and the Middle East. Drawing from extensive interviews, travels, and historical research, it describes how perceptions of China vary widely within states like Pakistan, Kazakhstan, and Iran. Eurasia’s powerful and privileged groups often expect to profit from their connections to China, while others fear commercial and political losses. Similarly, statesmen across Eurasia are scrambling to harness China’s energy purchases, arms sales, and infrastructure investments as a means to outdo their strategic competitors, like India and Saudi Arabia, while negotiating relations with Russia and America. The book finds that, on balance, China’s deepening involvement will play to the advantage of regional strongmen and exacerbate the political tensions within and among Eurasian states. To make the most of America’s limited influence along China’s western horizon (and elsewhere), it argues that US policymakers should pursue a selective and localized strategy to serve America’s aims in Eurasia and to better compete with China over the long run.

scholarly journals ArcGIS Urban: an application for plan assessment

2021 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Ellen Soward ◽  
Jianling Li
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
The United States ◽  
Spatial Context ◽  
Future Studies ◽  
Planning Profession ◽  
Gis Tools ◽  
Comprehensive Plans ◽  
Near Future ◽  
The City

AbstractMost cities in the United States rely on zoning to address important planning-related issues within their jurisdictions. Planners often use GIS tools to analyze these issues in a spatial context. ESRI’s ArcGIS Urban software seeks to provide the planning profession with a GIS-based solution for various challenges, including zoning’s impacts on the built environment and housing capacity.This research explores the use of ArcGIS Urban for assessing the existing zoning and comprehensive plans in meeting the projected residential growth in the near future using the City of Arlington, Texas as a case study. The exploration provides examples and lessons for how ArcGIS Urban might be used by planners to accomplish their tasks and highlights the capabilities and limitations of ArcGIS Urban in its current stand. The paper is concluded with some suggestions for future studies.

Kampungs and Conflict in Colonial Semarang

1988 ◽  
Vol 19 (2) ◽  
pp. 266-291 ◽  
Author(s):  
James L. Cobban
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
The United States ◽  
City Council ◽  
Economic Life ◽  
North Coast ◽  
The North ◽  
Central Java ◽  
The Government ◽  
The City

By the beginning of the twentieth century, Semarang was a major port city and administrative centre on Java. Attainment of this position was due partly to the expansion of its hinterland during the nineteenth century. This expansion was closely related to developments in the means of transportation and the consequent ability of plantation owners to bring the products of their plantations to the port for shipment to foreign markets. By the end of the century virtually the whole economic life of central Java focused upon Semarang. The city also exercised administrative functions in the Dutch colonial administration and generally had been responsible for Dutch interests in the middle and eastern parts of the island. The importance of Semarang as an administrative centre increased after 1906. In that year the government incorporated the city as an urban municipality (stadsgemeente). In 1914 it had consular representation from the United States, Belgium, Denmark, France, Great Britain, Italy, Norway, Germany, and Thailand. Subsequently, in 1926 it became the capital of the Province of Central Java under the terms of an administrative reform fostered by the colonial government at Batavia. Status as an urban municipality meant that local officials sitting on a city council would govern the domestic affairs of the city. The members of the city council at first were appointed from Batavia, subsequently some of them were elected by residents of the city. By the beginning of the twentieth century Semarang had enhanced its position as a major port on the north coast of the island of Java. It was one of the foremost cities of the Dutch East Indies, along with Batavia and Surabaya, a leading port and a centre of administration and trade. This article outlines the growth of the port of Semarang during the nineteenth century and discusses some of the conflict related to this growth over living conditions in parts of the city during the twentieth century, a conflict which smouldered for several decades among the government, members of the city council, and the non-European residents of the city, one which remained unresolved at the end of the colonial era.

Conference on the Limitation of Armament and Problems of the Pacific

1921 ◽  
Vol 15 (4) ◽  
pp. 503-510
Author(s):  
James Brown Scott
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
The Netherlands ◽  
British Empire ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Pacific ◽  
Far Eastern ◽  
The City

A conference of a group of Powers heretofore known as the Principal Allied and Associated Powers (the British Empire, France, Italy, Japan and the United States), to discuss the limitation of armament, and of these Powers, and Belgium, China, the Netherlands and Portugal, to consider Pacific and Far Eastern problems, will open in the City of Washington on November 11, 1921.

“The Principal Russian Church in America”: from the History of Saint Nicholas Russian Orthodox Cathedral in the City of New York

Istoriya ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 12 (11 (109)) ◽  
pp. 0
Author(s):  
Vladimir Pechatnov
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
New York ◽  
The United States ◽  
Russian Orthodox ◽  
History Of ◽  
Ministry Of Finance ◽  
The Russian Empire ◽  
Foreign Ministry ◽  
The City

Based on previously unearthed documents from the Russia’s State Historical Archive and the Archive of Foreign Policy of the Russian Empire the article explores the history of the first Russian Orthodox parish in New York City and construction of Saint-Nickolas Russian Orthodox Cathedral in the city. It was a protracted and complicated interagency process that involved Russian Orthodox mission in the United States, Russia’s Foreign Ministry and its missions in the United States, the Holy Governing Synod, Russia’s Ministry of Finance and the State Council. The principal actors were the bishops Nicholas (Ziorov) and especially Tikhon (Bellavin), Ober-Prosecutor of the Holy Governing Synod Konstantine Pobedonostsev and Reverend Alexander Khotovitsky. This case study of the Cathedral history reveals an interaction of ecclesiastical and civil authorities in which private and civic initiative was combined with strict bureaucratic rules and procedures.

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