In The Public Interest

When it comes to urban planning, to what extent and under what conditions should the community’s interest prevail over the rights of private property owners? Public Interest, Private Property addresses this question at a time when pollution, urban sprawl, and condo booms are forcing municipal governments to adopt prescriptive laws and regulations. Case studies focus on spheres in which public values and private property rights collide – expropriation law, natural resources regulation, green development, and water provision – laying the groundwork for more active debates on the issues currently shaping our cities.

A new approach to developing and applying technology in the public interest.

“Worth a read for anyone who cares about making change happen.”—Barack Obama A powerful new blueprint for how governments and nonprofits can harness the power of digital technology to help solve the most serious problems of the twenty-first century As the speed and complexity of the world increases, governments and nonprofit organizations need new ways to effectively tackle the critical challenges of our time—from pandemics and global warming to social media warfare. In Power to the Public, Tara Dawson McGuinness and Hana Schank describe a revolutionary new approach—public interest technology—that has the potential to transform the way governments and nonprofits around the world solve problems. Through inspiring stories about successful projects ranging from a texting service for teenagers in crisis to a streamlined foster care system, the authors show how public interest technology can make the delivery of services to the public more effective and efficient. At its heart, public interest technology means putting users at the center of the policymaking process, using data and metrics in a smart way, and running small experiments and pilot programs before scaling up. And while this approach may well involve the innovative use of digital technology, technology alone is no panacea—and some of the best solutions may even be decidedly low-tech. Clear-eyed yet profoundly optimistic, Power to the Public presents a powerful blueprint for how government and nonprofits can help solve society’s most serious problems.

Acclaimed African American scholar and teacher educator Gloria Ladson-Billings examines the field of teacher education through the accomplishments and contributions of well-known African American teacher educators—Lisa Delpit, Carl Grant, Jacqueline Jordan Irvine, Geneva Gay, Cherry McGee Banks, William Tate, and Joyce King. Using in-depth interviews and storytelling, Ladson-Billings depicts deeply personal portraits of these scholars’ experiences to confront race and racism, not only theoretically, but within their everyday professional lives in “the Big House” of the academy. Ladson-Billings gives these portraits even greater resonance and meaning by pairing these teacher educators with historical figures—such as Harriet Tubman, Nat Turner, and Charlotte Forten—whose contributions to the struggle for social justice are a wellspring of hope and courage to all educators, and a tribute to African Americans whose political, scientific, and spiritual efforts made life better for us all. This compelling book is important reading for all educators who want to transform teacher education for the better. “The American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education is enthused and excited about Ladson-Billings’s dynamic and provoking scholarship. Its focus on outstanding African American teacher educators is a major contribution to teacher education literature. This cutting-edge research is likely to prompt some of the best of unconventional teacher education thought.” —David G. Imig, President and CEO, American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education “In this moving and original book, Gloria Ladson-Billings offers complex insights about the politics of scholarship, the experiences of scholars of color in universities, and the larger enterprise of teaching and teacher education for social justice.” —Marilyn Cochran-Smith, Lynch School of Education, Boston College and President of the American Educational Research Association (AERA) for 2004–05.

Creditor Rights and the Public Interest supports the greater representation of non-traditional creditors in the process of insolvency restructuring in Canada, concentrating particularly on restructuring under the federal Companies' Creditors' Arrangement Act (CCAA). Arguing in favour of the representation of such non-traditional creditors as workers, consumers, trade suppliers, and local governments, Janis Sarra describes the existing process of addressing their interests, analyzes four case studies that focus on non-creditor groups, and compares the Canadian approach to that of several other countries, such as Germany, France, and the United States. Sarra draws on a comprehensive body of academic literature that covers a broad range of issues--insolvency theory, corporate governance theory, legislative history, and bankruptcy and insolvency practice. She further surveys the relevant legislation and supplements her analysis with insights drawn from extensive primary research of court records and personal interviews with lawyers, judges, and government officials. Creditor Rights and the Public Interest ultimately illustrates the way in which the concept of the public interest can be utilized to foreground the concerns of non-traditional stakeholders. Sarra provides a coherent account of the justification for recognizing these creditors by situating insolvency law in a legal regime that realizes a duty to maximize all of the interests and investments at stake in the corporation. In an academic field where scholarship is currently scarce, Sarra's text will be a welcome contribution.

This book studies the recent legacy of basti “evictions” in Delhi—mass clearings of some of the city’s poorest neighborhoods—as a way to understand how the urban poor are disenfranchised in the name of “public interest” and, in the case of Delhi, by the very courts meant to empower and protect them. Studying bastes, says Gautam Bhan, provokes six clear lines of inquiry applicable to studies of urbanism across the global south. The first is the long-standing debate over urban informality and illegality: the debate’s impact on conceptions and practices of urban planning, the production of space, and the regulation of value. The second is a set of debates on “good governance,” read through their intersections with ideas of “planned development” within rapidly transforming cities. The third is the political field of urban citizenship and the possibilities of substantive rights and belonging in the city. The fourth is resistance and the ability of a city’s subaltern residents to struggle against exclusion. The two remaining inquiries both cut across and unify the first four. One of these is the role of the judiciary and the relationships between law and urbanism in cities of the global south. The other is the relationship between democracy and inequality in the city. What emerges about Delhi in particular are a set of new modes for the reproduction of inequality. When rights are lost, citizenship is unequal and differentiated, the promise of development is refused, and poverty and inequality are reproduced and deepened. The task at hand, says Bhan, is not just to explain evictions but also to listen to what they are telling us about “the city that is as well as the city that can be.”