Rebuilding Urban Neighborhoods

Despite long standing efforts going back to the turn of the century when city planning and other reform movements emerged, the poverty and social problems of distressed urban neighborhoods in United States cities persist. This book looks at the progress that has taken place in many of the country's devastated areas. The book highlights examples of achievements made through community organizations and residents.

Our poorest urban neighbourhoods experience economic and social difficulties that uniquely affect the lives of those who live there. This volume examines the policies and initiatives now underway on both sides of the Atlantic to revitalize those areas. With contributors from the US, France and the UK the volume explains the nature of specific community building programmes and explores critical issues such as the role of partnerships and the importance of race and gender in urban regeneration.

Neighborhood-based initiatives -ranging from settlement houses in the nineteenth century to the Community Action and Model Cities program of the Great Society to the Empowerment and Enterprise Zones of the 1990s -have been called on to help solve a variety of poverty-related problems. This book examines the history of these initiatives.

Disasters—natural ones, such as hurricanes, floods, or earthquakes, and unnatural ones such as terrorist attacks—are part of the American experience in the twenty-first century. The challenges of preparing for these events, withstanding their impact, and rebuilding communities afterward require strategic responses from different levels of government in partnership with the private sector and in accordance with the public will. Disasters have a disproportionate effect on urban places. Dense by definition, cities and their environs suffer great damage to their complex, interdependent social, environmental, and economic systems. Social and medical services collapse. Long-standing problems in educational access and quality become especially acute. Local economies cease to function. Cultural resources disappear. The plight of New Orleans and several smaller Gulf Coast cities exemplifies this phenomenon. This volume examines the rebuilding of cities and their environs after a disaster and focuses on four major issues: making cities less vulnerable to disaster, reestablishing economic viability, responding to the permanent needs of the displaced, and recreating a sense of place. Success in these areas requires that priorities be set cooperatively, and this goal poses significant challenges for rebuilding efforts in a democratic, market-based society. Who sets priorities and how? Can participatory decision-making be organized under conditions requiring focused, strategic choices? How do issues of race and class intersect with these priorities? Should the purpose of rebuilding be restoration or reformation? Contributors address these and other questions related to environmental conditions, economic imperatives, social welfare concerns, and issues of planning and design in light of the lessons to be drawn from Hurricane Katrina.

Urban redevelopment in American cities is neither easy nor quick. It takes a delicate alignment of goals, power, leadership and sustained advocacy on the part of many. Rebuilding the American City highlights 15 urban design and planning projects in the U.S. that have been catalysts for their downtowns—yet were implemented during the tumultuous start of the 21st century. The book presents five paradigms for redevelopment and a range of perspectives on the complexities, successes and challenges inherent to rebuilding American cities today. Rebuilding the American City is essential reading for practitioners and students in urban design, planning, and public policy looking for diverse models of urban transformation to create resilient urban cores.

Coming Home to New Orleans documents grassroots rebuilding efforts in New Orleans neighborhoods after hurricane Katrina, and draws lessons on their contribution to the post-disaster recovery of cities. The book begins with two chapters that address Katrina's impact and the planning and public sector recovery policies that set the context for neighborhood recovery. Rebuilding narratives for six New Orleans neighborhoods are then presented and analyzed. In the heavily flooded Broadmoor and Village de L'Est neighborhoods, residents coalesced around communitywide initiatives, one through a neighborhood association and the second under church leadership, to help homeowners return and restore housing, get key public facilities and businesses rebuilt and create new community-based organizations and civic capacity. A comparison of four adjacent neighborhoods in the center of the city show how differing socioeconomic conditions, geography, government policies and neighborhood capacity created varied recovery trajectories. The concluding chapter argues that grassroots and neighborhood scale initiatives can make important contributions to city recovery in four areas: repopulation, restoring "complete neighborhoods" with key services and amenities, rebuilding parts of the small business economy and enhancing recovery capacity. It also calls for more balanced investments and policies to rebuild rental and owner-occupied housing and more deliberate collaboration with community-based organizations to undertake and implement recovery plans, and proposes changes to federal disaster recovery policies and programs to leverage the contribution of grassroots rebuilding and more support for city recovery.

This successful title, previously known as 'Building the 21st Century Home' and now in its second edition, explores and explains the trends and issues that underlie the renaissance of UK towns and cities and describes the sustainable urban neighbourhood as a model for rebuilding urban areas. The book reviews the way that planning policies, architectural trends and economic forces have undermined the viability of urban areas in Britain since the Industrial Revolution. Now that much post-war planning philosophy is being discredited we are left with few urban models other than garden city inspired suburbia. Are these appropriate in the 21st century given environmental concerns, demographic change, social and economic pressures? The authors suggest that these trends point to a very different urban future. The authors argue that we must reform our towns and cities so that they become attractive, humane places where people will choose to live. The Sustainable Urban Neighbourhood is a model for such reform and the book describes what this would look like and how it might be brought about.