The Delegated State

Shreveport serves as the representative case for municipalities without a local government level supportive housing policy. Shreveport is a case where the Continuum of Care, municipal policy goals, decision-making, and implementation remain very separate. The separation is evident in policy decision-making and implementation, where the municipal government has little to no involvement in homeless policy aside from coordinating pass-through federal funding. Limited involvement by Shreveport’s municipal government presents direct barriers to supportive housing policy design and implementation by restricting authority and resources available to the Continuum of Care to coordinate policy activities. Policy activities constrained by the limited municipal authority for the Continuum of Care include challenges reducing policing of persons experiencing chronic homelessness and severe mental illness and limited ability to participate in municipal decision-making, which disadvantaged the Continuum of Care in debates over new shelter or low-income housing constructions compared to economic elites in the Downtown Development Authority.

Philanthropy and Economic Development: New Roles and Strategies

Philanthropic investments in economic development—including grants, technical assistance, program-related investments, policy advocacy, and civic leadership—have increased during the past decades. Philanthropic support for economic development provides flexible, timely resources for innovation, capacity building, and policy advocacy. While philanthropy is often associated with social equity approaches, philanthropic investments in economic development are quite diverse—downtown development, place-based renewal, social enterprises, and economic development networks. This study reviews existing data about philanthropy and economic development, vignettes of foundation investments, and nonprofit perspectives about new foundation roles. Overall, place-rooted foundations are most engaged in economic development, while many national foundations are formulating broader strategic frameworks related to economic inclusion. Foundations are helping achieve concrete economic development results; future research requires improvements in data and in-depth case studies of places with significant philanthropic engagement.

Sustainable Downtown Development for the Tsunami-Prepared Urban Revitalization of Regional Coastal Cities

Regional cities in Japan are facing a decline in the downtown area owing to urban expansion and a decrease in the population. Promoting downtown living is indispensable for the realization of downtown revitalization. Since many coastal cities originally developed outward from a port, their downtown areas are located near the coast and are at high risk of tsunamis. The purpose of this research is to reveal the effectiveness of dealing with the above two issues in parallel by evaluating the Deae-ru Saiwai estate, a public housing relocation project in downtown Kushiro, Hokkaido, Japan that incorporates a tsunami evacuation facility with questionnaires and a GIS survey. Placing public housing in the downtown area shortens the distance to public facilities and improves the convenience of the surrounding environment for many residents. Installing the tsunami evacuation facility improves the feeling of reassurance of residents who would feel anxiety about immigration with regards to tsunamis. This research has clarified the synergistic effect of dealing with the daily and emergency issues in parallel for promoting downtown living. Planning downtown revitalization and disaster prevention concurrently, which has been separated so far, is a fundamental planning approach for urban revitalization in regional coastal cities.

The Reproduction of Babylon and the Gentrification Dilemma

This chapter focuses primarily on Richmond and Oakland and the military-industrial spaces of the Bay Area, on important African American places that struggled with the long legacy of ghettoized segregation and its geographic relationship to highways and heavy industry. It examines the struggles of downtown development, brownfield redevelopment, and the lost opportunity that has been the redevelopment of the old military bases. It examines the interlinked violence of air pollution and homicide that plagued these communities, part of a set of issues which the fiscally challenged cities were unable to meet. In doing so, it highlights the same mix of local responsibility and collective failure that marked the previous chapters. But it also discusses a profound dilemma particular to these communities.

Downtown Development and the Endeavors of Filmmaker Kent Mackenzie

At the same time that Wolper was building his studio and staffing it with the producers Mel Stuart, Alan Landsburg, and Jack Haley Jr., film school graduates were looking for employment in the city. This chapter focuses on Kent Mackenzie, who, like other talented, university-trained filmmakers, worked for Wolper Productions, the USIA, and film firms that catered to the educational and business sectors. These jobs offered a rewarding alternative to studio fiction but also entailed ideological and formal constraints. During this period, Mackenzie drew on the resources of his day jobs, along with the pro bono efforts of his colleagues, to make The Exiles (1961). Examining the major thrust of Mackenzie’s career reveals the professional challenges and opportunities for young filmmakers interested in making socially engaged documentary.

Possibilities for using solar energy to fulfil the energy needs of buildings in the city centre

Historical buildings in the centre of European cities are characterized by compact built-up areas with diversified heights of buildings, most often with multi-sloped roofs. Architectural elements, dormers, chimneys and bay windows, cause limitations in the availability of surface area for solar installations. The paper presents the results of an analysis for possibilities in meeting energy requirements with the use of solar energy for old-town buildings in the centre of Bydgoszcz. Based on the calculations made, it was determined that the dense downtown development has a very large roof surface, however, the vicinity of buildings, roof slope angles, and obstacles cause significant restrictions on the location of such installations. The article analyzes selected fragments of the Downtown district. The height of buildings, their shape and the surface of their roofs and all the obstacles that occur there were taken into account. The conclusions concern an assessment of the possibility of using the potential of solar energy in this type of building. The efficiency of solar installations and the losses associated with energy conversion and transmission to customers is also included.