Educating Reflective Practitioners: Learning to Embrace the Unexpected through Service Learning
Book Review: Bob Freitag, Susan Bolton, Frank Westerlund, and J. L. S. Clark Floodplain Management: A New Approach for a New Era. Washington, DC: Island Press, 2009. 242 ppService learning projects are characterized by complex processes of knowledge production, which are contingent on narratives that inform the identities of educators, students, and community members. By encouraging students to critically reflect on their positionality and the social processes that inform such coproduction of knowledge, educators can use service learning to educate reflective practitioners capable of working productively with multiple actors. In a service learning course focusing on environmental justice at the University of Texas at Austin, students worked with a variety of community partners to document children’s knowledge of environmental hazards, reflecting critically on unexpected challenges during their fieldwork.
N of One plus Some: An Alternative Strategy for Conducting Single Case Research
2009 Jay Chatterjee Award for Distinguished ServiceCase study researchers choose between single and multiple case research approaches. The literature recommends single cases for gaining in-depth understanding and multiple cases for acquiring broader understanding. This article presents the unconventional approach of a primary case informed by multiple secondary cases. It suggests that focusing on one case while following some additional secondary cases may, paradoxically and under certain conditions, be a better way of conducting in-depth, single case research. The secondary, or assisting, cases can help the researcher to identify issues to expect, questions to ask, and data to look for in the primary case.
Intermetropolitan Comparison of Transportation Accessibility: Sorting Out Mobility and Proximity in San Francisco and Washington, D.C
Book Review: David Ormandy, ed. Housing and Health in Europe: The WHO LARES Project. London: Routledge, 2009. 352 pp. $125.00 (hardcover)Both mobility and proximity influence transportation accessibility, but they exist in tension with each other. To understand the region-level trade-off between mobility and proximity requires intermetropolitan comparisons of accessibility. With a focus on the two metropolitan cases of San Francisco and Washington, D.C., we first describe a method for comparing regional accessibility and then explain a method that separates out the effects of mobility and proximity on regional accessibility. We find that the San Francisco region enjoys an accessibility advantage over Washington largely because of faster highway speeds but that central Washington offers an advantage in proximity.
Food Environment, Built Environment, and Women's BMI: Evidence from Erie County, New York
2009 Paul Davidoff Book AwardThe authors present the results of a neighborhood-scaled exploratory study that tests the association of the food environment and the built environment with women’s body mass index (BMI) in Erie County, New York. The proximity of women’s homes to a supermarket relative to a convenience store is associated with lower BMI. A diverse land use mix in a neighborhood is positively associated with women’s BMI, especially when restaurants dominate nonresidential land use. The article offers suggestions for how food environments may be improved using planning strategies.
Planning in Neighborhoods with Multiple Publics: Opportunities and Challenges for Community-Based Nonprofit Organizations
Book Review: Peter Hendee Brown America's Waterfront Revival: Port Authorities and Urban Redevelopment. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009. 228 ppNew York City is the quintessential immigrant gateway, and its transformation to a majority "minority" city is evident in the complex demography of its numerous neighborhoods. Based on detailed case studies of two neighborhoods undergoing significant development pressures that pose a dramatic reshaping of community life, this article examines whether New York City community boards serve as a "pivotal" public arena to mitigate racial tensions and meaningfully engage diverse stakeholders including immigrants in neighborhood planning. The case studies of Sunset Park, Brooklyn and Flushing, Queens demonstrate that community boards do not necessarily engage all stakeholders in meaningful or sustained ways and are limited in advancing race relations in a challenging socioeconomic context. This article substantiates how community-based nonprofit organizations are essential to the institutional landscape of immigrant neighborhoods by engaging multiple publics in community planning.
Commentary: Arts, Neighborhoods, and Social Practices: Towards an Integrated Epistemology of Community Arts
Book Review: Dan Immergluck Foreclosed: High-Risk Lending, Deregulation and the Undermining of America's Mortgage Market. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2009. 251 pp. $29.95 (hardback). ISBN 9780801447722Despite a common concern for social change, the multidisciplinary fields of city planning and performance studies rely on different theories, epistemologies, and language. We argue that these fields share common roots and would benefit from integrating their approaches.We use three issues in community arts, along with a case study from Oakland, California, as a lens into this new joint epistemology. The first is the concern over arts as instrument: the tension over the social uses of arts and the arts as commodifying neighborhood. Second is the concept of audience development, often conceptualized as uplifting the audience without acknowledging daily lived experience. Third is the vulnerability that threatens artists and neighborhoods alike. A concluding section addresses the human capital implications of a new field of arts and city planning.
Commentary: The City-Inscribed and City-Natural-At Your Feet
Acknowledgment
