Regent Park is Canada’s largest and among its oldest public housing developments. Like similar large-scale public housing developments across North America, Regent Park has come under considerable criticism for isolating low-income households and facilitating crime, among other things. As a result, an ambitious six-phase, one billion dollar revitalization project was initiated in 2005 to completely re-design Regent Park and integrate the neighbourhood into the urban fabric of Toronto. This qualitative study examines the impact of relocation on residents from phase 1 of this revitalization project. With demolition of the neighbourhood commencing in February of 2005, 370 households from Regent Park were dispersed; some stayed in Regent Park, some moved to surrounding neighbourhoods, and others moved further away in the Greater Toronto Area. Open-ended, semi-structured interviews were conducted with members of 21 of these households in an effort to discover some of the more salient impacts of relocation on the lives of phase 1 residents. Both social and place-based impacts were assessed using the frameworks of social capital and place attachment, respectively. The study was conceived of as the first part of a longitudinal study of relocation and resettlement of public housing residents in Regent Park.

Home environments pose a number of challenges for environmental justice. Healthy homes in healthy neighborhoods are often inaccessible due to socioeconomic factors, environmental racism, and/or environmental gentrification. Publicly funded home repair programs increasingly strive to both improve environmental health conditions and to reduce energy bills for low-income homeowners. Such programs have been intended to stimulate reinvestment in neighborhoods experiencing blight and more recently to reduce gentrification pressure in neighborhoods experiencing rapid reinvestment. While such programs do not represent a silver-bullet solution to the accessibility of healthy housing, the question remains: “What is the potential of low-income home repair programs to serve as a leverage point for environmental justice in urban home environments facing gentrification pressure?” This question is investigated through performance evaluation case studies of three municipally funded, low-income home repair programs in Austin, Texas intended to ameliorate gentrification and advance outcomes related to environmental justice. The findings suggest that as a site of intervention, dialogue, community connection, and resource-mobilization, home repair programs have potential as leverage points in regenerative community development that advances environmental justice performance outcomes. Actors in home environments can increase their performance with the support of the home ecology paradigm (HEP), a synthetic research paradigm that draws from sustainability science, environmental justice, and social learning literature to renew an action research paradigm established by Ellen Swallow Richards in the late 1800s to advance healthy community design and development. Guided by a vision of environmental justice, equipped with tools supporting holistic, multi-scalar systems-thinking and regenerative dialogue assessments, and engaged in a practice of resilient leadership, such actors can more deftly dance with the co-evolving systems of their home environments. In so doing, they increase their potential to directly enhance the material, social, and ecological conditions of life in the present, while also cultivating the capacity of these living systems to adapt resiliently to future disruptions. Furthermore, beyond producing life-enhancing performance outcomes, the HEP also appears to support actors in an engaged praxis that enhances their moment-by-moment experience of life and the vitality of living systems in the present.

The Lonely Planet advises visitors to Granada, Spain to "turn off...into the cobbled alleys of Calderería Vieja or Nueva and in a few steps you've left Europe behind." La Calderería is known for its Arab influences and North African immigrant businesses. A tourist's ability to easily step off one continent and enter another realm demonstrates an imagined border between Europe and the Orient, especially North Africa, that is created by historical narratives, policy discourses and daily practices. The antagonism between an imagined white, Catholic and European Spain vis-à-vis its North African Muslim neighbors is fundamental to the history of the Spanish nation. This East/West divide has recently been recast as Moroccan immigration, inspired by proximity and colonial legacies, since the 1980s has made Moroccan the largest immigrant group by nationality in Spain. Supranational borders, neighborhoods and specific streets participate in an intense debate about cultural difference, based on a complicated mixture of racial, ethnic and religious categories. Concurrently, more regional autonomy within the Spanish state has led Andalusia to reclaim its Islamic heritage, especially in Granada where tourism is important economically. This has dovetailed with gentrification of the Albayzín. Both the appropriation of the Islamic period of Iberian history and the contemporary social exclusion of Moroccan immigrants are realized through Orientalism. In La Calderería, tea, souvenirs, male Moroccan vendors, Western female tourists, pavement, cultural conservation, public space ordinances and police surveillance create a site where public and private space blurs and ‘practical orientalism’ constitutes subjects performing and resisting the identities prescribed to them.

Maintaining affordable housing in Canadian cities remains a challenge for municipal governments. With few political and financial resources, local governments often turn to zoning bylaws to protect affordable housing opportunities. This research focuses on the development and implementation of inclusionary zoning programs in Toronto and Vancouver. In order to understand the value of these policies, this research asks how planners implemented inclusionary zoning and with what outcomes. Interviews with key actors in the public and private sector form the basis of an account that details the implementation of affordable housing requirements negotiated at two new-build gentrification sites in Toronto and Vancouver. The findings from this research show mixed results and highlight the barriers to the successful implementation of inclusionary zoning. While capable of securing subsidized units in gentrifying neighbourhoods, the poor results of these policies demonstrates the difficulty of managing gentrification unleashed by the state.

Maintaining affordable housing in Canadian cities remains a challenge for municipal governments. With few political and financial resources, local governments often turn to zoning bylaws to protect affordable housing opportunities. This research focuses on the development and implementation of inclusionary zoning programs in Toronto and Vancouver. In order to understand the value of these policies, this research asks how planners implemented inclusionary zoning and with what outcomes. Interviews with key actors in the public and private sector form the basis of an account that details the implementation of affordable housing requirements negotiated at two new-build gentrification sites in Toronto and Vancouver. The findings from this research show mixed results and highlight the barriers to the successful implementation of inclusionary zoning. While capable of securing subsidized units in gentrifying neighbourhoods, the poor results of these policies demonstrates the difficulty of managing gentrification unleashed by the state.

The Lonely Planet advises visitors to Granada, Spain to "turn off...into the cobbled alleys of Calderería Vieja or Nueva and in a few steps you've left Europe behind." La Calderería is known for its Arab influences and North African immigrant businesses. A tourist's ability to easily step off one continent and enter another realm demonstrates an imagined border between Europe and the Orient, especially North Africa, that is created by historical narratives, policy discourses and daily practices. The antagonism between an imagined white, Catholic and European Spain vis-à-vis its North African Muslim neighbors is fundamental to the history of the Spanish nation. This East/West divide has recently been recast as Moroccan immigration, inspired by proximity and colonial legacies, since the 1980s has made Moroccan the largest immigrant group by nationality in Spain. Supranational borders, neighborhoods and specific streets participate in an intense debate about cultural difference, based on a complicated mixture of racial, ethnic and religious categories. Concurrently, more regional autonomy within the Spanish state has led Andalusia to reclaim its Islamic heritage, especially in Granada where tourism is important economically. This has dovetailed with gentrification of the Albayzín. Both the appropriation of the Islamic period of Iberian history and the contemporary social exclusion of Moroccan immigrants are realized through Orientalism. In La Calderería, tea, souvenirs, male Moroccan vendors, Western female tourists, pavement, cultural conservation, public space ordinances and police surveillance create a site where public and private space blurs and ‘practical orientalism’ constitutes subjects performing and resisting the identities prescribed to them.

Thesis (M.A.)--University of Oregon, 2008. / Typescript. Includes vita and abstract. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 94-99). Also available online.

Thesis (M. Arch.(Prof.)--University of Pretoria, 2004. / Title from opening screen (viewed Oct. 8, 2004). Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (M.A.)--University of Missouri-Columbia, 2008. / The entire dissertation/thesis text is included in the research.pdf file; the official abstract appears in the short.pdf file (which also appears in the research.pdf); a non-technical general description, or public abstract, appears in the public.pdf file. Title from title screen of research.pdf file (viewed on August 17, 2009) Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (M.A.)--Miami University, Dept. of Family Studies and Social Work, 2005. / Title from first page of PDF document. Document formatted into pages; contains [1], v, 54 p. Includes bibliographical references (p. 42-46).