This study of the West Side Urban Renewal Area (WSURA) in New York City examines the motives, preferences, and values of a selected group of householders residing in the WSURA. The findings should benefit social work and other planners in decision-making roles. The study identified a group of householders who had the option of choosing to move into urban integrated housing during a period when many of their counterparts were choosing the suburbs in order to escape urban problems such as deteriorating neighborhoods, the high cost of living, poor schools, a rising crime rate, and integrated neighborhoods. In order to better appreciate the householders' decision-making, the study explored the householders' reasons for moving from their previous homes to the WSURA, their expectations concerning life in the WSURA, some of their living experiences in the area, and their satisfaction with the decision to move into the WSURA. In order to effectively answer these questions, the variables of age, income, occupation, family cycle, and race and socioeconomic status were analyzed. The population from which the selected sample was drawn consisted of 774 black and white households located in the Stage I area of the WSURA project. The area was conducive to investigation because it had the physical and socioeconomic characteristics envisioned by the WSURA planners. A research instrument, the questionnaire, was prepared to conduct the study. A total of 173 householders were interviewed: 82 white and 91 black. The items in the questionnaire were coded, edited, and rechecked. Open-ended questions were coded according to a scheme developed from a content analysis of the first fifty questionnaires. The coded data were then keypunched and processed on an IBM 360 computer. The findings of the study demonstrated that the variables of age, income, occupation, family cycle, and race and socioeconomic status did define certain preferences and values of the respondents. The WSURA project was fortunate in its location in an area where highly valued amenities such as theaters, shopping facilities, and restaurants were already located. But the respondents were dissatisfied with schools, health and medical services, and police protection. Differences by race were distinguishable. Less racial tension was perceived in the WSURA than is evident nationally. But the respondents reported a lack of interracial contact on other than a superficial level. An additional survey of key informants. eight people who had been involved professionally in the WSURA project, revealed that the planners hoped to remove the stigma of urban renewal. They revealed also that because of citizen participation the planners and planning recipients had common areas of agreement. It was found that consideration of economics and social attitudes resulted in tradeoffs by the respondents in terms of their moving into the WSURA project. Detailed planning is viewed as a significant component of effective housing policy. No recipient group should be taken for granted. The most visible planning flaw is seen as a lack of sensitivity toward the poor. Limited income, poor education, and inequality in opportunity constituted a cycle that is not fully appreciated by planners. Past methods used by planners should be viewed skeptically. Plans for future housing and neighborhoods should reflect a more realistic view of the needs and preferences of all groups and a greater appreciation of the quality of life.

No description available.

Hui Ka Wai. / "Architecture Department, Chinese University of Hong Kong, Master of Architecture Programme 2004-2005, design report." / Introduction --- p.001-011 / Research Study --- p.012-047 / Precedent Study --- p.048-079 / Model Study --- p.080-117 / Final Presentation --- p.118-158

A Year in the City is a mosaic novel set in contemporary an historical Sydney. It is 70, 000 words long, and contains twelve different narratives, with the American author Mark Twain appearing as a fictional character in the opening and closing. A Year in the City seeks to represent the fragmented, multicultural nature of Sydney through a diverse range of narrators and styles. Each of the chapters is linked through the themes of belonging, race, land ownership. The Sydney portrayed in the novel is what Leonie Sandercock called a Mongrel City, a metaphor used to characterise the &quotnew urban condition in which difference, otherness, fragmentation, splintering, multiplicity, heterogeneity, diversity, [and] plurality prevail.&quot A Year in the City intends to celebrate cultural and racial heterogeneity. It is accompanied by a research dissertation of 30, 000 words, that investigates the project of writing about the city and the theme of race. It explores the imagined city through the work of James Donald and Ross Gibson, and addresses the challenge of capturing the lived experience in text, as theorised by Henri Lefebvre. The mosaic structure of A Year in the City borrows from Michel de Certeau's theory of walking the city and Walter Benjamin's flaneur. The issue of race is discussed in relation to the representation of white and non-white characters against the dominant white society.

This thesis posits that throughout history, the Western city has been made and understood according to a shared image of the cosmos. It argues that though the contours of this cosmos have changed over time and place, collectively held understandings of the city endure to the present day. Drawing on literary and cultural theory, this way of understanding the city may be conceptualised as ??magical??, that is incorporating knowledge which is hermeneutic and mythical, as well as empirical. The specific example of places of the dead, understood as cemeteries, memorials and other locations at which the dead are actually or symbolically interred, is used in this thesis to test the notion that that the city may continue to be understood as a reflection of world view. Places of the dead provide an appropriate test case for this task, as their forms and locations have clear associations with temporally and culturally specific understandings of the city. This thesis applies textual analysis and discourse analysis to seven case studies of contemporary places of the dead in order to examine the way in which the magic of the city may operate in one typology of place. It considers the representation of these case studies in a large array of texts, with particular emphasis on fictional, and thus potentially ??magical??, texts such as novels, television series and architectural drawings, as well as postcards, movies, cartoons, photographs, songs and paintings. The results of the case studies are used to argue not only that the city continues to be understood using a wide variety of ways of knowing, but also that these alternative epistemologies offer insights into contemporary cities which are not gained through the use of conventional methodologies.

Culture is expanding and has greater weight and explanatory potential in our culturalised age. Following the earlier literature of the ???cultural turn???, culture is now perceived as ubiquitous in society, the economy, and theory, and with the capacity to intervene on itself. Further, it may be seen to characterise both the nature and the progressive potential of a range of contemporary social and intellectual technologies such as planning, education, health, and organisational development. While this general process of ???culturalisation??? proceeds apace, the capacity of culture to act as an organising idea and category for sectors such as planning is still largely underdeveloped, most particularly in planning itself. A new Culturised Model for planning that is reflexive and ethical is proposed. Differentiated from the trend to culturalisation and its association with commodification, ???culturisation??? has true sustainable and transformational potential. The thesis consists of three main parts ??? each of three chapters - with a substantial scenesetting Introduction and a Conclusion. Part One examines culture and planning, Part Two develops a new Culturised Model for planning, and Part Three illustrates the Model. In Part One the grounds of culturisation are prepared by: 1) describing our culturalised age; 2) developing a new positionality for planning; 3) presenting a critical analysis of neomodern and postmodern planning theory; and 4) outlining an original history of culture and planning in the 20th and 21st centuries. In Part Two a practical Culturised Model for planning is developed, based on the three elements of 1) principles for culture; 2) a planner???s ???literacy trinity???; and 3) a methodology. The Model employs an integrated concept of culture and an integrated approach to research, and is applicable to the full spectrum of planning forms, scales and purposes. In Part Three the Culturised Model is illustrated in principle through a range of global examples, and in specific terms, for two major Australian places. The first study illustrates culture and urban and regional planning for metropolitan Sydney, NSW, at four nested geographical scales. The second illustrates strategic planning in its aspatial form for the Port Arthur Historic Site, in Tasmania, a major international convict heritage site proposed for UNESCO World Heritage listing. The thesis represents an original multi-dimensional synthesis on culture and planning. It also presents a ???breakthrough??? paradigm for the sustainable integration of culture in planning, previously only foreshadowed in the planning literature, and developed in randomised practices internationally.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Washington, 1988. / Vita. Bibliography: leaves [404]-454.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Hong Kong, 2007. / Title proper from title frame. Also available in printed format.

Thesis (M.-.)--Washington State University, May 2007. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 171-192).

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Hong Kong, 2006. / Title proper from title frame. Also available in printed format.