Culture and Community Development: Tough Questions, Creative Answers

By Caron Atlas What are the tough questions that public officials—mayors, planning commissioners and economic development experts—and private developers should address to incorporate issues of cultural planning in community development programs/projects? And what are the questions artists and arts organizations…

Categories: Fall 2005

Art and the Politics of Public Housing

By Jacqueline Leavitt We believe in a grassroots movement that puts into question the essential relationships on which the system is based. The focal point of these cultural campaigns is the evolution of political conviction into artistic actions and vice…

Categories: Fall 2005

Artists as Community Developers

By Ann Markusen Artists have been under-appreciated as participants in community and neighborhood development in cities around the world. On the one hand, they have been lumped into a “creative class” whose hedonistic preferences for residing in lively, diverse cities…

Categories: Fall 2005

Neoliberal Ideas and Social Housing Realities in Ontario

By Jason Hackworth A Return to the Halcyon Days or Just Another Empty Promise? On April 29, 2005, officials from Ontario and the Canadian federal government announced what was deemed by one senior provincial official as “the largest affordable housing…

Categories: Summer 2005

Participatory Housing Cooperatives: An Argentinean Experiment

By Marie Kennedy and Chris Tilly In the shadow of the sparkling skyscrapers of Buenos Aires ‘s newly redeveloped Puerto Madero waterfront area, we picked our way along the muddy paths of a villa miseria, the Argentinean word for a squatter settlement.…

Categories: Summer 2005

Bush to Cities: “Drop Dead”

By Gregory D. Squires and Charis E. Kubrin The 1977 Community Reinvestment Act (CRA) has generated trillions of dollars for urban and rural neighborhoods that had traditionally been redlined by financial institutions. But the Bush administration, with the help of…

Categories: Spring 2005

Fighting for Balanced Transportation in the Motor City

By Joe Grengs No other governmental program comes close to influencing the divided geographic patterns of our metropolitan regions like that of federal transportation. Yet most citizens would be hard-pressed to name who decides how and where transportation dollars are…

Categories: Spring 2005

Canadian Perspectives on the US Election

By R. Alan Walks “Morons Elect One of Their Own” was one of the more provocative headlines offered in the wake of the recent US election by commentators here in the Great White North. The phrase is in reference to…

Categories: Winter 2005

Where Do We Go from Here?

y Gus Newport Following the recent presidential election, many concerned and free-thinking Americans began to wonder, “Where do we go from here?” We soon recovered and recognized that G.W. was inheriting a mess which he himself created. As we wondered…

Categories: Winter 2005