Community development expert Ilana Preuss explains how local leaders can revitalize their downtowns or neighborhood main streets by bringing in and supporting small-scale manufacturing. Small-scale manufacturing businesses help create thriving places, with local business ownership opportunities and well-paying jobs that other business types can't fulfill.
What makes a city great? This book reveals the key planning and design guidelines needed to create a lively, appealing city center in any metropolitan area.
American cities are increasingly turning to revitalization strategies that embrace the ideas of new urbanism and the so-called creative class in an attempt to boost economic growth and prosperity to downtown areas. These efforts stir controversy over residential and commercial gentrification of working class, ethnic areas. Spanning forty years, Latino City provides an in-depth case study of the new urbanism, creative class, and transit-oriented models of planning and their implementation in Santa Ana, California, one of the United States’ most Mexican communities. It provides an intimate analysis of how revitalization plans re-imagine and alienate a place, and how community-based participation approaches address the needs and aspirations of lower-income Latino urban areas undergoing revitalization. The book provides a critical introduction to the main theoretical debates and key thinkers related to the new urbanism, transit-oriented, and creative class models of urban revitalization. It is the first book to examine contemporary models of choice for revitalization of US cities from the point of view of a Latina/o-majority central city, and thus initiates new lines of analysis and critique of models for Latino inner city neighborhood and downtown revitalization in the current period of socio-economic and cultural change. Latino City will appeal to students and scholars in urban planning, urban studies, urban history, urban policy, neighborhood and community development, central city development, urban politics, urban sociology, geography, and ethnic/Latino Studies, as well as practitioners, community organizations, and grassroots leaders immersed in these fields.
Picture your downtown vacant, boarded up, while the malls surrounding your city are thriving. What would you do? In 1974 the politicians, merchants, community leaders, and business and property owners, of Ithaca, New York, joined together to transform main street into a pedestrian mall. Cornell University began an Industrial Research Park to keep and attract jobs. Developers began renovating run-down housing. City Planners crafted a long-range plan utilizing State legislation permitting a Business Improvement District (BID), with taxing authority to raise up to 20 percent of the City tax rate focused on downtown redevelopment. Shaping a City is the behind-the-scenes story of one developer’s involvement, from first buying and renovating small houses, gradually expanding his thinking and projects to include a recognition of the interdependence of the entire city—jobs, infrastructure, retail, housing, industry, taxation, banking and City Planning. It is the story of how he, along with other local developers transformed a quiet, economically challenged upstate New York town into one that is recognized nationally as among the best small cities in the country. The lessons and principles of personal relationships, cooperation and collaboration, the importance of density, and the power of a Business Improvement District to catalyze change, are ones you can take home for the development and revitalization of your city.
"Document[s] the regulatory, administrative, and financial tools used by communities to provide safe pedestrian environments ... captures tools and strategies reported as effective in a range of contexts (e.g., geography, community size, weather, demographics, and regulatory requirements) and development conditions. Development conditions addressed include new and infill development, street reconstruction, and retrofitting."--Summary.
Author: United States. Congress. House. Committee on Appropriations. Subcommittee on Departments of State, Justice, Commerce, the Judiciary, and Related Agencies Appropriations
Urban design is a process of establishing a structural order within human settlements; responding to dynamic emergent meanings and functions in a constant state of flux. The planning/design process is complex due to the myriad of ongoing (urban) organizational and structural relationships and contexts. This book reconnects the process with outcomes on the ground, and puts thinking about design back at the heart of what planners do. Mixing accessible theory, practical examples and carefully designed exercises in composition from simple to complex settings, Urban Design is an essential textbook for classrooms and design studios across the full spectrum of planning and urban studies fields. Filled with color illustrations and graphics of excellent projects, it gives students tools to enable them to sketch, draw, design and, above all, think. This new edition remains focused on instructing the student, professional and layperson in the elements and principles of design composition, so that they can diverge from conventional and packaged solutions in pursuit of a meaningful and creative urbanism. This edition builds upon established design principles and encourages the student in creative ways to depart from them as appropriate in dealing with the complexity of culture, space and time dynamics of cities. The book identifies the elements and principles of compositions and explores compositional order and structure as they relate to the meaning and functionality of cities. It discusses new directions and methods, and outlines the importance of both buildings and the open spaces between them.
Community Planning is an introductory, interdisciplinary, planning textbook. This 'working' text uses an integrated text and lab manual approach, where theoretical concepts are integrated with practical applications and case studies.