Search

The article presents a paper that proposes a four step strategy for locating urban population service facilities. Although developed with regard to a specific problem, dealing with a system of public day care centers, the strategy has considerable generality and is applicable to a wide variety of situations and scales. Since population service agencies typically operate under budget, manpower, and other constraints that restrict the number and size of facilities and preclude serving the entire population, particular attention is given to applying the locational strategy to that situation. This includes illustrating the procedure by examining the need for public day care service among the poor in Columbus, Ohio, and locational options for a system of public day care centers in its Model Cities area. The total costs of implementing the locational strategy described in this paper were substantial. Those related to estimating and mapping the demand or need surface for day care service, which in itself would provide valuable information for a service or planning agency, are relatively small.

The article presents a paper that summarizes the present status of output measurement in urban government--the state of the art as well as the use being made of it--and discusses briefly prospects for its use and further development in the immediate future. The paper is concerned with measurement of both the quantitative and qualitative aspects of local government services. Two services, solid waste collection and recreation, are used to illustrate problems of measuring output and how they are being resolved. An important quality factor of solid waste collection is the resulting cleanliness. To measure this output the Washington D.C. government has implemented a method of inspector ratings of street and alley litter conditions. Three general conclusions regarding the present state of output measurement in local governments emerge from the two surveys. First, most governments collect some data on quantitative outputs. Second, some local governments collect data on qualitative aspects of output. And third, the state of measurements varies dramatically by service or program area.

The article focuses on the relationship between city characteristics and racial violence in the U.S. Previous research examining the impact of city characteristics on racial violence has generally failed to support most commonly asserted hypotheses, and/or has not systematically treated complex theories requiring multivariate controls. These ambiguous findings strengthen earlier explanations which deemphasize intercity differences in the condition of blacks and attribute primary importance to societal determinants, notably institutionalized deprivation of blacks and white racism. Although the emphasis is perhaps warranted, it is easy to overemphasize deprivation and racism as societal causes when such factors can be conceptualized as varying by cities. An unresolved issue, which can only be verbally addressed in this paper, concerns qualitative variations in racial violence. Those incidents occurring early in this century were characterized by white attacks on blacks and set against the background of black competition in the white labor markets of the North.

The article presents a paper that addresses the ways in which black citizens from 15 large American cities broadly assess the performance of their local economies and municipal administrations. These findings about black perceptions are part of a much larger study using a rather unique set of data and reflect the critical impact of five aspects of institutional urban life--police practices, welfare policies, employment, retail merchandising, and public education. The initial purpose of the research was to detect critical political differences between "riot" and "non-riot" cities, a task which was aborted in the spring of 1968 when three of the five "non-riot" cities experienced some of the most severe civil disorders of the entire 1960's period. The findings indicate that it is possible to uncover connections between political regimes, the behavior of municipal delivery systems, and citizen responses of confidence or despair in local political regimes. The crucial point is that the actions of city officials and delivery system personnel have substantial consequences for local residents.

The article presents a paper that seeks to explicate the many serious obstacles to obtaining reliable and valid measures of the outputs of urban criminal courts. Given the importance and relevance of the operation of criminal courts, two facts are particularly pertinent to the measurement of their performance in comparative urban research. First, the knowledge of the impact has not kept pace with the increased recognition and importance accorded to them by society. Detailed statistics on admissions to local, state, and federal penal institutions are not available. The best strategy to use in measuring the performance of courts is to use defendants as the standardized unit of analysis. Such a choice produces the most valid indicators of outputs because in most instances researchers as well as policymakers are concerned with what happens to people rather than what occurs to descriptions of events. For instance, the conviction rate would tell the proportion of defendants convicted independent of the specific charge, it would disregard the additional charges which were dismissed.