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The iconic Charleston Pineapple Fountain, installed in 1990 at Waterfront Park in downtown Charleston, stands as a symbol of the history and hospitality of the Palmetto State.From the beautiful bea...

The Recreational Business District (RBD) is a more active and attractive place in a city. The development of RBDs has become a popular transforming direction in downtown renewal progress by creatin...

This paper investigates time-series correlations between macroscopic travel speed and parking garage occupancy in downtown area, using the real-time parking occupancy data via SFPark.org and travel...

Dance critic and editor Wendy Perron has published a new volume titled The Grand Union: Accidental Anarchists of Downtown Dance, 1970–1976. The improvisational dance group Grand Union brought toget...

Red underwear hang across a memorial to victims of state violence, including women victimized by sexual violence, in downtown Santiago. (MANUELA BADILLA RAJEVIC)Chilean President Sebastian Pinera i...

The MIT Senseable City Lab simulates autonomous vehicles hurling through downtown Boston intersections unimpeded by traffic lights. Or pedestrians, or cyclists, or even a bus: in one of the busiest...

In recent years, far-reaching urbanization and gentrification processes have been taking place in and around downtown San Diego. These have been accompanied not just by structural upheavals, but by...

Street attributes are thought to play an important role in influencing pedestrian route choices. Faced with alternatives, pedestrians have been observed to choose faster, safer, more comfortable, more interesting or more beautiful routes. Literature on pedestrian route choice has provided methods for assessing the likelihood of such options using discrete choice models. However, route choice estimation, which is data intensive and computationally challenging, remains infrequently deployed in planning mobility analysis practice. Even when coefficients from previous studies are available, operationalizing them in foot-traffic predictions has been rare due to uncertainty involved in the transferability of behavioral effects from one context to another, as well as computational challenges of predicting route choice with custom attributes. This paper explores a simpler method of route choice prediction, implemented in the Urban Network Analysis toolbox, which assigns probabilities to available route options based on distance alone. We compare the accuracy of distance-weighted approaches to the more detailed utility-weighted approach using a large dataset of observed GPS pedestrian traces that include numerous trips between same intersections pairs in downtown San Francisco as a benchmark. Even though a utility-weighted model matches observed pedestrian flows most accurately, a distance-weighted model is only marginally inferior, on average. However, shortest-distance and highest-utility route predictions are both significantly inferior to the utility-weighted and distance-weighted sample-enumeration methods. Our findings suggest that simplified assumptions can be used to predict pedestrian flow in practice with existing software, opening pedestrian flow predictions to a wider range of planning and transportation applications.

The paper analyses placemaking in a small Finnish single-industry town through two architectural projects: the municipality’s downtown rejuvenation plan and the new visitor centre of a transnationa...

In recent decades, seismic vulnerability studies in residential Historic Districts have increasingly resorted to simplified assessment methods, which, very often, are grounded on idealized models o...

As you drive up the oft-congested US Highway 101 North freeway toward the downtown San Francisco skyline, one cannot help but fix your eyes on the 325-meter-high phallic structure that punctures th...

This article pays tribute to the life and work of Mary Overlie, the performer, choreographer, teacher and originator of The Viewpoints theory and practice. Developed in the downtown interdisciplina...

Through rapid ethnography undertaken in Vancouver, Canada's Downtown Eastside - one of Canada's overdose epicenters - this article examines how gendered expectations of labor shape overdose risk for structurally vulnerable women and gender diverse people who use drugs. Drawing on two participant narratives, we explore how structural, symbolic, and everyday violence frame the lives of women and gender diverse people who use drugs in ways that drive their overdose risk as they balance self-care with caretaking, paid work, and basic survival. This article underscores the need for structural reform of peer overdose response work and funding for gender-attentive harm reduction and ancillary supports to better mitigate overdose risk for these populations.

After becoming a no-man’s land during the civil war, Downtown Beirut underwent major reconstruction efforts to return what was lost of its vibrant character. Reconstruction was specifically organiz...

In a time when funding for small communities is limited, an analysis of investment strategy is critical. Facade improvement grant programs are thought to spur spillover of both direct and indirect ...

This research provides a historical analysis of the American experiment with pedestrian malls. Specifically, we ask why some pedestrian malls have failed and were reopened to vehicular traffic whil...

This paper seeks to understand the relationship between risk and cultural heritage as a strategy to raise awareness of the vulnerabilities of populations and their cultural heritage. It focuses on ...

We examine the distribution of residential care in California, showing geographical disparities in care supply and need. We mapped the ratio of beds to older women in Los Angeles and San Diego County census tracts and concentrations of small and large facilities in the Cities of Los Angeles and San Diego. The largest ratios of residential care beds per older women occur on the border of the City of San Diego and on the periphery of Los Angeles County away from the City of Los Angeles. Clusters of small facilities take place in northern Los Angeles and southeastern San Diego, while clusters of large facilities occur in Downtown Los Angeles and near La Jolla. Understanding geographical disparities in residential care supply and need in California can help residential care developers, service providers, and local and state agencies partner in planning for residential care facility development in underserved areas.

Located at the edge of downtown San Diego, Barrio Logan is a neighborhood undergoing rapid gentrification. With a host of new breweries, galleries and cafes, this traditionally working-class, Mexic...

Non-motorized traffic safety is a major public health concern, especially in the sprawling sunbelt cities of the United States. Phoenix is ranked quite high on the number of pedestrian and ...

Searching for a parking spot in metropolitan areas is a great challenge, especially in highly populated areas such as downtown districts and job centres. On-street parking is often a cost-effective...

This article seeks to address the lacuna in many academic and non-academic accounts of male homeless youth, which consistently overlook and thus fail to theorize the degree to which young homeless ...

In 1927, a white man named Jackson (Jack) Lee Bryan commissioned, funded, and erected a monument on Front Street in downtown Natchitoches, Louisiana (Figure 1). A conspicuous plaque mounted on the ...

In this essay I explore the Jamaican and Jamaican diasporic urban crime films that have appeared over the past fifty years. In these films, downtown Kingston, the impoverished inner-city of Jamaica’s capital, has been commonly portrayed as an ambivalent crime-ridden-but-music-driven space, violent yet vibrant. First, I place these Jamaican ghetto films in the context of the wider tradition of the black urban crime film that appeared in parallel with the liberation movements in Latin America and Africa from the 1950s and developed in dialectic with black city cinema and accented cinema in North America and Europe from the 1970s. Then, I present the history of the Jamaican urban crime film in two parts. The first part contains a discussion of the development of the genre from the 1970s until the 1990s, starting with The Harder They Come (1972) and some immediate successors and ending with Dancehall Queen (1997) and Third World Cop (1999), the two most successful Jamaican films to date. In the second part, I discuss the low-budget “gangsta” films made by Jamaican American filmmakers since the 2000s, as well as the bigger-budget (trans)national productions that were either partially or completely set in Kingston throughout the 2010s, with Yardie (2018) as most recent example. Taking into account the production and reception of these films, I will use the concept of reggae-ghetto aesthetics to characterize the portrayal of downtown Kingston in Jamaican city cinema.

Downtown Phoenix and Houston are changing. They are not dense, historic downtowns; instead, they reflect contemporary downtown growth in sprawling cities. Both cities have reimagined their downtown...

Evidence is growing that a large subset of U.S. Millennials prefers to live in walkable communities near amenities. Yet, we know relatively little about how developers are translating Millennial pr...

This paper provides the first wide-scale analysis of property renovation bias in repeat-sales house price indices across a multitude of U.S. geographies. Property improvements frequently lead to positive quality drift. In local markets, omitting information on property improvements can bias index estimates upwards. Bias often varies in a predictable manner and can distort valuations by as much as 15 percent in the central districts of large cities. This systematic variation in bias is partially a function of the disparate concentration of renovation activity with property improvements occurring more frequently in denser areas. The distortionary effect of not accounting for property renovations tends to decline outside of downtown areas and is generally negligible in smaller cities (populations below 500,000).

Residential care has increased in number of facilities and has grown in density in urban areas, yet it is disproportionately dispersed in cities and only beginning to meet the current long-term care need of older adults as an alternative to institutional and in-home care. California State Department of Social Services residential care facility data were linked with Los Angeles County census tract data to examine the spatial distribution of facilities through hot spot analysis of small and large clusters of facilities and zero-inflated negative binomial regression of census tract facility counts on older age and race groups, older disabled adults, and older adults in poverty in the area. The results show clusters of large facilities west of downtown Los Angeles and clusters of small facilities in the northern suburbs of the city in the San Fernando Valley. Increases in pre- and early-retired adults and older Hispanics in census tracts are associated with the greatest decreases in facility tract capacity in the area, whereas increases in the oldest old and older disabled adults are associated with the greatest increases. Understanding spatial disparities in residential care can help local agencies and developers plan and partner in more intentional and equitable development of facilities. The greatest opportunity for such development may lie in institutional tools for eldercare facility development such as the eldercare facility ordinance of Los Angeles and development of board and care facilities in residential zones of Los Angeles and other cities.

This paper explores how entangled layers of use and contingencies of open spaces in downtown Johannesburg, South Africa, relate to their structural, material and symbolic aspects. Reflecting on res...

This 300-page book is an excellent historical perspective of downtown Ithaca’s revitalization efforts since 1971 through the eyes of an active local developer and civic leader. Travis focuses on pu...

The paper transposes aspects of the histography of Fernand Braudel to the exploration of planning. It explores the extent to which different time scales, dominated by a longue duree perspective, re...

Traditional art forms and artists have been increasingly enrolled in urban revitalization projects in global cities, contributing to a desirable “creative city” vibe that can lead to the displaceme...

In 2013, the city of Tulsa, Oklahoma ‘renamed’ Brady Street in its downtown arts district to M.B. Brady Street and designated the road as Reconciliation Way to rid itself of ties to Wyatt ‘Tate’ Br...

The recent touristification of the historic downtown quarters of many European cities is not without its social, spatial and economic impacts. In turn, many global cities show a lack of efficient t...

Since their advent in the 1970s, Business Improvement Areas (BIAs) have played a central role in downtown renewal in cities around the world. With wide-ranging mandates to market, promote, beautify and advocate on behalf of their membership, the activities of each BIA reflect the diverse needs of their respective downtowns. While the number of BIAs continues to grow, little attention has been paid to their role in urban affairs in the context of mid-sized cities, and this paper seeks to address that gap in the literature.Using a local economic development (LED) framework that highlights the role of community allies in urban affairs, this paper explores the role BIAs can play partners to downtown revitalization within the context of a series of mid-sized cities in a designated growth area in Ontario, Canada. Findings from this research show that incremental improvements are occurring in the downtowns of these mid-sized cities, and that BIAs, through a combination of operational activities and broad...

Unlike virtually all other old immigrant enclaves in North American cities, the historic downtown Chinatowns of big cities in the United States and Canada largely survive, though not for lack of pl...

Symbols used in the Sewŏl protests in downtown Seoul from 2014 onwards proved effective in soliciting public engagement for three years. After the sinking of the Sewŏl ferry that took 304 lives, mo...

In 1932, David Alfaro Siqueiros painted his monumental public mural, America Tropical, measuring 24 × 6 m, on a south-facing exterior second-story wall of the Italian Hall in downtown Los Angeles. ...

This study catalogues the location, clustering and sociodemographic distribution of the development of multifamily rental housing over the last five decades in the Texas Triangle, one of the fastest growing megaregions in the United States. The research reveals prior to the 1970s, apartments clustered in downtown areas; throughout the 1980s and 1990s, the development of apartments expanded to the suburbs and along major interstates; and in the 2000s, apartment growth continued in the peripheral areas while returning downtown. During this time period, apartments were developed most often in majority white, high-income and low-poverty neighbourhoods. These geographic and sociodemographic characteristics challenge widespread conceptions that equate multifamily rental housing with central city locations and low-income populations. The findings suggest that multifamily rental housing offers a powerful tool to increase residential density in downtown and suburban locations, while also accommodating a so...

In the years since the ‘January 25th Revolution’ of 2011, Egypt has fallen on hard times, wracked by ongoing state instability and the unraveling of its economy. Against the backdrop of this politi...

Local public officials and community leaders in small and mid-size cities, especially those in non-metro areas, are facing major decisions regarding their economic future, especially about downtown...

Completed in 1920, the Coliseum Theatre holds the distinction of being the longest-running cinema in Malaysia. Located on a main thoroughfare in downtown Kuala Lumpur, it sits strategically on the ...

At the beginning of every historic preservation course I teach at Iowa State University, I include an image of an early-20th century commercial building in downtown Springer, New Mexico, a small to...

On July 6, 2013, in downtown Lac-Megantic (southern Quebec, Canada), several tank cars carrying crude oil derailed. This resulted in a series of explosions and a huge fire that led to the terrible ...

I examine Toronto's interest in the policy learning process regarding possible solutions to development pressure downtown though understanding policies from San Francisco, Seattle, and Vancouver. G...

This text introduces and discusses the MOVIMENTO HO (HO MOVEMENT), a collective action conceived by Brazilian performance artist Eleonora Fabiao and realized November 2016 in Rio de Janeiro. Performed by 4,700 bricks, 3 books, a group of 7 artists-collaborators, gallery visitors, the cultural center’s staff, a truck and moving workers, among others, the action started at Centro Municipal de Arte Helio Oiticica (Municipal Art Center Helio Oiticica, located in downtown Rio) and ended in front of the Casa das Mulheres da Mare (Women’s House at Mare, located in one of the city’s major conglomerates of slums). During 7 days people, bricks, books, and truck, among others, moved one another through varied spaces, tangible and affective matters, and performative dimensions.

Problem, research strategy, and findings: Big box stores have proliferated across the United States in the last three decades. Proponents have praised them for providing affordability and convenience to consumers, but opponents have criticized them for driving out local businesses, among other negative impacts for communities. We examine the impact of a big box store on a traditional downtown for the case of Davis (CA), which amended its zoning code to allow a Target store that opened at the periphery of the city in 2009. We use a before-and-after survey to determine where residents shopped for selected items before the store opened and after, evaluating which businesses were most affected. The results show that the new big box store had a limited impact on downtown businesses but substantial impact on stores located elsewhere within Davis and especially beyond city limits.Takeaway for practice: The Davis case suggests that the impacts of big box stores are not always what opponents anticipate. Other citi...

We investigate whether homeowners' association (HOA) fees are capitalized into condominium sales prices in San Diego, California. Prior work has found evidence that HOA fees are generally positively capitalized into housing prices, although the investigations have focused on single-family housing and have been conducted on the East Coast or the Midwest of the United States. Using sales of 1,087 condominiums in downtown San Diego, the results suggest that HOA fees do appear to have a marginally positive effect on sales price. We use a condominium data set to test whether the relative HOA fee (i.e., compared to other fees in the same condominium building) matters. We find that condominium units with below-average HOA fees sell at a premium relative to the average and units that pay above-average HOA fees sell at a discount relative to the average condominium. The differences are capitalized into sales prices using a capitalization rate of approximately 3.5%. These results suggest that buyers dislik...

In this study, we examine the sustainability of downtown parking in the likely advent of driverless vehicles (DVs). The confluence of driverless, electric, and fleet-owned cars is likely t...