Differential Effects of Strategic Planning on Community Change in Two Urban Neighborhood Coalitions

Community coalitions represent a promising approach for addressing the interrelated and multiply- determined issues affecting urban neighborhoods of concentrated poverty. The literature suggests a number of community processes that may affect coalition efforts to change and improve communities. This study uses an interrupted time-series design to examine the effects of a strategic planning intervention on community change in two urban neighborhoods in the Kansas City metropolitan area. Results showed that strategic planning was associated with increased rates of community change in the two urban neighborhood coalitions. Under appropriate conditions, such as the presence of consistent leadership, strategic planning may be a particularly effective mechanism for stimulating community change and addressing locally-determined goals in urban neighborhoods.     

Factors related to the use of pedestrian bridges in university students of Honduras

Considering that deaths and injuries due to run overs near pedestrian bridges (PB) are preventable events, this research aims to analyze the factors related to the use of pedestrian bridges in students of a public university of Honduras. This was made through a quantitative methodology; 330 questionnaires were applied to a sample of university students. Results suggest that 17.27% of the respondents don’t use the bridge. Most respondents (62.42%) believe it’s faster to cross the street and that using the bridge is tiresome (79.90%). Pedestrian bridges are also considered to be unsafe places, prone to robberies. Pearson’s r coefficient determined that this belief is significantly associated with the perception of cleanliness, quality of the infrastructure and illumination. There is a correlation between stress and considering the use of the bridge as a tiresome activity. A logistic regression model determined that significant variables explained the use of the PB included: being in a hurry, believing it’s faster to cross the street, thinking that PBs have a bad infrastructure, laziness and thinking that using the PB is tiresome, all of them reducing the chance that someone will use the bridge. On the other hand, non-significant variables in the model included: age, considering that using the PB is stressful, thinking that crossing the street is stressful, thinking PBs have good illumination. Safety related variables were not able to discriminate between users and non-users. These results are discussed in the light of previous research and their implication for public policy and future research.     

Reprint of “Unruly grasses: Affective attunements in the ecological restoration of urban native grasslands in Australia”

This paper explores affect as an ’angle of approach’ for re/considering the work of ecological restoration in urban spaces. My focus is on the more-than-human affective dimensions of the reintroduction of native grasses in Melbourne’s (Australia) urban parklands. Sara Ahmed suggests that ’affect is what sticks or sustains or preserves the connection between ideas, values and objects’ (2010, 29), and here I extend this notion to think about the restoration of grasslands not as primarily material transformations (to which we might react), but as the recomposition of the ’ideas, values and objects’ that constitute urban park naturecultures. The paper highlights the role of affective relations in the inheritance of landscapes that do not attract widespread positive affection. It employs Sara Ahmed’s concept of the affect alien as a figure of nonconformity, to uncover how the affective resonances of grasslands might open new possibilities for attuning to the complex and multiple naturecultures of postcolonial lands.     

The prefigurative politics of place-making: Analysis of a neighbourhood-based campaign for a social centre

This article analyses the production of meaning embedded in places through prefigurative practices. Although the use of space by activist groups is widely studied in the sociology of social movements and urban geography, this article extends the body of literature on place-making by analysing the prefigurative dimension between militant practices and living spaces. Drawing on walking interviews with Montreal's activists that campaigned for a social centre in Canada, this article argues that the strategies inform place-making of local grassroots mobilisations that aimed to develop urban alternatives, and that the meaning attributed to places depends on the individual and collective experience of activists engaging in prefigurative politics. In this sense, place-making derives from the lived collective experience therein and the individual's treatment of these spaces. The results show that the repetition of the action, as well as its emotional and symbolic intensity, are factors that favour the contribution of prefigurative practices to the place-making process.     

Safety effects of parking maneuvers

Parking maneuvers, particularly a vehicle’s maneuver for entering and leaving a parking space, have varying rates of use and safety impacts. In this effort, crash data were collected for parking lots in the vicinity of a university campus and compared to observational parking position data. The campus was selected for this study because a change in the parking enforcement process was expected to (and did) change parking maneuver choices. When entering and leaving a parking space, three maneuver options exist for drivers: (1) forward, (2) reverse, and (3) pulling through an adjacent parking space. When specifically entering a parking space, the maneuver options become: (1) pull-in, (2) back-in, and (3) pull-through. When leaving the parking space, the maneuver options become: (1) pull-out, (2) back-out, and (3) pull-through. This study found that the pull-in/back-out vehicle maneuver’s percentage of total crashes was greater than the percentage of vehicles that were actually observed to use the same maneuver. The analysis from this study implies that the pull-in/back-out parking maneuver is more likely to result in a collision and therefore, is associated with a higher crash risk. Further analysis of North Carolina’s parking related fatal and serious injury crashes found that vehicles backing out of parking spaces was overwhelmingly the main cause for these serious injuries. 90% of North Carolina’s parking related fatal and serious injuries occurred during a back-out maneuver. Overall, this study concludes that the back-in/pull-out parking maneuver is safer than the pull-in/back-out maneuver and is the recommended approach to 90° parking.     

Please stop now,automated vehicle! – Passengers aim to avoid risk experiences in interactions with a crossing vulnerable road user at an urban junction

The success of highly automated vehicles (HAVs; SAE Level 4) will depend to a large extent on how well they are accepted by their future passengers. This is especially true for the interaction of these vehicles with other human road users in mixed traffic. In future urban traffic, passengers of HAVs will observe from a passive position how the automated system resolves space-sharing conflicts with crossing vulnerable road users (VRUs; e.g., pedestrians and cyclists) at junctions. For one such crossing-paths conflict, we investigated when passengers would want the HAV to start braking and how much perceived risk passengers accept in the interaction of their vehicle with VRUs. To this end, we conducted 1) an online video study (N = 118), 2) a driving simulator study (N = 28), and 3) a human&vehicle-in-the-loop (Hu&ViL) study at a test site (N = 10). We varied the speed of the HAV (30 km/h vs. 50 km/h), the type (cyclist vs. pedestrian), and crossing direction of the VRU (left vs. right). During the approach to the junction, passengers' task was to trigger the HAV's braking maneuver, in a first trial at the point they considered ideal and in a second trial at the last point they still considered safe enough to decelerate and come to a stop at the stop line. For each braking maneuver, we analyzed the HAV’s distance and time-to-arrival (TTA) to the VRU at braking onset, as well as passengers’ perceived risk in the VRU interaction. The results showed that most passengers preferred harmless interactions with VRUs (at the ideal braking onset time), and accepted unpleasant, but not dangerous interactions at most (at the last acceptable braking onset time). Methodologically, the results were very similar in the three different environments (online, driving simulator, real vehicle). These results clearly show that, in addition to the technical considerations of safe automated driving, passengers’ perception and evaluation of HAV driving behavior should also be taken into account to achieve a satisfying level of acceptance of these vehicles.     

At the Nexus of cinema,city and memory: Resisting the demolition of Istanbul's historical Emek movie theatre

Emek was the oldest surviving movie theatre in Istanbul when it was demolished in 2013 so that a shopping mall could be built in its place, spawning a persistent civic resistance. Sitting at the juxtaposition of the vibrant literatures on urban studies, film studies, and memory studies, the article demonstrates that emotions, evoked by memories, have a part in triggering urban resistance, adding to the flourishing literature on how emotions inspire and sustain activism. Specifically, it provides ethnographic evidence for the presence of a positive link between place attachment and willingness to engage in place-protective behaviour, stressing the role played by memories in this regard. Focusing on a historical movie theatre, on the other hand, also reveals the complex spatiality of cinematic experience, stressing the importance of social relations and vicinity of the theatre (the street in particular) in this specific context. A final set of contributions derived from the case of Emek relates to the notions of “failure” and “sustainability of activism” given that the resistance to Emek's demolition is characterised by its resilience and persistence as well as a determination to “resist to forget”, despite the failure, practices of emotional reflexivity playing a key role in this respect.     

Integrating Human and Natural Systems in Community Psychology: An Ecological Model of Stewardship Behavior

Community psychology (CP) research on the natural environment lacks a theoretical framework for analyzing the complex relationship between human systems and the natural world. We introduce other academic fields concerned with the interactions between humans and the natural environment, including environmental sociology and coupled human and natural systems. To demonstrate how the natural environment can be included within CP’s ecological framework, we propose an ecological model of urban forest stewardship action. Although ecological models of behavior in CP have previously modeled health behaviors, we argue that these frameworks are also applicable to actions that positively influence the natural environment. We chose the environmental action of urban forest stewardship because cities across the United States are planting millions of trees and increased citizen participation in urban tree planting and stewardship will be needed to sustain the benefits provided by urban trees. We used the framework of an ecological model of behavior to illustrate multiple levels of factors that may promote or hinder involvement in urban forest stewardship actions. The implications of our model for the development of multi-level ecological interventions to foster stewardship actions are discussed, as well as directions for future research to further test and refine the model.     

Driver behaviour and traffic accident involvement among professional urban bus drivers in China

The present research aimed to investigate specific behaviors of professional urban bus drivers in China with the revised Driver Behavior Questionnaire (DBQ), and to define the relationships among various driving behaviors (errors, positives, inattention errors, violations), background information (age, years of driving experience, mobility, etc.), self-assessment, and traffic accident. To achieve such goals, the present research designed a four-dimensional DBQ with 20 items for professional urban bus drivers in China. The KMO coefficient of the whole scale was 0.835, and Bartlett’s test was statistically significant (p < 0.000), which demonstrated strong validity of the scale and should be suitable for factor analysis. The four loading factors accounted for 58.991%. In addition, the reliability and effectiveness of the present 20-item scales were measured. The coefficient of internal consistency-Cronbach’s alpha coefficient was 0.881 and the Cronbach’s Alpha Based on Standardized Items was 0.911. This showed that driving behavior scale of professional bus drivers in China was of high reliability and validity. The analysis showed that among the four factors, positive driving behaviors were significantly associated with errors, inattention errors and violations, respectively. Errors, inattention errors and violations correlated positively with each other. This verified that the correlation coefficient of each factor was medium and high, which indicated that the scale had good difference validity. The test content of the total scale was also highly consistent with the test content of each factor, which indicated that the revised scale had good standard related validity. According to the accident prediction model, the variables that significantly affected the occurrence of traffic accidents were daily driving time, positive driving behavior, SE2 (Driving safety), SE3 (Aberrant driver behaviors). The results showed that professional bus drivers often working overtime were most likely to have accidents. The probability of traffic accidents decreased by 53% for every unit of positive driving behavior frequency of professional bus drivers. The more they felt that they had the tendency of aberrant driving behavior, the more likely they were to have traffic accidents. To summary, the present research contributed to validating and improving the DBQ for professional urban drivers in China.     

Affective priming of perceived environmental restorativeness

Research into the perceived restorativeness of environments tends to focus on the Kaplans' Attention Restoration Theory at the expense of the affective considerations of Ulrich's psychoevolutionary model. To better understand the role of emotion, this study used contextual text‐based primers (newspaper articles) to manipulate participants' affective state (positive or negative) prior to them rating different environments using the Restorative Components Scale. Sixty‐nine participants completed the web‐based study, being pseudo‐randomly allocated to the positive‐ or negative‐prime condition before rating three natural and three urban environments. Natural environments were rated as more restorative than urban, with negative‐priming giving higher mean ratings for all environments. This effect was overall statistically significant for two components (Being Away and Fascination), but only Fascination showed a significant interaction of affective‐prime and environment, a larger effect being seen for natural environments. Results are discussed in terms of current understanding of the interrelationship between attentional and affective processes.     

The conditioned anticipation of people (CAP) model of driving in urban spaces

Despite significant gains in overall collision rates, pedestrian and bicycle safety in complete street environments remains an on-going challenge. However, urban areas with the most risk exposure for pedestrians continue to maintain lower incident rates than their suburban counterparts (“Dangerous by Design” 2021). Under most driving circumstances, the over-rehearsed nature of driving leads to a psychological state similar to self-hypnosis, where attention is subconsciously maintained on the driving task while metacognitive awareness is minimized or eliminated. This state continues until some type of conflict, uncertainty, and/or novel stimulus is presented. The primary difference in driver attention in urban environments is postulated to result from the Conditioned Anticipation of People (CAP). Based on the human neurological predisposition to recognize and fixate on human faces and figures, we hypothesize that in areas where drivers have been conditioned to expect human presence, low-level metacognition is preemptively re-engaged to address their presence, resulting in higher attentional resource expenditure and increased distraction management. Such conditioning may be generated by contextual features common to pedestrian-friendly environments but, necessarily, must be reinforced over time by the Actual Presence of People (APP). CAP driver engagement is limited by the perceptual abilities of the driver such that at higher speeds or within wider corridors, the presence of pedestrians is more difficult to perceive. This results in a non-CAP attention pattern, exhibiting minimal metacognitive activity, high levels of automaticity, and reduced attention. This model was generated based on the observation that vulnerable user presence and the roadway contextual features that support the driver's ability to see vulnerable users were related to attention data measured during the SHRP2 Naturalistic Driving Study. Visually discernable features that were associated with vulnerable user presence had relationships with attention and large effect sizes (η² > 0.5). Contextual features that had relationships with vulnerable user presence, but minimal visual impact or interfered with the driver’s ability to see vulnerable users had no relationship to driver attention. This behavioral pattern provides supportive evidence for the proposed model.     

Unruly grasses: Affective attunements in the ecological restoration of urban native grasslands in Australia

This paper explores affect as an ‘angle of approach’ for re/considering the work of ecological restoration in urban spaces. My focus is on the more-than-human affective dimensions of the reintroduction of native grasses in Melbourne's (Australia) urban parklands. Sara Ahmed suggests that ‘affect is what sticks or sustains or preserves the connection between ideas, values and objects’ (2010, 29), and here I extend this notion to think about the restoration of grasslands not as primarily material transformations (to which we might react), but as the recomposition of the 'ideas, values and objects' that constitute urban park naturecultures. The paper highlights the role of affective relations in the inheritance of landscapes that do not attract widespread positive affection. It employs Sara Ahmed's concept of the affect alien as a figure of nonconformity, to uncover how the affective resonances of grasslands might open new possibilities for attuning to the complex and multiple naturecultures of postcolonial lands.     

Territories of schooling and schooling territories in contexts of extreme urban poverty in Argentina: Between management and abjection

We are living in a time when large masses of workers have become large masses of the unemployed and, to borrow Butler’s term, their bodies constitute an army of bodies that don’t matter. This is probably one of the greatest dilemmas in our society, in the globalized world and in regions like Latin America in particular. In the framework of governmentality studies, this paper presents advances in research geared towards characterizing schooling practices in contexts of extreme urban poverty, specifically in an area on the outskirts of Buenos Aires (Argentina) with one of the highest concentrations of shantytowns. Starting in the late 1960s with the crisis in Fordism and the closing of factories, a dense population has come to inhabit these urban spaces in the midst of a process of extreme decay. I will focus, in this work, on the characteristics that I understand to distinguish the pedagogical devices and processes of subjectivation bound to the configuration of these abject territories.     

The Net in the Park

Ubiquitous Computing, Pervasive Computing, Physical Computing, Everyware, Tangible User Interface, and the Internet of Things all share the same viewpoint—a viewpoint that sees computers, phones, and game consoles as no longer being the only devices in our environment deemed worthy to embody computation and be connected. Each of these approaches focuses on slightly different aspects of the features and potentialities of the enabling technologies (i.e., Physical Computing focuses on the growing power of microcontrollers; IOT on the increasing influence of tagging systems; Everyware on the pervasiveness of the web through wired and wireless connections, etc.) We understand and place more emphasis on the similarities then the differences among these approaches, and at the same time, we try to address specific human activity issues by exploiting these new enabling technologies and visions. In the paper, we present a project, Wi-roni, that addresses two issues: in-person communication and the added value of being in a given location when accessing a given content. To this end, we considered in some detail the possibilities of three of these enabling technologies: ultrasound sensors, MEMS, and mash-up of Internet application. These technologies were chosen based on the nature of the human activity, and not vice versa. In Wi-roni, an Urban Architecture project located in the La Gora public park in Monteroni d'Arbia, a small village in the province of Siena (Italy), we developed two interconnect solutions: Wi-wave, a column for accessing web audio content in public spaces, and Wi-swing, a children’s swing that tells stories while swinging. These devices represent both the concrete grounds from which to begin to address the abovementioned human activity issues and the playground in which to explore the new, emerging interaction modalities that the enabling technologies could allow.     

The decline of cooperation,the rise of competition: developmental effects of long‐term social change in Mexico

Using Greenfield's theory of sociocultural change and human development as a point of departure, we carried out two experimental studies exploring the implications of decades of globalised social change in Mexico for children's development of cooperation and competition. In rural San Vicente, Baja California, the baseline was 1970 and the historical comparison took place 40 years later. In Veracruz, the baseline was 1985 and the historical comparison took place 20 years later. In Veracruz, children were tested in both rural and urban settings. We hypothesized that cooperative behavior would decrease in all three settings as a result of the sociocultural transformations of the past decades in Mexico. The Madsen Marble Pull Game was used to assess cooperative and competitive behavior. As predicted by Greenfield's theory of social change and human development, the Marble Pull procedure revealed a striking decrease over time in levels of cooperative behavior, with a corresponding rise in competitive behavior, in all three settings.     

The backstage of urban ambiances: When atmospheres pervade everyday experience

This paper explores a new way of designing and experimenting with the city. How are we to conceptualize the changes in contemporary cities on the basis of their ambiances? What about the sensory and emotional production of urban territories? What is at stake when our aim is no longer to design space but also to install an atmosphere? In order to answer such questions, rather than offering a formal definition of what an ambiance may be, I intend to show from what it proceeds, on what it is based, what it produces and transforms in urban life. The focus is exploring five ambiance operating modes in the province of urban design: establishing the sensory as a field of action, composing with affective tonalities, giving consistency to urban situations, maintaining spaces over time and playing with imperceptible transformations. Each of these operating modes can account for how a physical environment manages to become a lived ambiance, how a world of built forms manages to become a world of sensory atmospheres. Starting with the sensory environment itself, I show how it is increasingly becoming a domain of design and research. Then I emphasize on the role of affect in everyday urban situations and daily social activities. Thirdly I explore the pervasive character of an ambiance and question its capacity to unify an experience. I continue by pointing out the temporal dynamic of an ambiance and the necessity to sustain a sense of continuity of the environment. Finally I emphasize on the importance of micro-phenomena in the quality and immersive power of an ambiance. These five operating modes of ambiance enables us to focus on the very ordinary sensory fabric of urban life and its issues.     

Atmospheres of the other: Building and feeling Stockholm's orthodox synagogue

In this article, I use the concept of atmosphere to analyse disparate sources related to the process of sacralisation of the orthodox synagogue Adass Jisroel in modern Stockholm. Using the synagogue as an entry point, I explore the affective landscapes related to its unofficially sacred places in firstly a Pietist orphanage and secondly a cinema, and how they shaped inner-communal relations. The material components of Adass Jisroel's sites elicited different emotions from different visiting bodies: its orthodox members aimed to create a space of religious continuity and communal integrity, reformed guests othered the members, while poorer orthodox Jews felt alienated. By analysing these multiple affective experiences linked to material changes of set architectural designs, I outline, for the first time, the orthodox minority's unstable position between fragility and stability in Sweden's capital from 1870 until the 1940s. On a greater scale, through this case study, I propose that the concept of atmosphere provides the field of emotional geography with conceptual muscle to both excavate silenced minority voices, and explore the role of the built environment in eliciting emotions that shape, cement, contest and transform the inner-communal hierarchal landscape that unofficially sacred places are irrevocably situated in.     

Virtue Ethics,Social Difference,and the Challenge of an Embodied Politics

Following the revival of virtue theory, some moral theorists have argued that virtue ethics can provide the basis for a radical politics. Such a politics essentially departs from the liberal model of the moral agent as an autonomous reason‐giver. It instead privileges an understanding of the agent as conditioned by her community, and in the case of social oppression and marginalization, communal virtues may become a vehicle for social change. This essay compares political appropriations of virtue theory by Christian theologian Stanley Hauerwas and secular feminist thinkers Lisa Tessman and Margaret Urban Walker. Hauerwas and feminist theorists both embrace a kind of embodied vulnerability as a political virtue, arguing that it enables more genuine social recognition. The virtue feminist critique is more robust than Hauerwas's, however, insofar as it understands mutual recognition to involve acknowledgment of social difference and the concomitant pursuit of justice.