Abstract
HISTORY/THEORY/ADMINISTRATION
11. Concepts of Planning
11-2 PLANNING THEORIES
34-4528
Keywords:
Law. Planning. Politics. Religion.
Responding to the call for a deeper understanding of the religious phenomenon in planning – advanced, among others, by Leonie Sandercock and June Thomas in this journal – this paper argues that understanding religion in planning entails understanding religion’s constitutive other: secularism. This position draws on the burgeoning field of secular studies as well as examples of entanglement of religion, secularism, and planning in the United States and France. It problematizes a long-held assumption that good planning is based upon the notion of ‘religious indifference,’ for the assumption is conceptually anachronistic and practically untenable. This paper offers a set of methodological considerations as to how planners can radically rethink this assumption while effectively attending to the religious subjectivities of their constituencies and actively working through the structures of the modern state. The paper concludes by exploring the implications of this analysis for planning practice against the backdrop of recent improvements fostered by the American Planning Association as well as the relevance of this analysis across international contexts.
34-4529
Keywords:
Consultancy. Job skills. Knowledge. Planning. Private sector. Privatization. Public sector.
English planning system reforms can be understood as part of a broader reorganisation of public services involving private sector providers supplying new markets and taking on functions previously delivered by public servants. While planning activity has long featured a number of different actors, there has been limited discussion of the role that private sector actors play in an increasingly fragmented, and task-oriented system which requires knowledge and skills-sets which local planning authorities (LPAs) typically do not possess. Thus the paper discusses how a ‘fragmentary planning’ has emerged in England, and the implications for governance and research in this area.
11-4 PLANNING EDUCATION
34-4530
Keywords:
Development. Local environmental planning. Regions. United Kingdom.
This paper considers the influence of established local planning cultures and legacies on the trajectory of contemporary local development policies. Local and sub-regional planning cultures are interpreted as overall ‘developmental frames’ which set the context for local planning approaches both through more concrete territorial, developmental and policy forms and through cognitive structures, assumptions and values. These frames then exert significant influence on how planning policy is conceived and enacted, with potentially major implications for local development outcomes. Three illustrative case studies are presented from sub-regional growth areas in the South East of England.
11-6 NEGOTIATION/MEDIATION/DISPUTE RESOLUTION
34-4531
Keywords:
Asia. Development rights. Planning history. Planning ideology. Private property. Urbanism.
This article examines the contested interaction between planning and private property by focusing on development rights: an important, yet under-studied, aspect of private ownership. Three regulatory approaches – a road-based rule, a FAR (floor area ratio)-based rule, and a TDR (transfer of development rights) mechanism – have influenced how planning in Taiwan has governed vertical development since the early twentieth century. We link them to three planning ideologies, the city pathological, the city rational, and the city neoliberal. We argue that regulation-ideology dynamics have led to greater power for the real estate sector in appropriating density rent in Taiwan.
11-7 CITIZEN PARTICIPATION
34-4532
Keywords:
Engineering. Politics. Public participation.
How engineering in the context of urban socio-environmental challenges is practically and effectively mobilized has been the subject of some debate. Numerous professional bodies have encouraged engineers to approach socio-environmental issues through increased engagement with, and accountability to, the public through effective participatory practices. This article presents a close empirical analysis of a major engineering project in London to argue that engineering has a more complex relationship with social, political and environmental conditions than the idealistic participatory conception supposes. In fact, the spatial, technical and economic arrangements of engineering practice may limit the potential for public participation. Through a detailed analysis of the example of the London Water Ring Main (from around 1988 to 1994), this article shows how myriad sometimes conflicting engineering issues and responsibilities interfered with key elements of effective participation. Therefore, although increased public engagement in engineering may be desirable in theory, substantial professional, institutional and political change may have to occur before this is possible in practice.
34-4533
Keywords:
Community. Governance. Local autonomy. Local governance. Urban areas.
Efforts to promote community empowerment within regeneration management have been persistently critiqued. Particular concern regards the potential capture of civic organizations into the sphere of influence of more powerful governance stakeholders, leaving communities marginalized and frustrated. Although such ‘capture’ is a discernible threat, this article presents a more nuanced perspective demonstrating the scope for community-based organizations to dissent from seemingly inexorable regimes of power. The article details a series of tensions that emerged across the evolution of a community-led regeneration partnership. It then outlines how civil society organizations challenge ‘partnership orthodoxies’, seeking autonomy albeit nested within—and relative to—formal bureaucratic and administrative regimes. Community partners can therefore assume a hybridity of capture and autonomy—or a mutuality—that is rarely acknowledged by accounts that critique regeneration governance.
13. Planning Law and Legislation
13-1 ENVIRONMENTAL LAW
34-4534
Keywords:
Agricultural sector. Agriculture. Conservation planning.
Agricultural conservation programs aim to improve environmental quality by using payments to support voluntary adoption of environmentally sound practices. Supported practices, however, yield additional environmental gain only if they would not have been adopted without payment. We estimate additionality for selected practices using propensity score matching to analyze data from the Agricultural Resource Management Survey (ARMS). We find that greater than 95% of off-field structural practices (filter strips, riparian buffers) supported by payments are additional but that less than 50% of conservation tillage payments yield additional adoption. The effect of nutrient management payments varies across nutrient management practices and crops.
34-4535
Keywords:
Agricultural landowners. Conservation planning. Productivity.
The Conservation Reserve Program (CRP), which provides incentives for landowners to idle erodible and marginal farmland, faced new challenges as record-high commodity prices significantly affected landowners’ interests in the program in recent years. We develop and estimate an empirical structural model to examine the manner in which productivity, market conditions, and CRP payment affect landowners’ land use decisions. The model carefully controls for the endogeneity of CRP payment and landowners’ self-selection into the program. The parameter estimates are used to simulate how changes in agricultural prices and CRP payment influence program enrollment and cost across the Corn Belt states.
34-4536
Keywords:
Conservation planning. Resource conservation. Water. Water management.
Agricultural land retirement is increasingly used to manage water resources. This study uses well-level enrollment data to explore the factors that influence landowner participation in the Colorado Republican River Conservation Reserve Enhancement Program. An empirical model of enrollment is informed by a theoretical model of participation that incorporates aquifer and soil characteristics in addition to financial incentives. Our results reveal that enrollment is predicted to increase by 0.087 percentage points with a $10 increase in the incentives offered. The probability of enrollment is also influenced by the aquifer’s saturated thickness and the soil characteristics that impact land productivity.
34-4537
Keywords:
Carbon dioxide. Forest planning. Forest regions. Forestry. United States.
This paper develops structural dynamic methods to project future carbon fluxes in forests. These methods account for land management changes on both the intensive and extensive margins, both of which are critical components of future carbon fluxes. When implemented, the model suggests that U.S. forests remain a carbon sink through most of the coming century, sequestering 128 Tg C y-1. Constraining forestland to its current boundaries and constraining management to current levels reduce average sequestration by 25 to 28 Tg C y-1. An increase in demand leads to increased management and greater sequestration in forests. The results are robust to climate change.
13-2 LAND USE CONTROLS
34-4538
Keywords:
Europe. Land markets. Spatial planning.
Zoning restrictions often exclusively permit one or a few particular types of land use. If the tightness of restrictions differs between land uses, the result may be that the market for land splits into segments referring to particular uses, because the arbitrage mechanism between various land use types is turned off. We provide evidence of such a segmentation of the Dutch land market into three compartments: agricultural, commercial, and residential use. We analyze transactions of ready-to-be developed land and find that residential land is much more expensive than commercial land. We also find that agricultural land is much cheaper than residential and commercial land.
34-4539
Keywords:
Natural gas. Oil industry. Production.
Most oil and gas leases allow the operator to extend possession by establishing production in paying quantities. We show how this option to “hold by production” (HBP) stimulates the drilling of many uneconomic wells but also creates incentives to delay other economic wells. We provide a simple method to value the HBP provision as a compound option and estimate that it has increased the value of typical shale gas leases in the major U.S. basins by 25% to 250% in recent years. We also identify subbasins where drilling appears likely to have been suppressed rather than stimulated.
13-4 LIABILITY
34-4540
Keywords:
Environmental concerns. Land use changes. Welfare costs.
We describe welfare calculations when an environmental injury reduces trips to undamaged sites as well as those that were damaged. The welfare loss is (1) underestimated when standard welfare formulas are applied only to damaged sites but (2) overestimated when these formulas are applied to all sites with lost trips. We provide a formula that appropriately accounts for the lost trips to undamaged sites. Differences among the procedures are illustrated through hypothetical scenarios that differ in lost trips to undamaged sites. We apply the method under linear demand to aggregate estimates of shoreline-use losses from the Deepwater Horizon oil spill.
14. Planning and Society
14-1 POVERTY
34-4541
Keywords:
Family. Homelessness. Poverty. Religion. Social conditions.
Although almost all homeless people are poor, most poor people do not experience homelessness. We use a detailed national survey to explore the role of social ties—including connection to relatives, friends, and religious community—in explaining why only a subset of poor adults fall into homelessness. We find that lifetime incidence of homelessness is reduced by 60% for individuals with strong ties along each of these dimensions. Ties to relatives are most important, followed by ties to religious community, whereas ties to friends are not associated with reduced incidence of homelessness. We also find that among currently low-income individuals, social ties are not associated with income, providing evidence that our results are not explained by unobserved variation in historical depth of poverty that is potentially correlated with our measures of social ties.
34-4542
Keywords:
Crime. Homelessness. Policy. Property. Public space.
In response to housing crises across the country, many localities are implementing homeless-targeted policies that attempt to regulate public space by prohibiting sitting, lying, sleeping, and storing property in public places such as parks and sidewalks. We term these sociospatial control policies. Our research investigates the direct impacts of such policies in the city of Honolulu, which had become notorious for legal measures targeting homeless residents. We interviewed members of 70 households living in temporary shelters in public spaces, all of whom had experienced enforcement of city ordinances, such as receiving citations or being forcibly moved by city agents. Our data revealed three interconnected ways that enforcements of sit–lie and nuisance policies harmed homeless households. (a) Our respondents described feeling dehumanized and treated unfairly by city agents. We therefore argue that enforcement catalyzed both civic and social exclusion. (b) Second, the city’s confiscation of property spurred material hardship and posed obstacles to work, education, and access to services. And, finally, (c) respondents’ narratives revealed that enforcements provoked lasting worry, fear, anxiety, and despair.
34-4543
Keywords:
Poor. Poverty. Rental housing. United States. Urban areas.
During the past decade, the incomes of poor Americans have fallen or flat-lined, housing costs have soared and public policy has failed to bridge the gap. As a result, the majority of poor renting families in America now devote at least half of their income to covering housing costs, and eviction has become a common yet consequential event in their lives. While housing is central to the lives of the urban poor, it remains marginal to the sociology of American inequality. This essay begins by charting the growing rent burden among low-income households, and then draws on the unique contributions of Pierre Bourdieu to the study of the home to sketch an agenda for analyzing the roots and implications of the loss of affordable urban housing, a prerequisite for offering policy prescriptions.
34-4544
Keywords:
Poverty. Poverty reduction. Urban areas.
Combining statistical and ethnographic analyses, this article explores the prevalence and ramifications of eviction in the lives of the urban poor. A quantitative analysis of administrative and survey data finds that eviction is commonplace in inner-city black neighborhoods and that women from those neighborhoods are evicted at significantly higher rates than men. A qualitative analysis of ethnographic data based on fieldwork among evicted tenants and their landlords reveals multiple mechanisms propelling this discrepancy. In poor black neighborhoods, eviction is to women what incarceration is to men: a typical but severely consequential occurrence contributing to the reproduction of urban poverty.
34-4545
Keywords:
Homelessness. Information and communication technology. Prevention.
Do people at risk of homelessness have private information—information that social service agencies cannot credibly obtain—that helps predict whether they will become homeless? This article asserts that the answer to this question is yes: homeless people and people at risk of homelessness know important things about their future. Data from Journeys Home (JH), a pathbreaking longitudinal study of people experiencing homelessness and people at risk of homelessness in Australia, are used in this article. In many cases, the private information that participants have predicts entries better than the public information that agencies can obtain. Ways in which this private information can be used to improve service delivery are suggested.
14-2 DISCRIMINATION/DESEGREGATION/INTEGRATION
34-4546
Keywords:
Mortgage rates. Mortgages. Racial inequality. Segregation.
The subprime boom and subsequent foreclosure crisis highlighted risk associated with pursuit of the American Dream of homeownership. People of color and those living in segregated areas were particularly harmed by the dramatic rise and fall of the housing market. Almost a decade after the economy’s collapse, questions remain about racial and spatial disparities in access to mortgage credit. I leverage Home Mortgage Disclosure Act data to explore mortgage application outcomes in 2014. Well into the economy’s recovery, minority borrowers remained at a disadvantage in the mortgage approval process. Whereas 71% of White applicants were approved for home loans, approval rates were lower for Asians (68%), Latinos (63%), and Blacks (54%). Black and Latino borrowers were also significantly more likely to receive higher cost loans than Whites, a practice that has accelerated since the foreclosure crisis. Results suggest that segregation exacerbated racial disparities as lenders funneled expensive credit into isolated minority communities. Furthermore, the differences between White and minority outcomes were largest in census tracts where subprime lending was common in 2006 and foreclosures accumulated during the Great Recession. Together, these findings indicate how spatially organized markets have racialized consequences in a highly segregated society.
34-4547
Keywords:
Civic regionalism. Funding. Immigrants. Organization. Suburban areas.
The authors argue that taken-for-granted notions of deservingness and legitimacy among local government officials affect funding allocations for organizations serving disadvantaged immigrants, even in politically progressive places. Analysis of Community Development Block Grant data in the San Francisco Bay Area reveals significant inequality in grants making to immigrant organizations across central cities and suburbs. With data from 142 interviews and documentary evidence, the authors elaborate how a history of continuous migration builds norms of inclusion and civic capacity for public-private partnerships. They also identify the phenomenon of “suburban free riding” to explain how and why suburban officials rely on central city resources to serve immigrants, but do not build and fund partnerships with immigrant organizations in their own jurisdictions. The analysis affirms the importance of distinguishing between types of immigrant destinations, but argues that scholars need to do so using a regional lens.
34-4548
Keywords:
Discrimination. Homosexuality. Housing discrimination. Housing policy.
I present the results of a randomized matched-pair email correspondence test of 6,490 unique property owners in 94 U.S. cities to provide a nationally representative estimate of the level of discrimination that same-sex couples experience when inquiring about rental housing. I find that same-sex male couples, especially non-White same-sex male couples, are less likely to receive a response to inquiries about rental units. I also find that same-sex Black male couples are subject to more subtle forms of discrimination than heterosexual Black couples are. I then examine whether state and local antidiscrimination laws covary with rates of housing discrimination against same-sex couples. Although my results are not causal, I find that antidiscrimination laws have an ambiguous relationship with rates of discrimination faced by same-sex couples. State-level housing protections, for example, covary positively with response rates for same-sex Black male couples, whereas local-level laws covary negatively with response rates for these couples.
14-4 URBAN SOCIOLOGY
34-4549
Keywords:
Europe. Gentrification. Urban areas.
In times of austerity, gentrification is promoted as a prime investment opportunity capable of reviving stagnating local economies. In Athens, pro-gentrification policies (using English slogans like ‘Re-launch Athens’ and ‘Re-activate Athens’) have become increasingly defined in their targeting of specific areas. Moreover, planning in Greece is characterized by spontaneity, fragmentation and tolerance of speculation, specifically favouring the gentrification process. In many cases, the state’s ‘absence’ after promulgation of regeneration projects acts as a clear strategy for inner-city gentrification. After discussing the emergent relations between state policies on urban intervention and gentrification in the post-crash era, this article will focus on the peculiarities of the Greek planning system and how these have led to the gentrification of an inner-city area called Metaxourgio.
34-4550
Keywords:
Development. Politics. Water. World Bank.
This paper presents a historical analysis of the evolution of the World Bank’s policies on urban water supply networks, from 1960 to the late 1980s. The analysis frames urban water supply as an attempt (contested and incomplete) to extend the biopolitical power of developmental states. I argue that the World Bank’s agenda was predicated on a set of contradictions (and an untenable public/private binary) that contributed to the emergence of ‘state failure’ arguments by the late 1980s. This perspective enables critical reflection on the historical origins of the concept of ‘state failure’, and on contemporary debates over urbanization, infrastructure, and development.
34-4551
Keywords:
Infrastructure. Transportation infrastructure. Water supply.
Two decades ago, the rules governing the provision of piped municipal water supply in Mumbai became linked to the policy frameworks governing eligibility for a property titling scheme. This article outlines the ideological basis and practical implications of the shift, as well as the contradictions of the new regulatory regime. The article demonstrates how these contradictions have been mediated by the material and practical knowledge, embodied expertise, local authority and wide-ranging socio-political work of two sets of actors: municipal water engineers and a cast of characters known locally as ‘plumbers’. The social, political and hydraulic imaginaries animating the work of ‘plumbing’ are bound up with a temporal and spatial imaginary distinctly at odds with the network-flow conception of hydraulic engineering within which the work of water supply planning and distribution in Mumbai is conceptualized, materialized and institutionalized. The hydraulic and legal contradictions of these clashing infrastructural idioms––of flow and event––have rendered the regulatory framework highly unstable. These contradictions eventually erupted in Mumbai’s waterscape, leaving the city’s water infrastructures suspended in a highly politicized state of limbo between dueling infrastructural imaginaries.
34-4552
Keywords:
Cities. Engineering. Expert systems. Infrastructure. Urban areas.
This symposium opens up new critical insights and analytical perspectives into the relationships between power, politics, materiality and urban engineering. In so doing it demonstrates the central role of engineers in the production and negotiation of everyday life in the city. In contrast to the technocratic exercise engineering often professes to be, the contributors to this symposium argue that the assembling and choreography of cities through the myriad techniques, routines, standards and visions of engineers is inextricably bound up with broader socio-cultural, material and political urban dynamics and processes. This necessitates investigating the multiple and competing social imaginations, forms of knowledge and regimes of expertise associated with urban engineering. The symposium’s five articles, straddling disciplinary backgrounds in geography, anthropology, engineering and history, focus analytical and empirical attention on the figure of the engineer and on the work of engineering in the cities of Paris, Mumbai, Singapore and London. Engineering, we suggest, is a diagnostic for probing the shifting forms of mediation that animate and inhabit contemporary dynamics of urban change. The symposium thus opens up a new avenue for cross-disciplinary and transregional research for urban studies while also suggesting innovative ways of conceptualizing urban transformation and contestation.
34-4553
Keywords:
Social spaces. Space. Urban areas.
The structure of social space manifests itself, in the most diverse contexts, in the form of spatial oppositions, appropriated physical space functioning as a spontaneous metaphor for the social order. There is no space that does not express social hierarchies and distances in a more or less distorted fashion, especially through the effect of naturalization associated with the durable inscription of social realities in the physical world. The structure of the spatial distribution of powers records the balance of social struggles over the profits of space, which are waged individually (as indicated by mobility) and collectively (through political contests over housing policy, for instance). The stake of these struggles is the construction of spatially based homogeneous groupings, that is, segregation that is both cause and effect of the exclusive usage of a space. These profits take the form of profits of localization, rents of situation, profits of rank and profits of occupation. The ability to dominate appropriated space depends on the capital possessed, which allows one to keep undesirable persons and things at a distance and to draw desirable ones closer. Yet one can physically occupy a location without inhabiting it properly if one does not dispose of the means tacitly required for that, beginning with the proper dispositions, for it is the habitus that makes the habitat.
34-4554
Keywords:
Neoliberalism. United Kingdom. Urban areas. Urban governance.
This article reports on a research project, Leeds City Lab, that brought together partner organizations to explore the meanings and practices of co-production in the context of urban change. Our intention is to offer a response to the crisis in urban governance by combining the growing academic and practitioner debates on co-production and urban laboratories in order to explore radically different institutional personae that can respond to deficits in contemporary urban governance, especially relating to participation and disenfranchisement, and ultimately unlock improved ways of designing, managing and living in cities. Our analysis has identified four key ways in which co-production labs can recast urban governance to more progressive ends: by moving beyond traditional organizational identities and working practices, embracing grey spaces of new civic interfaces, foregrounding emotions and power and committing to durable solutions. Ultimately, what we point towards is that urban governance can be more effectively enacted in co-production labs that bring together universities and the public, private and civil society sectors on a basis of equality, trust and openness. These spaces have the potential to unlock a city’s knowledge, resources and assets, to unpack complex challenges and to build capacity to deliver improved city-wide solutions.
34-4555
Keywords:
Africa. Policy making. Redevelopment. Urban policy.
A burgeoning literature looks into the processes and actors involved in the adoption and emulation of best practices and models of urban policy and development across the globe, often with the aim of attracting investment and making cities more competitive. With its focus on leisure, tourism and global capital, the redevelopment of the Bay of Luanda, in the capital of Angola, echoes the rhetoric, policies and projects underpinning such practices. Yet, a deeper interrogation reveals that the redevelopment forms part of a predominantly inward-looking project driven by the highest echelons of the national government and its ruling party. While these actors mimic and appropriate the language and tools of entrepreneurial cities, their aim is not necessarily to make the city more internationally competitive but to achieve domestic political legitimacy and stability. The argument presented in this article builds on McCann’s (2013) call for scholars to also consider the ‘introspective’ politics of urban policy boosterism from the perspective of a context in which power is highly centralized. The article thus contributes to a growing literature that advances more adequate and provincialized theorizations of urban policy and city governance in the global South, with a particular focus on the African context.
34-4556
Keywords:
Citizen participation. Ethnic enclaves. Europe. Family. Neighborhoods. Parenting. Urban areas.
In recent years, cities have become ever more attractive to middle-class families. On the one hand, middle-class families tend to withdraw into (often newly built) socially homogeneous middle-class neighbourhoods. On the other hand, they are also known to move into inner-city and socially mixed areas, thus triggering processes of gentrification. Academic literature has often denounced these housing choices as being either ‘separatist’ or ‘revanchist’, more broadly categorized as strategies of ‘middle-class disaffiliation’. Although there is a grain of truth in these interpretations, the reality is certainly more complicated. In our research on middle-class parents’ housing and neighbourhood choices as well as their patterns of neighbourhood use, carried out in each of the two types of residential area mentioned above, we have only very rarely found an explicit desire to draw boundaries that exclude those ‘beneath’ them. We rather argue that the housing choices and neighbourhood-related activities of middle-class family households are heavily influenced by the specific dilemmas the interviewees face as (working) urban parents. While a significant number of respondents worry about the social sustainability, justice and cohesion of urban society, they are also concerned about the future prospects of their children. Many find it difficult to reconcile these conflicting normative demands under the prevailing circumstances.
34-4557
Keywords:
Cities. Class. Culture. Social conditions. Urban areas.
This essay employs Pierre Bourdieu’s theory of practice and the methodology of Multiple Correspondence Analysis (MCA) to extend the mapping of the dynamic relations between class and culture presented in Bourdieu’s Distinction to encompass urban space, drawing on data from a multi-method research project on the city of Porto, Portugal. We present a detailed analysis of the formation and structure of local social space and show its relevance for the study of the (re)production of urban lifestyles. Differences in the volume and composition of the capital of city residents are identified and shown to underpin the relations between social positions, dispositions and position takings in various realms of cultural consumption. Meaningful configurations of ‘lifestyle modalities’ have clear roots in the city’s social space, which in Portugal, as in France, can be interpreted in terms of distinction, pretension and necessity.
34-4558
Keywords:
Cities. Infrastructure. Politics. Smart growth. Urban areas.
This article argues for the importance of social imagination in the understanding of urban infrastructures, especially those designed and built by engineers. It begins by defining social imagination as image-based systems of representation and values that are shared by various collective stakeholders concerned with infrastructure, such as engineers, but also politicians, administrators, operators, maintenance technicians and indeed users, and then introduces a tripartite model of infrastructure. Infrastructure is interpreted as the result of the interactions between a material basis, professional organizations and stabilized socio-technical practices, and social imagination. The notion of network is interpreted from such a perspective. Its dependence on imagination is outlined. Through two case studies, the nineteenth-century networked metropolis, epitomized by Haussmann’s Paris, and the rise of the contemporary smart city perspective, the role of social imagination in the conception of urban infrastructure is analyzed further. What seems at stake in the transition towards the smart city is the increased importance given to occurrences, events and scenarios as the basis for urban infrastructure regulation.
34-4559
Keywords:
Cities. Power. Social capital. Social spaces. Space.
Urban sociology has long ignored districts of wealth and privilege in cities because they harbor few ‘social problems’ and the class background of sociologists has not inclined them to venture there. In France after 1968, the continued attraction of Marxism and the sulfurous reputation of sociology conspired to make such investigation difficult. Pierre Bourdieu pioneered it with his landmark book on the bourgeoisie, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste. This essay reports on two decades of research extending Bourdieu’s model of social space to study the territories and strategies of the French high bourgeoisie and aristocracy. The dominant class lives in reserved upscale districts and this seclusion, resulting from the elective spatial aggregation of familial dynasties, is a fundamental characteristic of the group. Segregative isolation is strengthened by specific institutions, such as society balls and social clubs, entrusted with effecting class closure and perpetuation. But, in the greater Paris region, the best districts also attract businesses (corporate headquarters, luxury firms), and thus employment that prompts the established bourgeoisie to migrate westwards in an endless search for social exclusivity. In addition to their Paris homes, upper-class dynasties possess family properties (a castle or a large manor house) in the provincial hinterland that serve as a basis for paternalistic forms of sociability, linking them to the local lower class via such institutions as riding to hounds. Spaces reserved by and for the high bourgeoisie are major vectors of social reproduction and, along with family and elite schools, help to train heirs suited to safeguarding and valorizing their inherited assets.
34-4560
Keywords:
Capital. Cities. Cross-cultural. Europe.
This essay examines how the contemporary city is being redefined as a fundamental crucible in which new and emerging modes of cultural capital are being forged. Drawing inspiration from the links Bourdieu draws between physical and social space, we use comprehensive quantitative surveys from Belgium and the UK to explore the accelerating interplay between large urban centres and the generation of ‘cosmopolitan cultural capital’. We show a close association between urban sites and the location of residents with new kinds of emerging cultural capital. This appreciation allows us to understand the increasing prominence of large metropolitan centres, which stand in growing tension with their suburban and rural hinterlands. This process is simultaneously cultural, economic, social and political and marks a remaking of the nature of cultural hierarchy and cultural capital itself, away from the older model of the Kantian aesthetic, as elaborated by Bourdieu in Distinction, which venerates a ‘highbrow’ aesthetic removed from everyday life, towards ‘emerging’ forms of cultural capital that valorize activity, engagement and intense forms of contemporary cultural activity.
34-4561
Keywords:
Europe. Neighborhoods. United States. Urban areas. Urban theory.
This essay offers a reflexive return to two research projects to demonstrate the value of Bourdieu’s emphasis on the symbolic for the analysis of contemporary urban transformation. Bourdieu’s insistence that we track the social genesis and diffusion of spatial categories of thought and action directs us to the empirical study of the struggles between agents and organizations that promote and/or oppose these categories, as well as the political, economic and other interests animating the agents. A retracing of the parallel invention of the ‘at-risk neighborhood’ (quartier sensible) coined for and targeted by French urban policy since the late 1980s and the emergence of ‘historic’ or ‘diverse’ neighborhoods touted by gentrifying residents, cultural organizations and real estate agents in the United States since the 1960s challenges misleading oppositions between materiality and representations that often underpin and cramp urban research.
34-4562
Keywords:
Power. Sociology. Space. Urban form. Urban sociology. Urban theory.
This article frames the themes of the two-part Interventions section ‘Bourdieu Comes to Town’. I first establish the pertinence of Bourdieu’s sociology for students of the city by revisiting his youthful work on power, space, and the diffusion of urban forms in provincial Béarn and colonial Algeria. In both cases, urbanization is the key vector of transformation, and the city, town, or camp the site anchoring the forces dissolving the social fabric of the French countryside and overturning French imperialism in North Africa. These early studies establish that all social and mental structures have spatial correlates and conditions of possibility; that social distance and power relations are both expressed in and reinforced by spatial distance; and that propinquity to the center of accumulation of capital (economic, military, or cultural) is a key determinant of the force and velocity of social change. Next, I discuss four principles that undergird Bourdieu’s investigations and can profitably drive urban inquiry: the Bachelardian moment of epistemological rupture, the Weberian invitation to historicize the agent (habitus), the world (social space) and the categories of the analyst (epistemic reflexivity); the Leibnizian-Durkheimian imperative to deploy the topological mode of reasoning; and Cassirer’s command to heed the constitutive efficacy of symbolic structures. The plasticity and productivity of his concepts suggest that Bourdieu can not only energize urban inquiry but also merge it into a broader analytic of the trialectic of symbolic division, social space, and the built environment. This paves a pathway for reconceptualizing the urban as the domain of accumulation, differentiation and contestation of manifold forms of capital, which makes the city a central ground, product, and prize of historical struggles.
34-4563
Keywords:
Education. Gentrification. Space. Spatial analysis.
An extension of gentrification, jiaoyufication–urban change driven by a desire for high-quality education–is not only displacing previous lower-class residents, but also replacing earlier jiaoyufiers with newcomers, turning formerly blue-collar neighbourhoods into white-collar ones. New middle-class communities are emerging as spatially limited school catchment zones attract social groups who occupy these spaces in an attempt to facilitate social mobility or consolidate social status, causing tension between them. Consequently, jiaoyufication has narrowed down opportunities for intergenerational social mobility and exacerbated social polarization, gradually replacing traditional social hierarchies with intergenerational neoliberal stratification.
14-5 RURAL SOCIOLOGY
34-4564
Keywords:
Ecology. Gender. Politics. Power. Water.
Despite decades of water-supply development programs in the Global South, their effect on gendered access to water remains both unclear and contradictory. This paper addresses this lacuna by examining the expansion of a rural water-supply network aimed at reducing household water scarcity in the arid zone of Rajasthan, India. Specifically, the Indira Gandhi Canal was conceived and constructed during the green revolution to ‘green the Thar Desert’. But now, through a complex network of reservoirs, treatment facilities, distribution centers, and supply pipelines, it connects much of rural and urban western Rajasthan to a drinking water-supply network. The paper examines the interaction of water-supply technologies, social power relations studying and dynamic socioecological change operating within these development processes. To do so it draws on household surveys, interviews with water users and government engineers, and participant observation with women and children water collectors. The paper finds that this ongoing water development project rendered the water provision landscape technical on the surface, but that uneven flows of water between villages and people reveal a more complex water provision landscape. The expansion of the network based on a technical reimagining of water supply has resulted in intervillage scarcity, intragender differential access, usurious private water markets, the abandonment and then the proposed rehabilitation of traditional water bodies, and urban water logging. In the conclusion I argue for a rethinking of water-supply development programs through a political ecology approach that focuses on the emergent capacities of water-supply technologies to redirect existing socioecological associations in unanticipated ways. Looking at the relationship between nature–society and technology may illuminate the possible ruptures in these associations and the ways that they may be rearticulated to produce less differentiating modes of accessing water.
14-6 CRIME/DELINQUENCY
34-4565
Keywords:
Crime. Legality. Political and legal institutions. Social construction.
The traditional “jurisprudential model” of law views the application of legal sanctions primarily as a function of the facts of the case and the rules that govern the proceedings. Sociology of law scholars have challenged this model on theoretical grounds, arguing persuasively that law is variable and often yields patterns that parallel broader considerations of community social organization and collective sentiment. The authors’ analysis yields evidence that the certainty and severity of sanctions for murder cases are heightened where social capital is more plentiful, religious fundamentalist values more prevalent, and support for punitive sanctions is greater. They also find that sentences given to murder defendants are longer in areas in which the public expresses higher levels of fear. Overall, the findings provide provocative evidence that legal outcomes in murder cases are influenced by several features of the social environments in which they are processed.
14-7 HEALTH/EDUCATION/SOCIAL SERVICES
34-4566
Keywords:
Mental health. Social impact analysis. Social networks.
This study examines how dynamics surrounding biographical disruptions compare to more routine fluctuations in personal social networks. Using data from the Indianapolis Network Mental Health Study, the authors track changes in patients’ social networks over three years and compare them to a representative sample of persons with no self-reported mental illness. Overall, individuals at the onset of treatment report larger and more broadly functional social networks than individuals in the population at large. However, the number of network ties among the latter increases over time, whereas network size decreases slightly among people using mental health services. As individuals progress through treatment, less broadly supportive ties drop out of extended networks, but a core safety net remains relatively intact. The findings in this case provide evidence that social network dynamics reflect changing needs and resources: persons labeled with psychiatric disorders learn to manage illness, with functionality driving social interaction in times of biographical disruption.
14-8 PLANNING AND GENDER/RACE/ETHNICITY
34-4567
Keywords:
Race. United States. Urban areas.
Extreme land abandonment is one of the most visible expressions of urban decline. Conventional theory emphasizes housing lifecycle processes, municipal fiscal challenges and deindustrialization to explain its prevalence. Empirically however, these factors are not strongly associated with the most extreme instances of land abandonment in the American Rust Belt. Race, by contrast, is strongly associated with these patterns, yet there is little mention of it in conventional theory. This article draws on group threat theory to explain how the construction of Blackness as a threat to white property, power and political influence, has propelled the production of extreme land abandonment. The constructed threat has translated into a sustained suppression of demand and capital for overwhelmingly black neighborhoods. These forces operate both independently and as an accelerant for other abandonment drivers.
34-4568
Keywords:
Cyberspace. Education. Gender. Race.
In this article, the authors examine how race, gender, and education jointly shape interaction among heterosexual Internet daters. They find that racial homophily dominates mate-searching behavior for both men and women. A racial hierarchy emerges in the reciprocating process. Women respond only to men of similar or more dominant racial status, while nonblack men respond to all but black women. Significantly, the authors find that education does not mediate the observed racial preferences among white men and white women. White men and white women with a college degree are more likely to contact and to respond to white daters without a college degree than they are to black daters with a college degree.
15. Development Planning
15-2 SMALL TOWN/RURAL DEVELOPMENT
34-4569
Keywords:
Alternative monetary forms. Public access. Uncertainty.
Labor time has been proposed as an alternative payment vehicle in eliciting preferences for public goods in nonmonetized communities. However, we so far have no empirical evidence for situations where the labor-time elicitation format reduces the respondent’s contribution uncertainty. In this study we compare the uncertainty of people’s stated willingness to contribute time and money for a local public good in a nonmonetized small-scale community in Papua New Guinea. We find that independently of conversion issues, uncertainty is reduced when respondents are asked to contribute time instead of money. Moreover, we find that risk aversion, risk apprehension, and risk exposure are significant predictors of uncertainty.
METHODOLOGY/QUANTITATIVE/ECONOMIC/QUALITATIVE
22. Economics
22-1 ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT AND GROWTH
34-4570
Keywords:
Family. Human capital. Income. Social capital.
Resource-dependent households often diversify their income. We model demand for remittances and supply of off-resource labor as a joint decision, and discuss household trade-offs. We extend the off-farm labor supply literature to a rural fishery, contrasting our results to common findings in the farm literature and providing empirical evidence of the interdependence between education and family structure in determining income diversification. Using a unique dataset from Malaysia, we find that more-educated households are less likely to diversify their income, with caveats depending on family composition. Policy implications for resource management in a remittance economy with alternative livelihoods are discussed.
22-2 ECONOMIC DECLINE/RESTRUCTURING
34-4571
Keywords:
Business. Community mobilization. Economic recession. Recession. United States.
The unexpected investment decisions of companies during recessions often frustrate commentators and policy makers who view the economy from the top down. Companies may act against immediate market signals during recessions because of uncertainties about strategy and the future direction of the economy. A mesolevel sociological model of how firms interpret and respond to economic conditions in uncertain times improves understanding of firms’ variable responses to recessions, which cumulatively shape macroeconomic trajectories. Examining firm-level employment during four recessions from 1950 to 1970, the author generates results from dynamic panel models to show that firms set their employment levels against profits and market share and in alignment with peers and political affiliations. Firms manage uncertainty by imitating peers but also by endeavoring to construct their environment collectively through business associations. This article’s counterintuitive economic findings and the evidence of social and political influences reinforce the importance of careful investigation into how firms respond to recessions.
22-6 SPATIAL ANALYSIS/MODELS
34-4572
Keywords:
Built environment. Construction costs. Development. Economic change. Labor markets. Local development. Local economy.
A new approach is introduced for analysing the economic flows in a construction project that will complement the existing methods. The main focus of the new method is to trace the flow of costs in the project and identify their spatial characteristics as well as who are the final recipients. This type of analysis highlights the flow of costs of the specific project in the local economy. It can be used for decision-making purposes from the project-commissioning party. Costs were divided into six categories, namely: labour, materials, energy, office overheads, taxes and personnel, and into two levels: local and national. Three case studies of stone and reinforced concrete structures were selected and analysed to test the application of this method. The case studies showed that this method and the representation by a Sankey diagram can provide useful insights regarding both the spatialized distribution of the cost of a project and the economic flows going to direct labour versus overhead and taxes. For future projects, local authorities or developers can select the most economically suitable strategy maximizing the income of the local community.
34-4573
Keywords:
Careers. Community workers. Immigration. Immigration policy.
While earlier work primarily examines the point-in-time effects of immigration on the earnings of native workers, this article focuses more broadly on the effects of immigration on native workers’ career trajectories. Cross-classified multilevel growth-curve models are applied to 1979 National Longitudinal Survey of Youth and U.S. Census Bureau data to demonstrate how people adjust to changing local labor market conditions throughout their careers. The key findings indicate that substitution and complementary effects depend on the stage of the worker’s career. At entry into the labor market, high levels of immigration have a positive effect on the career paths of young native-born adults. However, negative contemporaneous effects to natives’ earnings tend to offset positive point-of-entry effects, a finding that suggests job competition among natives is greater in areas of high immigrant population concentration. These results raise questions about whether foreign-born workers need to be in direct competition with natives for there to be substitution effects.
22-7 ECONOMIC THEORY
34-4574
Keywords:
Ecology. Economic development. Economy. Environment. Modernization.
Ecological modernization theory posits that even though economic development harms the environment, the magnitude of the harmful link decreases over the course of development. In contrast, the treadmill of production theory argues that the strong relationship between environmental harms and economic development will remain constant or possibly increase through time. To evaluate these competing propositions, interactions between economic development and time are used in cross-national panel analyses of three measures of carbon dioxide emissions. The results vary across the three outcomes as well as between developed and less developed countries, providing mixed support for both theoretical perspectives. The authors conclude by discussing how both theories could benefit from engaging contemporary research concerning changes within the transnational organization of production and the structure of international trade and how these global shifts influence environment/economic development relationships.
34-4575
Keywords:
Development. Gentrification. Privatization. Public housing. Revitalization.
Prior to the 2008 global financial crisis, Chicago’s agenda to privatize public housing had begun its ascent. As over 20,000 residents relocated, 10 mixed-income housing developments started to replace the areas where high-rise buildings once stood. In the postrecession context, however, the promised transformation proved financially difficult—if not impossible in certain geographic areas—to complete at the scale intended or with the continuum of socioeconomic diversity expected. That shift in the economic context, along with subsequent political responses, thoroughly altered the policy strategy. Sixteen years into Chicago’s public housing reforms, the former public housing sites remained underdeveloped. Chicago’s reforms provide a worthwhile case for empirical observation and theoretical extension about the nature of privatization within a city considered America’s testing ground for neoliberal urbanism. Drawing from nearly 2 years of ethnographic research, this article contributes to the literature by explaining how, in the context of extreme volatility, the mixed-income development strategy premised on market logics became untenable. When the tools and rationales for privatization no longer held up, Chicago’s reforms had to be reconstituted. It is shown that whereas the financial crisis resulted in disastrous impacts that called into question the reliance on private-sector actors and finance capital, local political actors nonetheless continued to seek new strategies dependent on the private market for the provision of affordable housing. The mixed-income strategy needs to be restructured so that it more equitably generates a mix of housing tenures, rather than subsidizing private development in gentrifying neighborhoods where market-rate populations are already attracted to move. Alternative policy options are needed, especially during inevitable periods of economic downturn and in more distressed, racially segregated neighborhoods.
34-4576
Keywords:
Economic analysis. Economics. Social conditions.
In an increasingly knowledge-based global environment, American-style economics may be an especially important form of expertise to understand. Existing studies of the discipline present something of a paradox, however, as some suggest that economic discourse is a logically unified and powerful promarket ideology, while others indicate that in practice it is quite fragmented and constrained. A series of 52 interviews with economists working in various jobs is used to reveal a possible way out of this paradox by highlighting three basic features of economic expertise: cognitive and practical framing via a “core” of relatively simple ideas and techniques, great flexibility in results due to various available “subframes,” and dependence of the selection of subframes on local institutional contexts. These underlying features potentially explain how the unified academic discourse of economics produces a variety of outcomes and maybe even plays a range of quite different social roles in different situations.
PHYSICAL/ENVIRONMENTAL
30. Housing and Real Estate
30-1 HOUSING/REAL ESTATE POLICY
34-4577
Keywords:
Child development. Housing subsidy. Low income. Public policy. Renting.
In this article, we ask how housing subsidies might influence young children. We examine two national housing policies – public housing assistance and the Section 8 vouchers program – and two demonstration projects that aimed to improve the administration of providing housing subsidies – HOPE (Homeownership Opportunities for People Everywhere) VI and Moving to Opportunity. This article is a critical examination of these policies and demonstration projects in relation to the following housing dimensions that promote the healthy development of young children: income supplements residential stability, physical environment, access to services and amenities, housing choice, neighborhood safety, and social capital. We compared advantages and limitations of each of these national housing policies and demonstration projects and examined ways in which they might influence children in these housing dimensions. The article concludes with implications and future research directions for U.S. housing policy by discussing its most recent U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) initiative, Rental Assistance Demonstration, in addressing limitations of housing policies and demonstration projects we examined.
34-4578
Keywords:
Canada. Federal housing policies. Mortgages. Suburbanization.
Researchers agree that, in Canada and the United States, federal policy with respect to mortgage finance encouraged suburbanization in the early postwar period. However, direct evidence has been lacking. Unique mortgage file data for 1951 for two Canadian cities, Hamilton, Ontario, and Vancouver, British Columbia, make it possible to assess this claim, and related claims. They show that the impact of federal mortgage assistance was similar in direction in both cities, but much more striking in Hamilton: federal involvement encouraged suburbanization, reinforced existing broad patterns in the social geography of the city, and increased the amount of income segregation at the scale of specific neighborhoods and suburban subdivisions. The broad generalizations that previous researchers have made about the impact of federal mortgage policy are confirmed, but the magnitude of that impact could vary enormously and cannot be assumed in particular cases.
34-4579
Keywords:
Housing. Housing production. Neighborhoods. Public opinion. Sustainable communities.
Cohousing is a resident-led neighborhood development model that clusters private dwelling units around collectively owned and managed spaces, with potential to address long-term social and environmental challenges in American metropolitan regions. To date, however, the cohousing model has been slow to diffuse beyond a demographically narrow following. This limited following may signal to policymakers that cohousing is an unappealing housing model, and therefore an impractical policy objective. Drawing from a survey of 1,000 American residents, the results of a multivariate regression model suggest that (a) many of the characteristics of the current resident population of cohousing in the United States have no statistical association with the individuals who indicate interest in cohousing nationwide; (b) other characteristics serve as better predictors of interest in cohousing; and therefore (c) the slow diffusion of cohousing is likely the consequence of inaccessibility rather than low appeal. Overcoming these challenges demands shifts in policy.
34-4580
Keywords:
Economic crisis. Housing. Housing policy. United Kingdom.
This article analyzes the role of social housing in Ireland’s property bubble and its experience of the global financial crisis. The article argues that over recent decades social housing has been transformed from a countercyclical measure which counterbalances the market into a procyclical measure which fuelled Ireland’s housing boom. The reform of social housing financing and acquisition mechanisms has embedded social housing in the boom/bust dynamics of the private housing system. Analyzing the shifting relationship between social and private housing is crucial to understanding the role of housing policy in Ireland’s property bubble as well as the current housing crisis. Despite being caused by problems in the private housing and financial systems, the crisis has had very negative consequences for social housing, thus producing a crisis across the housing system as a whole.
34-4581
Keywords:
Family. Housing. Redevelopment. Suburban areas.
Mansionization—the process in which original single-family houses are demolished and replaced with larger houses—in the older inner-ring suburbs of U.S. cities is a contentious and important driver of physical, social, and economic neighborhood change, yet little is known about how the mansionization process varies across the diverse inner-ring suburban landscape. With a focus on the inner-ring suburbs of Chicago located in Cook County, Illinois, this study presents a typology of mansionization based upon the housing, population, and household characteristics; economic status; and race and ethnicity of the neighborhoods in which mansionization occurs. Principal components analysis followed by cluster analysis are used to identify five distinct types of mansionization in the inner-ring suburbs of Chicago: highly affluent, upper middle class, postwar ethnoburb, white middle class, and diverse working class. Although mansionization is often perceived as a single process, findings reveal that it occurs in a variety of places and manifests in a variety of ways. The regulatory approaches of municipalities with differing types of suburban mansionization are discussed.
34-4582
Keywords:
Economic crisis. Housing. Housing policy. Research. Urban policy.
In response to the urban crisis of the early 1990s, the government-sponsored enterprise known as Fannie Mae used what would become the Annual Housing Conference (AHC) to influence urban and housing policy. This article traces the history of the AHC in relation to Housing Policy Debate as part of a concerted effort of Fannie Mae to invest in and upgrade the quality of urban and housing policy research during the 1990s. The impact of these conferences on the policy community in universities, Washington DC, the states, and indeed the world is analyzed by highlighting some of work that came out of the more influential conferences including the 1991 Homeless Conference, the 1994 Access to Opportunity Conference, and the 1997 Social Capital Conference. The article is concluded with an appraisal of the AHC’s legacy.
34-4583
Keywords:
Europe. Housing policy. Neoliberalism. Welfare. Welfare policies.
In this article we analyze the historical roots of neoliberal housing policies, mottos, and principles in Italy and Spain, two countries with a Mediterranean welfare regime, showing how they are embedded in the twentieth-century fascist–dictatorial regimes of Mussolini and Franco. To stimulate economic growth in a situation of autarchy, both regimes saw the construction sector and the promotion of homeownership as keys to fuel the accumulation process while believing this guaranteed social order. After acknowledging these long-standing roots, we show how the current phase of neoliberalism, characterized by severe austerity policies, relies on similar principles, the main reforms approved in both countries proceeding mainly toward cuts to service provisions and resources, whereas the promotion of homeownership remains unchallenged.
34-4584
Keywords:
Agency decision making. Displacement. Gentrification.
To shed some light on longstanding questions around gentrification, in this research we model environmental gentrification and gentrification-related displacement of residents. We do this through the development of an agent-based model of a simple urban region, considering different urban contexts and policy approaches to polluted facilities and the relationship of these policies with subsequent gentrification and displacement. We find that gentrification-related displacement is most likely, and most impactful, in urban regions characterized by high levels of density and low levels of residential segregation preferences. Displacement is far less prevalent in low-density regions, particularly those with high segregation preferences. We discuss the potential for different policy implications in these different urban contexts.
34-4585
Keywords:
Equity. Housing. Housing policy. Neighborhoods. Social impact analysis.
This article provides a holistic analysis of why and how federal assisted housing policy (specifically, public housing, Low-Income Housing Tax Credit [LIHTC], and voucher programs) should be reformed in ways that would be more conducive to socially desirable outcomes at the neighborhood level. First, I argue that past research has documented mutually causal interrelationships between assisted housing policy and neighborhoods that have been couched as having negative connotations for both. Second, I argue that there is there a rationale on grounds of both efficiency and equity for altering assisted housing policy so it would encourage the creation and preservation of neighborhoods that are physically of good quality and economically diverse. Third, I advocate a circumspect menu of programmatic reforms that would be gradualist, option enhancing, and relatively budget neutral, yet would garner these positive impacts. As overarching reforms, I propose regional housing institution-building, fair housing law revisions, impaction standards, and diversity incentives built into Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing. As reforms to site-based assistance programs, I propose: a new formula for disbursing LIHTC, to repeal and replace the Qualified Census Tract bonus, diversification/preservation incentives for existing assisted private developments, and preserving assisted housing in revitalizing neighborhoods. As reforms to tenant-based assistance programs, I propose: Small Area Fair Market Rents, premove and postmove mobility counseling, ancillary family supports postmove, reducing barriers to lease-up, and diversification incentives in U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development regulations.
34-4586
Keywords:
Governance. Government. Housing vouchers. Rental housing.
To succeed, the Housing Choice Voucher (HCV) program must be attractive to rental property owners. When landlords refuse to accept subsidized renters, lease-up rates decline, administrative costs increase, and options become limited to high-poverty neighborhoods where owners are most desperate. This article examines what motivates landlords’ decisions to accept subsidized tenants. We use 127 interviews with a random and field sample of landlords, combined with administrative data from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development on property ownership in Baltimore, Maryland, Dallas, Texas, and Cleveland, Ohio. We find that landlords’ perspectives on the HCV program, including rents, tenants, and inspections, are highly dependent on context; landlords weigh the costs and benefits of program participation against the counterfactual tenant that a landlord might otherwise rent to in the open market. We argue that policymakers can boost landlord participation by better understanding how landlords think about their alternatives within each local context. Finally, we consider what drives nonparticipation in the program. Our results show that the majority of landlords who refuse voucher holders had accepted them previously. We suggest that policy reform should be dually focused on improving bureaucratic inefficiencies that deter landlord participation, and providing training and education to landlords.
34-4587
Keywords:
Economic crisis. Financing. Housing. Housing policy.
Accra is experiencing a housing crisis caused by the failure of both the state and the market to provide affordable shelter for the city’s low-income population. The launch of a new National Housing Policy in 2015 indicated a growing interest on the part of policymakers to support an alternative approach to low-income housing pioneered by civil society that is based on the principles of collective self-help and financial inclusion. This article conceptualizes this approach as an attempt to incorporate previously excluded surplus populations into the circuits of capital by extending finance to low-income city dwellers. However, this approach diverges from more conventional market-based approaches by promoting collective forms of organization, tenure and resource management—or “commons.” To scale this approach up beyond isolated pilot projects and ensure that it is genuinely affordable to the poorest groups, it is argued that collective self-help must be accompanied by subsidies from the state.
34-4588
Keywords:
American cities. Cities. Neighborhood change. Residential mobility.
Residential mobility processes remain largely a black box for housing policy researchers. Whereas neighborhood sociodemographic indicators provide insight into the types of push and pull factors that are associated with residential mobility, connecting the behavior of individual households to patterns of neighborhood change remains a challenge. At the same time, displacement and replacement are core tenets of theorized neighborhood change processes. Using household-level longitudinal data on residential location choice for Cook County, Illinois, this article connects residential mobility flows to origin and destination neighborhood change trajectories. This approach highlights the ways in which income plays an important role in mediating flows between neighborhood change types, as well as the neighborhood change dynamics experienced by nonmovers. Findings from this work are particularly important for engaging with longstanding housing policy concerns—namely, how to balance organic processes of neighborhood change with the need for stability.
34-4589
Keywords:
Gentrification. Health. Housing. Participatory research.
A gentrification wave is sweeping across metropolitan America, yet we know very little about the health consequences of this current neighborhood redevelopment trend across different community contexts. This article describes an interdisciplinary, comparative, community-based participatory action (CBPA) research project investigating how housing, community change, and health are connected. We first discuss the linkages among America’s affordable housing crisis, increased rates of gentrification, and health concerns for low-income people in revitalizing neighborhoods. We then lay out our initial hypotheses of how early- and late-stage gentrification processes might affect the health of low-income residents. This is followed by an explanation of how our CBPA approach influenced and altered our gentrification-related research questions and methods. This article contributes to the housing and community development literature by explaining an innovative theoretical and methodological framework for understanding the complex relationships among housing, neighborhood change, and health.
34-4590
Keywords:
Implementation. Mixed-income communities. Plan quality. Urbanism.
This article explores the barriers to implementing mixed-income development plans that incorporate the social (income) and physical (new urbanism) mixing goals of HOPE VI. I examine a comparative case study of three HOPE VI planning efforts in Chicago, Illinois, that exhibit different results. I draw from 25 in-depth interviews across three primary types of actors involved in the development process: developers, housing officials, and consultants. This research uses the perspectives of these key actors to identify the barriers that constrain the implementation of new urbanist designs. Current research indicates that mixed-income developments vary in their degree of income mixing and how new urbanist strategies are implemented. However, there is little consensus on why this is so. Findings indicate implementation of new urbanism is constrained by limited interagency coordination, restrictive design policies, low community buy-in, and exclusive marketing and occupancy practices. Overall, the research offers lessons learned from which I recommend changes in planning practices to assist actors in the consistent implementation of new urbanism in mixed-income developments.
34-4591
Keywords:
Cities. Historic preservation. Neighborhood change. Neighborhood effects. Taxes.
Since the program’s inception in 1976, the Federal Historic Rehabilitation Tax Credit (RTC) has supported more than 42,000 projects and $84 billion of rehabilitation work. Through 2016, this tax incentive created or retained nearly 550,000 housing units. Despite its role as an important housing redevelopment incentive, the effects of Historic Tax Credit projects on neighborhood change are largely unknown. This research uses data from Federal Historic Tax Credit projects between 1998 and 2010 to examine the neighborhood-level effects of these investments in six legacy cities (Baltimore, Cleveland, Philadelphia, Providence, Richmond, and St. Louis). The difference-in-differences regression model reveals minimal significant changes in socioeconomic characteristics and no significant changes in racial or housing composition. Although neighborhood change is limited overall, RTC housing activity does significantly increase median household income. There is also evidence of significant increases in the share of low-income households where the RTC creates or rehabilitates affordable units.
34-4592
Keywords:
Affordable housing. Federal housing policies. Housing policy.
In this article we identify 11 contemporary housing market and policy trends that will frame the next 10 years of federal housing policy. In each case, we review the relevant numbers before summarizing the policy issues raised by those realities. In some cases, these issues prompt specific policy recommendations. In other cases, they point to the need for greater research and debate.
34-4593
Keywords:
Economic conditions. Public housing. Work.
This study examines the early impact of a Local Self-Sufficiency (LSS) program of the Housing Authority of Champaign County (HACC), Illinois, on recipients’ total annual household income and earnings, and employment. In 2013, HACC, through LSS, mandated work requirements for households with working-age, able-bodied adult members and imposed sanctions on those who did not meet the program requirements. We find that, between 2012 and 2014, the LSS program led to an average increase of $2,283 in earnings for an individual household. In aggregate, this allowed HACC to serve an additional 98 (9%) LSS-eligible households for a year. Also, LSS-eligible households experienced an increase in the employment–adult ratio by 11.6 percentage points. The LSS program also had a larger impact for more economically disadvantaged households with no prior work history.
34-4594
Keywords:
Experiments. Housing relocation. Relocation.
Policymakers have actively pursued urban renewal and dispersal programs to deconcentrate poverty in urban neighborhoods. Relocation strategies lead to new housing opportunities and may encourage employment opportunities for relocated residents if resourceful contacts and job information become more easily available after the move. This study provides an innovative evaluation of the early impacts of involuntary relocation programs in the Netherlands on the housing careers, earnings and employment rates of forced relocatees. It establishes a quasi-experimental design by employing unique longitudinal individual-level population registry data from Statistics Netherlands: forced relocatees are tracked and matched to a control group consisting of similar residents that were not forced to move. A difference-in-difference design shows that forced relocatees are living in less deprived neighborhoods after the move. However, we find no conclusive evidence that this upgrade in housing leads to more socioeconomic opportunities for the forced relocatees.
34-4595
Keywords:
Entrepreneurialism. Informal sector. Poverty. Redevelopment. Settlement. Urban areas.
Informal settlements in cities in the global South have been increasingly targeted for redevelopment led by public–private coalitions, especially if they are in central locations. Previous scholarship often characterizes housing policies targeting informal settlements as examples of entrepreneurial governance geared toward recapturing land value by private and public elites. This understanding, however, glosses over the disparate policy choices that local governments use to address informal settlements. This article proposes an analytical framework to explain the variations in policy responses to informal settlements, and it argues that the various policy initiatives are largely shaped by four factors—intergovernmental relations, electoral politics, municipal finance, and the capacity of the civil society. With examples from China, India, and Brazil, this study comparatively examines how these forces have produced distinct informal housing policies, such as urban village removal in Guangzhou, slum rehabilitation in Mumbai, and favela upgrading in Rio de Janeiro.
34-4596
Keywords:
Community planning. Decision support. Housing. Housing choices.
Community-engaged research (CEnR) is experiencing a resurgence as a way of informing community-level change and policymaking. Yet the rules and regulations that are crucial to policy implementation and success are relatively understudied through CEnR. This case study of CEnR on a Medicaid service definition for tenancy supports illustrates the benefits of engaging a policy advocate in regulatory research. These include the advocate’s relationships with stakeholders; her knowledge of the regulatory domain, process, and context; and her visibility as a team member. The case also illustrates challenges to advocate–researcher collaboration, including time demands, differing goals, risks to advocate relationships, and the politicized nature of advocacy. The case depicts strategies that address these challenges, including advocate compensation time, early engagement, discussions of motivations and expectations, and proactive attention to the advocate’s role.
34-4597
Keywords:
Community development. Housing. Neighborhood revitalization. Public health.
Governments and nonprofits routinely partner to launch place-based initiatives in distressed neighborhoods with the goal of stabilizing real estate markets, reclaiming vacant properties, abating public nuisances, and reducing crime. Public health impacts and outcomes are rarely the major policy drivers in the design and implementation of these neighborhood-scale initiatives. In this article, we examine recent health impact assessments in Baltimore, Maryland, and Memphis, Tennessee, to show how public health concepts, principles, and practices can be infused into existing and new programs and policies, and how public health programs can help to improve population health by addressing the upstream social determinants of health. We provide a portfolio of ideas and practices to bridge this classic divide of housing and health policy.
34-4598
Keywords:
Fair housing law. Housing. Mobility. Place. Regulation. Segregation.
The Department of Housing and Urban Development’s 2015 Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing Rule requires municipalities to formulate new plans to address obstacles to fair housing and disparities in access to opportunity. Although the rule provides a more rigorous structure for plan compliance than previously, as a form of metaregulation, it still gives substantial flexibility to localities. Are municipalities creating more robust fair housing plans under the new rule, and what types of municipalities are creating more rigorous goals? Analyzing the plans filed thus far, we find that municipalities propose significantly more robust goals under the new rule than they did previously. Local capacity is positively correlated with goals containing measurable objectives or new policies. Measures of local motivation are positively associated with goals that enhance household mobility or propose place-based investments.
34-4599
Keywords:
Affordability. Affordable housing. Hedonics. Housing. Public policy. Trade.
NIMBYism (not in my backyard) decreases the amount of affordable housing construction. A possible motivator for this is an existing homeowner’s fear that proximity to affordable housing depresses property value. Using a hedonic regression analysis of the sales prices of homes in Sacramento County, California, this study finds that increases in the demographic characteristics in a census tract that are likely to increase if more affordable housing is built there lower the sales price of a home. This finding holds even after controlling for the percentages of racial/ethnic groups more likely to face discrimination. Policymakers should recognize this economic element of NIMBYism as they consider instruments to increase the amount of affordable housing built. We conclude with a suggestion for a knowingly controversial policy mechanism based upon cap and trade with the hope it will spur further debate on this issue.
34-4600
Keywords:
Economic recession. Low-income housing. Nonprofit organizations. Organizational theory. Recession.
This study identified factors that influenced California nonprofit housing development organizations’ (NHDO) survival and financial stability during the Great Recession. NHDO typically develop and manage affordable housing, while providing social services. During the recession, NHDO financial issues were exacerbated and compounded by the elimination of state redevelopment funds. This research tested organizational theories through bivariate and multivariate analyses from Internal Revenue Service 990 tax forms for nearly 800 NHDO. In many ways, the factors that influenced NHDO sustainability and performance were similar to those affecting for-profits and other nonprofits. For example, older and larger organizations with more staff and revenue fared better. Other factors were unique to this sector (e.g., the region and type of housing developed affected outcomes). An important finding was that reliance on government funding was negatively associated with survival and revenue. The lessons learned from NHDO inform other organizations about surviving and thriving during tough economic times.
30-2 CONSTRUCTION/MAINTENANCE/HOUSING AND BUILDING CODES
34-4601
Keywords:
Affordable housing. Development. Land use. Real estate development. Transit. Zoning.
There is strong evidence that land use regulations constrain housing production. We know less about how real estate developers respond to specific zoning provisions. I compare the characteristics of new multifamily housing with baseline land use regulations in two sets of rail station areas in Los Angeles. I supplement this building-scale analysis with expert interviews. I find that developers were most sensitive to density restrictions and parking requirements. The average development in the Vermont/Western area had 112% of the maximum allowable residential density and 94% of the minimum required parking. Koreatown’s average development had 99% of the maximum density and 88% of the required parking. But, there was variation by area and whether a building was affordable or market rate, apartment or condominium, and by development size. Additionally, regulatory implementation can matter as much as the written regulations themselves. I recommend that cities take an evidence-based approach to reforming regulations and implementation processes.
34-4602
Keywords:
Housing development. Land use regulation. Metropolitan areas.
Amid concerns that increasingly stringent local land-use regulations are constraining housing development across the United States, there is a need for an empirical investigation into whether, how, and where such regulations are being enacted. In this article, we report the results of a nationwide (n = 728 jurisdictions, representing almost a quarter of the U.S. population) survey of local land-use regulation, unprecedented for having been conducted at two distinct points in time (1994 and 2003). Using descriptive statistics and logistic modeling, we arrive at four main findings. First, we find that regulations are in flux to an underappreciated degree, being frequently enacted but also often abandoned. Second, we find a strong regional orientation to the use of certain regulatory tools. Third, we find more evidence in support of land-use regulations being used to solve local problems than to intentionally exclude new residents. Finally, we find that high levels of education are frequently associated with the use of tools that have a redistributive or proaffordable housing intent.
30-3 HOUSING/REAL ESTATE FINANCE AND VALUE
34-4603
Keywords:
Credit. Homeownership. Lending.
The tightening of mortgage credit in the aftermath of the global financial crisis has been identified as a factor in the decline of homeownership in the United States to 50-year lows. In this article, we review findings about the role of borrowing constraints and tightened credit in lowering access to homeownership. We also discuss how institutional changes could hinder or support this access going forward.
34-4604
Keywords:
Dispossession. Economic crisis. European Union. Financial crisis. Financing. Housing.
The emerging postcrisis geographies in Southern Europe are intrinsically related to debt and dispossession. In Spain, mortgage homeownership and indebtedness led to housing dispossessions, while in Greece, skyrocketing private indebtedness is eventually arranged through housing foreclosures. Building upon the notion of accumulation by dispossession, i.e., on the way capital accumulates wealth in the era of neoliberal globalization, this article elaborates two novel concepts to understand the housing crises in both countries. The perception of dispossession by odious taxation describes the process of wealth extraction facilitated by financial mechanisms in Greece, and dispossession by political fraud is conceived as a characterization of fraudulent political arrangements and financial tools used for orchestrating housing stealth in Spain. This nurtures the perception that a comparative insight on the processes of dispossession in the Spanish and Greek housing markets may facilitate a nuanced understanding over the interrelated processes of contemporary housing restructuring.
34-4605
Keywords:
Buildings. Construction. Development. Housing. Land use policies. Low-income housing. Market studies.
Growing numbers of affordable housing advocates and community members are questioning the premise that increasing the supply of market-rate housing will result in housing that is more affordable. Economists and other experts who favor increases in supply have failed to take these supply skeptics seriously. But left unanswered, supply skepticism is likely to continue to feed local opposition to housing construction, and further increase the prevalence and intensity of land-use regulations that limit construction. This article is meant to bridge the divide, addressing each of the key arguments supply skeptics make and reviewing what research has shown about housing supply and its effect on affordability. We ultimately conclude, from both theory and empirical evidence, that adding new homes moderates price increases and therefore makes housing more affordable to low- and moderate-income families. We argue further that there are additional reasons to be concerned about inadequate supply response and assess the evidence on those effects of limiting supply, including preventing workers from moving to areas with growing job opportunities. Finally, we conclude by emphasizing that new market-rate housing is necessary but not sufficient. Government intervention is critical to ensure that supply is added at prices affordable to a range of incomes.
34-4606
Keywords:
Community. Foreclosure. Housing. Mortgages. Neighborhoods.
Mortgage foreclosures hit Detroit, Michigan hard between 2005 and 2014, especially in what we define as strong neighborhoods; there, more than one third of homes experienced foreclosure. Before the crisis hit, these selected tracts had largely intact physical environments and higher owner occupancy, household income and property value than the citywide median. In some of them residents worked intensely to abate the neighborhood effects of mortgage foreclosures. This study examines those efforts’ effectiveness. We selected neighborhoods with the most extensive efforts, as measured, for instance, by creation of community-based plans and applications for grants, and we conducted interviews and field observations to examine those efforts. To assess strengthening of neighborhood housing markets, we applied a modified adjusted interrupted time-series approach to evaluate changes in prices as one measure of neighborhood change. We found that strong resident initiative supported by community development organizations and external assistance led to increased neighborhood housing prices, compared with comparable neighborhoods. However, when initiative, context, and support were weaker, community-based efforts could not prevent considerable decline.
34-4607
Keywords:
Credit. Location. Low-income housing. Taxes.
There is considerable controversy about the allocation of Low-Income Housing Tax Credits (LIHTC). Some charge that credits are disproportionately allocated to developments in poor, minority neighborhoods without additional investments and thereby reinforcing patterns of poverty concentration and racial segregation. We examine whether Qualified Allocation Plans, which outline the selection criteria states use when awarding credits, can serve as an effective tool for directing credits to higher opportunity neighborhoods (or neighborhoods that offer a rich set of resources, such as high-performing schools and access to jobs) for states wishing to do so. To answer this question, we study changes in the location criteria outlined in allocation plans for 20 different states across the country between 2002 and 2010, and observe the degree to which those modifications are associated with changes in the poverty rates and racial composition of the neighborhoods where developments awarded tax credits are located. We find evidence that changes to allocation plans that prioritize higher opportunity neighborhoods are associated with increases in the share of credits allocated to housing units in lower poverty neighborhoods and reductions in the share allocated to those in predominantly minority neighborhoods. This analysis provides the first source of empirical evidence that state allocation plans can shape LIHTC siting patterns.
34-4608
Keywords:
Credit. Ethnic minorities. Mortgages.
Despite falling interest rates and federal policy intervention, many borrowers who could financially gain from refinancing have not done so. We investigate the rates at which, relative to prime borrowers, subprime borrowers seek and take out refinance loans, conditional on not experiencing mortgage default. We find that starting in 2009, subprime borrowers are about half as likely as prime borrowers to refinance, although they still shop for mortgage credit, indicating their interest in refinancing. This disparity is driven in part by the tightened credit environment postfinancial crisis, and the fact that many subprime borrowers were ineligible for the Home Affordable Refinance Program (HARP). In addition, we find that refinance rates have been significantly lower for black and Hispanic borrowers, even after controlling for borrower credit status. We argue that these barriers to refinancing for subprime borrowers have long-term implications for social stratification and wealth building.
34-4609
Keywords:
Diverse neighborhoods. Ethnicity. Foreclosure. Immigration. Neighborhoods. Segregation.
The United States continues to be defined by racial concentration, where most racial/ethnic groups live apart from each other. For homeownership, neighborhoods with large proportions of racial minorities are often linked to negative outcomes for minority homeowners; this was particularly the case during the Great Recession. However, middle and upper income ethnic neighborhoods, or resurgent neighborhoods, have grown in numbers because of a concentration of immigrants, federal policies favoring professionals, ethnic-specific resources, and affluence. In 2007, about 37% of Los Angeles, California, Latino tracts were resurgent and 53% of Asian tracts were resurgent. This study finds that homeowners in resurgent neighborhoods had lower default/foreclosure rates and predicted probabilities than those in low-income neighborhoods. Asian resurgent neighborhoods had the lowest predicted probabilities of default or foreclosure, followed by Latino resurgent and White middle-class neighborhoods. There were also discrepancies among Asian neighborhoods based on nativity. Consequently, it is important to recognize that minority neighborhoods are heterogeneous, with differing impacts on homeownership opportunities when examined by class.
34-4610
Keywords:
Business loans. Experiments. Homeownership.
Using data from the American Community Survey, this article assesses the effects of the 2014 Federal Housing Administration (FHA) loan limit reductions on homeownership decisions. Employing a difference-in-differences identification strategy, we find little evidence that the loan limit reductions caused an overall decline in homeownership rates. However, we do find that overall homeownership rates (as well as African American homeownership rates more specifically) increased in low-price parts of metropolitan statistical areas that experienced a loan limit reduction relative to high-price areas, suggesting that the lack of an overall effect may be because of changing decisions on where to own a home, not whether to own a home. This thesis is further supported by evidence of an increase in commuting times for residents in areas that experienced a limit reduction. Our findings contribute to the debate over how individuals respond and adapt their homeownership decisions to policy changes and credit constraints.
34-4611
Keywords:
Homeownership. Mortgages. Taxes.
Although the mortgage interest deduction enjoys broad public support, critics argue that the policy disproportionately benefits wealthy households, fails to expand homeownership opportunities to households on the margins, and costs the federal government an extraordinary amount of money in foregone tax revenue. Drawing on data collected through an online experiment, this analysis tests the sensitivity of public support to these critiques. The findings reveal that support for the mortgage interest deduction declines when respondents are presented with information about the cost, effectiveness, or distribution of benefits associated with the deduction. Support among renters is more sensitive to framing effects than that among homeowners. Republicans are less sensitive to framing effects than Democrats when the deduction is framed as distributing benefits unequally, but more sensitive to these effects when the issue is framed as costly. However, all groups register their lowest level of support when told that the mortgage interest deduction is not an effective tool for expanding ownership opportunities.
34-4612
Keywords:
Federal Housing Administration. Financing. Housing. Mortgages. Rural areas.
Rural homeownership is promoted in the United States by mortgage insurance programs administered by the federal government. We analyze the choice between assistance offered by two such agencies: the Federal Housing Administration and the Rural Housing Service (RHS). We find applicants are sensitive to the relative annual mortgage insurance premiums and guarantee fees. However, there are also persistent racial differences as well as institutional effects. We also find the application and origination process is substantially longer in the RHS program, but variation in closing times does not clearly impact mortgage choice.
34-4613
Keywords:
Economic crisis. Housing. Housing sector. Investing. Investment. Segregation.
In this article we investigate the connections between home purchases by individual investors and urban space by exploring the spatial dimension of investor lending in Chicago and Cook County, Illinois, during the first decade of the 2000s. Previous research on investors (nonoccupant homebuyers) links them to foreclosures and the wave of real-estate owned purchases following the crisis, but leaves relatively unexamined their connection to subprime lending and the housing bubble, particularly the way that the crisis occurred unevenly in cities. We find that investor lending in Chicago increased during the housing boom and that subprime mortgages played a sizable role in overall levels of investor lending. We also show that there were geographically distinct submarkets for prime and subprime investor loans, with subprime investor loans significantly clustered in low-income, majority Black neighborhoods. Our analysis reveals that racial segmentation in the housing market and different types of credit helped produce an uneven geography of investor lending in the years before the housing crisis.
34-4614
Keywords:
Economic crisis. Foreclosure. Housing. Neighborhoods. Recovery.
The surge in foreclosures in the United States that began in 2007 reached a peak in mid-2011, and since then, the rate of foreclosures has been decreasing, providing evidence of the housing market recovery. This study examines factors that affected changes in ZIP code-level foreclosure rates in more than 300 U.S. metropolitan areas during the national housing recovery. Using multivariate analyses of the long- and short-term effects of foreclosures simultaneously, this finding shows that certain characteristics of the mortgage and housing markets led to more rapid neighborhood recovery. Results also indicate, however, that most urban-form variables led to neighborhood resilience over the long term, that high shares of mixed land use were strongly associated with fewer foreclosures, and that high shares of auto dependency were associated with high foreclosure rates. Finally, findings suggest that low- and moderate-income neighborhoods, particularly in cities, were more vulnerable and less resilient to economic shock, and the accumulated effects of foreclosures worsened over the long term. However, low- and moderate-income neighborhoods surrounded by suburban affluent neighborhoods recovered more rapidly than those in cities did. Understanding such resilience to economic crises will provide policymakers with insights that they can leverage to establish housing policies for sustainable neighborhoods.
30-4 HOME OWNERSHIP/RENTAL HOUSING
34-4615
Keywords:
Development. Housing choices. Location. Urban planning.
Edmonton, Alberta, has been experiencing rapid population growth and its associated housing pressures for the past decade. Municipalities like Edmonton are attempting to promote compact, transit-oriented, and infill housing development with policy while accommodating large increases in a population that may demand traditional suburban housing options. This article examined homebuyers’ opinions and preferences regarding their home location choice and found three distinct segments of homebuyers. These segments were established using a Q methodology to group homebuyers by their shared opinions as opposed to traditional sociodemographic or socioeconomic variables. These groups illustrate different perspectives regarding the everyday transportation choices, home attributes, and neighborhood predilections that comprise a home location choice. The identification of these groups of homebuyers provides insights for municipalities attempting to attract and retain citizens in redeveloped housing areas and assists to dissuade greenfield sprawling development.
34-4616
Keywords:
Affordable housing. Development. Rental housing.
The question of how to build decent housing that is affordable to lower income households has challenged policymakers in the United States for decades. In response, the federal government has developed a variety of partnership approaches that involve private for-profit developers. Although these entities are currently the major producers of affordable housing in the United States, they have received relatively little attention from the academic and policy communities. This inquiry is aimed at filing a small portion of this gap by presenting a qualitative case study of one of the country’s leading for-profit developers that has a longstanding commitment to affordable housing, McCormack Baron Salazar. Using a modified version of the quadruple bottom line framework as the starting point, this exploration discusses the complexity and challenges facing the affordable housing sector and offers programmatic and policy recommendations that are applicable to both for-profit and nonprofit developers. In view of the results of the 2016 presidential election, and the likely continued retreat by the federal government from supporting affordable housing, the need to better understand, and form productive working alliances and collaborations with, private for-profit affordable housing developers is more compelling than ever.
34-4617
Keywords:
Community development. Health. House renovation. Housing renovation. Participatory research. Public housing.
In this article, we share our mixed-methods community-engaged approach to study the association between public housing renovation funded through the Rental Assistance Demonstration (RAD) program and the health status and outcomes of the residents living in RAD developments. RAD addresses the nationwide backlog of deferred maintenance at public housing properties. Using address-based queries of electronic health records from 2006–2019, this study will measure the healthcare utilization and clinical health status of residents living in RAD sites pre and post renovation and compare them with nonpublic housing residents living in proximity to RAD developments over the same time period. Applying the principles of community-engaged research, we use in-depth interviews to explore the lived experience of renovation and its impacts on residents’ health and how policymakers and housing developers factor considerations of resident health into their decisions around renovation and redevelopment. Using a prospective, mixed-methods approach that captures both clinical and experiential data will bring into clearer focus the actual health burdens that public housing residents bear, and the health benefits that investment in public housing renovation may bring.
34-4618
Keywords:
Homeownership. Housing. Housing tenure. Renting. Suburban areas. Suburbanization.
In the aftermath of the foreclosure crisis, there has been a marked shift toward renting in the United States, with a large increase in households renting single-family homes. In the 50 largest metropolitan areas, the number of detached, single-family rental homes (SFRs) increased from 3.8 million to 5.8 million from 2006 to 2015. Single-family rentership rates increased in all 50 large metro areas, with the percentage of single-family units that are rented increasing from 11.3% to 16%. Notably, the nine metropolitan areas with the largest increases were all located in the Sunbelt. Given expected neighborhood sorting, it is important to consider neighborhood increases in SFRs. In one large Sunbelt metro area, Atlanta, increases in SFRs from 2010 to 2015 were particularly large in older, inner-county diverse suburbs. Regression results show that, controlling for other neighborhood characteristics, neighborhoods with larger Asian, Latino, and black populations saw larger increases in SFRs. The effects were particularly high in neighborhoods with larger Latino and, especially, Asian populations. Another key finding is that, in neighborhoods with lower property values, more foreclosures during the crisis were associated with sizeable increases in SFRs. However, more foreclosures in neighborhoods with high property values were not associated with increases in SFRs. This is possibly due to the exclusionary nature of high property-value suburbs and the strong demand in such neighborhoods for owner-occupied housing. Implications for policy and research are considered.
34-4619
Keywords:
Gender. Health and well-being. Homeownership. Housing maintenance. Quality. Well-being.
This article investigates whether homeownership provides psychological benefits, particularly as mediated through the act of working on the dwelling. It examines whether work on the home potentially increases subjective well-being (SWB) for home occupants because such work improves the dwelling or because the work is fulfilling and promotes feelings of mastery and control. It also investigates whether homeowners are more likely to perform such work compared with renters. The article finds that homeownership is associated with somewhat elevated life satisfaction, but that homeowners tend to experience less intense positive affect than renters. Homeowners spend much more time working on the home than renters. Strong links between work on the home and life satisfaction are not found, but certain types of home work activities—such as interior or exterior decoration and repairs and yard work—tend to be experienced as psychologically meaningful. Gender also plays a role in the division of home labor and the psychological costs and benefits of homeownership and work on the home. Women are much more likely than men to clean the interiors of dwellings, an activity associated with poor affect. Men perform more of most of the other types of work on the home; in homeowning households these burdens tend to balance each other out, but in renting households there tends to be a dramatic disparity in terms of work on the home, raising concerns about gender inequity.
34-4620
Keywords:
Demographic characteristics. Demographics. Education. Homeownership. Housing policy. Simulation.
In this article we highlight the scope of public policy and demographic change for the future path of homeownership. In so doing, we review the literature on the scope of impact of certain policy tools, estimate housing tenure choice models that highlight how sensitive households are to various factors in different time periods to highlight how credit conditions can influence the future path of homeownership, and then simulate the future paths of homeownership in light of prospective changes in young-adult race/ethnicity, education, income, and wealth. The study focuses on prospective changes between 2015 and 2035 to the rate of homeownership among young adults age 25 to 44, prime ages for first-time homebuying. We find that rising education levels—even if minority-white college education gaps were eliminated completely—would only partially reverse the steep declines in young-adult homeownership attainment witnessed since the onset of the housing bust. However, our findings also suggest that the common narrative, which predicts that young-adult homeownership rates will inevitably decline due to increasing racial/ethnic diversity, does not take into account the positive effect of rising educational attainment among minorities on homeownership rates.
34-4621
Keywords:
Affordability. Affordable housing. Destabilization. Homelessness. Housing. Rental housing.
Many indicators of renter household insecurity remain widespread or have shown signs of worsening in the past decade, including unaffordability, poor unit conditions, overcrowding, and evictions. Most research to date has examined each of these conditions as a standalone problem, without examining the extent and severity of simultaneously occurring housing problems. This study closes that gap by examining the suitability of measuring housing insecurity as an index of multiple variables within four identified dimensions: unaffordability, poor conditions, overcrowding, and forced moves. Results show that dimensions of housing insecurity are highly correlated and suitable for measurement as an index. The proposed index shows that housing insecurity is widespread among U.S. renters, but varies greatly in severity and type.
34-4622
Keywords:
Housing vouchers. Rent control. Rental housing.
Fair Market Rents (FMRs), calculated for an entire metropolitan region, are used to establish payment standards for the Housing Choice Voucher (HCV) program. In response to recent criticism that FMRs do not represent rent disparity and restrict households from moving to high-opportunity areas, a new rule introducing Small Area Fair Market Rents (SAFMRs) has been issued. SAFMRs are based on ZIP codes to reflect local market rents and increase the number of payment standards used to administer the HCV program. The purpose of this research is to determine whether the number of payment standards can be reduced by consolidating ZIP codes, while adhering to the primary objectives of the SAFMR rule. The ZIP code grouping process conducted offers one method for reducing the number of payment standards needed to implement the new rule; however, the rent analysis reveals the over- and underestimation of SAFMRs for some ZIP codes.
30-5 HOUSING REHABILITATION
34-4623
Keywords:
Community. Design methods. Mixed-income communities. Partnerships. Redevelopment.
There is growing evidence supporting comprehensive community development efforts that focus on multiple determinants of well-being. Yet evaluation has been limited by a lack of longitudinal studies, difficulty tracking displaced residents, and limited data on diverse cultural communities. The Yesler Terrace Redevelopment Project analyzes longitudinal and repeated cross-sectional data to evaluate the impact of redevelopment on a low-income, ethnically diverse cohort of residents in Yesler Terrace. Yesler Terrace is a 30-acre publicly subsidized housing community in downtown Seattle, Washington, owned and operated by the Seattle Housing Authority. To evaluate the redevelopment strategies and related programs on resident well-being, we are examining multiple sources of data, linking housing and healthcare data, and collecting contextual data about residents’ experiences. Here we describe the participating agencies and residents, study objectives and methods, and preliminary results. Early study results include shifts in resident demographics, health outcomes, and community social cohesion and perception of safety measures.
34-4624
Keywords:
Asset-based community development. Community. Housing. Narrative analysis. Regional disparities.
Research on housing goes beyond simply examining the physical structures. It represents access to public and private markets, markets that sort themselves based on race, income, health status, and other social determinants. The final goal of our project is to examine how housing affordability, neighborhood conditions, and housing conditions affect the health of residents in the city of Baton Rouge. The Interdisciplinary Research Leadership model is unique in that it encourages a framework where the rigors of methodology and research intersect with the power of community voices. Our research project provides these emotions fertile soil through the articulation of narratives and stories via our community conversation platform. Among the many takeaways from this study, there is one that needs immediate attention. Whereas some from the policy community recognized the need of the community to gain access to resources, mostly they viewed the link between health and housing through a structural and regulatory lens. However, community residents viewed housing more as a context than as a structure. This finding clearly shows us why it is important to bring community narratives and voices to the research and policy table in defining a problem and designing workable policy solutions.
34-4625
Keywords:
China. Displacement. Gentrification. Housing. Urban areas.
In less than 20 years the housing system in China has been transformed from one based predominantly on the public provision of housing to a market-based system, to the extent that more than 80% of households in urban China are homeowners. The sheer scale of this change, compressed into such a short time, is impressive. However, the move to a commodified system has not been problem free. Indeed, the twin issues of displacement and, more generally, affordability are coming increasingly to the fore, resulting in significant policy shifts since 2010 toward the promotion of low-end housing for lower middle- and low-income groups. This article examines these issues through a detailed analysis of the implementation of the indemnificatory housing policy in Nanjing, and highlights the complex and often contradictory nature of this policy in practice.
30-6 HOUSING FOR SPECIAL POPULATIONS
34-4626
Keywords:
Assisted housing developments. Disabilities. Health. Health services. Housing. Housing vouchers. Public housing.
Using newly available U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) administrative data linked with National Health Interview Survey data, this study estimates the prevalence of disability among HUD-assisted adults and examines health disparities for this population. The linked data suggest a much higher prevalence of disability among HUD-assisted adults than previously suggested by HUD administrative data. Controlling for individual characteristics and HUD program type, assisted-housing residents who have disabilities experienced higher rates of self-reported fair or poor health, asthma, diabetes, hypertension, obesity, and cigarette smoking. Adults with disabilities had more frequent use of emergency rooms and increased concerns with affording the necessary health care. HUD-assisted adult residents with disabilities were more likely than residents without disabilities to be connected to the health-care system, having higher rates of insurance coverage and more frequent contact with specialists, general doctors, and mental health-care providers. Policy implications are discussed.
34-4627
Keywords:
Advocacy planning. AIDS. Case studies. Housing. Rural areas.
Housing remains the greatest unmet need for people living with HIV/AIDS (PLWH). Homelessness and unstable or marginal housing strongly predict poor health outcomes among PLWH, and they complicate the medical management of HIV. The majority of extant research has focused on urban areas; very few studies target areas in the rural South. Rural areas face distinct issues related to housing including a lack of structured housing programs. Further, the communal nature of life within the rural South presents an additional burden for PLWH as the disease is still highly stigmatized in these areas. The goal of this article is to: (a) describe issues related to housing needs among PLWH in the rural South and the effect of these factors on health outcomes; (b) highlight a community-based participatory research project, known as Project CHAP (Case management, Housing, Advocacy and Policy) and evaluate the impact of housing and case management on health outcomes among rural residents living with HIV in West Alabama; and (c) summarize the impact for future research or policy work in the area of housing among PLWH in the rural South. The findings have implications for PLWH and for those who provide care or services to this population.
34-4628
Keywords:
Homelessness. Housing. Property. Squatter settlements. Urban areas.
Despite severely depressed property markets, housing in declining U.S. cities can be surprisingly unaffordable for poor residents. Yet the characteristics of decline, such as abundant vacant property and constrained economic/political conditions, also provide opportunity for squatting. This article explores survival squatting—illegal occupation of property as a means for procuring suitable housing by marginalized residents. Drawing on a 4.5-year ethnography in Detroit, I examine the mechanisms by which people strategically choose squatting as a method of sheltering in the context of local conditions, and the experiences and conditions of this practice. I situate these empirical findings within a broader discussion comparing squatting and other forms of housing that have received considerable attention by researchers (e.g., shelter use, sleeping rough, doubling up). Squatting is particularly risky and unstable, and often very hidden. Substandard housing conditions prevail, and substance abuse is common. Squatting may have negative implications for child welfare, but may also provide measures of independence, self-determination, and comfort for illegal occupiers. There is a critical need for further research in this area, both to inform comprehensive housing policies and to anticipate how squatters’ well-being is impacted by other urban initiatives, such as blight demolition.
34-4629
Keywords:
Housing policy. Housing subsidy. Imprisonment.
An emerging literature has documented the challenges that formerly incarcerated individuals face in securing stable housing. Given the increasingly unaffordable rental market, rental subsidies represent an important and understudied source of stable housing for this population. The existing literature has described substantial discretion and a varied policy landscape that determine former prisoners’ access to housing subsidies, or subsidized housing spaces that are leased to members of their social and family networks. Less is known about how former prisoners themselves interpret and navigate this limited and uncertain access to subsidized housing. Drawing on data from repeated qualitative interviews with 44 former prisoners, we describe the creative and often labor-intensive strategies that participants employed to navigate discretion and better position themselves for subsidized housing that was in high demand, but also largely out of reach. Our findings also illustrate the potential costs associated with these strategies for both participants and members of their social and family networks.
34-4630
Keywords:
Decision making. Homelessness. Housing. Social welfare. Welfare.
The present study embedded a qualitative substudy within a randomized controlled trial of housing services for child welfare-involved families to examine housing decisions made in the face of homelessness and child protection. Participants included a representative sample of caregivers (n = 19) randomized to receive the Family Unification Program—a permanent housing intervention for inadequately housed families under investigation for child abuse or neglect—or child welfare services as usual. Qualitative interviews 12 months after randomization assessed housing decision-making processes involved in keeping families safe and stable. Results indicated a push–pull dynamic that constrained housing choices regardless of whether permanent housing was made available. Caregiver housing decisions were constrained by time limitations, affordability, and access to services, whereas child and family safety was perceived as less important. Findings emphasize the need for housing-informed child welfare services to ensure the long-term safety of children in families experiencing homelessness.
30-7 LOW- AND MODERATE-INCOME HOUSING
34-4631
Keywords:
Affordability. Affordable housing. Metropolitan areas.
The United States is facing an acute shortage of reasonably priced housing with over 35% of households paying more than 30% of their income for housing costs in 2015. As the U.S. economy recovers from the Great Recession, will housing become less unaffordable as incomes rise and households could potentially pay a lower share of their income for housing costs? To see if this is likely, I examined the change in housing affordability in the 100 largest metropolitan statistical areas (MSAs) in the United States between 1990 and 2000, a period of exceptional economic prosperity. I used the percentage of housing cost-burdened households (those that pay more than 30% of their gross income on ownership or rental costs) as a measure of the availability of reasonably priced housing. I used discriminant analysis techniques to detect statistically significant differences in the percentage of cost-burdened households in the 100 MSAs based on a variety of factors. I found that despite the phenomenal economic prosperity of the 1990s, about 30% of households were cost-burdened both in 1990 and 2000. High MSA median income was correlated with a greater shortage of reasonably priced housing. Neither economic growth rate nor poverty rate nor population growth rate distinguished high-shortage MSAs from low-shortage ones. Large MSAs and MSAs in the West had greater shortages than other MSAs. Economic prosperity did not alleviate the problem of lack of reasonably priced housing in the past, and is not likely to do so in the near future. Planners and policy-makers need to enact new policies at local, regional, state, and federal levels to effectively address America’s chronic affordable housing shortage.
34-4632
Keywords:
Children. Ethnic minorities. Housing. United States.
The purpose of this article is to examine parental perceptions of child maltreatment to inform services that target families living in low-income housing communities in Fresno, California, through focus group interviews. We identified three main themes across all focus group interviews that describe the child maltreatment among our participants: (a) acknowledging child maltreatment as a problem, and its negative consequences; (b) normalizing or justifying child maltreatment as part of growing up; and (c) seeing child maltreatment as intergenerational. Additionally, parents discussed types of help to address child maltreatment. We then propose a prevention model using a public health framework along with other policy recommendations that highlight the importance of culturally and linguistically appropriate services for diverse families living in low-income housing communities.
34-4633
Keywords:
Ethnic minorities. Low-income housing. Neighborhoods. Opportunism. Taxes.
A key goal of housing assistance programs is to help lower income households reach neighborhoods of opportunity. Studies have described the degree to which Low-Income Housing Tax Credit (LIHTC) developments are located in high-opportunity neighborhoods, but our focus is on how neighborhood outcomes vary across different subsets of LIHTC residents. We also examine whether LIHTC households are better able to reach certain types of neighborhood opportunities. Specifically, we use new data on LIHTC tenants in 12 states along with eight measures of neighborhood opportunity. We find that compared with other rental units, LIHTC units are located in neighborhoods with higher poverty rates, weaker labor markets, more polluted environments, and lower performing schools, but better transit access. We also find that compared with other LIHTC tenants, poor and minority tenants live in neighborhoods that are significantly more disadvantaged.
34-4634
Keywords:
Affordable housing. Housing. Low-income housing.
Mixed-use affordable housing buildings collocate residences and commercial uses. The Low-Income Housing Tax Credit (LIHTC) program provides one mechanism to fund such structures. But the literature offers little insight into the frequency of mixed-use LIHTC buildings, partly because of a lack of data identifying them, and it does not pinpoint conditions that facilitate their development. I explore these issues through a Chicago, Illinois, case study. First, I analyze imagery to create the first database of mixed-use LIHTC buildings. I show that only 5% of LIHTC structures incorporate commercial uses, and that these are concentrated in wealthier, whiter, and already retail-heavy neighborhoods. Second, I use stakeholder interviews to explain the low rate and selective location of mixed-use projects; I find that the stiffest barriers are conflicting governmental policies, difficulties securing financing in the context of a perception of weak retail demand and investor desires for reliable returns, and design constraints.
34-4635
Keywords:
Land preservation. Local businesses. Policy. United States. Urban policy.
Affordable housing stock has diminished as communities face often-conflicting contexts of rising costs and rapid gentrification, and deteriorating housing quality and challenging neighborhood conditions. Research has focused on the loss of subsidized housing, typically in gentrifying neighborhoods. Yet efforts to prevent the loss of affordable housing encompass the broader range of conditions faced across cities. Cities with declining markets may lose units because of a lack of investment in maintenance and/or oversight of conditions Market-affordable housing represents more than three times the number of units of subsidized stock. In this article, we examine the cases of Chicago, Illinois, Washington, DC, and Austin, Texas, to better understand the role of local markets, community conditions, and governance structures in framing the need and developing plans and policies for preservation. We find that preservation policies must be nested within the local context to be effective, responsive, and efficient. Success requires the collaboration of multiple city- and state-level agencies, and must be based on local knowledge and understanding of the market and community at multiple scales. Moreover, through the development of local sources of data and funding, local organizations and agencies shape the mechanisms, focus, and scale of the policies developed.
34-4636
Keywords:
Automobiles. Geography. Housing choices. Housing vouchers. Opportunism.
Transportation influences residential location choices generally, but low-income households often face unique constraints because of a lack of access to automobiles. This article examines how vehicle access influences the type of neighborhoods in which low-income households are able to secure housing following a move to a new neighborhood. We rely on data from the Moving to Opportunity program to estimate locational attainment models, including a wide range of variables capturing various dimensions of neighborhood opportunity. Our findings suggest that auto access enables low-income households to secure housing in neighborhoods that exhibit a wide range of positive neighborhood attributes, including lower poverty rates, lower housing vacancy rates, higher median household income, higher labor-force participation, and higher adult high school graduation rates.
34-4637
Keywords:
Housing. Land use. Low-income housing. Municipalities. Regulation. State agencies. Zoning.
Several U.S. states have supplemented traditional judicial review of local land-use regulation with a state affordable housing appeals system (SAHAS). Empirical evidence indicates that a SAHAS can increase the proportion of housing that is affordable to low- and moderate-income households. But some scholars have suggested that an effective SAHAS will ultimately backfire, by producing incentives to prohibit market-rate development, thereby rendering a state’s housing stock less affordable overall. We test this “backfire” hypothesis with a longitudinal comparison of single-family housing development from 1980 through 2007 in municipalities located in adjacent areas of Connecticut (which adopted a SAHAS in 1989) and New York State (which did not have a SAHAS during the study period). Contrary to the predictions of the backfire hypothesis, our fixed effects regression indicates that Connecticut’s SAHAS was associated with increased single-family development relative to the New York State jurisdictions in our sample. This result suggests that a SAHAS can increase below-market rate and mixed-income development without impeding market-rate development.
34-4638
Keywords:
Development. Low-income housing. Rental housing. Revitalization. Tax incentives.
This research examines the Low-Income Housing Tax Credit (LIHTC) developments in metropolitan areas nationwide. The results indicate that the LIHTC program contributes to the spatial concentration of poverty as well as of racial and ethnic minorities. The program is not promoting mixed-income housing. The program is serving an income category with very little need for additional units and is not serving those with a need. Finally, the program is increasing the rental housing stock in soft markets and failing to increase the supply in tight ones. It is recommended that states adopt allocation standards that would deconcentrate poverty and affirmatively further fair housing. The benefits of the program should be reconfigured to promote mixed-income housing. The LIHTC program should permit states to exchange tax-credit authority for vouchers, to better serve the poorest households. The program should exercise greater rigor in market analysis so that new units are added only in tight markets and deteriorated units are rehabilitated elsewhere.
34-4639
Keywords:
Disaster. Natural disasters. Recovery.
New York State received $4.5 billion in Community Development Block Grant-Disaster Recovery (CDBG-DR) funds after Superstorm Sandy. A major CDBG-DR requirement is to prioritize assistance to low- and moderate-income (LMI) populations. The state is spending two fifths of funds on community-wide (e.g., infrastructure) recovery activities. For these activities to be documented as LMI, a specified percentage of residents benefiting from them must be LMI. We explore the potential tension between addressing community recovery needs and prioritizing LMI assistance. Specifically, we develop a series of scenarios to estimate the likelihood that any community-wide activities will be documented as LMI in New York State. We find that documenting these activities as LMI is largely dependent on the underlying demographics of disaster-impacted areas. Additionally, as recovery activities increase in size, thereby impacting larger populations, they are less likely to be documented as LMI, potentially disincentivizing larger, more impactful investments. We recommend empirically based LMI targets for CDBG-DR grantees.
34-4640
Keywords:
Affordable housing. Employment. Housing. Transit.
California spent over a billion dollars supporting the construction of subsidized affordable housing in rail-adjacent neighborhoods through its transit-oriented development program. We test whether placing affordable housing close to rail or in jobs-rich communities increases development costs on a per-unit basis. We constructed budget and land-use data for nearly 500 tax credit-financed affordable housing sites which applied for tax credits in the state between 2008 and 2016. Through hedonic cost modeling and spatially lagged regression, we fail to find a significant effect of proximity to rail on development costs. Only by interacting proximity to transit with a project being higher than four stories do our models yield a significant effect of 8% higher total development costs. But in these models, a negative 16% interaction term suggests this cost impact is completely absorbed by developers by building above four stories. Beyond this, we find that only jobs–housing balance correlates significantly with per-unit development costs: as the number of jobs relative to housing within a five-mile radius of a site increases by 1, per-unit development costs increases by a mere 5%, on average.
34-4641
Keywords:
Health care. Low-income housing. Public housing. Rental housing.
Interest in the health impacts of renter housing assistance has grown in the wake of heated national discussions on health care and social welfare spending. Assistance may improve renters’ health by offering (a) low, fixed housing costs; (b) protection against eviction; and (c) access to better homes and neighborhoods. Using data from the Survey of Income and Program Participation and econometric analysis, I estimate the effect of receiving assistance from the public housing or Section 8 voucher programs on low-income renters’ reported health status and spending. Assisted renters spent less on health care over the year than unassisted low-income renters did, after controlling for other characteristics. This finding suggests that assisted housing leads to health benefits that may reduce low-income renters’ need to purchase health services. Voucher holders’ lower expenditures are influenced by their low, fixed housing costs, but public housing residents’ lower expenditures are not explained by existing theory.
34-4642
Keywords:
Housing subsidy. Housing vouchers. Low-income housing. Neighborhoods. Section 8 housing.
One critique of the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD)’s Housing Choice Voucher program is that its maximum rent limit is set at the metropolitan level, making more expensive neighborhoods effectively off limits to households who receive rental assistance. As a result, the design of the program limits a voucher household’s access to opportunity neighborhood. In response, HUD created the Small Area Fair Market Rent (SAFMR) demonstration program, which calculates the maximum voucher rent at the zip code level so that HUD’s rent limits more closely align with local neighborhood rents. In theory, this program should improve a voucher household’s choice set and location outcomes. Looking at changes in the location of beneficiaries in the six sites that participated in the SAFMR demonstration program, we find a significant amount of regional variation in the results. Specifically, introduction of the SAFMR rent calculations results in voucher households living in higher opportunity neighborhoods in Dallas, Texas, in lower opportunity neighborhoods in Chattanooga, Tennessee, and mixed effects in other areas. These mixed results highlight some of the potential incremental benefits of the program and reinforce the importance of viewing this policy over a longer period of time, and in the context of other constraints voucher households face in accessing neighborhood opportunity.
34-4643
Keywords:
Affordability. Location. Public expenditure. Residential mobility. Transportation.
In recent years, researchers and advocates have turned their attention to the trade-offs between housing affordability and transportation expenses. They argue that were families to move to more compact, transit-accessible, and walkable neighborhoods, they would reduce their driving and, possibly, forego the need for one or more cars, thus saving them money. We use the Panel Study of Income Dynamics to test this assumption with descriptive statistics and panel regression models, and we find little evidence to support it. We conclude that the location affordability literature may significantly overstate the promise of cost savings in transit-rich neighborhoods.
30-8 PUBLIC SECTOR HOUSING
34-4644
Keywords:
Education. Mixed-income communities. Public housing.
This research examines the federally funded HOPE VI urban revitalization program’s influence on neighborhood public school performance. A comparative case study was conducted in two HOPE VI neighborhood public schools, one that improved significantly (Philadelphia), and one that experienced a decline (Washington DC). The analysis revealed several insights into neighborhood factors that may influence school performance: the most vulnerable residents were least likely to gain reentry, mixed income housing residents often opt out of traditional public schools, and partnerships between public housing and education officials have been historically overlooked.
34-4645
Keywords:
Accountability. Implementation. Income. Public housing.
Government efforts to redevelop public housing often face a contentious gap between plans and realities. This paper compares 2014 U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) administrative data on housing unit counts and unit mixes for all 260 developments receiving Housing Opportunities for People Everywhere (HOPE VI) revitalization grants with data provided in the original HOPE VI grant award announcements. We find that HUD records undercount approximately 11,500 once-proposed units. The biggest changes were a 29% decline in the number of market-rate units and a 40% decline in homeownership units. The chief shortfall during implementation, therefore, was not with public housing units (although the HOPE VI program as a whole did trigger an overall decline of such units). To help elucidate the dynamics at play when the unit allocation shifts between initial grant award and implemented project, we include a series of five brief case studies that illustrate several types of unit change. Interviews with HUD staff confirm the baseline for record-keeping shifted during implementation once project economic feasibility became clearer; adherence to original unit mix proposals remained secondary. HUD prioritized its accountability to Congress and developers over its public law accountability to build the projects initially proposed to local community residents. Although these changes have sometimes been interpreted as broken promises, it is even clearer that HUD’s monitoring system exemplifies what we call Selective Memory Planning: when planners and policy makers, willfully or not, selectively ignore elements of previous plans in favor of new plans that are easier to achieve.
31. Energy
31-1 ENERGY POLICY
34-4646
Keywords:
Buildings. Design. Energy policy. Market analysis. Property markets.
Non-domestic buildings have great potential for energy-related emission reductions in response to climate change. However, high-specification office buildings in the UK demonstrate that regulation, assessment and certification (‘standards’) have not incentivized the development of lower-energy office buildings as expected. Making use of the concepts of ‘qualculation’ and ‘calculative agency’, qualitative case studies of 10 speculatively developed office buildings in London, UK, provide new insight into why this is the case. Interview data (n = 57) are used to illustrate how ‘market standards’ substitute for user needs, and ratchet up the provision of building services to maximize marketability competitively. The examples of energy modelling and the market’s (mis)use of British Council for Offices guidelines are used to explain how such standards perversely bolster energy-demanding levels of specification and building services, and militate against lower-energy design, in the sector researched. The potentials for alternative, performance-based standards and new industry norms of quality are discussed. It is concluded that at least the London speculative office market by its very constitution and operation, including the reliance on standards, continues to create increasingly energy-demanding buildings.
34-4647
Keywords:
Building design. Building performance. Energy consumption. Energy demand. Governance. Performance. Policy making.
Building regulations are important policy instruments for increasing building energy efficiency. However, when it comes to actual energy use, studies have shown that improvements in building energy efficiency are offset by changes in the inhabitants’ comfort practices. Nevertheless, the improvement of energy efficiency continues to be a cornerstone in building regulations, with no consideration of how this simultaneously influences everyday practices. The example of Danish building regulations, which are among the strictest in Europe, is critically reviewed for the implications regulatory design can have for reducing energy consumption. Based on readings of policy documents, consultancy reports and research papers from the last two decades, this paper outlines where things go amiss during a building’s lifetime if a user perspective is excluded. The focus is on three phases: the development of new building technologies, the design and construction of buildings, and occupancy. The question of how building regulations could be redesigned to regulate energy use better is explored, along with what research and strategies are needed within four domains: developing alternative measures to energy per square meter; developing more advanced models simulating occupancy; improving feedback technologies’ usability; and the increased use of commissioning and post-occupancy evaluations.
34-4648
Keywords:
Design. Energy planning. Energy policy. Social indicators. Social practices.
The aims of this commentary are to generate thought and discussion about the potential role and value of energy feedback in future energy transitions. There is now a global research and policy effort devoted to developing energy feedback (e.g. from improved bills, metering or displays) in order to change energy-use behaviour and reduce demand. Within this, calls to go beyond conventional energy feedback through the use of disaggregation are increasingly common. An alternative approach is presented for how to go beyond energy feedback. Instead of focusing solely on generating larger energy savings, it is argued that new approaches need to consider how conventional energy feedback frames energy problems and shapes the agency and engagement of different actors. Three potential routes are highlighted for going beyond conventional approaches to energy feedback through emerging work on practice feedback, policy feedback and speculative design. Three core challenges for future work on energy feedback are: recognizing the multiple forms of energy-related feedback that shape everyday life; engaging with a much wider range of actors involved in shaping energy feedback loops; and using new approaches to energy-related feedback to reframe energy problems and establish new roles for actors engaged in energy transitions.
34-4649
Keywords:
Agency decision making. Behavior. Change. Data. Disaggregate. Energy demand. Visualization.
Different data visualizations are investigated for how they enable occupants to learn about domestic energy consumption. Smart metering can potentially encourage householders to change their behaviour and save energy. However, concerns exist about whether users understand domestic energy feedback. Two challenges are addressed: feedback displays typically show aggregate consumption and they show time-series data visualizations, which are difficult to relate to everyday actions in the household. A laboratory experiment (N?=?43) assessed changes in participants’ knowledge of how much electricity everyday actions consume after being exposed to different forms of energy-consumption data visualizations: (1) an aggregated time-series line graph, (2) a disaggregated time-series line graph and (3) a normalized disaggregated visualization that deemphasized time. Participants played an energy game both before and after they saw the simulation. Participants in condition (3) were more accurate and more confident in their post-test judgments about everyday domestic electricity consumption than other participants. These findings suggest that the type of data visualization affects users’ understanding of domestic electricity consumption. The visualization of disaggregated energy feedback at the appliance level should be considered for future generations of technology.
34-4650
Keywords:
Buildings. Carbon dioxide. Energy policy. Policy outcomes. Public policy.
Since the energy crisis of the mid and late 1970s, society has been aware of the need for a built environment that uses less fossil fuel energy. Although the built environment accounts for a large proportion of global fossil fuel use, it may be argued that the energy and buildings agenda is not being addressed at the depth or scale needed to meet global and national CO2 emission-reduction targets. Most actions to reduce energy use in the built environment have mainly used a ‘top-down’ decision-making approach, from government and industry, with little end-user engagement. Greenhouse gas emission-reduction targets will not be met without providing the technological and socio-economic pathways for achieving them. The paper is divided into three parts. Firstly, it discusses the need to reduce fossil fuel use and the apparent failure to transition policy goals and aims into practice. Secondly, top-down and bottom-up approaches are reviewed, advocating a greater emphasis on a ‘whole-system’ bottom-up approach in delivering multiple benefit solutions. Thirdly, the concept of ‘smart’ is considered in relation to bottom up with its implementation at a regional scale.
34-4651
Keywords:
Affordable housing. Community. Diversity. Gentrification. Public policy. Urban policy.
This paper examines how policies and practices for affordable housing in Paris, especially ‘green’ housing for the poor, are being subverted to retain or attract the middle class: the ‘greentrification’ of lower-class neighbourhoods. From the 1960s onward, many middle- and working-class households have left Paris due to de-industrialization and the city’s high housing costs. To bring these middle classes back, the municipality initiated a policy calling for increased social diversity, using social housing as its main policy tool. In France the provision of public housing is legally mandated, and compared with international standards, the income ceilings for gaining access to it are high. Thus, municipalities may pursue urban renovation and construct social housing for the middle class to replace substandard buildings occupied by low-income populations. The Paris municipality has established ‘green’ residential eco-districts known as ‘eco-quartiers’. In the national eco-district programme, the neighbourhoods must meet environmental performance criteria, show potential for economic development, and provide social and functional diversity. Thus, housing location and price must fit the needs of the existing residents. However, most ‘green’ subsidized housing in Paris is for the middle class. Social diversity has become a means of redistribution: more middle class and fewer poor people.
34-4652
Keywords:
Design. Energy resources. Governance. Households. Policy evaluation. Public policy.
Energy-feedback tools are commonly used to promote energy saving. In the UK, energy-feedback provision (currently via an in-home display) is part of the government-mandated roll-out of smart meters to all homes by 2020. A core assumption underlying this widespread provision is that information, or evidence, can lead to positive changes in action. This is analogous to assumptions underlying the notion of ‘evidence-based policy’, and raises questions about how users, researchers and policy-makers go about using evidence when aiming for a ‘successful’ outcome. In addition, the ‘policy feedback’ research agenda has asked how policies alter the landscapes within which they operate by, for example, affecting relationships between actors. Via an in-depth review of Department of Energy and Climate Change (DECC) policy literature over 2010–16, the UK smart meter roll-out was analysed in terms of how its energy-feedback-focused measures may be deemed as ‘successful’. Findings include the fact that direct energy savings played a smaller role than might be expected, and translation from one success measure to another was repeatedly observed. A key conclusion is that acting on feedback requires an assessment of success, but such assessment is highly contextual, for consumers and policy-makers alike. Ways to increase reflexivity in this area are discussed.
31-2 ENERGY MODELING
34-4653
Keywords:
Buildings. Energy sector. Organizational capabilities. Public participation. Social practices.
This paper discusses socio-technical relationships between people, organizations and energy in workplaces. Inspired by Sherry Arnstein’s ladder of citizen participation, it explores widening energy management beyond energy managers to other employees, introducing the idea of an ‘engagement gap’ to support a move beyond unidirectional forms of engagement (e.g. feedback and nudging) to more socially interactive processes. Results are drawn from two projects researching energy practices in public authorities and retail organizations. The first project, ‘GoodDeeds’, collaboratively created an information and communication technology tool and explored participatory processes within a municipality. The second project, Working with Infrastructure, Creation of Knowledge, and Energy strategy Development (WICKED), explored energy management in retail companies. The paper uses a ‘4Cs’ framework to articulate the influences of concerns, capacities and technical conditions within organizational communities. The results concur with previous research that energy management sits against a backdrop of competing organizational, institutional and political concerns. New data reveal discrepancies across organizations with regard to energy management capacities and technical metering conditions. The authors suggest employee engagement can be broadened by treating energy as a communal subject for discussion, negotiation and partnership. This objective moves beyond the ‘information-deficit’ approach intrinsic in the existing focus on analytics, dashboards and feedback.
34-4654
Keywords:
Buildings. Carbon dioxide. Emissions. Energy planning. Sustainability.
Surplus energy can be a recurrent phenomenon in zero-energy buildings (ZEBs) with onsite generation systems, usually resulting in the export of excess electricity. Yet, converting electricity into heat and exporting it could improve the overall energy balance. This study analyses the energy and exergy performance of a Finnish nearly zero-energy building (nZEB) as a heat and electricity prosumer, and proposes alternative energy topologies to improve energy and exergy levels, primary energy demand and CO2 emissions. The results show that increasing the installed capacity of the photovoltaic systems would lead to zero energy, exergy, emissions and a balance of primary energy. However, by instead using the surplus electricity to drive a heat pump and export heat, the currently installed capacity would lead to a net energy export of over 4000 kWh/a. Thus, energy conversion could significantly enhance the contribution from heat and electricity prosumers to smart energy grids, though not without affecting other criteria. Two management strategies arise: favouring heat export improves the net energy and CO2 emissions reduction but lessens the net exergy, while favouring electricity export improves the net exergy and primary energy reduction. The findings highlight that energy conversion can enhance nZEB performance and its exchange with hybrid grids.
34-4655
Keywords:
Energy efficiency. Housing policy. Participation. Public policy. Simulation. Stakeholders. Well-being.
The built environment is a key target of decarbonization policies. However, such policies often have a narrow objective and narrow focus, resulting in ‘policy-resistance’ and unintended consequences. The literature attributes these unintended consequences to a narrow financial focus, adverse incentives, and inadequate handling of knowledge, skills, communication and feedback gaps, but it provides little advice on how these complex interactions can be captured. This paper illustrates the development and application of an integrated approach to address these complex interactions with regard to housing performance, energy, communal spaces and wellbeing. In particular, it explores the dynamics created by these relationships with simulation modelling in participatory settings, and with a diverse group of stakeholders. The simulation results suggest that monitoring is key to improve the performance of the housing stock besides energy efficiency; and investments in communal spaces positively affect the adoption of energy-efficiency measures and the wellbeing of residents. The evaluation results for participatory workshops show this approach was found useful by the stakeholders for supporting more integrated decision-making about housing. In future research, this approach can be implemented for policy problems in specific contexts.
34-4656
Keywords:
Building performance. Built environment. Climate. Urban design.
Regulated energy loads of buildings are typically explored at the scale of individual buildings, often in isolated (and idealized) circumstances. By comparison, little research currently exists on the performance of building groups that accounts for the interactions between buildings. Consequently, the energy efficiency (or penalty) of different urban configurations (such as a city street) is overlooked. The present paper examines the energy demand of a city street in London, UK, which is comprised of typical office buildings with internal energy gains associated with daytime occupancy. Simulations are performed for office buildings placed in urban canyons that are defined by the ratio of building height (H) to street width (W). The results show the annual energy demand is dominated by the cooling load, which can be significantly reduced through street design that provides shading by increasing H/W. However, the ‘best’ street design for modern office buildings may be incompatible with that for residences or, for that matter, outdoor climates.
34-4657
Keywords:
Behavior. Carbon dioxide. Energy demand. Households. Mapping techniques. Visualization.
Most research to date on the provision of energy feedback to households has focused on assessing the efficacy of numeric-based feedback. This paper describes the application and evaluation of more visual energy feedback techniques (carbon mapping, thermal imaging) at different scales, alongside traditional methods (web-based energy and environmental visualization platform, home energy reports) delivered through community workshops, home visits and the internet, across six low-carbon communities in the UK. Overall, most of the feedback approaches were able to engage and raise awareness amongst the householders. Whilst carbon mapping was felt to be aimed more at community groups and local councils by providing evidence of past and future community action, displaying carbon maps at community workshops helped to show that others were also engaged in energy action. Thermal imaging was successful in engaging individual local residents through both community workshops and home visits, especially when included in the home energy reports. This stimulated discussions on future energy savings through building fabric upgrade. However, the data-driven web-based platform had limited uptake due to online log-in requirement and information overload. Such insights are useful for those involved in scaling up the deployment of energy feedback to encourage energy demand reduction.
34-4658
Keywords:
Alternative fuels. Energy consumption. Energy planning. Energy policy. Energy sector. Technology.
Due to the complex interactions between socio-economic, cultural and political factors, some urban households consume a portfolio of energy sources, e.g. electricity, coal, paraffin, gas and solar power. A social construction of technology perspective is used to understand the choices underlying these multiple fuel practices. Nine participants (household energy managers, consumers and users) were purposefully selected from Soshanguve, an urban township in Pretoria, South Africa. Data were collected through individual in-depth interviews and narrative analysis was used to generate findings. Stories about multiple fuel use in the household showed this practice is common and forms part of the participants’ lifestyles. Social, cultural and political meanings of fuel use are identified in the narratives. Suggested interventions to optimize multiple fuel use in this context include additional technology such as solar power, collaborations with manufacturers to improve existing fuel types that are seen as potentially hazardous, and leveraging women’s knowledge and position in the household to formalize education about multiple fuels. The role of government in providing subsidies for alternative energies and reviewing accessibility to electricity was also highlighted by the participants. This research demonstrates that policy-makers should actively involve consumers in household energy system decisions through deliberative dialogue with communities.
31-3 ENERGY CONSERVATION
34-4659
Keywords:
Emissions. Energy efficiency. Europe. Households. Quality of life.
Different designs and concepts of low-energy and zero-emission buildings (ZEBs) are being introduced into the Norwegian market. This study analyses and compares the life cycle emissions of CO2 equivalents (CO2e) from eight different single-family houses in the Oslo climate. Included are four ZEBs: one active house, two passive houses, and a reference house (Norwegian building code of 2010). Monthly differences in CO2e emissions are calculated for the seasonally sensitive Norwegian context for electricity generation and consumption. This is used to supplant the previous applied symmetric weighting approach for CO2e/kWh factors for import and export of electricity for the ZEB cases. All the ZEBs have lower use-stage emissions compared with the other buildings or the reference case. Embodied impacts are found to be 60–75% for the analysed ZEB cases, confirming the importance of embodied impacts in Norwegian ZEBs. The lowest total emissions were from the smallest ZEB, emphasizing area efficiency. The highest emissions were from the reference case. By abandoning the symmetric approach, a new perspective was developed for assessing the performance of ZEBs within the Norwegian context. One of four ZEB cases managed to balance out its annual energy-related emissions.
34-4660
Keywords:
Buildings. Carbon dioxide. Energy demand. Energy efficiency. Policy making. Social practices. Social theory.
At first sight the purpose of energy efficiency is plain: it is to reduce the amount of energy used and the carbon emissions associated with the design and operation of things like buildings, domestic appliances, and heating and cooling technologies, or with the organization of bureaucratic, business or industrial processes. National and international responses to climate change are dominated by policies that promote energy efficiency and by people who take this to be a self-evidently important thing to do. Established criticisms, including those which focus on problems of rebound, draw attention to the unintended consequences of such strategies, but rarely challenge the conceptual foundations of ‘efficiency’ as a topic in its own right. This paper uses Bruno Latour’s We Have Never Been Modern (1993) notion of purification and Ian Hodder’s Entangled: An Archaeology of the Relationships Between Humans and Things (2012) ideas about entanglement to develop a more fundamental critique and to argue that, far from being a solution, efficiency, as currently constituted, undermines that which it is expected to achieve. It is concluded that if carbon emissions are to be reduced on any significant scale, then it is essential to consider the meanings and levels of service and the types of consumption and demand that efficiency policies support and perpetuate.
31-5 ENERGY IMPACTS
34-4661
Keywords:
Energy efficiency. Housing. Public health. Public policy.
Living in cold conditions poses a risk to health, in particular to low-income, fuel-poor households. Improving the energy efficiency of the housing stock may bring multiple positive health gains through improved indoor temperatures and reduced fuel consumption. This study used a multilevel interrupted time-series approach to evaluate a policy-led energy-performance investment programme. Long-term monitoring data were collected for intervention and control households at baseline (n = 99) and follow-up (n = 88), creating a dataset with 15,771 data points for a series of daily-averaged hydrothermal outcome variables. The study found that the intervention raised indoor air temperature by on average 0.84 K as compared with control households, thereby bringing the majority of indoor temperature measurements within the ‘healthy’ comfort zone of 18–24°C, while average daily gas usage dropped by 37%. External wall insulation was the most effective measure to increase indoor air temperature. The greatest increases were found in the evening and at night, in the bedroom, and in British steel-framed buildings. No evidence was found that the intervention substantially increased indoor relative humidity levels when accompanied by mechanical ventilation. The study concludes that the multilevel interrupted time-series approach offers a useful model for evaluating housing improvement programmes.
31-6 ENERGY SYSTEMS PLANNING
34-4662
Keywords:
Assessment. Energy planning. Households. Performance. Performance evaluation.
This paper provides powerful evidence empirically demonstrating for the first time the reliability of the co-heating test. The test is widely used throughout Europe to measure the total heat transfer through the fabric of buildings and to calculate the heat-transfer coefficient (HTC; units W/K). A reliable test is essential to address the ‘performance gap’, where in-use energy performance is consistently, and often substantially, poorer than predicted. The co-heating test could meet this need, but its reliability requires confirmation. Seven teams independently conducted co-heating tests on the same detached house near Watford, UK. Despite differences in the weather and in the experimental and analytical approaches, the teams’ final reported HTC measurements were within ±10% of the mean. With further standardization it is likely to be possible to improve upon this reproducibility. Furthermore, uncertainty analysis based upon a 95% confidence interval resulted in an estimated uncertainty in HTC measurements of ±8%. This research addresses persistent doubts about the reliability of the co-heating test. Avenues to further improvement of the test are discussed. This work helps to enable the test’s wider adoption as a component of the regulatory process and thus improvements to standards of house construction.
34-4663
Keywords:
Activity. Buildings. Change agents. Clientele. Energy efficiency. Sense of community. Sense of place.
A case study is presented of how a public-sector client organization engaged with a political directive on energy efficiency in buildings. The value of communication skills of built environment professionals is explored during a strategic change process. An interpretative approach is used to study the organizational discussions and interactions between mainly a senior engineer (an energy expert), the management team and officials. It demonstrates how the political directive led to an initially ambiguous energy target, but was successfully framed, contextualized and anchored within the organization. This change process was shaped by key actors’ ability to influence others. Use of discursive competence is important for explaining what stakeholders may gain from the changes needed to meet the energy target. The focus on the role of a senior engineer (middle management rather than top management) provides a novel perspective on how strategies develop and are adopted in organizations.
32. Environment
32-2 ENVIRONMENTAL MODELING
34-4664
Keywords:
China. Cities. Design. Developmental density. Environmental planning. Neighborhoods. Performance. Urban form.
The regenerative design framework aims to ‘engage a broader range of possibilities by moving beyond the immediate building and site boundaries’. It implies that the environmental performance of buildings requires a revised definition so that it considers not only the building itself, but also its contribution beyond its own boundary, i.e. neighbourhoods. In high-density cities, outdoor spaces are culturally considered as the extension of one’s living spaces. The environmental performance of neighbourhoods is particularly important to the health and wellbeing of urban inhabitants. This paper aims to define the environmental performance of neighbourhoods in high-density urban context based on the experience acquired in previous studies in Hong Kong over the last 15 years. These studies cover a wide range of environmental issues including urban climate, outdoor thermal comfort, and daylighting design in high-density cities. Subsequent development of the assessment tools for environmental performance of neighbourhoods in Hong Kong is also presented. The framework of stakeholder engagement, as an integral part of the neighbourhood assessment tool, is discussed. This paper highlights the distinctive features of the environmental performance of neighbourhoods in high-density urban context and how it influences the professional practices in Hong Kong.
32-3 ENVIRONMENTAL PLANNING
34-4665
Keywords:
Engineering. Government. Urban water supply.
This article scrutinizes the relationship between governmental reform and infrastructural change in Singapore. Focusing on the role of engineers, it is argued that neoliberal decentralization has occurred through the physical reconfiguration of drainage. Neoliberalization is conceived as a localized technical response to a public health crisis resulting from infrastructural enclosure, which is orchestrated on and through the material-ecological environment. A closed drainage system consisting of trapezoidal canals and concrete culverts had produced an ideal breeding environment for dengue-carrying mosquitoes, undermining the state’s centralized approach to water governance. This article reorients Michel Foucault’s analytics of government around engineering and the ‘milieu’ to consider how drainage infrastructure was consequently opened up to an emerging civil society to relieve pressure on the state and allow greater public participation in the surveillance and management of canals, pipes and culverts. Alongside landscape architects, engineers would increasingly turn to naturalized waterways and open catchment policy to encourage citizens to form an affective bond with water and to inculcate principles of individual ownership and responsibility through physical contact. The article contends that with the proliferation of integrated resource management systems, governmental power is increasingly exercised through the liveliness as well as the fetishization of urban infrastructure.
34-4666
Keywords:
Infrastructure. Institutional change. Institutions. Paths. Public administration. Waterways.
Modern waterway networks are ageing and need to be renewed, yet the institutional context in the waterway sector is averse to change because of path dependencies. Waterway renewal requires actors to navigate between institutional reproduction and change. Applying an innovative framework for analysing institutions in a case study of the Dutch national waterways, we mainly find instances of institutional reproduction, which turns waterway renewal into a technical and financial exercise. However, institutional change becomes increasingly evident through a new functional-relational path, suggesting that planning for waterway renewal also entails reconsidering novel waterway configurations and incorporating neighbouring spatial developments.
32-4 RISK MANAGEMENT/IMPACT ASSESSMENT
34-4667
Keywords:
Disaster. Earthquakes. Economic analysis. Property. Public policy. Regulation. Risk.
The marked increase in the awareness of earthquake risk following the Canterbury earthquakes in New Zealand offered a unique opportunity to investigate the economic effect of disaster-mitigation regulations on the commercial building stock. A difference-in-differences (DD) framework was used to determine whether earthquake risk has been capitalized into the property prices of buildings constructed prior to 1976, as a response to the national policy requiring assessment and strengthening (or demolition) of the existing earthquake-prone building stock. A negative externality is found in the policy announcement on affected (pre-1970s) office and retail buildings which caused office buildings to suffer a 12.5% stigma discount. However, retail properties were less impacted suffering a 2.3% stigma loss. The value of the commercial building stock has been affected by the policy. These findings provide policy-makers with timely evidence as to the economic effects of New Zealand’s earthquake-prone buildings policy. Facing losses in property value and financial responsibility for retrofitting their assets, building owners will be looking for a workable set of regulatory and non-regulatory incentives to encourage disaster risk management and protect the built environment.
32-5 ENVIRONMENTAL QUALITY/POLLUTION
34-4668
Keywords:
Development. Ecology. Nature. Technology. Water.
Delivering safe drinking water is often equated with delivering development in much of the Global South. Yet different arrangements of technologies, waters, and social relations constitute uneven waterscapes and produce different water – society relations across sites and scales. Analyzing the contradictory roles of water-producing technologies and differentiated waters in enabling and challenging processes of development thus becomes important to explaining the political ecologies of development. In order to investigate the technonatural relations of power that constitute development, I look at the ways that different types of waters, water technologies, nature (aquifers, groundwater, arsenic), and power relations coproduce water (in)securities and (un)healthy development subjects, with a case study from waterscapes of the Bengal Delta. Contaminated tubewells have resulted in a drinking water crisis and a reconfiguration of hydro – social relations. Groundwater usage for drinking water purposes was introduced via Dtubewell technology, creating a public health success story as ‘safe’ groundwater offered alternatives to the consumption of unsafe surface water sources that had caused high morbidity and mortality rates. But a situation of millions of tubewells producing water with unsafe levels of naturally occurring arsenic has resulted in challenging such development narratives of success, where the tubewells that embodied social status and notions of progress (producing ‘good water’) came to slowly poison people across the delta (with ‘bad water’). I detail the ways that hybrid waters (safe/unsafe/untested and good/bad) and the discourses of water poisoning are produced by water technologies, aquifers, and social relations that are enrolled to support notions of development; in addition, I critically analyze the ways that development goes awry when these technonatural assemblages are unexpectedly altered by the agencies and materialities of variously contaminated waters, differentiated aquifers, and the changing status of water-producing technologies. In contributing to political – ecological analyses of water and technology, I raise questions about the troubled relationship between development and so-called appropriate technologies by bringing attention to the articulations and mutual enrollments of technologies, ecologies, discourses, and subjects in the technonatural processes of development.
32-7 SUSTAINABILITY
34-4669
Keywords:
Assessment. Cities. Greenhouses. Sustainability.
The United Nations’ (UN) sustainable development goals (SDGs), the core of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development and the UN Paris Agreement, were adopted in 2015. Involvement of not only national governments but also all other stakeholders including local governments is important to promote sustainable development and to achieve the goals. The question arises, therefore, of what methods should be used to best implement and assess sustainability issues at a local level. In this light, a new version of Comprehensive Assessment System for Built Environment Efficiency (CASBEE), CASBEE for Cities, is introduced for assessing the sustainability of cities and communities around the world based on SDG indicators and greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. The tool allows users to understand the sustainability of cities and communities based on quality (Q) and environmental load (L) perspectives. The sustainability assessments show that cities in developed countries tend to have good grades for Q, but bad grades for L, while cities in developing countries tend to have the opposite trend. This will assist cities and communities in both developed and developing countries to understand urgent problems and to identify effective solutions for sustainable development.
34-4670
Keywords:
Collaboration. Community participation. Ecological planning. Neighborhoods. Planning. Stakeholders. Sustainability. Urbanism.
A process-based approach is used to examine the deployment of two neighbourhood-scale sustainability assessment systems and their tools in two European cities. It explores how these sustainability assessment systems and their tools are contextualized within a larger design and planning process by considering how stakeholders collaborate, how they set design problems, how they make decisions and how they propose design solutions in the early design phases. Specifically, using interviews conducted with key project actors in Malmö, Sweden, and Barcelona, Spain, this paper examines how the sustainability assessment systems in each respective case study were framed, and how this framing impacted upon the design process. A key finding is that how sustainability assessment systems are framed has just as significant an impact as the nature of the tools, especially on the processes entailed. Community participation can have a strong, positive impact on the design process and on outcomes. The case studies confirm that context and players cannot be divorced from tools.
34. Transportation and Communication
34-3 TRANSPORTATION PLANNING
34-4671
Keywords:
Infrastructure. Transportation infrastructure. Transportation planning. World cities.
This article investigates the engineering of elevated transport infrastructure in contemporary Mumbai. It argues that the conception, construction and implementation of flyovers and skywalks in Mumbai over the past 20 years has been part of elite efforts seeking to instil a more free-flowing, predictable and regulated city. The techniques, routines, standards and visualizations comprising these engineering schemes have promised ways of reshaping the socio-material configurations and everyday landscapes of Mumbai into a more knowable, functional and integrated realm. The article suggests that this can be understood analytically as a means of trying to establish and maintain ‘formal’ ideals, citizens and spaces in Mumbai against wider urban contexts perceived as increasingly ‘informal’. The article thus emphasizes the importance of exploring how the ‘informal’ and ‘formal’ are actively produced and imagined against each other through material practices and procedures, and the central role of urban engineering in attempts at reconfiguring the social and political dimensions of urban life.
34-4672
Keywords:
Infrastructure. Transportation. Transportation infrastructure.
This article interrogates the political economy of Dubai’s Jebel Ali Port, ranked among the top ten container ports internationally by traffic, and its operating conglomerate, Dubai Ports World (DP World). The article aims to situate trade infrastructure in the production of Dubai’s economic geography as a sea–air multimodal trading hub. Three interrelated arguments are put forward: that port infrastructure plays an essential role in linking diverse moments of capital accumulation in Dubai; that Dubai’s state-owned conglomerates have overseen a substantial internationalization of Dubai’s capital through maritime port public–private partnership arrangements; and that the particularities of Dubai’s repressive labour regime underpin its role in the logistics industry internationally.
35. Architecture and Urban Design
35-1 URBAN DESIGN
34-4673
Keywords:
Climate. Geometrics. Population density. Urban design. Urban form.
The radiant environment in open spaces is very sensitive to the surrounding built form, which determines their openness to the sky and exposure to the sun. This paper presents the analysis of 132 urban forms in London and Paris, two cities at similar geographical latitude, but of different urban geometry, focusing on the relationship between urban geometry and insolation of open spaces at neighbourhood scale. The method consists of three stages: (1) the geometric analysis of the urban forms, (2) their solar access analysis and (3) the statistical exploration of the results. Special emphasis is on the sky view factor (SVF), which is employed as an integrated geometry variable and environmental performance indicator. The comparative analysis of the two cities underlines the significance of urban layout for modifying the outdoor radiant environment, and reveals temporal characteristics of the relation between urban geometry and insolation of urban forms, induced by the varying solar geometry. Indicatively, the average mean ground SVF (mSVF) was found to be primarily affected by the quantitative characteristics of the open space, and able to predict average daytime insolation on March 21 and June 21 (R2 > 0.8), in both cities.
34-4674
Keywords:
Demographics. Work. Workplace.
Many different multi-tenant offices have arisen over the last decades, as building owners address the changing nature of the workplace – a need for users to share facilities. However, the existing literature on multi-tenant buildings from the point of view of user satisfaction is scarce, limiting input for user-centred design. This study analyses the influence of personality on user satisfaction with multi-tenant office characteristics. Data were collected through a questionnaire distributed among users of 17 different multi-tenant offices (business centres, incubators serviced offices and co-working places), which yielded 190 respondents. To determine the effects of personal characteristics, a multiple regression model was performed per office variable category. Results showed that users who are more extraverted, open to new experiences and more agreeable were overall more satisfied with the multi-tenant office characteristics. However, the effects of demographics and work-related characteristics were much larger. Men, older users and users working in an open and flexible work environment were overall more satisfied with the office characteristics. Owners, developers and managers can use these results for developing user-centred designs, optimizing the level of satisfaction in their offices.
34-4675
Keywords:
Design. Environmental assessment. Sustainability. Urban development.
A response is presented to the dilemma of hosting resource-intensive large-scale sporting events at a time when requirements for sustainability and sustainable development must also be met. A framework was devised for judging development and design issues for future planning, one which is based upon extant historic evidence from host city experiences as well as previous event outcomes. It offers potential to compare plans against best/optimal practice. The technique for appraisal arises from a detailed analysis of Olympic Games held since 1896. Data associated with venue design, construction and usage, athletes’ accommodation, and the facilities for officials, the media and visitors/spectators, were amassed and reviewed. An evaluation technique was produced which demonstrates how the organizers of a modern Olympic Games can assess and reflect upon planning, design and development decisions associated with their own city from an early outline stage. This should permit less wasteful, more appropriate and more sustainable Games’ infrastructures to be considered before complex detailed development occurs.
34-4676
Keywords:
Adaptation. Adaptation strategies. Buildings. Carbon dioxide. China.
Low-carbon building retrofit will contribute to delivering China’s policy to reduce carbon emissions. This paper proposes viable low-carbon adaptation strategies for a recurrent building type within the Hot Summer and Cold Winter (HSCW) zone. An existing 23-storey tower in Hangzhou is investigated within the context of a representative city environment. Indoor air temperatures and energy consumption were monitored across a typical floor and simulated in EnergyPlus. Outdoor and indoor airflow patterns were modelled in an advanced computational fluid dynamics (CFD) tool, FLUIDITY. Across a typical floor, observations and modelling show marked variations. South-facing flats overheat significantly in summer largely due to solar radiation. External sun-shading structures are proposed and evaluated to counter summer overheating. An innovative wind catcher and exhaust-stack natural ventilation system is proposed to enhance indoor thermal comfort using natural ventilation. Modelling of this integrated ventilation system indicates that the proposed retrofit system will improve indoor thermal comfort even in the lower floors. The proposed building retrofit strategy is costed using locally established construction cost estimates. Predicted energy savings suggest that the adaptation strategy proposed is potentially viable with significant implications for policy-makers, developers, constructors and designers in this challenging climate zone in China.
34-4677
Keywords:
Air pollution. Air quality. Buildings. Climate. Dispersal. Environmental modeling. Urban design.
Research under the Managing Air for Green Inner Cities (MAGIC) project uses measurements and modelling to investigate the connections between external and internal conditions: the impact of urban airflow on the natural ventilation of a building. The test site was chosen so that under different environmental conditions the levels of external pollutants entering the building, from either a polluted road or a relatively clean courtyard, would be significantly different. Measurements included temperature, relative humidity, local wind and solar radiation, together with levels of carbon monoxide (CO) and carbon dioxide (CO2) both inside and outside the building to assess the indoor–outdoor exchange flows. Building ventilation took place through windows on two sides, allowing for single-sided and crosswind-driven ventilation, and also stack-driven ventilation in low wind conditions. The external flow around the test site was modelled in an urban boundary layer in a wind tunnel. The wind tunnel results were incorporated in a large-eddy-simulation model, Fluidity, and the results compared with monitoring data taken both within the building and from the surrounding area. In particular, the effects of street layout and associated street canyons, of roof geometry and the wakes of nearby tall buildings were examined.
35-3 VISUAL FORM
34-4678
Keywords:
Buildings. Maintenance. Services.
In the present world economic situation, the resources directed to the maintenance of buildings are very limited. Therefore, an increasing concern arises for the planning and prioritization of necessary maintenance works during buildings’ life cycle. The planning of maintenance action is achieved by predicting the moment when construction elements reach degradation levels that exceed acceptable standards. To be able to make such forecasts, crucial developments must be made regarding the methods to predict the serviceability of building materials and components. In this study, 444 facades located in the cities of Lisbon and Almada and the Algarve region (Portugal) are analysed based on in situ visual inspections. The approach proposed can be employed in various scopes of service life prediction and maintenance of constructions. This paper develops a priority hierarchy of maintenance actions for the claddings under analysis. The expertise acquired in buildings’ serviceability is very useful to support decision-making in the development of proactive maintenance strategies. The results reveal accurate outcomes in the correlation with the functionality and degradation parameters of facade claddings. The serviceability of the most common types of facades claddings (render, ceramic and paints) applied in Portugal is analysed.
35-5 DESIGN METHODS
34-4679
Keywords:
Built environment. Education. Institutions. Professionalism. Public interest. Universities.
Definitions and perceptions of professionalism are continually challenged and transformed by public need, government interaction and institutional organizations. When the goals of those three entities are focused on near-term results, this poses a significant threat to the integrity, value and relevance of professional services. When the individual and corporate professional’s profit margin, corporate shareholder responsibility and news media sensationalism are factored in, this short-termism dynamic is greatly magnified. Built environment professions are seen as particularly vulnerable to this threat, given that investments in buildings and infrastructure have long-life and high-performance service expectations. This commentary responds to the Building Research & Information special issue entitled ‘New Professionalism’ (2013, volume 40, number 1) and situates the predicament of built environment professionals within an emerging historical transition: that of the post-industrial information society with its characteristic knowledge workers and cybernetic bases of production. Long-term virtues of the built environment mission such as sustainability, public good and evidence-based design are shown to be reflections of the transition from industrial era short-termism to post-industrial systemic foresight. This commentary supplements the special issue papers with a discussion on the broader academy’s potential role in breaking the stranglehold of contemporary short-termism in the built environment professions.
34-4680
Keywords:
Built environment. Change agents. Community. Construction industry. Institutional theory. Professionalism.
By way of review and response to the Building Research & Information special issue entitled ‘New Professionalism’ (2013, volume 40, number 1), compiled by Bordass and Leaman, this paper assesses the potential and prospects for changes to the ‘system of professions’ in construction associated with a shift towards sustainability. The paper builds on and develops the analysis of professionals and professionalization in the special issue, forming a bridge with other contemporary work in organization studies and the sociology of the professions. The creation of a ‘new professionalism’ that transcends existing divisions amongst building professions will present a number of challenges. Amongst these are, on the one hand, the interweaving of processes of professionalization and institutionalization and, on the other hand, the influence of practice. Suggestions are provided on how the themes and issues raised in the special issue can be taken forward in both research and practice.
34-4681
Keywords:
Age differences. Building stock. Buildings. Economy. Efficiency. Europe. Mining. Resource conservation.
Building stocks are the dominant consumers of resources within national economies. Correspondingly, there is high demand for improved knowledge of material stocks and flows in the built environment. Material flow analysis is well suited to meet this demand. Although numerous studies have been conducted on this topic over recent years, these frequently lack applicability and transferability due to insufficient documentation or treatment of uncertainties. A new approach is presented here to calculate material stocks and flows for domestic buildings using the example of multi-family housing (MFH) in Germany. The approach is critically examined to determine its validity. The calculation process involves four steps: (1) building types are classified according to building age; (2) highly specific material composition indicators (MCIs) are calculated for the respective building types; (3) the total material stock as well as inflows and outflows are derived from the total floor space of Germany’s MFH; and (4) validity tests are performed to quantify uncertainties. The main results are age-based MCIs for MFH, the total material mass as well as quantitative information on parameter- and model-related uncertainties. Conclusions are drawn on the validity of results, the scalability and applicability of the model and its implementation, along with potential model refinements.
34-4682
Keywords:
Buildings. Climate. Design.
Watertightness tests for building facades attempt to simulate the most relevant climatic exposures for water penetration by reproducing standard conditions. Such conditions do not represent all possible climatic exposures, hence a new method was recently presented that relates test severity to watertightness performance of a facade under any operating conditions. In addition, test conditions vary for each regulatory framework (i.e. the results generated for one test cannot necessarily be extrapolated to other tests). A process is presented for considering the influence of exposure time. This allows a comparison of the severity of the conditions imposed by different watertightness tests independently of the exposure parameters. This comparison, which is based on a performance criterion, can enable a global certification of watertightness of any facade design under any operating conditions using results from only one watertightness test. The method developed herein was applied to facades under various operational conditions at a reference location, comparatively evaluating the conditions recreated by different international watertightness tests. The results suggest that American tests are more appropriate for recreating high climatic exposures, while European tests are more suitable for evaluating moderate and protected conditions of wind-driven rain and wind pressure.
34-4683
Keywords:
Built environment. China. Construction industry. Governance. Professionalism. Uncertainty.
As the third force beside markets and governments, professionalism emerged to protect the interests of civil society, and it has played a unique role in the building sector. By conceptualizing professionalism as a community-based governance structure, an economic governance perspective is adopted to examine professionalism in China’s building sector. The development of professionalism in China’s building sector is reviewed, and both its achievements and its weaknesses are assessed. Root-cause analysis reveals that the primary impediment to building professionalism is the imbalanced relationship between markets, governments and professionals. It is argued that the success of professionalism in China’s building sector is dependent ultimately on whether the government can change its overly dominant role in the economy. To address the concern of creating an independent, vibrant professional culture that contributes to the long-term public interest, the following are recommended: separating professional associations and relevant bodies from government agencies completely; improving the administrative system for both practice qualification and market access; and increasing the proportion of non-government investments to change the imbalanced relationship between professionals and public clients.
35-6 PROGRAMMING/FACILITY PERFORMANCE EVALUATION
34-4684
Keywords:
Assessment. Branding. Building performance. Construction. Environmental assessment. Globalization.
A proliferation of the development of building environmental assessment methods has occurred for application within many individual countries’ domestic markets. However, the demand for ‘brand recognition’ in a global market, the desire for international standards and the motivation of the owners of some systems to expand the adoption of their assessment systems abroad are among many of the forces driving toward the increased international use of the two most established methods: BREEAM and LEED. Drawing on published databases of projects assessed by these two systems, an examination is presented of their international use, with particular attention paid to the relationship between their use and the existence of national systems developed in the countries of application. A more detailed analysis of the types of projects that have been assessed is provided using data from six specific countries with qualitatively different cultural, economic and environmental contexts and some of which that have national assessment systems: Chile, Colombia, the Czech Republic, the Netherlands, Sweden, and the United Arab Emirates. The influence of national Green Building Councils in promoting environmental assessments is also considered.
34-4685
Keywords:
Behavior. Energy demand. Human activity. Monitoring. Technological innovation. Technology.
A body of research suggests that the provision of energy feedback information to building users can elicit significant energy reductions through behaviour change. However, most studies have focused on energy use in homes and the assessment of interventions and technologies, to the neglect of the non-domestic context and broader issues arising from the introduction of feedback technologies. To address this gap, a non-domestic case study explores the delivery of personalized energy feedback to office workers through a novel system utilizing wireless technologies. The research demonstrates advantages of monitoring occupancy and quantifying energy use from specific behaviours as a basis for effective energy feedback; this is particularly important where there are highly disaggregated forms of energy use and a range of locations for that activity to take place. Quantitative and qualitative data show that personalized feedback can help individuals identify energy reduction opportunities. However, the analysis also highlights important contextual barriers and issues that need to be addressed when utilizing feedback technologies in the workplace. If neglected, these issues may limit the effective take-up of feedback interventions.
34-4686
Keywords:
Branding. Building performance. Sustainability.
In the design and operations industries, the performance gap is a common discrepancy found between predicted building energy performance and actual energy performance. The performance gap is considered to have negative impacts for the brand of ‘green’ buildings, designers and operators. A socially based analogue is proposed here: the qualitative performance gap, defined as the perceived gap between what inhabitants expect and their actual experience of the building environment. This concept is explored at a regenerative Living Lab: the Centre for Interactive Research on Sustainability (CIRS) in Vancouver, Canada. ‘Official’ and ‘lived’ stories about the building were interpreted from sources of building information and interviews. Expectations about and forgiveness of building performance were gained from pre- and post-occupancy evaluations and interviews. The solution to the qualitative performance gap is not to eliminate it, but, in line with the concept of interactive adaptivity, to use the gap to generate new stories and new consequences for human wellbeing. The qualitative performance gap is thus conceived as positively generative, of new stories of place and identity. This work recommends crafting an ‘official story’ of social aspirations, and a communication feedback loop amongst designers, operators and building inhabitants, transparently sharing successes and failures.
34-4687
Keywords:
Africa. Building performance. Buildings. Climate. Climate change. Design. Performance.
The six-region climatic map used in the current South African National Standards SANS 10400XA and SANS 204 does not support quantified design decisions within the built environment or indicate the amount of cooling and heating energy required per climatic region. An alternative set of maps based on interpreted degree-days is presented and can be used for regulation and design strategies. A dataset of 21 years of hourly, 0.05-degree data was used to produce a map with discrete heating and cooling degree-day classes. The resultant zones are therefore not derived from only the dominant climatic characteristics, but from simultaneous annual heating and cooling demands. The advantage is that the new map enables adaptive building design for climates with significant diurnal or annual temperature swings, making it useful for regulators and designers. A good correlation exists between the developed degree-day indices and building energy. The majority of South Africa was found to fall within the medium heating/medium cooling zone as expected; however, the KwaZulu-Natal coastal region is within the medium cooling zone and not the expected high cooling zone. This may be due to the humidity levels that are not accounted for.
34-4688
Keywords:
Built environment. Carbon dioxide. Consumption. Housing. Monitoring. Social practices. Social theory.
The monitoring of buildings can enhance the understanding of everyday life, yet it has sparsely been used in social practices research. Monitoring usually provides context (e.g. differences in performing practices) for more prominent qualitative enquiry. The potential of building monitoring is investigated for studying the performance of domestic practices. A Passivhaus development is examined for its applicability. Monitoring data include temperature, humidity, CO2 and electricity sub-metering. These data provide a good basis for investigating how technologies relate to the other elements (influences) of practice in shaping everyday life. The benefits and limitations of integrating monitoring with qualitative data are considered (e.g. residents’ enthusiasm for co-investigating monitoring data; monitoring data having insufficient richness without accompanying qualitative data). Monitoring and qualitative data are shown to be complementary, and capable of producing insights beyond those of non-integrated approaches. Building monitoring can be further utilized in researching practices, particularly when considering the everyday implications of technological changes.
34-4689
Keywords:
Assessment. Design. Design quality. Housing. Performance. Private finance.
The complex procurement process entailed by the private finance initiative (PFI) means that clients need new capacities to manage their relationships with bidders and to assess project proposals if the desired level of design quality is to be achieved. To assist local authorities in their client role, a new Architectural Design Quality Evaluation Tool was developed. The aim was to improve the quality of design in residential sheltered housing, procured through the PFI. The tool was developed for and applied to a programme that will see the replacement of a local authority’s entire sheltered housing stock. The tool has two functions: (1) to inform the client’s assessment process and assist with the selection of the preferred bidding consortium through a series of stages in the PFI process; and (2) to improve the quality of all the submitted designs through an iterative process. Although several existing mechanisms are available for evaluating the performance attributes of buildings, few also tackle the less tangible amenity attributes, which are vital to the feeling of home. The new tool emphasizes the amenity attributes without neglecting performance.
34-4690
Keywords:
Building performance. Buildings. Carbon dioxide. Emissions. Energy conservation. Epidemiology.
The relationship between energy use and height is examined for a sample of 611 office buildings in England and Wales using actual annual metered consumption of electricity and fossil fuels. The buildings are of different ages; they have different construction characteristics and methods of heating and ventilation; and they include both public and commercial offices. When rising from five storeys and below to 21 storeys and above, the mean intensity of electricity and fossil fuel use increases by 137% and 42% respectively, and mean carbon emissions are more than doubled. A multivariate regression model is used to interpret the contributions of building characteristics and other factors to this result. Air-conditioning is important, but a trend of increased energy use with height is also found in naturally ventilated buildings. Newer buildings are not in general more efficient: the intensity of electricity use is greater in offices built in recent decades, without a compensating decrease in fossil fuel use. The evidence suggests it is likely – although not proven – that much of the increase in energy use with height is due to the greater exposure of taller buildings to lower temperatures, stronger winds and more solar gains.
34-4691
Keywords:
Architecture. Performance evaluation. Sustainability.
The importance of post-occupancy evaluation (POE) is widely acknowledged in the academic literature, industry press and, increasingly, by professional institutes. Learning from previous projects systematically is central to improving building performance, resulting in a built environment that better fits the needs of clients, end users, wider society and the environment. The key role of architects in pushing forward this agenda has been recognized, however evidence suggests that take up of POE is low across the profession. Whilst research has investigated barriers to POE across the construction industry, very little has considered the unique perspective of architects. In-depth interviews with UK-based architects are presented to explore their experiences in relation to POE and their perspectives on its potential to be a standard part of architectural practice. The findings indicate that a considerable amount of practical work is being undertaken, but uncertainty over what constitutes POE means it is often excluded from the POE label – with significant implications for the development of a rigorous evidence base. An appetite is identified for more holistic evaluation measures that move beyond the current preoccupation with energy efficiency to consider other aspects of building performance, and thereby sustainability, in a wider value framework.
34-4692
Keywords:
Building performance. Research methodology. Technical knowledge.
Raymond J. Cole’s body of work, spanning sustainable design, system complexity and human agency, has encouraged researchers to reconceptualize the notions of comfort and building performance. However, methods for predicting energy use and assessing environmental performance have remained predominantly within a reductionist approach common to physics and engineering. The recognition that building performance is characterized by interactive adaptivity and co-evolution of the physical with the social has not been matched by the generation of new methods. Although social practice theories that articulate the socio-technical nature of the built environment have been increasingly appropriated to understand occupants’ role in performance, the challenge of studying buildings as complex socio-technical systems remains. This methodological paper discusses the application of the case study method (CSM) to the study of 10 retrofit projects selected from the Retrofit for the Future (RfF) Programme in UK between 2011 and 2012. Guided by Greene’s framework for methodological discourse, the epistemic regime is articulated under four headings: philosophical assumptions, investigative logics, guidelines for practice and contribution to system perspective. The discussion of these domains highlights the fecundity of CSM in providing a more nuanced understanding of the interaction between social and technical systems in performance.
34-4693
Keywords:
Buildings. Decision making. Design process. Environmental indicators. Environmental planning. Performance. Sustainability.
Since the 1970s, intense discussions have occurred within the research and practitioner communities on how to assess and influence the environmental performance of buildings. Many different methods, criteria and tools were developed to raise awareness, enable goal formulation, support design and decision-making processes, and evaluate a building’s environmental performance. This development can be retraced through the example of the works of Raymond J. Cole, who made an important contribution to this scientific debate. The integration of environmental performance into a sustainability assessment, the ongoing development of life cycle assessment (LCA) methods, and clients’, financiers’ and assessors’ different demands for environmental performance assessment, raise additional questions and highlight the conflicting goals. Six topics are examined in relation to current developments: the further development of the classic ‘three pillars’ sustainability model; the suitability of assessment criteria and indicators; the handling of technological progress; the discounting of environmental impacts; the environmental assessment of existing buildings; and the further development of legal requirements. ‘Time’ is a key factor relating to LCA, weighing current versus future emissions, ecological value and recycling potential of existing buildings or ‘options’ for different ways to use the building in future. Recommended actions are provided for key stakeholders.
34-4694
Keywords:
Buildings. Governance. Regulation. Risk. Risk analysis.
Building regulatory systems have been evolving in recent decades, first with a transition to a functional or performance basis, and more recently with the introduction of new societal objectives, including those related to sustainability and climate change resiliency. Various policy and technical challenges have been identified with this evolution, including the lack of a common basis for establishing performance expectations, quantified performance metrics, and robust mechanisms to incorporate new objectives in a manner that effectively integrates a diversity of stakeholder input and results in regulatory requirements that do not compete with long-standing objectives. Among the mechanisms being explored to facilitate a managed evolution is the use of risk as a basis for performance, and modifications within the building regulatory environment to enable this. It is posited that framing the building regulatory system as a socio-technical system (STS) will highlight the complex interactions that exist between regulators and the market, the roles stakeholders play in characterizing risk for use in building regulation, and what steps are required to shift to a risk-informed performance-based building regulatory system, taking into account different legal structures and regulatory approaches that exist between jurisdictions.
34-4695
Keywords:
Building performance. Buildings. Job satisfaction.
An explorative statistical analysis of consistent non-domestic building performance studies is conducted non-domestic buildings (n?=?47) to validate the universal positions of comfort widely cited in industry guidance and standards. The Building Use Studies (BUS) methodology for evaluating occupant satisfaction employed by these studies was tested for reliability and the factor structure explored. The reliability of this method was found to be ‘excellent’ and eight latent variables that characterize a hierarchical factor structure induced. Increased visual display unit use and open-plan arrangements were found to be associated with negative occupant perceptions. This suggests that privacy and personal communication may be defining issues for occupant satisfaction, with implications for space planning. Significantly different perceptions towards air quality and conditions in winter were observed between gender and those familiar with their environments were found to have a tendency to hold more negative perceptions more broadly. It has also been found that perceptions towards seasonal conditions may be improved by providing local control to mechanical services. Such insights highlight the limitations of reliance on positivist theory. Hence, it is recommended that high-performance buildings be provided control and management systems that learn from those occupying the building over time, cautiously adapting service provision accordingly.
34-4696
Keywords:
Diffusion process. Energy efficiency. Energy planning. Housing. United States.
Energy Star, the largest voluntary housing eco-labelling programme in the US, conveys important signals to housing market actors about the energy efficiency of homes. With energy demand from housing being a significant energy consumer and contributor to climate change, gaining insight into the diffusion patterns of these certifications is an important analytical step. Informed by theories of new product adoption, research is used to identify the factors associated with the diffusion patterns of Energy Star certifications into US single-family housing from 2002 to 2013. The findings are generally congruent with recent studies of energy-efficiency adoption patterns in commercial property (real estate) and residential building construction. The key significant predictors of variation in the proportion of Energy Star-certified homes across US core-based statistical areas (CBSAs) are found to be public policy, climate, market attributes, industry characteristics and energy prices.
34-4697
Keywords:
Behavior. Buildings. Data. Energy demand. Technology. Visualization.
Building management systems are designed for energy managers; there are few energy-feedback systems designed to engage staff. A tool, known as e-Genie, was created with the purpose of engaging workplace occupants with energy data and supporting them to take action to reduce energy use. Building on research insights within the field, e-Genie’s novel approach encourages users to make plans to meet energy-saving goals, supports discussion and considers social energy behaviours (e.g. discussing energy issues, taking part in campaigns) as well as individual actions. A field-based study of e-Genie indicated that visualizations of energy data were engaging and that the discussion ‘Pinboard’ was particularly popular. Pre- and post-survey (N = 77) evaluation of users indicated that people were significantly more concerned about energy issues and reported engaging more in social energy behaviour after about two weeks of e-Genie being installed. Concurrently, objective measures of electricity use decreased over the same period, and continued decreasing over subsequent weeks. Indications are that occupant-facing energy-feedback visualizations can be successful in reducing energy use in the workplace; furthermore, supporting social energy behaviour in the workplace is likely to be a useful direction for promoting action.
34-4698
Keywords:
Building performance. Community. Culture. Housing. Knowledge exchange. Performance evaluation. Performance measurement. Policy.
Developing effective building performance evaluation and feedback processes is a vital part of global efforts to reduce building energy use and gain insight into the actual performance of buildings and technologies. Although attempts have been made to introduce internationally agreed models for these processes, it is clear that various countries are producing different approaches according to their cultural, institutional and policy differences. Knowledge exchange is potentially a key means of developing a shared understanding of values, meanings and practices in relation to building performance evaluation. This paper identifies cultural and institutional barriers in the European Union for international building performance communities of practice utilizing knowledge exchange, from an experiential ‘real-world’ perspective. The preparation of a 30-month research project to help develop building performance evaluation in Poland and an associated bilateral symposium is closely evaluated through an action research case study in terms of the stakeholders, the national contexts in which they operated and the key challenges they faced. Recommendations are then made in terms of the support needed to develop more responsive research programmes in relation to developing international knowledge exchange, and the capacity-building elements required for these international communities of practice.
35-7 ENVIRONMENTAL CONTROL SYSTEMS
34-4699
Keywords:
Adaptive behavior. Architecture. Public facilities.
Naturally ventilated offices enable users to control their environment through the opening of windows. Whilst this level of control is welcomed by users, it creates risk in terms of energy performance, especially during the heating season. In older office buildings, facilities managers usually obtain energy information at the building level. They are often unaware or unable to respond to non-ideal facade interaction by users often as a result of poor environmental control provision. In the summer months, this may mean poor use of free cooling opportunities, whereas in the winter space heating may be wasteful. This paper describes a low-cost, camera-based system to diagnose automatically the status of each window (open or closed) in a facade. The system is shown to achieve a window status prediction accuracy level of 90–97% across both winter and summer test periods in a case study building. A number of limitations are discussed including winter daylight hours, the impact of rain, and the use of fixed camera locations and how these may be addressed. Options to use this window-opening information to engage with office users are explored.
34-4700
Keywords:
Adaptive management. Comfort. Energy conservation.
Indoor temperature (T) and relative humidity (RH) are important for collection preservation and thermal comfort in museums. In the 20th century, the notion evolved that T and RH need to be stringently controlled, often resulting in excessive energy consumption. However, recent studies have shown that controlled fluctuations are permissible, enabling improved energy efficiency. Consequently, the thermal comfort requirements are increasingly important to determine temperature limits, but knowledge is limited. Therefore, a thermal comfort survey study and indoor measurements were conducted at Hermitage Amsterdam museum in Amsterdam, the Netherlands for one year, including: (1) monitoring of existing conditions (T = 21°C, RH = 50%); and (2) an intervention in which T is controlled based on an adaptive comfort approach (T = 19.5–24°C, RH = 50%). The results show that the thermal comfort of the existing conditions is far from optimum; visitors feel too cool in summer and slightly too warm in winter. The adaptive temperature limits were developed to improve thermal comfort significantly without endangering the collection, thereby saving energy. Furthermore, facilitating visitors to adapt their clothing may contribute to enlarging the temperature bandwidth and improve (individual) thermal comfort.
34-4701
Keywords:
Air quality. Built environment. Climate. Urban design. Urban form. Urban planning.
A novel, flexible method to derive urban morphometric parameters is presented. Through selected examples, it demonstrates its employability in a wide range of applications. This method builds upon an extension of an image-based technique for the treatment of building data to discuss objective criteria for model grid choice and related consequences. Starting from an estimation of aerodynamic parameters, and their validation by computational fluid dynamics using an existing simulation of downtown Oklahoma City in the US, the method is used to evaluate improvements in the performance of an operational dispersion model. Results are applied to flow over a neighbourhood for the determination of ventilation parameters. It is suggested that the grid used for calculation of morphometric parameters provides the best agreement with data from laboratory experiments when the selection of grid size is made upon the spatial profile of building height standard deviation and maximum building height. The implication is that when a mesoscale numerical model is employed, morphometric parameters should be calculated by positioning the computational grid based on physical boundaries, while for finer resolution (namely, smaller scale) numerical models, morphometric parameters should be calculated using the street grid as external boundary, and the maximum building height criterion performs well.
34-4702
Keywords:
Building performance. Climate. Energy demand. Simulation. Urban design. Urban form.
The impact of the increasing technomass (TM) on cooling demand in buildings is explored for cities in South America. The entangled double nature of the building–environment interrelation in an urban context is analyzed. The research question is whether an increase in the building density produces a superlinear increase of energy consumption at the urban scale. Advanced spatially explicit quantitative methods are used to select representative samples of the urban environment and to quantify the volumes of TM in four South American cities. Principal component analysis is used to extract representative urban tissue categories. The Urban Weather Generator tool is used to produce the urban weather data used in building performance simulations. The results confirm the superlinear dependence of the total cooling consumption of each sample in relation to the existing TM in areas with high-rise buildings due to the combined primary and secondary effects, namely, the increase of the total energy needs and the increase of air temperature due to the urban heat island effect. The great significance of the second-order effect poses challenges to current assessments performed on the basis of consumption per m2. The use of the TM indicator can promote the development of climate-sensible urban planning.
34-4703
Keywords:
Behavior. Design. Energy conservation. Space.
Occupant behaviour is a key variable affecting the amount of energy used in homes. The understanding, interface and interaction with heating controls hold the potential to influence how heating is operated and, in turn, how much energy is consumed. A study is presented to test a series of hypotheses that the design of the home-heating interface can positively influence the achievement of home-heating goals, if it is specifically designed to communicate a user mental model (UMM) of how the system functions. This would encourage appropriate inhabitant behaviour. The experiment involved 20 pairs of participants matched by age, gender and home-heating experience. The participants were asked to attain a series of home-heating goals using an accelerated home-heating simulator. The impact of specific design features of a novel interface design was compared with an interface offering a traditional home-heating system experience. The evidence confirms that design features contributed to differences in UMMs, intentional behaviour and goal achievement. A mental model approach to design can be used as a means of putting users ‘in control’ of their heating system to enable them to fulfil their home-heating goals better.
34-4704
Keywords:
Adaptation. Building stock. Climate change. Housing. Vulnerability.
The UK is predicted to experience warmer summers in the future, but the domestic building stock in England was not designed to cope with this change. The Standard Assessment Procedure (SAP) 2009 is used to assess the current state of the English building stock in terms of its vulnerability to overheating. The English Housing Survey 2009 provided data for 16 150 dwellings which are weighted to represent the housing stock. SAP predicts 82% of dwellings are currently at ‘slight’ risk of overheating and 41% at medium to high risk. If summer temperatures become 1.4°C warmer, then 99% of properties are predicted to have a medium to high risk of overheating. Several potential adaptations to the housing stock were considered to reduce overheating. Although ventilation strategies had the largest positive effect, the use of solar shading and shutters which allow secure ventilation could reduce vulnerability to overheating in the current climate. In a warmer climate, although some dwellings would still be at slight risk, the results suggest that solar shading strategies could reduce the percentage of those at medium to high risk to 6%. Future energy efficiency programmes will need to include adaptation measures to prevent overheating.
34-4705
Keywords:
Agency decision making. Building performance. Buildings. Comfort. Energy planning. Performance evaluation.
The performance of buildings remains topical, but in many current conversations the definitions of ‘good performance’ are taken for granted. Building performance evaluation tends to be dominated by studies of how buildings behave with reference to technical standards. However, past studies show that the perceptions of good performance are based on broader understandings of what buildings offer, often augmented by interpretations emerging from historical social practices and cultural context. This paper considers different approaches to describing thermal experience as one way to explore what is meant by ‘performance’, arguing that just as the social sciences have enriched earlier approaches to describing relations between people and the thermal environment, there are benefits to embracing humanities-based approaches to describe thermal experience. Architectural theory is replete with examples of a deliberate focus on environmental aspects, but its methods and concepts rarely cross the line from ideation to evaluation. This paper disrupts current notions of building performance evaluation by positing alternative perspectives of how people experience buildings. It discusses how current methods might co-exist with phenomenological insights in ‘thick descriptions’ of how buildings ‘perform’ and considers possible contributions from modes of enquiry in the humanities to describe thermal experience, illustrated by the authors’ research in housing.
35-8 UNIVERSAL DESIGN
34-4706
Keywords:
Buildings. Disaster. Disaster paradigms. Mitigation. Public policy. Regulation. Risk analysis. Safety.
New Zealand’s devastating Canterbury earthquakes provided an opportunity to examine the efficacy of existing regulations and policies relevant to seismic strengthening of vulnerable buildings. The mixed-methods approach adopted, comprising both qualitative and quantitative approaches, revealed that some of the provisions in these regulations pose as constraints to appropriate strengthening of earthquake-prone buildings. Those provisions include the current seismic design philosophy, lack of mandatory disclosure of seismic risks and ineffective timeframes for strengthening vulnerable buildings. Recommendations arising from these research findings and implications for pre-disaster mitigation for future earthquake and Canterbury’s post-disaster reconstruction suggest: (1) a reappraisal of the requirements for earthquake engineering design and construction, (2) a review and realignment of all regulatory frameworks relevant to earthquake risk mitigation, and (3) the need to develop a national programme necessary to achieve consistent mitigation efforts across the country. These recommendations are important in order to present a robust framework where New Zealand communities such as Christchurch can gradually recover after a major earthquake disaster, while planning for pre-disaster mitigation against future earthquakes.
34-4707
Keywords:
Carbon dioxide. Energy efficiency. Housing. Policy evaluation. Policy making. Public policy.
The US Better Buildings Neighborhood Program (BBNP) consisted of 41 different versions of thermal retrofit programmes with a common structure and objectives. This created a natural experiment in thermal retrofit programme design. This paper uses qualitative interviews with programme organizers measured against third-party programme performance data to create a model of 14 programme steps that were common to all BBNP grantees. This model uses the experiences of programme organizers to define best-practice principles associated with each programme step. Five themes emerge from the programme steps: (1) programme design: local market features and suitable programme structures; (2) marketing and outreach: the processes of creating awareness versus personal engagement – how community-based social marketing is a key strategy in driving demand; (3) workforce engagement: the skills gaps across the supply chain; (4) financial incentives: the merits of grants versus loans – how to use them in combination; and (5) data and evaluation: best-practice techniques for both programme evaluation and enabling iterative programme adjustments. These principles create a template for an ‘optimal’ programme model for retrofit programmes with stated objectives similar to the US BBNP. The potential and limitations in extrapolating this model to UK retrofit markets are considered.
34-4708
Keywords:
Adaptation. Adaptation strategies. Building stock. Buildings. Performance. Sustainability. Vulnerability.
The green and the subsequent sustainable building movements have been framed by changing societal contexts. Their main focus has been on the design of new buildings. However, these movements have neglected the life span of existing buildings and the long-term management of building stocks. The reasons why are considered: the changing interpretations of sustainability, the evolution of different forms of tacit knowledge, lack of a metabolic framework covering the built environment and lack of a consistent multi-scale building information modelling (BIM). The transition toward a ‘risk society’, with an increasing diversity and frequency of threats, challenges the current optimistic definition of sustainability. Resilience addresses fast- and slow-moving threats that can lead to unknown consequences and new risks. Alternative planning approaches (e.g. scenario planning, adaptive change and resilience heuristics) are discussed. The differences between anticipation- and resilience-based strategies are considered. Possible heuristics can be found in social–ecological systems, in resilience engineering and in the historic evolution of the built environment. Resilient solutions generally lead to a higher level of complexity and carry additional environmental costs. In the creation of resilience capacity, new knowledge will be co-produced through transdisciplinary research, scenario planning and design experiments under conditions of uncertainty.
34-4709
Keywords:
Buildings. Design. Job satisfaction. Performance. Sustainability.
There is increasing interest in understanding how office accommodation affects organizational productivity. Data on metrics of engagement, job satisfaction, job performance and facility complaints for thousands of employees (n = 14,569) of a large Canadian financial organization were analysed to explore differences in outcomes between those working in green-certified office buildings (n = 10) and those in otherwise similar conventional buildings (n = 10). Overall, green-certified buildings demonstrated higher scores on survey outcomes related to job satisfaction, value to clients and stakeholders, evaluation of management, and corporate engagement. There was also a tendency for manager-assessed job performance to be higher in green-certified buildings. Nevertheless, not all green-certified buildings outperformed all conventional buildings, and superior performance was not exhibited on all outcomes examined. A key observation is that such metrics are routinely recorded by organizations, but relating them to building characteristics is new. Recognition of such datasets opens up many promising avenues for buildings research.
34-4710
Keywords:
Environmental quality. Health. Housing facilities. Housing policy. Management. Safety. Well-being.
Housing and health issues can vary over time and between populations. The elderly population is increasing worldwide. Yet only limited information exists about housing conditions: changes over time, and the relationships between health and safety among the elderly. Based on repeated surveys (2007 and 2011), housing and health issues in Finland were assessed, especially among the elderly (more than 65 years old). From various housing factors studied, the largest differences between surveys were in thermal comfort. From the six outcomes studied – satisfaction with the dwelling, maintenance, indoor air quality (IAQ), perceived safety, general health, and sleeping difficulties – only satisfaction with the dwelling had significant temporal variation. Modelling the outcomes led to a selection of variables that were significantly associated with the outcomes. The models’ sensitivity was 65–81% for perceived safety and satisfaction with the dwelling, maintenance, and IAQ, whereas it was only 5% for sleeping difficulties and 32% for general health status. Among the elderly, higher odds ratios (ORs) were found for the associations between housing satisfaction and non-elevated radon concentrations, accessibility, dwelling size, and stuffy odour, as compared with the total population sample. The results are useful for developing policies that increase wellbeing, and for building owners wishing to increase housing satisfaction among occupants.
36. Environmenal Psychology/Environment, Behavior, and Society
36-3 ENVIRONMENTAL ATTITUDE/AWARENESS/VALUES
34-4711
Keywords:
Neoliberalism. Power. South America. Technology. Water.
Chile’s free-market economic and political reforms, designed and implemented under General Pinochet’s military regime (1973–90), have been important in discussions of neoliberal public policy and environmental governance. However, understandings of how and why these reforms unfolded often overlook the complex power dynamics involved. This paper examines the role of water in consolidating the design, implementation, and outcomes of Chile’s neoliberal programme, through the contested production, retention, and reform of the 1981 Water Code. Drawing on the idea that water and power are mutually constitutive, it demonstrates the significance of the transition to private tradable water rights with minimal state regulation not only for changing social relationships with water, but also for consolidating the neoliberal programme and the ambitions of the military regime, government technocrats, and business groups. I make three related arguments: first, that water was more central to the formation and effectiveness of the neoliberal programme in Chile, and the ambitions of its core supporters than hitherto acknowledged; second, that political interest groups, and their alliances, can play crucial roles in neoliberalising nature; and third, that water reforms consolidate power relationships and produce waterscapes in particular ways.
34-4712
Keywords:
Ethnicity. Network society. Planning and society. Social impact analysis.
This article explores the conditions under which political modernization leads to nation building, to the politicization of ethnic cleavages, or to populism by modeling these three outcomes as more or less encompassing exchange relationships between state elites, counterelites, and the population. Actors seek coalitions that grant them the most advantageous exchange of taxation against public goods and of military support against political participation. Modeling historical data on the distribution of these resources in France and the Ottoman Empire from 1500 to 1900 shows that nation building results from strong state centralization and well-established civil societies; ethnic closure, from weak state capacity and civil societies; and populism, from medium centralization and weak civil societies. The results are consistent with French and Ottoman political histories of the 18th and 19th centuries.
34-4713
Keywords:
Development. Informal sector. Legality. Political power. Water.
Informal and illegal water provision is increasingly targeted as an impediment to state authorities and water development in the Global South. In contrast, this paper uses a biopolitical approach to argue that state authorities use illegal forms of water provision as a source of power, particularly to discipline certain spaces and sectors of the population; and moreover, that such power geometries are deeply uneven. To support these claims, I examine the production and enforcement of illegal provision in two communities located in Tijuana, Mexico. I examine how water theft functions—including the key objects and practices that shape the illicit abstraction and distribution of water—and then examine how water theft is policed and enforced by state authorities. Following Foucault, I suggest these processes occur on a bodily and infrastructural level to discipline water users. Findings indicate that while water theft supplies a vital resource for marginalized citizens—often in communal ways that exceed state power—the alternating tolerance and repression of water illegality is largely used by authorities to maintain hydrosocial order and, in effect, to control informal modes of development. The paper concludes with implications for understanding water informality and the uneven spatiality of state power.
34-4714
Keywords:
Ethics. Planning ethics. Responsibility.
Within the context of biodiversity loss, this paper asks the question: What is response? In asking how responsibility is raised as a sensible question, I argue there is a need to address the insensible, immaterial, and untimely dimensions of matter and relations. I suggest that thinking along the cusp of the insensible offers a way into an expanded realm of relationality that queries the exclusions that govern the sphere of intelligibility, and help us think between natures to promote a noncontemporaneous ethics of apprehension. Taking up Jean-Luc Nancy’s concept of sense and specifically his ideas around the direction of sense, I argue that the insensible is a realm of possibility within the praxis of social and affective norms of sense that may release other modes of being into being. This is a paper about sense as matter forming, as cohabitation, and as an exclusionary tactic that bears on the cohabitation of worlds. I argue that an understanding of how sense is enrolled into our habits of thought and theories of materialities is crucial if we are to create new practices of sensations and new sensibilities around such diffuse, recalcitrant, and dislocated issues as biodiversity loss, new forms of biotechnological life, and climate change. I conclude that if the insensible alerts us to the work of sense in securing the bringing into relation, its configurations, and its a priori orientations, then it also points towards modes of exclusion and forms of resistance in our thinking with nonhuman others that are before and beyond relationality.
36-4 SOCIO-SPATIAL FACTORS
34-4715
Keywords:
Borders. Government. Sovereignty.
Research on the Israeli checkpoints in the West Bank has emphasized not only that these checkpoints have dire implications for the Palestinians living there, at the personal, familial, and communal levels, and devastating effects on the Palestinian economy, but also that they have far-reaching consequences for the ability of the Palestinians to establish an independent political entity. At the same time, analysis of the Israeli forms of domination over the Palestinians has also stressed the role of a Palestinian governing authority in sustaining the Israeli rule, since the former relieves the latter of its responsibility to care for the occupied Palestinian population. This paper aims to address this apparent contradiction claiming that a comprehensive analysis of Israeli forms of domination requires a spatial examination of the operation of sovereignty with an assessment of governmentalizing arrays. This combined analysis suggests that a Palestinian sovereignty, but one which is emptied of its actual ruling power, is construed at the checkpoints as an epiphenomenon of Israeli apparatuses of control.
34-4716
Keywords:
Exploration. Security. Space.
As Foucault’s writing on the role of population in managing societies through security would attest, the term milieu is not primarily a tool for analysing primary data. Instead, it is a means to model data on population according to specific spatial parameters, and a means of structuring examination of populations in a particular way. The importance of space is also apparent in Canguilhem’s work on the notion of milieu in his writings on bacteriology and organism development. Although the contexts in which the term is deployed are different, both thinkers show how the notion of milieu allows observation of heterogeneous elements in relation to one another, in terms of the movement of elements studied and what possible points of intersection may be forged between elements. In spite of the different research contexts in which each author uses the term, both can be seen to share an understanding of the milieu according to its epistemological qualities. What is stressed in both Foucault’s and Canguilhem’s accounts is an indication of the structural parameters which characterise the milieu. These parameters work to enframe the circulation of that which is being observed. From this structure, particular forms of knowledge concerning that which is examined are produced by the milieu model. In this paper I argue that both Foucault and Canguilhem show how the milieu facilitates thinking, and produces knowledge, that is speculative. As such, the paper can explore how, through their understanding of the milieu, the authors make claims which describe speculative thinking in its practice.
34-4717
Keywords:
Automobile use. Automobiles. Cities. Noise reduction. Urban areas.
In this article we present an experimental sonic space—the mobile noise abatement pod (mNAP)—constructed and used over a two-week period in Delhi, India, during December 2014. The interdisciplinary project, involving a composer, designer, carpenter, development scholar, filmmaker, graphic designer and sociologist, sought to investigate how noise, including honking (one of the most prevalent sounds in Indian cities), is perceived. The fieldwork reveals noise to be a complex contextual, spatial and personal experience that is as much about habit as it is about identity and class, intimately related to economic inequality and inherently connected to social justice. The article suggests that attempts to reduce levels of noise need to take into account its meaning and position—by whom and how narratives of noise reduction are constructed and reproduced.
36-5 LIFESTYLE
34-4718
Keywords:
Buildings. Data. Internet. Monitoring.
A 30-day monitoring campaign was conducted in a university library building to investigate the usefulness of a novel Wi-Fi-based indoor location system for revealing indoor occupancy patterns and related user behaviour. The system has demonstrated its effectiveness in providing occupancy information with a relatively high degree of granularity and accuracy in this study. The occupancy results revealed that the current 24-hour opening policy for the library during term time did not correlate with usage. On the other hand, the eight-hour library-opening duration during the summer holiday period could be extended to include the early evening hours to benefit user productivity. Four occupancy patterns were identified based on cluster analysis. Most users were found to belong to the short-occupancy one-time visitor type, while a minority were long-occupancy users. The cross-correlations between various occupancy parameters were investigated. For example, the pattern of user arrival times at the library was found to be significantly correlated with their study durations. Further, data analysis showed that the majority of long-occupancy users tended not to have frequent breaks with some taking no break for four hours. This could have implications for their health and wellbeing as well as their productivity.
36-6 QUALITY OF LIFE
34-4719
Keywords:
Adolescence. Adolescents. Network structure. Social capital.
Although research on social embeddedness and social capital confirms the value of friendship networks, little has been written about how social relations form and are structured by social institutions. Using data from the Adolescent Health and Academic Achievement study and the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health, the authors show that the odds of a new friendship nomination were 1.77 times greater within clusters of high school students taking courses together than between them. The estimated effect cannot be attributed to exposure to peers in similar grade levels, indirect friendship links, or pair-level course overlap, and the finding is robust to alternative model specifications. The authors also show how tendencies associated with status hierarchy inhering in triadic friendship nominations are neutralized within the clusters. These results have implications for the production and distribution of social capital within social systems such as schools, giving the clusters social salience as “local positions.”
34-4720
Keywords:
Environmental security. Human resources. Knowledge. Surveillance.
The question of how to make life secure in a world of zoonotic disease threats is often answered in terms of an ever-tighter regulation of wild, domestic, and human life, as a means to control disease. Conversely, in both theoretical and practical engagements with the business of making life safe, there is recognition of the circulatory and excessive qualities of life, its ability to overflow grids of intelligibility, and a requirement for knowledge practices to be responsive to a mutable world. In this paper we use empirical work on the field and laboratory practices involved in knowing life, specifically within the UK’s avian influenza wild bird survey, in order to argue strongly for a form of biosecurity that does not seek to integrate life or the practices that make it intelligible into grids and closed circuits. Extending work by Latour, we argue that the truth-value of life science not only stems from the circulation of references along a single chain of reference; it is also dependent upon the productive alliance of knowledge forms and practices that are loosely brought together in this process. By demonstrating the range of practices, materials, and movements involved in making life knowable, we claim that it is the spatial configurations of knowledge practices, organisms, and materials, their ongoing differentiation and not their integration, that make safe life a possibility.
34-4721
Keywords:
Geopolitics. Political terrorism. Terrorism. War.
In the wake of the Global War on Terror, Judith Butler has written of the ‘precarity’ of life, of the inevitable vulnerability of one’s life in the face of the actions of strangers. Refusing to accept this, the United States has developed a form of nationalism that claims invulnerability for its citizens while treating as expendable the lives of distant others who even unwittingly associate with those who threaten the US homeland. Butler has extended this set of criticisms to Israel’s policy towards Palestinian people and in doing so has been criticised as anti-Semitic. She has engaged with these questions about Jewish identity, nationalism, and toleration through an engagement with writers of the Jewish diaspora, developing what we may describe as a geopolitical perspective on identity. The value of such a perspective was given ironic point by the public controversy over the award to Butler of the Adorno Prize in 2012. This paper argues also that in responding to the biopolitics of the Global War on Terror, Butler has elaborated on some of the geopolitical bases of identity and in doing so has illuminated the academic politics of the current Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions campaign called for by many institutions of Palestinian civil society.