Spatial variations in US poverty: beyond metropolitan and non-metropolitan.

Because poverty in rural and urban areas of the US often has different causes, correlates and solutions, effective anti-poverty policies depend on a thorough understanding of the ruralness or urbanness of specific places. This paper compares several widely used classification schemes and the varying magnitudes of poverty that they reveal in the US. The commonly used 'metropolitan/non-metropolitan' distinction obscures important socioeconomic differences among metropolitan areas, making our understanding of the geography of poverty imprecise. Given the number and concentration of poor people living in mixed-rural and rural counties in metropolitan regions, researchers and policy-makers need to pay more nuanced attention to the opportunities and constraints such individuals face. A cross-classification of the Office of Management and Budget's metro system with a nuanced RUDC scheme is the most effective for revealing the geographical complexities of poverty within metropolitan areas.

Suburbanization and sustainability in metropolitan Moscow.

Although Soviet-era urban-growth controls produced relatively sustainable metropolitan development patterns, low-density suburban sprawl has accelerated markedly in modern Russia. Distinctive features of Moscow's development history are its greenbelt, which dates from 1935 and is becoming increasingly fragmented, proliferation of satellite cities at the urban fringe, conversion of seasonal dachas into full-time residences, the very exclusive Rublevo Uspenskoe Highway development, and today's crippling traffic congestion. The recent economic crisis has slowed development and actually increased the supply of "economy-class" single-family homes, for which there is much pent-up desire but insufficient credit availability to meet the demand. A renewed commitment to sustainability's triple bottom line­environmental quality, equity, and economic prosperity­will require greater government transparency and fairness, stronger planning controls, and an expanded public transportation system.

The politicisation of suburbanisation in Belgium: towards an urban­suburban divide.

The electoral and political consequences of suburbanisation recently regained interest in the Anglo-Saxon literature, pointing to a growing polarisation between city and suburban fringe. This paper analyses these processes in the Antwerp urban region and shows the development of a similar electoral divide that is supported by the political parties involved. These observations add to the existing evidence that city­suburban polarisation in Belgium cannot be simply equated with the Anglo-Saxon experience, where a complete suburban fencing off from the city is observable. Rather, because of the comparatively limited development of functions in the Belgian suburbs, a suburban discourse emerges that focuses on safe and accessible cities for the suburban user, yet without much reference to its present inhabitants.

Retrofitting the suburbs to increase walking: evidence from a land-use-travel study.

This paper reports results from a detailed travel diary survey of 2125 residents in the South Bay area of Los Angeles County - a mature, auto-oriented suburban region. Study areas were divided into four centres, typical of compact development or smart growth, and four linear, auto-oriented corridors. Results show substantial variation in the amount of walking across study areas. Trips are shorter and more likely to be via walking in centres. A key to the centres' increased walking travel is the concentration of local shopping and service destinations in a commercial core. Yet the amount of business concentration that is associated with highly pedestrian-oriented neighbourhoods is from three to four times as large as what can be supported by the local resident base, suggesting that pedestrian-oriented neighbourhoods necessarily import shopping trips, and hence driving trips, from larger surrounding catchment areas. The results suggest both land use and mobility strategies that can be appropriate for suburban regions.

Where is the café? The challenge of making retail uses viable in mixed-use suburban developments.

Contemporary planners see mixing residential, retail and other compatible uses as an essential planning principle. This paper explores the challenges that planners, developers and municipal councillors encounter in trying to implement retail uses as part of the mix in suburban areas in three Canadian cities. The study finds that planners employ evolutionary theories of urban development to naturalise their normative visions of walkable and sociable communities. By contrast, developers point to consumer behaviour to explain why planners' ideas on mix do not work. In a society where people shop at big-box outlets, making the local café or pub commercially viable proves increasingly challenging.

Opportunities for making ends meet and upward mobility: differences in organizational deprivation across urban and suburban poor neighborhoods.

Objectives. Given the recent rise of poverty in U.S. suburbs, this study asks: What poor neighborhoods are most disadvantageous, those in the city or those in the suburbs? Building on recent urban sociological work demonstrating the importance of neighborhood organizations for the poor, we are concerned with one aspect of disadvantage­the lack of availability of organizational resources oriented toward the poor. By breaking down organizations into those that promote mobility versus those that help individuals meet their daily subsistence needs, we seek to explore potential variations in the type of disadvantage that may exist.Methods. We test whether poor urban or suburban neighborhoods are more likely to be organizationally deprived by breaking down organizations into three types: hardship organizations, educational organizations, and employment organizations. We use data from the 2000 U.S. County Business Patterns and the 2000 U.S. Census and test neighborhood deprivation using logistic regression models.Results. We find that suburban poor neighborhoods are more likely to be organizationally deprived than are urban poor neighborhoods, especially with respect to organizations that promote upward mobility. Interesting racial and ethnic composition factors shape this more general finding.Conclusion. Our findings suggest that if a poor individual is to live in a poor neighborhood, with respect to access to organizational resources, he or she would be better off living in the central city. Suburban residence engenders isolation from organizations that will help meet one's daily needs and even more so from those offering opportunities for mobility.

"God's Golden Acre for Children": pastoralism and sense of place in new suburban communities.

This paper is based on an empirical case study of four suburbs in the Dublin city hinterland. It is argued that pastoral ideology plays an active role in constituting these new suburbs and helps to inculcate a sense of place. This sense of place in turn helps to cement social embeddedness which acts as a bulwark against isolation and alienation. Pastoral ideology is invoked by suburbanites even when the pastoral dimension of the suburb is under threat or has disappeared. The village or 'main street' acts as an important anchor for new suburban residents as does the surrounding 'rural' landscape and their own collective memories. However, the study reveals a gap between how some newer suburbs are represented and imagined, and how they are experienced in everyday life. This raises questions about the long-term viability of suburbs that lack a sense of place.

Living lawns, dying waters: The suburban boom, nitrogenous fertilizers, and the nonpoint source pollution dilemma.

The March 1963 issue of Consumer Bulletin included a four-page article titled "How to grow a better lawn", the lead paragraph of which assured readers that "one does not have to be an expert or spend large sums of money to have a good lawn. It is necessary, however, to follow certain established practices in the construction and maintenance of any lawn." These two assertions may have struck readers, as I suspect they would strike lawngrowers today, as somewhat contradictory. Given the list of established practices that followed--"the construction of the lawn base, with proper grading, drainage, and preparation of the seedbed; selection of the type of grass and spreading of the seed; and maintenance, including fertilizing, mowing, and control of weeds"--it is difficult to imagine how the homeowner could have accomplished all of this without large sums of money or expertise. In fact, building lawns in the manner described by Consumer Bulletin required tremendous amounts of both. Recognizing these established practices in lawn construction and maintenance as a technological system allows us to better understand the persistence of this grassy landscape in America.

"This villa life": town planning, suburbs and the "new social order" in early twentieth-century Sydney.

In Australia, social reformers approached the new century and post-First World War reconstruction with the hope of establishing a "new social order" based on national efficiency and class harmony. This was to be delivered through the new science of town planning. The would-be reformers posited themselves as an intellectual vanguard which would provide leadership and assist in establishing an enlightened bureaucracy of professional public servants who would also lead the way to social betterment. Their project, however, had collapsed by the end of the war. Lacking collective political clout, the nascent planning professionals' influence declined as the political environment became more conservative in the 1920s. Reformist and radical features of town planning were stripped from suburban agendas. Suburbs, once held up as the cradle of the 'new social order', were to become places for quarantining class and reinvigorating liberalism.

The agriburb: recalling the suburban side of Ontario, California's agricultural colonization.

This essay spotlights the development of Ontario, California, in the last decades of the nineteenth century. It demonstrates that many agricultural communities in California, particularly so-called agricultural colonies, represent a unique rural suburban type labeled here as "agriburbs." Agriburbs, such as Ontario, were communities consciously planned, developed, and promoted based on the drive for profit in emerging agricultural markets. Advertised as the perfect mix of rural and urban, they promised a superior middle-class lifestyle. On the one hand, agriburbs evoked the myths of agrarian security and virtue, a life on a farm in an environment that was good for both soil and soul. On the other hand, agriburbs were ideally urbane but not urban because of their many amenities that represented cultural symbols of modernity, refinement, and progress. An understanding of California's agriburbs deepens an appreciation for both the growth and development of California at the turn of the twentieth century and the diversity of suburban types across the American landscape.

Microcosms of democracy: imagining the city neighborhood in World War II-era America.

This essay sketches the rise of a Popular Front-inflected vision of the U.S. city neighborhood's meaning and worth, a communitarian ideal that reached its zenith during World War II before receding in the face of cold-war anxieties, postwar suburbanization, and trepidation over creeping blight. During the war years, numerous progressives interpreted the ethnic-accented urban neighborhood as place where national values became most concrete, casting it as a uniquely American rebuff to the fascist drive for purity. Elaborations appeared in the popular press's celebratory cadences, in writings by educators and social scientists such as Rachel DuBois and Louis Wirth, and in novels, plays, and musicals by Sholem Asch, Louis Hazam, Kurt Weill, Langston Hughes, and others. Each offered new ways for making sense of urban space, yet their works reveal contradictions and uncertainties, particularly in an inability to meld competing impulses toward assimilation and particularism. Building on the volume's theme "The Arts in Place," this essay examines these texts as a collective form of imaginative "placemaking." It explores the conflicted mode of liberal nationalism that took the polyglot city neighborhood as emblem. And it outlines the fissures embedded in that vision, which emerged more fully as the provisional wartime consensus dissolved.

Streets and stages: urban renewal and the arts after World War II.

Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts in Manhattan and the revitalization of the Brooklyn Academy of Music in Brooklyn offer insights into the intersection of arts and urbanization after World War II. This intra-city comparison shows the aggrandizing pull of the international arena in the shaping of Lincoln Center and the arts it featured in contrast to the local focus and debate that transformed how BAM fit into its Brooklyn neighborhood. The performing arts, bound as they are to a moment fused in space and time, reveal the making of place within grandiose formal buildings as well as outside on the streets that surround them­and it is, perhaps, that tensile connection between stages and streets that informs the relevancy of both the institution and the arts it features. At a time when the suburbs pulled more and more people, the arts provided a counterforce in cities, as magnet and stimulus. The arts were used as compensation for the demolition and re-building of a neighborhood in urban renewal, but they also exposed the more complex social dynamics that underpinned the transformation of the mid-20th century American city from a segregated to a multi-faceted place.