Learning from tradition: the planning of residential neighborhoods in a changing world

This paper analyses the community values of residential neighborhoods in the southwestern region of Saudi Arabia as an approach to a new theory in urbanism. The indigenous masterbuilders and tribemen incorporated planning decisions pertinent to climatic, cultural, social, economic and religious factors when designing physical elements in their built environment. This is what makes every traditional settlement in the southwest region of Saudi Arabia unique in terms of urban form and social structure. As a step to examining and evaluating the process of residential neighborhood development, three stages of practiced urbanism are discussed. These stages are labelled “vernacular”, “transitional” and “new vernacularism”. These are planning concepts used worldwide in the development of residential neighborhoods throughout history until the present. “New Vernacularism” is envisioned in this investigation as a design/planning objective implemented in most recently planned neighborhoods in Al-Horaidhah, Southwest Saudi Arabia. The achievement of successful urbanism underlies the political goals of urban planning practice. The Al-Horaidhah planning concept is conceived in the light of preservation of community values in neighborhood design/planning as a critical issue.The paper aims to investigate and reconcile the conflicts in the planning of residential neighborhoods in a changing world. The conflicts are restricted between retaining traditions of architecture, urban design and planning with the necessary social, economic, and technological changes in urban formation, mainly, the vernacular and modern. The paper illustrates the concept “New Vernacularism” by presenting Al-Horaidhah scheme as a model for community development in three administrative regions along the Red Sea coastline. “New Vernacularism” as a planning concept looks at the community development in Al-Horaidhah in the light of Sharicah, the Islamic Law and Customary norms by emphasizing the importance of the involvement of local residents in the planning process and gives suggestions of how this might best be achieved and later implemented into new communities.     

‘Aging’ identities: Degradation and negotiation in the search for employment

This study draws on data from interviews with individuals aged 45 to 65 (n = 30) to examine changes in identity that occur during their search for employment. Findings indicate that once participants perceive they have been labelled “old” by others (i.e. potential employers and personnel at older worker programs) they begin to define themselves as “old” and become susceptible to identity degradation. However, the majority of individuals are able to successfully negotiate their identities by drawing on social support, attending older worker programs, changing their identities, maintaining some of their key roles, and altering their overall mental outlook. This paper draws attention to the paradoxical nature of the job search process and to the latent consequences of older worker programs — individuals go to older worker programs for job search assistance, yet some of the experiences encountered during attendance at these programs mirrored many experiences encountered with discriminatory employers.     

Gender violence, fan activism and public relations in sport: The case of “Footy Fans Against Sexual Assault”

This paper is based on the belief that online activism is essential for understanding the role and potential of public relations in modern campaigns. In relation to the issue of gender violence against women in football, analyzed and compared are the responses of two official, resource-rich organisations – the National Rugby League (NRL) and Australian Football League (AFL) – and an unofficial, resource-poor fan advocacy group, called Football Fans against Sexual Assault (FFASA). In cooperation and conflict with the leagues, FFASA positioned itself in the market place, taking the widely unoccupied niche of “fan advocacy”—different from “expert advocacy” or “player advocacy”.The article discusses in more detail the major strategy of the group, the Purple Armband Games, which carries many elements of cutting-edge public relations such as advocacy as third-party endorsement; “fan activism” as empowering of “expert advocacy”; “symbolic outsourcing” of participants by facilitating their mode of engagement, the “emblematic richness” of the purple armband symbol, the “oneness” of which overcomes any confrontational dualism.     

Consensus or contention: an exploration of multidisciplinary team functioning in an Irish mental health context

Multidisciplinary teams (MDTs) are conventionally recommended in mental health care literature as an important way to offer holistic treatment provision to patients. This study aims to explore multidisciplinary teamwork in contemporary mental health settings, particularly what aids and hinders the process of multidisciplinary teamworking, and the social work contribution in such teams. In order to attain an in-depth exploration of these phenomena, a single case study design was employed. Within this design, data were generated through semi-structured interviews and structured observation of a mental health MDT in Ireland. These data were analysed using interpretative phenomenological analysis. The research highlights how the concept of mental illness is contested within this MDT, with the medical model dominant within an environment of fluid working arrangements. Professional role blurring and stereotyping were found to impact the division of labour on this team, with role negotiation found to be an integral part of retaining a professional's practice identity. This research raises concerns for social work's capacity to function within mental health MDTs in Ireland, and highlights ways in which social work educators might respond in order to empower Irish social workers to meet the challenges of mental health multidisciplinary teamworking.     

Relationship between collective efficacy and contextual performance among university athletes in Japan

The purpose of this study was to clarify the relationship between collective efficacy and contextual performance among university athletes in Japan. We carried out 305 university athletes (201 males, 104 females) from 14 teams in various geographic areas in Japan. The average age of the participants was 19.91 years (SD = 1.01). The kinds of sports were soccer, basketball, baseball, volleyball, and so on. Then, using Collective Efficacy Questionnaire for Sports (CEQS; Sandra E. Short et al., 2005) and Contextual Performance Scale (Ikeda, and Furukawa, 2008), we examined the relationship between collective efficacy and Contextual performance. In conclusion, this study provided the following three remarks. 1) There are relationship between collective efficacy and contextual performance. 2) Contextual performance execution level improve collective efficacy. 3) It is important to always recommend contextual performance in own team to strengthen the collective efficacy more.     

Rural Area Agencies on aging: An overview of activities and policy issues

This article presents an overview of the nature and service activities of rural Area Agencies (AAAs) with data from a recently completed national survey. Compared to their urban counterparts rural AAAs serve much larger, more sparsely populated areas with poorer and older elderly populations; have much smaller budgets and staffs; and support fewer services. This leads to a clear rural disadvantage in resources and services for the elderly. Policy makers need to examine and address factors identified as associated with this rural-urban inequity including SUA intrastate funding formulas, “rural” service models and training needs, and regulations regarding direct service provision. Important research and policy questions in need of further study are also identified.     

Le maire en action : gouvernement urbain et production de politiques publiques. Michel Delebarre à Dunkerque

Changes in the French political, administrative system and trends in the economy starting in the 1970s have reshaped power at the municipal level. The figure of the mayor as a “notable” has apparently taken a more entrepreneurial and managerial turn in line with changes in local government, its sources of revenue and contractual procedures. By studying the mayor through the prism of the production of public policy at the local level, this shift can be qualified: the role as a notable is tapped in mobilizing resources, while the dynamic entrepreneurial role comes into play in steering policies, timing interventions and assessing the related risks. The observation of the whole process of producing the two urban policies described in Dunkerque sheds light on how the “municipal team” led by the mayor defines the rules of the game, takes diverging interests into account and maintains an interdependence between the various actors involved in policy-implementation. This article seeks to open a dialog between a case study of a municipal government and the observation of local public policy so as to understand changes in the levers of local power.     

Equivalence of Nash implementability and robust implementability with incomplete information

This paper is concerned with the design of robust mechanisms which are applicable to a wide class of possible information structures of agents. We examine a society consisting of several groups such that (i) there are at least three agents in each group; and (ii) each agent knows the preferences of the agents in his group but has incomplete information about the preferences of the agents outside his group. We show that for a large class of information structures, a social choice set (SCS) is implementable for each possible information structure if and only if it is Nash implementable. In other words, the class of robustly implementable SCS's is identical to the class of implementable SCS's in the complete information setting.This paper is a substantially revised version of a chapter of my dissertation submitted to the University of Rochester (Yamato [25]). I thank Professor William Thomson for his invaluable advice and suggestions. Detailed comments and suggestions of an anonymous referee were very helpful for further revision of the paper. I also acknowledge comments from Professors Randall Calvert, Luis Corchon, Glenn MacDonald, Eric Maskin, Lionel McKenzie, Ryo-Ichi Nagahisa, Koji Okuguchi, Ignacio Ortuño-Ortin, Tatsuyoshi Saijo, Ken-Ichi Shimomura, Tomas Sjöström, Yoshikatsu Tatamitani, and seminar participants at Harvard University, the 1992 Meeting of Kobe Summer Seminar in Economics of Organization and Game Theory, Tokyo Metropolitan University, and Toyama University. This work was supported in part by the Ministry of Education in Japan, the Nomura Foundation for the Social Sciences, and the Tokyo Center for Economic Research.     

Asian urban sustainability in the era of globalization

The process of achieving urban sustainable development is uncharted. We only know that plans should address the economic, environmental and social health of the city and this task can only be accomplished by approaching each of these issues at different scales. For rapidly developing world cities, “sustainability” is becoming an increasingly elusive objective, in part, because of impacts by forces beyond their borders. Using the Asia-Pacific region as a case study, a framework relates regional transnational flows to the state of the urban environment and the social conditions of linked rapidly developing cities. The “functional city system” within the Asia-Pacific increasingly is both the engine of urban growth and the force behind differentiating urban environmental and social issues. At the same time, while globalization forces have been particularly strong within cities in the Asia-Pacific, local factors also play a crucial role in urban development. Globalization driven growth has not translated into a single path of development, rather localities have demonstrated contextually specific paths.     

"Nothing about me without me": leading the way to collaborative relationships with families

This article discusses the National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse's CASA Safe Haven, an evidence-based, community-driven intervention program for children and families in child welfare whose lives have been adversely affected by substance abuse, and for staff in the agencies that work with them. CASA Safe Haven builds collaborative relationships that feature a blend of multidisciplinary teams that share responsibility for helping families; family group conferencing, in which families are equal and welcome participants in designing and driving a service plan; and the influence of family court to hold families and service providers accountable for progress. CASA Safe Haven is a framework for collaboration.     

An axiomatic approach to intergenerational equity

We present a set of axioms in order to capture the concept of equity among an infinite number of generations. There are two ethical considerations: one is to treat every generation equally and the other is to respect distributive fairness among generations. We find two opposite results. In Theorem 1, we show that there exists a preference ordering satisfying anonymity, strong distributive fairness semiconvexity, and strong monotonicity. However, in Theorem 2, we show that there exists no binary relation satisfying anonymity, distributive fairness semiconvexity, and sup norm continuity. We also clarify logical relations between these axioms and non-dictatorship axioms. Received: 30 August 2000/Accepted: 18 March 2002 This paper is based on Chapt. 4 of my Masters Thesis [15] submitted to Kobe University, and won the Kanematsu Fellowship from the Research Institute for Economics and Business Administration of Kobe University in May 2001. I am grateful to Jun Iritani for helpful discussions and encouragement, two anonymous referees of this journal, three anonymous referees of the Kanematsu Fellowship, Eiichi Miyagawa, Noritsugu Nakanishi, Nguyen Huu Phuc, Hiroo Sasaki, Koji Shimomura, William Thomson, and Toyoaki Washida for detailed comments. I also thank participants at the spring meeting of Japanese Economic Association at Yokohama City University in May 2000, at the annual meeting of the Society for Environmental Economics and Policy Studies in Tsukuba in September 2000, and at the Kanematsu Fellowship Seminar at Kobe University in May 2001 for valuable comments.     

Urban environment, spatial fragmentation and social segration in Latin America: Where does innovation lie?

To “review the urban question” in terms of sustainable development, the premise is formulated that improving infrastructures, equipment and services to preserve the natural and built urban environment is costly and generates expenses of all kinds—at economic and social levels. Without the introduction of equalisation mechanisms, these expenses will increase inequalities between different parts of the urban population.As confirmed by 2 Latin American case studies in Buenos Aires, Argentina, and La Paz Bolivia, the quality of urban environment depends directly on improving living conditions for the resident population. The aim is to assist the poor in developing a rubbish disposal service for the families living in the informal settlements of La Paz, or to extend water supply to the poorer areas on the outskirts of Buenos Aires. The collective benefits of these “innovations” are self-evident. However, understanding the environmental issues involved, and evaluating the social impact of these innovations, means examining what motivates their implementation.The first difficulty was in finding financial and economic information on the global cost of the new technologies, due to the lack of managerial culture and the discretional attitude of private enterprises and public administration.A second observation is that the social dimension of the environmental upgrading process in Latin America cities has been neglected by the main urban decision-makers. In all the contexts, the evolution of the projects’ implementation clearly demonstrates that social issues cannot be dissociated from political ones. Although the players themselves often find it difficult to estimate economic costs, these are nonetheless real and represent burdens that should be distributed equitably among the beneficiaries of services; but which are, in practice, often viewed in terms of profit. This leads to conflicts between different population groups, the political authorities and private intermediaries.Rather than viewing technological action as an unique “source” of innovation, we must consider its global dimension via the social practices it generates. On the other hand, we should reposition every specific event in its immediate environment and see how it reflects contemporary macro-social processes, in a world of “globalisation”.     

Multidisciplinary Team Involvement and Prosecutorial Decisions in Child Sexual Abuse Cases

This study examines the impact of multidisciplinary teams (MDTs) coordinated by Children’s Advocacy Centers (CACs) on the prosecutorial decision to accept or reject cases of child sexual abuse (CSA). This analysis is part of an examination of the utility of CACs as it relates to prosecutorial decisions. Case specific information was obtained on all cases with both child protective services (CPS) law enforcement involvement processed through one Texas CAC, serving multiple counties, from 2010 to 2013. For the purposes of this study one county is listed as rural and one is listed as urban. The study site also unofficially serves several more rural counties. The urban county accounts for approximately 75% of all cases processed through the CAC. The final analyses included 553 cases of alleged CSA. Logistic regression was used to evaluate the utility of MDTs and case coordination among law enforcement and CPS as they relate to prosecutorial decisions. The number of participants at MDT meetings was correlated with an increase in prosecutorial acceptance rates by approximately 30%. Prosecutor presence at MDT meetings was correlated with an increase in acceptance rates by approximately 80%. Official case coordination between law enforcement and CPS was not statistically significant. Results of this study suggest that the MDT model provides a useful tool for prosecutors when determining whether to accept or reject cases of CSA, while official coordination may be less impactful.     

The World Bank and housing policy in Madras

The World Bank began its involvement with housing and urban programmes in 1972, offering a new theory and practice. This new theory emphasised “affordability” and the recovery of costs from the beneficiaries of programmes. It stood in contrast to the conventional way of doing things, with government providing “permanent construction” housing with extensive subsidies. “Affordable” housing would take the form of serviced plots of land on which the occupants arranged their own building (i.e. sites-and-services schemes), and in situ slum upgrading. In Madras, policymakers and senior public servants had a positive attitude to housing, especially for low-income groups. Consequently Madras contains much interest for developing countries generally in an evaluation of World Bank experience there, commencing in 1977.     

Perceptions of intergenerational conflict: The politics of young vs. old in Florida

Not long ago, syndicated columnist Richard Reeves pondered the portents in an aging America and found trouble. “There is a confrontation coming in the United States between the demands of old people and the needs of the whole society,” he declared (Reeves 1988). His premonition is widely shared. Many social prophets are convinced that the graying of America is the prelude to a new politics. It will be the young against the old, they suggest, a politics of age polarization characterized by political mobilization, confrontation and backlash between generations reaching from Congress to city hall. Florida, with the nation's highest proportion of aging and a steady inflow of new retirees, is where many expect such conflict to appear early and often. This article concerns whether Florida is, or soon may be, the arena for such a confrontation and, if so, how it has become manifest.     

The Pune Slum Census: creating a socio-economic and spatial information base on a GIS for integrated and inclusive city development

Urban planning systems rarely include the poor. Cities are growing and so is the urban population. Pune is a large city in Western Maharashtra. According to the National Census, 2001, the population of the Pune urban agglomeration is 3.5 million and it is (in some estimates) to reach nearly 6 million by 2021.¹ Out of this, the city of Pune has a 2.5 million people living in it. Forty percent and above of the population live in slums. One of the biggest shortfalls of Pune's urban planning is that it still fails to include the poor in mainstream policies. The reason is that the poor are hardly known about, in fact, even government authorities are unaware about how many poor people there are in Pune. This attitude, and the fact that Shelter Associates (SA) work is closely connected with the poor regarding basic services and housing, started the development of a slum database by SA. Finally, the Pune Municipal Corporation asked us to make a complete census of the slum dwellers in the year 2000. That gave rise to a detailed survey of Pune's slum dwellers, to become, amongst other things, the first ever spatial and socio-economic census processed and analysed on a geographical information system (GIS). The Pune Slum Census has built upon this experience and expanded the communities’ information base, and has created a methodology which the city can use to work on detailed urban planning using a GIS and with the slum database as the base. This article focuses on the Pune Slum Census in progress.