CITIZEN ATTITUDES ABOUT SERVICE DELIVERY MODES

ABSTRACT: This research seeks to analyze citizens' understanding of and attitudes toward modes of public service delivery. The work is based upon a survey of citizens in the Southeastern Michigan area around and including Detroit. It includes measures of citizens' understanding of how their services are delivered, their satisfaction with their service delivery, the accuracy of their understanding, and their attitudes about how services should be delivered. The research finds little support for service delivery arrangements affecting satisfaction. It also finds that citizens are frequently incorrect about how their service is delivered, though this is less the case if somewhat relaxed standards are used. Finally, the survey data indicate the vast majority of residents prefer services delivered teh eay they perceive them to be delivered and want no change. If public officials actually consider citizen attitudes in their policy making in this arena, they need to be aware that such reluctance to change may impede experiments with alternative service arrangements.     

Is your training on tracks

Training has reached a status akin to motherhood: a 100% approval rating. So, for all businesses the clarion call has gone out: if you want to be more profitable, train your staff; if you want to attract the best staff, offer training. So what's available, how do you choose and what benefits accrue? Availability is no problem. Training is one of the growth industries of the past ten years. There is a course available for any skill you want to learn, likewise for any skill you want to improve. This then presents the first dilemma: how do you select training? The logical route is to start with the definable needs of the business. Where are we short of skills, where are we lagging behind our competitors, where are the new opportunities to be grasped? Then you need to fit this to your staff. Who needs these extra skills, who will benefit from them and in so doing benefit the business? Here you hit one of the classic dilemmas of training: can you afford to lose the person you want trained while they're being trained? This paper discusses these issues.     

Familification: Family,Neighborhood Change,and Housing Policy

This paper proposes the term familification to describe one type of gentrification: the process of neighborhood change by families moving into a neighborhood. This study, drawing upon in-depth interviews, document analysis, and ethnographic observations, focuses on an urban familification program—one city's attempt to benefit families by restricting participation in its downtown housing programs. The paper first describes the programs and then explores how leaders, program participants, and neighbors understand the programs' intentions and effects. While family is not prominent in the programs' grant proposals, leaders indicated that promoting traditional families was a central objective. Implementing these programs revealed difficulties in defining family and in managing the programs' outcomes. Implications for fair housing laws are considered, and it is argued that fostering diversity in family life course stages may be a compelling government interest to promote neighborhood stability, and an inclusive strategy for urban development.     

Staying Put! A Housing Pathway Analysis of Residential Stability in Belgium

Governments all over the world try to influence in one way or another the residential mobility of their citizens. This article takes the vantage point of why Belgians do not want to change residence a lot and how they actually succeed in doing this. We claim that the framework of a housing pathways approach helps to get to grips with the historically built-up archive of normalizing discourses and practices related to housing and diverse other domains of life. Our in-depth interviews with 67 residents reveal that normalizing discourses and practices on becoming and remaining a stable home-owner mainly support the two pillars of Belgian housing policy (home ownership and commuting) even when these practices and discourses further endorse ecological and accessibility problems. Policies that successfully want to change the relocation practices of people do have to take this archive seriously.     

社区意识引导下的文态空间研究

社区建设是一项广受关注的重要课题.近些年来随着住宅消费观念的提高,从"居者有其屋"发展到"居者优其屋",只有"以人为本",进一步研究居民的社区意识,进行相应的文态空间建设,研究其作为住区中良性引导空间的存在价值,才能更好地利于、促进文化交流,增强文化底蕴.     

Is ‘Citizen Kid’ an Independent Kid? The Relationship between Children's Independent Mobility and Active Citizenship

Children want to engage with their city and have freedom to explore and learn. CATCH (Children, Active Travel, Connectedness and Health) is a three-year research project investigating local environment influences on children's independent mobility, social connectedness and health in four Australian cities. In this project, ‘active citizenship’ as well as children's ability to articulate local environmental preferences through photo collages correlated with higher levels of independent mobility. Taking a social constructivist perspective, these results are analyzed to explain how children's active citizenship might be grounded in experiences of local neighbourhood and what this might mean for children and cities.     

工程总承包是设计企业发展的新动力

结合设计院的发展实际,就设计单位从事工程总承包（EPC）的优势、工程总承包有利于提高设计院的综合实力、工程总承包是设计企业发展的新动力等几个方面进行了论述。     

Go Public!

Problem: While mortgage foreclosures are devastating communities across the United States, few planners know how to access the data necessary to document the number of foreclosures, where they are located, how the problem has changed over time, or how many households are affected, in order to assess how foreclosures affect borrowers, renters, and communities. There is no national dataset with foreclosure information, and in many communities, this information is buried in county property records, state legal files, and property auction lists.

Purpose: This article explains foreclosure as a process and describes how to use publicly available data to study foreclosure and inform outreach efforts. It shows how a collaborative effort among researchers and practitioners can produce useful data and analysis to reduce incidences of foreclosure. It concludes with suggestions for improving data access and quality.

Methods: The main foreclosure data used in the illustrative examples in this article were gathered from foreclosure court records and enhanced with data from property sales and tax records, Home Mortgage Disclosure Act data, and foreclosure sale records.

Results and conclusions: Although records on property foreclosures, real estate owned properties, and loan servicers are publicly available, accessing them, combining information from different records, and correcting mistakes to make them useful for analysis is time consuming and costly. Teams of researchers, public officials, and non-profits in a number of places, including one involving the author, have collaborated to build local foreclosure datasets using public data, producing accurate, property-level data that planners can use to guide policy, target direct outreach to at-risk borrowers and renters, and purchase distressed properties.

Takeaway for practice: Public entities hold some of the best data available on the foreclosure crisis but, in most places, accessing it involves considerable time, effort, and money. When researchers and practitioners work collaboratively to access and analyze these data their joint efforts can transform data-sharing practices and institutions, facilitating wider access and use in the future.

Research support: This research was supported by the Fund for New Jersey, NeighborWorks America, Local Initiatives Support Corporation (LISC), the Michael J. and Susan Angelides Public Policy Research Fund, the Edward J. Bloustein School of Planning and Public Policy at Rutgers University, Essex County, Hudson County/Jersey City, and Union County.     

“I Will Try My Best to Make It Worth It”: Robert Venturi's Road to Rome

Robert Venturi's Rome Prize fellowship (1954–56) is a familiar, pivotal episode in his early career. But why did he want to go to the American Academy in the early 1950s? Venturi approached his fellowship with rare determination at a time when modernism made the Rome Prize's architectural relevance unclear. What made him certain this opportunity would be the key to his success, and how did this influence the book he published a decade later? As Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture marks its fiftieth anniversary, clarifying why Venturi valued the Rome Prize further illuminates his views on history, context, and meaningful design.     

从绿色社区评估标准看社区特色

绿色社区评估标准里,对社区特色做了初步界定。本文从绿色社区的定义出发,说明绿色社区中的社区特色应该包含的内容,并通过福州融侨锦江的具体实例加以说明,进而对如何创建社区特色提出建议。     

Interpretations: “New Ideas in Planning”

A critical planning task is recognizing and addressing uncertainty. Actual problems vary in uncertainty over means and ends. If people agree on what they want and how to achieve it, then certainty prevails and planning is rational application of knowledge. If they agree on what they want but do not know how to achieve it, then planning becomes a learning process; if they do not agree on what they want but do know how to achieve alternatives, then planning becomes a bargaining process; if they agree on neither means nor ends, then planning becomes part of the search for order in chaos. Each prototype situation suggests a particular range of planning styles. Planners should tailor their styles to problem conditions. By acting contingently they can use reason to cope with uncertainty.     

加强社区消防安全网格化管理的做法

消防安全关乎人民群众生命财产安全,随着经济社会的飞速发展,消防安全管理工作也面临着新的挑战.社区是构成社会的基础内容和有机单元,社区的情况直接反映着社会的整体基本情况.社区的消防安全管理作为社会消防安全管理体系的组成部分,在新形势下,如何加强和改进社区消防安全管理工作成为了一个亟待研究和解决的问题.文章主要分析了当前社区消防安全网格化管理工作现状和存在的主要问题,在此基础上,以T市X区为例,探讨了如何加强社区消防安全网格化管理,并提出了下一步解决对策,为社区消防安全网格化管理工作提供一定的参考,更好地服务于经济社会发展,保障人民群众生命财产安全.     

Kieran Timberlake Associates

Nothing about the beautifully detailed buildings that Steven Kieran, James Timberlake and their colleagues are creating, mostly for schools and colleges, suggests that they have a radical agenda. There are no crazy shapes, dayglo colours or other attention-grabbing devices in them. But what these architects are doing in their built work, research and teaching attempts no less than to change the way that buildings are made. Jayne Merkel explains how they are expanding the architect's sphere beyond mere ‘design’ to become ‘master builders’ of a uniquely 21st-century kind - developing new materials and ways to save energy, and introducing methods of collaboration and fabrication drawn from the automobile, aeroplane and shipbuilding industries. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Shifting Shores: Managing Challenge and Change on the Lizard Peninsula,Cornwall, UK

In this paper, we look at how landscape and climate change are simultaneously apprehended through institutional strategies and then negotiated through local knowledge and social relations on the ground. We argue that by examining landscapes that are practised, embodied and lived, it is possible to gain an understanding of people's actions, beliefs and values in relation to climate and climate change. This attention to cultural landscapes also enables us to ask how a variety of publics make sense of climate change, and how they are invited to do so by organisations that take responsibility for the management and preservation of landscape, such as the National Trust, Europe's biggest conservation organisation. This paper considers how the Trust makes sense of climate change via the document Shifting Shores and how its strategies are operationalised on the Lizard Peninsula, Cornwall, UK.     

Preserving and maintaining the concept of Letchworth Garden City

In 1903, the world's first garden city was founded in Hertfordshire, England. The utopian dream to combine the best of town and country living was about to be progressed from concept to reality. A hundred and ten years later, Letchworth Garden City is a thriving town of 33,000 people who enjoy living in a place of beauty, underpinned by a strong sense of identity and community. This paper examines how the legacy of the original garden city masterplan by Parker and Unwin is protected. It considers how the town manages its architectural heritage while striving to maintain its economic viability and responsiveness to today's challenges. The paper also discusses how a Community Benefit Society – The Letchworth Garden City Heritage Foundation – manages the town's social reinvestment model, which ensures that commercial earnings within the town are shared for the benefit of local communities. The paper looks at the Heritage Foundation's governance structure and how it is accountable to the local residents and businesses. A case study summarizing a community consultation exercise to consider the future of the town centre is also included.     

Engineers and power. The engineering contribution to the managerialand political process

Engineers have a profound influence on the future of their organisations and societies. But how is this represented in political and managerial processes, and can a better understanding of the nature of power help focus their contribution? This article takes a fresh look at the nature of managerial and political power. It argues that the core contribution of engineers to management and politics-if they want a voice-must be in leading and managing change     

Green ideas travelling across organizational boundaries

In the last few decades, environmental commitment has become a powerful discursive means of mobilizing actors and developing distinct organizational identity. However, the prevalent uncertainty in society concerning the interpretation and operationalization of concepts, such as ‘green’, ‘sustainable’, ‘environment’ and ‘ecology’ allows for interpretative flexibility. Accordingly, individual members or groups of members in organizations operationalize the concept green in ways that make sense to their working contexts' specific ontology, epistemology and ideology. Based on a comparative case study of three Swedish municipal housing companies, the paper examines how green ideas are translated as they travel across organizational boundaries, and how these notions become embedded within different organizational processes, and thus set external as well as internal boundaries. The underlying assumption is that the meaning of ‘green’ shifts depending on which organization and sphere of society is in perspective. Therefore, the paper traces spatial shifts in meanings of ‘green’ as these travel across organizational boundaries, from the local governmental authority, via the Parent company, to the three individual companies studied. Comparing the companies' official environmental statements with the organizational members' representations of green shows discrepancies in talk and action, which may have implications for the companies' internal identity as well as for the creation of an external image. Furthermore, these discrepancies are traced to different communities of action and practice, i.e. those who make strategic environmental decisions in the companies are not the same as those who possess environmental expertise.

Au cours de ces dernières années, les préoccupations environnementales sont devenues un puissant moyen discursif de mobilisation des acteurs et de développement d'une identité organisationnelle distincte. Or, l'incertitude qui règne dans la société en ce qui concerne l'interprétation et l'exploitation de concepts tels que «vert», «durable», «environnement» et «écologie» autorise une certaine souplesse. En conséquence, des membres individuels ou des groupes de membres d'organisations exploitent le concept «vert» de manière à donner du sens à l'ontologie, à l'épistémologie et à l'idéologie propres au contexte de travail. S'appuyant sur une étude de cas comparative de trois entreprises suédoises de construction de logements municipaux, l'auteur de cet article examine comment les concepts écologiques se transforment lorsqu'ils traversent des frontières à l'intérieur des organisations et comment ces notions s'inscrivent dans différents processus organisationnels et fixent ainsi des limites externes et internes. L'hypothèse sous-jacente est que la notion de « vert » se déplace en fonction de l'organisation et de la sphère de la société mises en perspective. Cet article retrace donc ces déplacements dans l'espace de la signification du concept «vert» lorsqu'il traverse des limites organisationnelles, de l'administration locale, via la société-mère, jusqu'aux trois entreprises individuelles étudiées. Lorsque l'on compare les déclarations environnementales officielles de ces entreprises au concept de «vert» affiché par les membres des organisations, on voit apparaître des différences dans le discours et dans l'action qui peuvent avoir des incidences sur l'identité interne des entreprises et sur la création d'une image externe. En outre, on fait remonter ces différences jusqu'aux différentes communautés d'action et de pratique, c'est-à-dire que celles qui prennent des décisions environnementales stratégiques ne sont pas les mêmes que celles qui possèdent les compétences en matière d'environnement.

Mots clés: Communauté d'action, communauté de pratiques, bâtiments verts, construction de l'identité, innovation, culture de l'organisation, mise en oeuvre des politiques, donner du sens, déplacement des idées     

Whole Community Resilience: An Asset-Based Approach to Enhancing Adaptive Capacity Before a Disruption

Problem, research strategy, and findings: Conventional hazard mitigation and pre-disaster recovery planning processes typically begin with hazard scenarios that illustrate probable events and analyze their impacts on the built environment. The processes conclude with responses to the hypothetical disruption that focus on “hardening” buildings or structures or removing them from threatened areas. These approaches understate the importance of natural and social sources of adaptive capacity. Three “proof-of-principle” exercises designed to strengthen the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA)'s Risk MAP (Risk Mapping, Assessment, and Planning) process in Washington State suggest how better to conduct hazard mitigation and recovery planning. Each begins with workshops where stakeholders identify built, natural, and social assets that contribute to human wellbeing (HWB) before introducing earthquake scenarios that affect HWB. Participants then identify assets that could facilitate adaptation to changed circumstances (a “new normal”). Participants discuss how these assets would achieve the goals of comprehensive community planning as well as hazard mitigation and recovery from disaster. Neighborhood-scale social organization emerges as an important priority.

Takeaway for practice: Asset-based approaches enable communities to better recover from disaster and adapt to a post-disaster “new normal.” By premising planning discussions on a more holistic set of assets, communities can balance physical recovery goals with qualities that help them to adapt to future change. Furthermore, thinking about recovering before an event actually occurs can enlarge the menu of mitigation strategies. Planning for adaptation can also help communities achieve many non-risk-related objectives.     

儿童参与视角下“校社共建”社区花园 营造模式研究

在快速城市化背景下,如何在增加儿童接触自然机会的同时实现社区花园的可持续营造成为重要研究课题。通过对儿童参与理论及国内外案例的研究分析,提出将儿童参与运用到社区花园营造中的必要性和可能性。结合在长沙市八字墙社区和丰泉古井社区开展的社区花园实践,提出"校社共建"的社区花园营造模式,并从社区花园设计、参与主体意识和多方合作3个层面提出建议,总结儿童参与视角下社区花园营造的重要意义及可行性,为后续儿童参与社区花园营造提供借鉴和参考。