URBAN REGIMES AND NEIGHBORHOOD MOBILIZATION AGAINST URBAN REDEVELOPMENT: The Case of an Arab-Jewish Neighborhood in Israel

ABSTRACT: This study deals with the effects of an urban bureaucratic regime on urban development and neighborhood mobilization. It examines the sociospatial transformations in an Arab-Jewish neighborhood in a major city in Israel. During the period of 1948–1990, the neighborhood experienced population turnover, planned deterioration and decline, and subsequent renewal and gentrification. The paper deals with the factors which shaped those policies and processes. the author argues that the political economy of Israel contributed to the emergence of a bureaucratic urban regime which effectively drove off all private entrepreneurial involvement in the area's development process. It is also shown that the inherent features of the bureaucratic regime facilitated community mobilization opposing development plans and made the governing agencies vulnerable to citizens' protests and court rulings.     

On the optimal control of a stochastic system with discontinuous sample paths

This paper deals with the optimal control of a stochastic n-order system. It is assumed that the system is subjected to two different kinds of perturbations. The first kind of perturbation is represented by a vector of independent standard Wiener processes and the second kind by a vector of a generalized type of Poisson process. By applying the calculus of variations necessary conditions on the optimal controls are derived. These conditions are given by a pair of coupled non-linear partial integro-differential equations, A stochastic second-order system is given, as a test case, and a numerical method for the computation of its optimal controls is suggested. The efficiency and applicability of this method ore demonstrated with examples.     

On the suboptimal control of a heat conduction process

An optimal control problem, concerned with a heat conduction process of a moving material in a furnace, is posed. Due to the stochastic nature of the process only a suboptimal version of the problem is treated. This is done in the following manner. First the process is modelled by using an adequate stochastic partial differential equation. Then, sufficient conditions are found on suboptimal controls in the form of a sot of non-linear partial differential equations. Finally, a central finite differences scheme is proposed to solve the set of equations, and the applicability of the scheme is demonstrated by examples.