Instead of seeking theory to justify practical professional judgments this book describes how professionals can and should use theory to guide these judgments. Professional spatial planning in the US, and globally, continues to suffer from a weak conceptual grasp of its own practice. Practitioners routinely recognize the value and wisdom of practical judgment finely attuned to context, nuance and complexity; but later offer banal testimony and glib stories of ‘just so’ best-practice discrediting the ambiguity of their own experience. The chapters in this book provide a vocabulary tailored to the conventions of practical judgment, challenging students and practitioners to treat professional expertise as work in progress rather than ‘best’ practice. Instead of seeking theory to justify practical professional judgments, Hoch describes how professionals can and should use theory to guide these judgments. The pragmatist plan helps cope with complexity rather than control it, making it invaluable in the anyone’s pursuit of a planning career. This book will appeal to a wide cross section of students and scholars, especially those working in urban planning, public policy, and government.
Blending detailed historical perspective with contemporary survey research, Charles Hoch and Robert Slayton argue that the answers to one of the most pressing problems of our time come from the poor themselves. Their examination of the Skid Row single room occupancy hotel (SRO) reveals how communities formed by low-income single-person households have for decades offered the security, personal autonomy, and privacy for the "old" homeless that the "new" homeless lack. And they show how public urban renewal efforts, which destroyed the bulk of these hotels with the intent to rid the inner city of the Skid Row homeless, actually laid the foundation for today's urban homeless crisis. Focusing on Chicago from 1870 to the present, but including case studies in other cities, Hoch and Slayton analyze how these SRO hotels operated in the past and claim that the term "flop house" really described a wide range of shelter types available to the poor according to their economic conditions. Based on their research, the authors conclude that policies for solving the homeless problem should focus mainly not on the homeless people, but on the institutional actors who benefit directly and indirectly from their predicament. This means changing public policies that encourage the destruction of affordable housing, especially SRO hotels, and implementing preservation, rehabilitation, and new construction policies instead. Author note: Charles Hoch is Associate Professor in the School of Urban Planning and Policy at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Robert A. Slayton is Assistant Professor of History at Chapman College and author of Back of the Yards: The Making of a Local Democracy.
Americans with changing lifestyles, nontraditional households, and special needs and interests are increasingly looking for alternatives to the single-family house, and especially for the opportunity to share housing with others for economic, social, and personal reasons. This book reviews the status of shared housing in the U.S. housing market, establishes a research and policy agenda on shared housing as a contribution to the national effort to improve housing affordability and quality, and argues for changing public policy to support it. The book consists of original essays (by Anna Hardman, Sherry Ahrentzen, Jacqueline Leavitt, Jean Butzen, Richard Biddlecombe, Patricia Baron Pollak, Peter Marris, and the editors) on topics such as shared housing in low-income households; shared housing for the elderly; single-room occupancy housing; zoning as a tool for shared housing; and problems associated with shared housing. The authors argue convincingly that current housing policy and regulations, supported by popular opinion, greatly limit the development of multiple-dwelling houses, and they make the case that shared housing can provide an attractive option for low- and moderate-income families who cannot afford suburban homes during a period of economic recession and declining expectations.
Implications for Prevention and Health: Proceedings, Findings, and Expert Recommendations from the Seventh Department of Defense State-of-the-Science Meeting
Implications for Prevention and Health: Proceedings, Findings, and Expert Recommendations from the Seventh Department of Defense State-of-the-Science Meeting
The Seventh Department of Defense State-of-the-Science Meeting examined the risk posed to military personnel by low-level blast exposure, the current evidence base, and potentially promising approaches to prevent and detect blast injuries.
Agrarian Landscapes in Transition researches human interaction with the earth. With hundreds of acres of agricultural land going out of production every day, the introduction, spread, and abandonment of agriculture represents the most pervasive alteration of the Earth's environment for several thousand years. What happens when humans impose their spatial and temporal signatures on ecological regimes, and how does this manipulation affect the earth and nature's desire for equilibrium? Studies were conducted at six Long Term Ecological Research sites within the US, including New England, the Appalachian Mountains, Colorado, Michigan, Kansas, and Arizona. While each site has its own unique agricultural history, patterns emerge that help make sense of how our actions have affected the earth, and how the earth pushes back. The book addresses how human activities influence the spatial and temporal structures of agrarian landscapes, and how this varies over time and across biogeographic regions. It also looks at the ecological and environmental consequences of the resulting structural changes, the human responses to these changes, and how these responses drive further changes in agrarian landscapes. The time frames studied include the ecology of the earth before human interaction, pre-European human interaction during the rise and fall of agricultural land use, and finally the biological and cultural response to the abandonment of farming, due to complete abandonment or a land-use change such as urbanization.
Historians have customarily explained the 1920s in terms of urban-rural conflict, arguing that cultural, ethnic, and economic differences between urban and rural Americans erupted to intensify and influence political conflict in the decade. In Democracy Delayed, Charles W. Eagles uses the issue of congressional reapportionment to examine politics in the 1920s, in particular to test the urban-rural thesis. After the 1920 census, the United States Congress for the first time failed to reapportion the House of Representatives as required by the Constitution. The 1920 enumeration showed that for the first time more people lived in urban areas than in rural areas. During a decade-long stalemate, congressional debates over reapportionment legislation contained repeated examples of violence and hostility as rural representatives resisted acceding to increased urban interests. Eagles points out that previous studies employing the urban-rural theory use an abstract model borrowed from the social sciences. Eagles combines historiography, narrative political history, and legislative roll-call analysis to provide extensive concrete evidence and a more precise definition of the urban-rural interpretation.
Nothing prepares a man for war and Private Charles Waite, of the Queen’s Royal Regiment, was ill-prepared when his convoy took a wrong turning near Abbeville and met 400 German soldiers and half a dozen tanks. ‘The day I was captured, I had a rifle but no ammunition.’ He lost his freedom that day in May 1940 and didn’t regain it until April 1945 when he was rescued by Americans near Berlin, having walked 1,600 kms from East Prussia. Silent for seventy years, Charles writes about his five lost years: the terrible things he saw and suffered; his forced work in a stone quarry and on farms; his period in solitary confinement for sabotage; and his long journey home in one of the worst winters on record, across the frozen river Elbe, to Berlin and liberation. His story is also about friendship, of physical and mental resilience and of compassion for everyone who suffered. Part of that story includes the terrible Long March, or Black March, when 80,000 British POWs were forced to trek through a vicious winter westwards across Poland, Czechoslovakia and Germany as the Soviets approached. Thousands died. There are simply no memoirs of that terrible trek – except this one.
The lineage of American schoolbooks, like that of our educational system, goes back to Europe and, particularly, to England. The first schoolbooks used in the United States were printed in England and for two hundred years a great influx of books came from sources outside this country. However, with the break from England and the emergence of the United States as a nation, text book publishing came into being in America. This book presents a general portrayal of American textbooks, and along with this, as a requisite accompaniment, a picture of the pioneer-day school system insofar as it had to do with production and early usage of schoolbooks. The author shows how the first textbooks came to be, tells of textbook writers, and traces through the bulk of the material presented the changes that most of the textbook authors brought about. The types of books discussed include the New England primers as well as other types of primers; readers, specially the McGuffey readers; rhetoric and foreign language books; arithmetics; spelling books; literature texts; elocution texts; handwriting and copy books; histories; and many other books that made our school systems what they are today. Besides being a study of the textbook field in America, History of American Schoolbooks is also a history of the United States as reflected in the type of teaching and instructional aids used to educate Americans. A study of this subject is by no means just an interesting side trip into America's past. Many of the books are still influential, and many of the old methods are staging a comeback in the educational field, History of American Schoolbooks should be of interest to educators and historians, as well as teachers, librarians, book collectors, publishers, and general readers who are interested in the evolution and growth of a segment of education and educational publishing that is one of the most important and vital in our country.
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