1761 books match the query 'Public Policy' and 18 start with j

cover of Jane Jacobs: Urban Visionary

Jane Jacobs

Urban Visionary

Alice Sparberg Alexiou

Rutgers University Press, 2006

Today, we take for granted the wisdom of renovating old factory buildings into malls or condos, of making once decaying waterfronts into vibrant public spaces, of protecting historic buildings under landmark laws, and of building public housing on a human scale rather than as high-rises. In contemporary cities, it is now common for community groups to plant gardens in empty lots and to buy abandoned apartment buildings from the city for a dollar and fix them up.

But these and other urban planning policies and practices have not always been accepted. Before they became widespread, they were the visionary ideas of the writer and urban commentator Jane Jacobs. Best known in the United States for her path-breaking efforts to preserve the character of Greenwich Village, Jacobs is the author of the classic 1961 book, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, one of the most influential works ever published in urban studies. The architectural critic Herbert Muschamp wrote in the New York Times that its publication “was one of twentieth-century architecture’s most traumatic events. Its impact is still felt in cities across the land.” 

 In this analysis of Jane Jacobs’s ideas and work, Alice Sparberg Alexiou tells the remarkable story of a woman who without any formal training in planning became a prominent spokesperson for sensible urban change. Besides writing the seminal book about contemporary cities, Jacobs organized successful community battles in New York against powerful interests. She resisted urban renewal in the West Village in the 1960s, helped defeat the Lower Manhattan Expressway, advocated the pleasures of street life that she called “sidewalk ballet,” and opposed the original Twin Towers plans. She was also active in the anti–Vietnam War movement, which eventually led her to move to Canada. There she continued her grass-roots activism, including helping to prevent the construction of an expressway that would have cut through several neighborhoods in Toronto.

Based on a rich array of interviews and primary source material, this book brings long-overdue attention to Jacobs’s far-reaching influence as an original thinker and effective activist.

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cover of Japanese Cities

Japanese Cities

edited by Kuniko Fujita and Richard Child Hill

Temple University Press, 1993

Japan is the world's second most powerful economy and one of the most urbanized nations on earth. Yet English-language literature contains remarkable little about cities in Japan. This collection of original essays on Japanese urban and industrial development covers a broad spectrum of city experiences. Leading Japanese and Western urbanists analyze Japan's largest metropolitan areas (Tokyo, Osaka, Nagoya); proto-typical industrial cities (Kamaishi, Kitakyushu, Toyota); high technology urban satellites (Kanagawa); and smaller, more traditionally organized industrial districts (Tsubame). This book demonstrates how Japan's flexible economic growth strategies and changing relationship to the world economy have produced a uniquely Japanese pattern of urban development in this century.

Throughout the essays that describe individual cities, contributors provide commentary on each city's twentieth-century history and functional relations with other cities and focus on the dynamic linkage between global relations and local activities. They examine the role of government—central, prefectural, and local—in the restructuring of Japanese industrial and urban life. One essay is devoted to the urbanization process in pre-World War II Japan; another considers urban planning on the western Pacific Rim. This is the first book that analyzes how the economic transformation of Japan has restructured Japanese cities and how urban and regional development policies have kept pace with (and in some ways effected) changes in the economy.

This comprehensive study of Japanese cities provides interdisciplinary coverage of urban development issues of interest to the fields of economics, business, sociology, political science, history, Asian and Japanese studies, and urban planning.

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cover of Japanese Foodways, Past and Present

Japanese Foodways, Past and Present

Edited by Eric C. Rath and Stephanie Assmann

University of Illinois Press, 2010

Spanning nearly six hundred years of Japanese food culture, Japanese Foodways, Past and Present considers the production, consumption, and circulation of Japanese foods from the mid-fifteenth century to the present day in contexts that are political, economic, cultural, social, and religious. Diverse contributors--including anthropologists, historians, sociologists, a tea master, and a chef--address a range of issues such as medieval banquet cuisine, the tea ceremony, table manners, cookbooks in modern times, food during the U.S. occupation period, eating and dining out during wartimes, the role of heirloom vegetables in the revitalization of rural areas, children's lunches, and the gentrification of blue-collar foods.
 
Framed by two reoccurring themes--food in relation to place and food in relation to status--the collection considers the complicated relationships between the globalization of foodways and the integrity of national identity through eating habits. Focusing on the consumption of Western foods, heirloom foods, once-taboo foods, and contemporary Japanese cuisines, Japanese Foodways, Past and Present shows how Japanese concerns for and consumption of food has relevance and resonance with other foodways around the world.
 
Contributors are Stephanie Assmann, Gary Soka Cadwallader, Katarzyna Cwiertka, Satomi Fukutomi, Shoko Higashiyotsuyanagi, Joseph R. Justice, Michael Kinski, Barak Kushner, Bridget Love, Joji Nozawa, Tomoko Onabe, Eric C. Rath, Akira Shimizu, George Solt, David E. Wells, and Miho Yasuhara.
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cover of Jean Paton and the Struggle to Reform American Adoption

Jean Paton and the Struggle to Reform American Adoption

E. Wayne Carp

University of Michigan Press, 2013

Jean Paton (1908–2002) fought tirelessly to reform American adoption and to overcome prejudice against adult adoptees and women who give birth out of wedlock. Paton wrote widely and passionately about the adoption experience, corresponded with policymakers as well as individual adoptees, promoted the psychological well-being of adoptees, and facilitated reunions between adoptees and their birth parents. E. Wayne Carp's masterful biography brings to light the accomplishments of this neglected civil-rights pioneer, who paved the way for the explosive emergence of the adoption reform movement in the 1970s. Her unflagging efforts over five decades helped reverse harmful policies, practices, and laws concerning adoption and closed records, struggles that continue to this day.


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cover of Jews Welcome Coffee: Tradition and Innovation in Early Modern Germany

Jews Welcome Coffee

Tradition and Innovation in Early Modern Germany

Robert Liberles

Brandeis University Press, 2012

Tracing the introduction of coffee into Europe, Robert Liberles challenges long-held assumptions about early modern Jewish history and shows how the Jews harnessed an innovation that enriched their personal, religious, social, and economic lives. Focusing on Jewish society in Germany in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and using coffee as a key to understanding social change, Liberles analyzes German rabbinic rulings on coffee, Jewish consumption patterns, the commercial importance of coffee for various social strata, differences based on gender, and the efforts of German authorities to restrict Jewish trade in coffee, as well as the integration of Jews into society.
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cover of Jobs Aren't Enough: Toward a New Economic Mobility for Low-Income Families

Jobs Aren't Enough

Toward a New Economic Mobility for Low-Income Families

Roberta Rehner Iversen and Annie Laurie Armstrong

Temple University Press, 2006

This unflinching examination of the obstacles to economic mobility for low-income families exposes the ugly reality that lies beneath the shining surface of the American Dream. The fact is that nearly 25% of employed adults have difficulty supporting their families today. In eye-opening interviews, twenty-five workers and nearly a thousand people who are linked to them—children, teachers, job trainers, and employers—tell wrenching stories about "trying to get ahead." Spanning five cities over five years, this study convincingly demonstrates that prevailing ideas about opportunity, merit, and "bootstraps" are outdated. As the authors show, some workers who believe the myths end up destroying their health and families in the process of trying to "move up." Jobs Aren't Enough demonstrates that the social institutions of family, education, labor market, and policy all intersect to influence—and inhibit—employment mobility. It proposes a new mobility paradigm grounded in cooperation and collaboration across social institutions, along with revitalization of the "public will."
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cover of Jobs and Economic Development in Minority Communities

Jobs and Economic Development in Minority Communities

edited by Paul Ong and Anastasia Loukaitou-Sideris

Temple University Press, 2006

Over the past four decades, the forces of economic restructuring, globalization, and suburbanization, coupled with changes in social policies have dimmed hopes for revitalizing minority neighborhoods in the U.S. Community economic development offers a possible way to improve economic and employment opportunities in minority communities. In this authoritative collection of original essays, contributors evaluate current programs and their prospects for future success.Using case studies that consider communities of African-Americans, Latinos, Asian immigrants, and Native Americans, the book is organized around four broad topics. "The Context" explores the larger demographic, economic, social, and physical forces at work in the marginalization of minority communities. "Labor Market Development" discusses the factors that shape supply and demand and examines policies and strategies for workforce development. "Business Development" focuses on opportunities and obstacles for minority-owned businesses. "Complementary Strategies" probes the connections between varied economic development strategies, including the necessity of affordable housing and social services.Taken together, these essays offer a comprehensive primer for students as well as an informative overview for professionals.
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cover of Johannesburg: The Elusive Metropolis

Johannesburg

The Elusive Metropolis

Sarah Nuttall and Achille Mbembe, eds.

Duke University Press, 2008

Johannesburg: The Elusive Metropolis is a pioneering effort to insert South Africa’s largest city into urban theory, on its own terms. Johannesburg is Africa’s premier metropolis. Yet theories of urbanization have cast it as an emblem of irresolvable crisis, the spatial embodiment of unequal economic relations and segregationist policies, and a city that responds to but does not contribute to modernity on the global scale. Complicating and contesting such characterizations, the contributors to this collection reassess classic theories of metropolitan modernity as they explore the experience of “city-ness” and urban life in post-apartheid South Africa. They portray Johannesburg as a polycentric and international city with a hybrid history that continually permeates the present. Turning its back on rigid rationalities of planning and racial separation, Johannesburg has become a place of intermingling and improvisation, a city that is fast developing its own brand of cosmopolitan culture.

The volume’s essays include an investigation of representation and self-stylization in the city, an ethnographic examination of friction zones and practices of social reproduction in inner-city Johannesburg, and a discussion of the economic and literary relationship between Johannesburg and Maputo, Mozambique’s capital. One contributor considers how Johannesburg’s cosmopolitan sociability enabled the anticolonial projects of Mohandas Ghandi and Nelson Mandela. Journalists, artists, architects, writers, and scholars bring contemporary Johannesburg to life in ten short pieces, including reflections on music and megamalls, nightlife, built spaces, and life for foreigners in the city.

Contributors: Arjun Appadurai, Carol A. Breckenridge, Lindsay Bremner, David Bunn, Fred de Vries, Nsizwa Dlamini, Mark Gevisser, Stefan Helgesson, Julia Hornberger, Jonathan Hyslop, Grace Khunou, Frédéric Le Marcis, Xavier Livermon, John Matshikiza, Achille Mbembe, Robert Muponde, Sarah Nuttall, Tom Odhiambo, Achal Prabhala, AbdouMaliq Simone

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cover of Judging Children As Children: A Proposal for a Juvenile Justice System

Judging Children As Children

A Proposal for a Juvenile Justice System

Michael A. Corriero

Temple University Press, 2007

At a time when America's court system increasingly tries juvenile offenders as adults, Michael Corriero draws directly from his experience as the founding judge of a special juvenile court to propose a new approach to dealing with youthful offenders. Since 1992, Judge Corriero has presided over the Manhattan Youth Part, a New York City court specifically designed to discipline teenage offenders. Its guiding principles, clearly laid out in this book, are that children are developmentally different from adults and that a judge can be a formidable force in shaping the lives of children who appear in court. Judging Children as Children makes a compelling argument for a better system of justice that recognizes the mental, emotional, and physical abilities of young people and provides them with an opportunity to be rehabilitated as productive members of society instead of being locked up in prisons.
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cover of Judging Inequality: State Supreme Courts and the Inequality Crisis

Judging Inequality

State Supreme Courts and the Inequality Crisis

James L. Gibson

Russell Sage Foundation, 2021

Social scientists have convincingly documented soaring levels of political, legal, economic, and social inequality in the United States. Missing from this picture of rampant inequality, however, is any attention to the significant role of state law and courts in establishing policies that either ameliorate or exacerbate inequality. In Judging Inequality, political scientists James L. Gibson and Michael J. Nelson demonstrate the influential role of the fifty state supreme courts in shaping the widespread inequalities that define America today, focusing on court-made public policy on issues ranging from educational equity and adequacy to LGBT rights to access to justice to worker’s rights. 
 
Drawing on an analysis of an original database of nearly 6,000 decisions made by over 900 judges on 50 state supreme courts over a quarter century, Judging Inequality documents two ways that state high courts have crafted policies relevant to inequality: through substantive policy decisions that fail to advance equality and by rulings favoring more privileged litigants (typically known as “upperdogs”). The authors discover that whether court-sanctioned policies lead to greater or lesser inequality depends on the ideologies of the justices serving on these high benches, the policy preferences of their constituents (the people of their state), and the institutional structures that determine who becomes a judge as well as who decides whether those individuals remain in office. 
 
Gibson and Nelson decisively reject the conventional theory that state supreme courts tend to protect underdog litigants from the wrath of majorities. Instead, the authors demonstrate that the ideological compositions of state supreme courts most often mirror the dominant political coalition in their state at a given point in time. As a result, state supreme courts are unlikely to stand as an independent force against the rise of inequality in the United States, instead making decisions compatible with the preferences of political elites already in power. At least at the state high court level, the myth of judicial independence truly is a myth. 
 
Judging Inequality offers a comprehensive examination of the powerful role that state supreme courts play in shaping public policies pertinent to inequality. This volume is a landmark contribution to scholarly work on the intersection of American jurisprudence and inequality, one that essentially rewrites the “conventional wisdom” on the role of courts in America’s democracy. 
 
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cover of Just Around The Corner: The Paradox Of The Jobless Recovery

Just Around The Corner

The Paradox Of The Jobless Recovery

Stanley Aronowitz

Temple University Press, 2005

Americans have always believed that economic growth leads to job growth. In this groundbreaking analysis, Stanley Aronowitz argues that this is no longer true. Just Around the Corner examines the state of the American economy as planned by Democrats and Republicans over the last thirty years. Aronowitz finds that economic growth has become "delinked" from job creation, and that unemployment and underemployment are a permanent condition of our economy. He traces the historical roots of this state of affairs and sees under the surface of booms and busts a continuum of economic austerity that creates financial windfalls for the rich at the expense of most Americans. Aronowitz also explores the cultural and political processes by which we have come to describe and accept economics in the United States. He concludes by presenting a concrete plan of action that would guarantee employment and living wages for all Americans. With both measured analysis and persuasive reasoning, Just Around the Corner provides an indispensable guide to our current economic predicament and a bold challenge to economists and policymakers.
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cover of Just Don't Get Sick: Access to Health Care in the Aftermath of Welfare Reform

Just Don't Get Sick

Access to Health Care in the Aftermath of Welfare Reform

Seccombe, Karen

Rutgers University Press, 2007

The ability to obtain health care is fundamental to the security, stability, and well-being of poor families. Government-sponsored programs provide temporary support, but as families leave welfare for work, they find themselves without access to coverage or care. The low-wage jobs that individuals in transition are typically able to secure provide few benefits yet often disqualify employees from receiving federal aid.

Drawing upon statistical data and in-depth interviews with over five hundred families in Oregon, Karen Seccombe and Kim Hoffman assess the ways in which welfare reform affects the well-being of adults and children who leave the program for work. We hear of asthmatic children whose uninsured but working mothers cannot obtain the preventive medicines to keep them well, and stories of pregnant women receiving little or no prenatal care who end up in emergency rooms with life-threatening conditions.

Representative of poor communities nationwide, the vivid stories recounted here illuminate the critical relationship between health insurance coverage and the ability to transition from welfare to work.
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cover of Just Transitions: Social Justice in the Shift Towards a Low-Carbon World

Just Transitions

Social Justice in the Shift Towards a Low-Carbon World

Edouard Morena

Pluto Press, 2019

In the field of 'climate change', no terrain goes uncontested. The terminological tug of war between activists and corporations, scientists and governments, has seen radical notions of 'sustainability' emptied of urgency and subordinated to the interests of capital. 'Just Transition' is the latest such battleground, and the conceptual keystone of the post-COP21 climate policy world. But what does it really mean?

Just Transition emerged as a framework developed within the trade union movement to encompass a range of social interventions needed to secure workers' and frontline communities' jobs and livelihoods as economies shift to sustainable production. Just Transitions draws on a range of perspectives from the global North and South to interrogate the overlaps, synergies and tensions between various understandings of the Just Transition approach. As the concept is entering the mainstream, has it lost its radical edge, and if so, can it be recovered?

Written by academics and activists from around the globe, this unique edited collection is the first book entirely devoted to Just Transition.
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cover of Just Transitions: Social Justice in the Shift Towards a Low-Carbon World

Just Transitions

Social Justice in the Shift Towards a Low-Carbon World

Edouard Morena

Pluto Press, 2022

In the field of 'climate change', no terrain goes uncontested. The terminological tug of war between activists and corporations, scientists and governments, has seen radical notions of 'sustainability' emptied of urgency and subordinated to the interests of capital. 'Just Transition' is the latest such battleground, and the conceptual keystone of the post-COP21 climate policy world. But what does it really mean?

Just Transition emerged as a framework developed within the trade union movement to encompass a range of social interventions needed to secure workers' and frontline communities' jobs and livelihoods as economies shift to sustainable production. Just Transitions draws on a range of perspectives from the global North and South to interrogate the overlaps, synergies and tensions between various understandings of the Just Transition approach. As the concept is entering the mainstream, has it lost its radical edge, and if so, can it be recovered?

Written by academics and activists from around the globe, this unique edited collection is the first book entirely devoted to Just Transition.
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cover of Justice And School Systems: The Role of the Courts in Education Litigation

Justice And School Systems

The Role of the Courts in Education Litigation

edited by Barbara Flicker

Temple University Press, 1990

This book examines the effectiveness and deficiencies of judicial intervention in solving the problems of discrimination in the nation’s schools. The authors present case studies, surveys, and interviews of the lawyers and judges who participated in the leading cases. And they analyze critical issues that remain unresolved, such as the battle over racial desegregation that still rages in Yonkers, New York.
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cover of Justice and the American Metropolis

Justice and the American Metropolis

Clarissa Rile Hayward

University of Minnesota Press, 2011

Today’s American cities and suburbs are the sites of “thick injustice”—unjust power relations that are deeply and densely concentrated as well as opaque and seemingly intractable. Thick injustice is hard to see, to assign responsibility for, and to change.

Identifying these often invisible and intransigent problems, this volume addresses foundational questions about what justice requires in the contemporary metropolis. Essays focus on inequality within and among cities and suburbs; articulate principles for planning, redevelopment, and urban political leadership; and analyze the connection between metropolitan justice and institutional design. In a world that is progressively more urbanized, and yet no clearer on issues of fairness and equality, this book points the way to a metropolis in which social justice figures prominently in any definition of success.

Contributors: Susan S. Fainstein, Harvard U; Richard Thompson Ford, Stanford U; Gerald Frug, Harvard U; Loren King, Wilfrid Laurier U; Margaret Kohn, U of Toronto; Stephen Macedo, Princeton U; Douglas W. Rae, Yale U; Clarence N. Stone, George Washington U; Margaret Weir, U of California, Berkeley; Thad Williamson, U of Richmond.

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cover of Justice at Work: The Rise of Economic and Racial Justice Coalitions in Cities

Justice at Work

The Rise of Economic and Racial Justice Coalitions in Cities

Marc Doussard

University of Minnesota Press, 2022

A pathbreaking look at how progressive policy change for economic justice has swept U.S. cities

 

In the 2010s cities and counties across the United States witnessed long-overdue change as they engaged more than ever before with questions of social, economic, and racial justice. After decades of urban economic restructuring that intensified class divides and institutional and systemic racism, dozens of local governments countered the conventional wisdom that cities couldn’t address inequality—enacting progressive labor market policies, from $15 minimum wages to paid sick leave.

Justice at Work examines the mutually reinforcing roles of economic and racial justice organizing and policy entrepreneurship in building power and support for policy changes. Bridging urban social movement and urban politics studies, it demonstrates how economic and racial justice coalitions are collectively the critical institution underpinning progressive change. It also shows that urban policy change is driven by “urban policy entrepreneurs” who use public space and the intangible resources of the city to open “agenda windows” for progressive policy proposals incubated through national networks. 

Through case studies of organizing and policy change efforts in cities including Chicago, Seattle, and New Orleans around minimum wages, targeted hiring, paid time off, fair scheduling, and anti-austerity, Marc Doussard and Greg Schrock show that the contemporary wave of successful progressive organizing efforts is likely to endure. Yet they caution that success is dependent on skillful organizing that builds and sustains power at the grassroots—and skillful policy work inside City Hall. By promoting justice at—and increasingly beyond—work, these movements hold the potential to unlock a new model for inclusive economic development in cities. 

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cover of Justice in Public Life

Justice in Public Life

Claire Foster-Gilbert, Jane Sinclair, and James Hawkey

Haus Publishing, 2021

An exploration of the concept of justice, focusing on its place in public service.

The three essays in Justice in Public Life, written by Claire Foster-Gilbert, Jane Sinclair, and James Hawkey, examine the meaning of justice in the twenty-first century, asking how justice can be expressed by our public service institutions and in society more widely. They consider whether justice is tied to truth and whether our idea of justice is skewed when we conflate it with fairness. They also explore how justice as a virtue can help us navigate the complexities of life in economics, in wider society, and in righting wrongs. In addition, their essays consider the threats to a just society, including human nature itself, the inheritance of unjust structures, the wide range of views about what constitutes justice, and the difficulty of establishing it globally and between nation-states. Justice in Public Life brings an often abstract concept to life, calling on public servants to nurture justice as a virtue pursued both individually and communally.
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