Search results

Reviews the relationship between building design and crime. Presents evidence that anti‐social activity is encouraged by bad design. Tabulates features that are “beneficial” and “adverse”. Cites examples where design improvement (DI) has led to a reduction in crime. Concludes that though DI has an initial cost, it tackles the root cause of anti‐social behaviour and benefits the community in quality of life and saves money.

Summarizes the currently available strategies for success in carrying out improvements in the state of housing estates. Discusses the symptoms of the degeneration and outlines the actual problem as estate design, poverty, bad estate management and fuel poverty. Suggests solutions based on improved estate design and estate management, and affordable heating. Declares that the only method of measuring the success of these solutions is in terms of alleviating the symptoms of social breakdown.

The aim of the project entitled Training for the Evaluation and Repair of Non‐Traditional Buildings is to bring together current research, knowledge, practice and development in a range of units, comprising videos and handbooks on a wide spectrum of subjects. These relate to the effective diagnosis, evaluation and repair of defects to non‐traditional buildings, primarily housing. The definition of non‐traditional for this project is any structure not built in load‐bearing masonry walls. It includes concrete‐, timber‐ and steel‐frame; pre‐cast concrete columns, beam panels; large panel construction in concrete; in situ concrete framed multi‐storey blocks using a variety of cladding panels. It covers low‐, medium‐ and high‐rise. It embraces a large number of structures, for example Birmingham City Housing Department term all their housing over six storeys (426 blocks) as non‐traditional as it was not the normal method for housing people in the UK prior to the development of the 1960s. The material, six videos and 22 handbooks, is produced in an open learning style for in‐house or at home study and is intended for use by anyone involved, whether they are clients/owners, professional advisers, or builders. It is intended to bridge gaps in knowledge and stimulate thought and practice procedures in specifying and executing appropriate remedial works.

This paper explores the representation of consequential women in history within children's and young adult biographies.

The data pool was established by developing a list of women's names extracted from common textbooks and state social studies curricula. Early-grade (K-4th) and middle-grade (5th-8th) in-print books were selected for juxtaposition because these students have the least prior knowledge and are perhaps most dependent on the text. Two researchers independently engaged in qualitative content analysis research methods, which included open and axial coding.

Early- and middle-grade biographies aptly established the historical significance of, but largely failed to contextualize, each figure's experiences, accomplishments and contemporaneous tensions. The women were presented as consequential, though their advocacies were not situated within the larger context.

Limitations included a dearth of women featured in both state standards and biographies, limited audience (early and middle grades) and exclusion of out-of-print books. Comparable inquiries into narrative nonfiction, expository texts and historical fiction, which have different emphases than biographies, are areas for future research.

Discussion focused on the significance of findings for teachers and researchers. Early- and middle-grade teachers are guided to contextualize the selected historical figures using primary and secondary source supplements.

No previous scholarship exists on this particular topic. Comparable inquiries examine trade books' depiction of historical significance, not contextualization of continuity and change.

In this chapter, I focus on stigmatization exercised and experienced by local residents, comparing two socially-diverse areas in very different contexts: the Cabrini Green-Near North area in Chicago and the La Loma-La Florida area in Santiago de Chile.

Data for this study were drawn from 1 year of qualitative research, using interviews with residents and institutional actors, field notes from observation sessions of several inter-group spaces, and “spatial inventories” in which I located the traces of the symbolic presence of each group.

Despite contextual differences of type of social differentiation, type of social mix, type of housing tenure for the poor, and public visibility, I argue that there are important common problems: first, symbolic differences are stressed by identity changes; second, distrust against “the other” is spatially crystallized in any type and scale of social housing; third, stigmatization changes in form and scale; and fourth, there are persisting prejudiced depictions and patterns of avoidance.

Socially-mixed neighborhoods, as areas where at least two different social groups live in proximity, offer an interesting context for observing territorial stigmatization. They are strange creatures of urban development, due to the powerful symbolism of desegregation in contexts of growing inequalities.

The chapter contributes to a cross-national perspective with a comparison of global-north and global-south cities. And it also springs from a study of socially-mixed areas, in which the debate on concentrated/deconcentrated poverty is central, and in which the problem of “clearing places” appears in both material (e.g., displacement) and symbolic (e.g., stigmatization) terms.

Time to Move On After 15 years working within the profession, eight of which were spent as a chartered librarian, I am completing my first month as the Senior Information and Advice Officer for the London Borough of Newham's Youth Service.

Recent criminological attention has tended to focus upon those areas from which direct policy proposals can be made, whether it be to improve the ways in which the criminal justice system treats victims or the specific measures that can be taken to prevent specific types of crime and criminal. Two areas in particular have proved fruitful: the ‘broken windows’ thesis of Kelling and Wilson has led to studies of crime prevention strategies, including ways in which communities can be encouraged to self‐police, and the work of Levi, Burrows, McBarnet and others has focused attention upon the attitudes of those involved in the financial services sector towards financial and business crime. It is argued that the issue of gender has been largely ignored in the consideration of financial crime; that aspects of the ‘broken windows’ thesis lend themselves to consideration in the context of financial crime, and that to investigate attitudes towards female criminality in the context of the financial services sector — to look for ‘Ms Big’ — may throw unexpected light upon the reported incidence of both male and female criminality in this area. Since the inception of criminology the issue of the involvement of women in crime has been problematic. Theories about women's criminality have frequently taken a basically biological stance; although more recently this view has been challenged by (female) criminologists, nevertheless there has been a tendency cither to ignore the question of whether there are different attitudinal factors at play, or to assume that the best explanation for the persistence of the ratio of male to female crime must lie in women's biology and psychology. Of course, originally biological and psychological explanations for criminality were not given solely for women alone. Yet whereas the general failure of criminology to provide a causal theory for criminality led to a change of emphasis in the nature of its concerns, moving on to consider specific types of criminal and criminal activity, such as delinquency, the behaviour of gangs, rational choice‐making by burglars, and the like, the exploration of gender in specific types of criminality has largely fallen by the wayside. Yet the positivist notion, that the difference in recorded criminality rates for the sexes reflects reality, can still be detected in the persistence of the question ‘Why do women commit less crime than men?’ The idea that reported and recorded crime rates can be safely taken as ‘true’ has been abandoned otherwise, and indeed the way in which crime statistics are produced has become a topic of study in its own right. One issue that has been raised in relation to females and crime is whether there is a ‘new’ female criminal. This idea sought to link together female emancipation and rates and types of crime committed. The evidence for this has been much criticised, however, it being pointed out by Smart that not only do the statistics, when compared over a 40‐year period, cast doubt upon the asserted recent percentage increase, but that in its own way this is another monocausal explanation. Moreover, it ignores the effect that the existence of the women's movement may have upon ‘significant defining agencies such as the police and the courts’. In short, utilising other theoretical developments in criminology, feminists have formed what might be called ‘critiques from within’: that is, if the premises of criminology are correct, they should be able to cope with female criminality: criminogenic factors should be able to explain the comparative level of female criminality as opposed to that of males. Thus, by adopting the so‐called ‘strain’ theories one may re‐evaluate the role of social structure, power and privilege in the economic relations of society to suggest that women are systematically deprived of access to sources of power and prestige, although this again treats women as an homogeneous group. Furthermore, these factors are not sufficient to explain the level of criminality either individually or at aggregated levels, for women should be among the most criminal and more women should be criminal. As Morris says, a theory that cannot explain this, cannot even be said to be an adequate explanation for male criminality. This is not to deny that the targets of criminology today are thought‐provoking. For a number of reasons current criminology takes on more specific targets than the production of grand theory: it looks at policing and policers, regulation and regulators, victimisation, specific venues for crime: it looks towards the creation of policy and the establishment of a body of crime‐and‐victim‐specific data. The redefinition of the subject‐matter of criminology, to include not only objective crime but perceptions of crime, has also encom‐passed the realisation that the definition of deviance relates not only to delinquency but also to those in the upper socio‐economic strata. For example, the ability of certain advantaged participants actively to define and redefine the boundaries between the legal and the illegal has been raised, notably by McBarnet. Such developments have also occurred in what was once known only as ‘white‐collar crime’. Suitable topics for attention now include the evaluation of self‐regulation versus criminal law as effective sanctions, the rating of different crimes in terms of their seriousness by those in the financial services sector, the attitude of those employed to enforce the self‐policing of the regulated sectors of the economy to the police and indeed their definition of what is, and is not, ‘criminal’ behaviour in normal busi‐ness life. Yet whilst the effect of the criminal justice system in differentially sanctioning and sentencing offenders has been looked at in terms of the gender of the offender, those working in the specific area of financial crime and the financial services sector do not appear to have linked together the type of crime with the gender of the offender. There would appear to be good reason to do so.

About two years ago Professor Peter Hall gave a series of lectures at an Oxford college on the subject of regional planning, and devoted an entire lecture to a definition of planning. I have no wish to emulate such a performance, but perhaps I can spend some preliminary minutes in establishing what it is I am going to talk about. The more one reads and listens the more apparent it becomes that the word ‘planning’ means all things to all men—from planning next year's summer holiday to planning the American space programme. In all cases, though, there are common features. There is a goal to be achieved. The achievement of that goal is generally subject to a certain number of constraints, or limiting factors, such as the amount of time available or a limit on the financial budget. In most cases, also, there are several ways of achieving the goal and these have to be evaluated in terms of respective advantages and disadvantages, taking into account the known constraints, and one of them selected as the optimum solution. If this is then adopted as the plan, it has to be put into action, and of course the more complex the plan the longer the period of its implementation and, during that period, fresh constraints may arise, conditions may change and continuous modifications have to be made to the original statement of intent to adapt it to changing circumstances.

We introduce a multi-level model of the dependence of interfirm network topologies on the distribution and commonality of information in a network and the information strategies pursued by its member firms. Network topology, information properties of the network, and firm-level action within the network form dynamic, recursive, cross-level relationships – information properties in the network determine firm-level action, which in turn impacts the network topology and information properties. We derive predictions about the kinds of information strategies that firms are likely to adopt and succeed with in different information regimes, and about the kinds and short- and long-run dynamics of network topologies expected under different information regimes. Our model sheds new light on network topologies as a dependent variable that can be explained by network-level information regimes and firm-level information strategies.

Who will lead Ambridge in the years to come? Theories rooted in psychology and political science, when applied to family dynamics in The Archers, allow for some educated guesses. Social learning theory suggests that children who see their parents vote, run for office and participate in other civic activities are more likely to do the same in adulthood. Emma Grundy did just that when she followed in the footsteps of her father, Neil Carter, in winning a seat on the parish council. Previous research has found that birth order also can shape future leaders, with the eldest child more likely to benefit developmentally from parents' undivided attention in the early years, and also more likely to establish a hierarchy of power over younger siblings. With these factors in mind, who are the most probable contenders to lead Ambridge in the spheres of politics, business and civic affairs? The extant research points to Pip Archer, Lily Pargetter, Phoebe Aldridge and George Grundy. The unique circumstances of Ruairi Donovan's childhood suggest he may also be a formidable candidate. And, as is the case in so many contexts, one would be wise not to overlook Molly Button.