Search results

In much of the literature written in Sustainability and Environmental Justice, the focus is on the effects of government mismanagement or corporate social irresponsibility, or CSR ignored for the goal of greater profits. Certainly we have seen natural resources ripped from communities and nations for the benefit of corporate profits (Sarkar, 2013). The idea that a participatory government will lead to greater efforts for sustainability must be viewed in the light of its times and economy (Gonzalez-Perez, 2013). What happens when the man-made disaster precedes or clashes with natural disaster? The Great Recession of 2008 was stunning in the rapidity with which it spread around the globe. The recession illustrated a global acceptance of financial wisdom that had been presented as fact and yet could easily be undermined by people who understood the barriers, boundaries, and restrictions in place as well as where the financial assumptions could be deceived by introduction of new terms and definitions as in the case of credit default swaps.

In this chapter, we focus on the influence of the recession on one of the most powerful financial capitals of the world, New York City. We discuss the general effect of the recession on New York City as a whole and then take a narrower look at each of the five boroughs, Manhattan, Queens, Staten Island, Brooklyn, and the Bronx. We examine the disparate economic states of each borough and how the recession has impacted each of them. Furthermore, we discuss the implications of the general perception of Manhattan’s resilience to the recession and how is has impacted the other boroughs, such as the housing crisis in Staten Island and Queens following Hurricane Sandy, unemployment rates in the Bronx, and the rebuilding of a sustainable job market in Brooklyn.

We reviewed relevant literature, including academic research, reports issued by the State of New York, census data, articles printed in popular press outlets, and business resources to provide a thorough look at the influence of the Great Recession on New York City and each of its five boroughs. We found extensive support for the disparity amongst the five boroughs, despite the perception that New York City is thriving in the wake of the Great Recession and Hurricane Sandy. We detail the unique economic and environmental factors of each borough and explain how it influenced the impact of the Great Recession and subsequent natural disaster.

Manhattan was well insulated from the initial impact of the Great Recession, with tourism in the city remaining high through 2008 and financial firms on Wall Street experiencing record high profits well into 2009. Despite the downfall of Lehmann Brothers and Merrill Lynch, the financial bailouts and Federal Reserve credit available to Wall Street firms prevented Manhattan’s financial sector from experiencing the dramatic unemployment rates that the rest of New York and the United States were facing (DeFreitas, 2009).

The Great Recession hit disadvantaged areas, like the Bronx, harder than other areas of New York, while Hurricane Sandy halted the economic recovery in areas like Queens and Staten Island. While unemployment remains low in New York City as a whole, the recovery from the Great Recession has been uneven, further widening the gap between New York City’s boroughs, with the lower income areas at a greater disadvantage and the higher income areas souring. While Manhattan has recovered significantly, with Wall Street profits reaching record levels in 2009, other boroughs haven’t experienced the same economic upturn and are still facing significant challenges (Parrott, 2010). While the city has gained nearly 375,000 jobs, nearly twice the number of jobs that were lost during the Great Recession (Crain’s New York Business, 2013), the significant variance in wages and high costs of living has not greatly reduced the number of working poor across New York City and has not resulted in an evenly spread boost in wealth.

At the end of our chapter, we discuss “lessons learned” and, in particular, the importance of preparation for both fiscal and natural disasters. Local policy makers must ensure that the needs of its constituents are being met and will be met in the future if such hardship were to strike. Government leaders need to have a forward-looking plan, rather than simply handling immediate needs.

The originality of our content stems from a deeper look into the nuances of the economy of New York City. Statistics paint a picture of a thriving City, despite the Great Recession. However, understanding the distinct differences amongst the five boroughs illustrates that these citywide averages do not paint an accurate picture of life for New Yorkers off of Wall Street. The extent to which the high-income areas in Manhattan have recovered suggests that the economy of New York City as a whole is thriving, whereas the reality is that the middle-class has not recovered and the previously disadvantaged are now even more so. It is important to look at each of the five boroughs of New York City individually when creating policy to both recover from and prevent events such as the Great Recession and the destruction of Hurricane Sandy. Our chapter illustrates stark differences within New York City in the face of both financial and natural crises.

The political campaigns of Una Clarke and Major Owens show an interesting display of ethnic politics. In this paper, I argue that the presence of a Caribbean population in Brooklyn New York presents itself as a challenge to the already present African-American structure. The Caribbean politicians do not subscribe nor fully ally with the African-American politicians, and instead, seek to carve out a niche for themselves and utilize their ties to home in an effort to cajole the Caribbean populace for support. Through the purview of a political campaign in Brooklyn between an African-American incumbent and a Caribbean insurgent, I attempt to contribute to the transnationalist literature through illustrating the concept of the nation−state, which can be explained as an immigrant’s continual bond to their home country while living abroad.

The purpose of this paper is to analyse urban transformation as a tourism resource. Tourism is undeniably a powerful motor for urban transformation but in return, urban transformation can represent a resource for actors related to tourism. More precisely this paper focuses on one major transformation of modern cities: gentrification.

The central hypothesis of this paper is that gentrification accompanies tourism, but that gentrification itself may also become an object of the tourist gaze. The paper focuses on local guides and small touristic entrepreneurs in order to identify the tensions that might arise. The presentation of two guided tours – “Subculture Brixton Nightlife Tour” and “Where Brooklyn At?” – will enable us to explore how the gentrification of Brixton (London) and Brooklyn (New York) may be used as a tourism resource for local private entrepreneurs.

Results presented here are based on ethnographic methods such as observation as well as content analysis and semi-directive interviews. Mobilising the historical concept of “slumming”, this paper proposes an extended conceptual framework, “neo-slumming”, to analyse evolving tourism practices in modern cities, practices that are considered here as tourism’s new frontiers.

However, as tourism transforms cities, the process itself is now of interest to tourists and thus becomes a resource for sector businesses (Naef, 2018). Yet studies about the touristification of urban transformation are still quite rare. This analysis aims to fill this gap by looking at the way a process, such as some spectacular, rapid or radical transformation of the urban fabric, can become a touristic resource associated with specific narratives and representations. In this context, the tourist gaze (Urry, 2002) is directed on a resource characterised by its ongoing change.

The preservation of historic library buildings can produce results that meet or surpass expectations. Discusses key features that greatly impact on the renovation of libraries in general, and historic libraries in particular. Renovation with preservation sensitivity is not merely a re‐creation of the library building as it existed when it was built. Renovated historic libraries must provide for today’s collections and services, climatic controls, comfort levels, ergonomics, accessibility standards and desired amenities. The skillful integration of inviting new spaces and uses can actually enhance the existing historic building. The ease with which expanded services can be integrated is a testament to the innate flexibility of these profoundly civic structures. Historic library buildings afford infinite renovation possibilities. These inspirational buildings exude a civic presence and serve a vital purpose in connecting and enriching communities. Restorations of these grand and evocative civic buildings can preserve and transform their awe‐inspiring spaces to serve generations to come.

The purpose of the paper is to describe the Long Island University Brooklyn Campus Library's experience with a Smart Space Project. This paper recounts how the library creates new instructional spaces, through the use of smart technologies. This study illustrates challenges facing the library, recounts collaboration with other campus units, and describes support service provided by Library Information Technology. This account contributes to the sharing and discussion of experiences among modern academic libraries regarding needs assessment, space planning, and utilization of technology to support library services.

The literature review includes space planning, building renovation and construction, and instructional technology. Various aspects of the Smart Space Project are described and analyzed. Studies and experiences from other academic libraries are also discussed.

Space renovation projects may be complex, requiring a systematic approach encompassing vision, needs assessment, funding, planning, technological considerations, and collaboration with other campus units. Creativity, flexibility, open‐mindedness, and attention to details are keys to the success of renovation projects.

In the areas of library space, student learning behaviour, utilization of technology, and smart technology's impacts on online/distance library instruction, more research needs to be conducted.

This account provides useful information and first‐hand experience for library administrators and faculty planning instructional space projects.

This article provides a snapshot of the efforts of a mid‐sized urban library to address issues of limited space, budgetary constraints, growing collections, and increasing user needs. It provides practical lessons and suggestions for other library administrators and faculty seeking to make building and instructional technology improvements. It also offers valuable information for library information technology units implementing smart instructional projects.

This study explores the history of conflict and future options for cooperation between two distinct ethnic groups in New York City, Caribbean-Americans and Jews. The argues, however, that relations between both groups cannot be read through the crude lens of “Black/Jewish relations.” The article is divided in two major parts. In the first part, the authors explore the historical trajectory of relations between the two groups largely by focusing on the Crown Heights district in Brooklyn, home to a variety of Caribbean nationals, and the Jewish Lubavitcher Hasidic community. As the survey of historical material will reveal, in the late 1960s/early 1970s, issues pertaining to contestation over space and resources increasingly affected relations between both groups. A low point was reached in 1991 with the “Crown Heights unrest,” which threw this part of Brooklyn into several days of openly violent conflict. Although – as Part II will demonstrate – issues such as crime, cultural peculiarities, access to resources and political influence, remain on the agenda, both groups have since managed to restore less conflict-prone and productive relationships. Although conflicts have been often couched in terms of these relations, additional cultural factors suggest that the conflict has been shaped by other dynamics.

Ever since Robert Ezra Park and Ernest Burgess published their classic research on Chicago which described “how” residential neighborhoods follow a distinct ecological pattern, generations of urban practitioners and theoreticians have been arguing about “why” they are spatially distributed. This essay is designed to demonstrate the utility of Visual Sociology and the study of Vernacular Landscapes to document and analyze how the built environment reflects the changing cultural identities of neighborhood residents. It is strongly suggested that a visual approach can also help build a bridge between various theoretical and applied disciplines that focus on the form and function of the metropolis. While discussing some of these often-competing models, the text is illustrated by a selection of photographs taken in Brooklyn, New York whose neighborhoods over the past century have been a virtual Roman fountain of ethnic transitions. Although many of the oldest and newest residents of Brooklyn such as Chinese, Italians, Jews, and Poles would be familiar to Park and Burgess, others such as Bangladeshis, Egyptians, and Koreans would not. Ideas about Old and New cities from the “classical” to the “post-modern”; from Park and Burgess to Harvey and Lefebvre are also synthesized via the insights of J. B. Jackson.

When and how did modern rankings emerge? This paper aims to answer that question by taking a closer look at the history of American baseball. In the 1870s, baseball was the first team sport to introduce a competitive system, the league, that determined the champion based on teams’ overall number of wins and losses. The in-depth analysis of the baseball discourse from the 1850s to the 1870s shows that leagues were introduced as a solution to a specific problem: how to identify deserving champions that had proved their ability again and again over the course of a season. The rising awareness of this problem was due to a shift in the baseball discourse of the 1860s, which established a new, statistical understanding of athletic achievement that demanded consistency of performance together with an acceptance that even champions lose a game once in a while. Rankings and other statistics, based on constant scoring of individual plays and increasingly sophisticated methods, helped institutionalize this new understanding of achievement and, in so doing, made the introduction of the league system possible. Moreover, the league system proved to be dependent on rankings – in the form of league tables – that made it possible to observe and experience the championship race, making rankings an essential element of modern competitive sports. Given that today’s rankings apply similar ideas of achievement to other fields (e.g., the “excellence” of universities), the story draws attention to the history of a specific imaginary of achievement that transcends the field of sports and should be studied more widely to understand the institutionalization of rankings in other fields.

There is little published information available in the area of youth programs and social entrepreneurship in underrepresented communities. However, there are many idealistic entrepreneurs in the community; the case describes the experience of one such individual. Case analysis and the Instructor’s Manual are based on standard theories and techniques in organizational environmental and strategy analysis, as well as information and approaches regarding nonprofit functioning.

This case was prepared from primary sources, based on interviews with the founder. The name of the organization was disguised but the location and the founder’s name were not.

Growing up in a rough neighborhood, Darnell found refuge in an after-school program, which he credited for several positive values. As an adult, he felt a strong desire to give back to the community he had grown up, and still lived in. Thus, was launched MoveAhead, a fitness-based after-school program similar to the one he had participated in. However, as was common for many social entrepreneurs, Darnell struggled to overcome severe lack of capital and to deal with operational issues. Now, MoveAhead had reached a critical and existentially important point, when a strategic decision had to be made.

This is a decision case. It discusses the difficulties faced by a social entrepreneur who had a strong drive and conviction but little capital. The case describes a strategic turning point for one such organization. It can be used in business and management courses at the undergraduate level. It would also be relevant to a course on (social) entrepreneurship. The level and analysis required of students and discussion questions used can be adjusted depending on whether the course is introductory or more advanced, such as strategy.

Construction of a new library for Brooklyn College required that the collections and staff move out of the existing library building. This move into temporary quarters necessitated that the library close its stacks. The author describes how the staff planned, implemented, and managed an on‐site as well as an off‐site paging system for approximately one million volumes. Practical administrative and management issues are discussed that could be applied to other libraries needing to plan a paging system for their library collections. The impact on library users is also discussed. The author concludes that paging systems may become commonplace as storage facilities become the new model for academic and research libraries.