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Given the unprecedented scale of the climate emergency and the need for swift and radical change in how we travel, it is important for local authorities to consider how best to use their ‘authority’ to initiate sustainable change. However, without collective decision-making, longstanding issues around equity, real, and perceived injustices will trump any good intentions and policies. In this chapter, I attempt to make sense of why the initial stages of the Emergency Active Travel Fund (EATF) a mobility scheme designed to tackle two emergencies – the pandemic and the climate – largely failed in the eyes public, even though it was designed with their benefit in mind.

The boundaries of Little Italy are not precise, and have shifted over time. In the 19th century, the district extended south of Canal Street into the area identified by Jacob Riis as the “Mulberry Bend,” and described as “the foul core of New York’s slums.”³ By the 1960s, Little Italy had retreated across Canal Street, as the Italian population began to leave the neighborhood for other areas in the city. For the purposes of this paper, Little Italy shall be understood as comprising three census tracts in New York City’s Manhattan county, numbers 41, 43, and 45. This area, lying within a short walking distance of City Hall, is roughly bounded by Canal Street on the south, Bowery on the East, Broadway on the west, and East Houston street to the north. Nicknamed the Mulberry District, it became the first and largest Italian enclave in the United States between 1870s and 1924. While there had been an Italian community in New York for generations, historian George Pozetta has argued that the winter of 1872–1873 was pivotal in the development of this community, when more than 2000 poor Italian immigrants, arrived at Castle Garden, the immigrant reception center, unable to care for themselves.⁴ These immigrants were quickly fitted in to the preexisting Italian community, taking advantage of the contacts provided by the bossi, typically northern Italian men who had arrived earlier, to find jobs in such local enterprises as groceries and saloons, and with American employers. Once the new comers settled, a process of chain-migration began. By the later 1870s, the bossi were acting as agents for gangs of labor sent out from New York to work in other areas across North American. As a result, the Mulberry district became a sort of transshipment point for Italian labor.

This research note focuses on the quest to move beyond the poverty paradigm in researching, planning, and developing distressed urban neighborhoods. It is based on the notion that the poverty paradigm hides more than it reveals about the positionality of people in neoliberal society. It argues that low incomes and joblessness are structural components of neoliberal economies. Therefore, they cannot be eliminated without making fundamental changes in the way that neoliberalism operates. Thus, in a neoliberal society, with a small, passive government, both low incomes and joblessness will grow over time, especially among blacks, Latinos, and immigrants of color. Within this context, the distress found in inner-city neighborhoods is a product of failed urban institutions and the lack of investments in such places. However, there are no laws of socioeconomic development that say low income and joblessness must equate with living in distressed neighborhoods, where dilapidation, crime, and violence are characteristic features of the landscape. This reality is a public policy decision. Therefore, it can be changed by altering the investment strategy in distressed community and by radically transforming the institutions operating in these communities. If this happens, it will be possible to produce communities where low-income workers live in energetic places where they enjoy a high quality of life and standard of living. In such regenerated neighborhoods, it will also be possible to develop innovative strategies that put the jobless to work.

When Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans on August 29, 2005, the category 3 storm’s surge caused nearly every municipal levee to break leaving 80% of the city flooded. In the aftermath of the storm, television images of stranded residents, drowned hospital patients, looted stores, and chaos in designated shelters ignited an ethical debate over the role of race and class in modern America. As debates raged over how, or whether, to rebuild New Orleans, the idea of cultural sustainability underlies these discussions.

Drawing on the largest diaspora since the American Dust Bowl of the 1930s, I begin by examining the concept of a civil society through Habermas’ (1994) utopian model of an ideal speech community. I extend Habermas’ idea to the environmental justice movement with an emphasis on the utilitarian approach. This includes my discussion of Hinman’s (1998) pluralistic view of moral ethics within a multicultural society coupled with Bullard’s (1993, 1994, 2008) applied environmental social justice in low-income racial minority neighborhoods disproportionately impacted by hazardous waste sites. Then, I expand this argument into the concept of cultural sustainability in which the concept of a free speech community and environmental justice are embedded.

Drawing on a case study of New Orleans, I examine how the city’s divided racial and class cultures provide major challenges to applying cultural sustainability practices in the post-Katrina rebuilding process.

This chapter uses a case study to explore the application of cultural sustainability practices highlighting the concepts implicit roots in Habermas’ utopian free speech community and underlying ties to the environmental justice movement.

Many of the challenges experienced by the New Town remain the same 50 years on: funding major infrastructure, land acquisition and planning still requires national political and policy support. In the scramble to deliver the thousands of new homes needed, the British government is revisiting policy levers and programmes of the past. Ebbsfleet, a large new settlement in Kent, two decades into realisation, shows how subsequent government visions overlay the historic New Town principles, the characteristics underpinning Garden Cities or the newly emerging Healthy New Towns (HNT). Rediscovering New Town design principles has prompted a reinvention of the historic planning mechanisms that delivered them. The influence of policy actors is contrasted to Ebbsfleet Development Corporation’s emergent role as the practical delivery agency. Comparing criteria for recent government new settlement programmes reveals the Housing Ministry’s rapid shift from promoting sustainable development to facilitating private-sector investment in exchange for guaranteed housing delivery. A similar dilution is seen in the HNT Network, where the New Towns’ provision of health-giving environments for populations escaping from city slums has been supplanted by a broader (more diffuse) facilitation of healthy wellbeing. In a fluid policy context, Ebbsfleet’s adoption of these principles could cynically be read as market-led place rebranding not reinvention. Will the historic lessons of the early New Towns have been learnt so that the new wave of Garden Cities or Healthy New Towns fare better?

In port cities with declining industries, waterfront redevelopment is one major part of the competitive agenda. The increasing economic importance of service, leisure, and tourism industries created an opportunity to reuse urban waterfront areas no longer considered profitable. Parque das Nações in Lisbon is a product of such a process: It’s a newly built mixed-use waterfront neighborhood, planned, and developed, first and foremost, to be the site of Expo ’98. This former industrial and port area has been emerging in the last 15 years as a “showcase” for Lisbon: a piece of the competitive strategy of the Portuguese capital. Its public spaces are an important part of that strategy and have been managed in order to remain particularly safe and clean.

On one hand, Parque das Nações is a socially homogenous elite residential neighborhood, on the other hand, it is emerging as a new metropolitan centrality characterized by an intense mobility and by an increasing concentration of urbanites carrying on work and leisure related activities. It is the coexistence of these two complementary and contradictory dynamics that shapes the interactive logic of public life in the area.

This chapter explores the use, appropriation, and interaction patterns afforded by the public spaces of Parque das Nações. I discard both the idealized conception of public spaces that characterizes them as havens of diversity and accessibility and the more contemporary idea of public spaces as empty spaces that no longer promote encounters with others, serving exclusively as marketing tools for real-estate developers. Instead, I argue that the production of urban areas such as Parque das Nações is a socially unequal process resulting in excessively planned and controlled public spaces. However, when they attract different populations for different reasons, these spaces might foster unexpected, emergent, or even transgressive uses and interactions that promote public space vitality.

In the post-industrial economies of large urban centers, redevelopment has become the primary engine of economic growth. Redevelopment projects are designed to encourage investment, attract tourism and bring new residents to the city. This form of city building is driven by a neoliberal urban agenda that embraces privatization, and is controlled by the economic interests of private business. In this chapter, we argue that city building under a neoliberal rubric is also a gendered political process, the outcome of which is the redevelopment of urban space in ways that reflect a masculinist and corporatist view of city life. Moreover, both the form of redevelopment and the process itself function to limit public participation in the life and growth of cities, particularly for women and other marginalized groups. In the first section of this chapter, Gendered spaces of redevelopment, we examine how the results of such a process are made manifest in the built form of Canada's largest city, Toronto, with a population of 2.5 million. The city is experiencing a major process of redevelopment and city building that is evident in a massive wave of condominium construction. We suggest that condominium projects, as a particular form of redevelopment, create privatized spaces and encourage privatized services that articulate neatly with a neoliberal urban agenda.