Search results

To look at the role of local decision-making and control in the face of a trend towards unified national and transnational disaster protocols. To look at the implications of a shifting rhetoric – from sustainability to resilience – for this issue.

This chapter draws upon the author’s case studies of the 2009 H1N1 pandemic in New York City and Hurricane Sandy (2013) in New York City, as well as studies of Hurricane Katrina (2006) in New Orleans, to discuss governance issues.

Empirical studies confirm the importance of locally based decision-making and control. There are tensions between national disaster protocols and local decision-making; urban governance matters given differences in political culture, leadership, and community participation.

We need a resilient social infrastructure as well as a resilient physical environment. Strong social institutions are an essential part of this process but communities must be given material, not only symbolic benefits.

The conclusion that the threat of natural disasters requires more rather than less autonomy in decision-making for the locality.

Furthermore, that the shift in objectives, from sustainability to resilience (mandating redundancy and sophisticated data retrieval) requires what we might call a more empowered city.

Despite nationwide decreases in school crime and violence levels, a relatively high and increasing number of students report feeling unsafe in their school environments. In response, many school and law enforcement officials are collaborating to develop school–police partnerships, especially in urban areas as an effort to significantly deter student criminal activity and violence in schools. This chapter examines the beginning efforts of New York City's Impact Schools Initiative, a punitive-based school–police partnership created in January 2004 to significantly increase police presence at some of New York City's most violent public schools. An initial examination of school-level demographic and environmental variables reveal that despite increased police presence, students enrolled at New York City's Impact Schools continue to experience higher than average problems linked directly to future criminality, including more student suspensions and lower attendance rates compared to other New York City Schools. Additionally, the data revealed that compared to other New York City public schools, Impact Schools experience greater student overcrowding and receive less funding.

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.

New York City, the most dense and populous city in the United States, is one of the world's most altered landscapes. Yet, New York City boasts an urban ecology which produces invaluable environmental benefits. The extent and vitality of its green and blue spaces would not be where it is without the unrelenting organization, stewardship, and advocacy of the New York citizenry.

Born from these grassroots environmental justice movements, citizens have built the nature-based solutions (NBS) they seek out of oft-neglected landscapes and vacant lots. Today, over 800 civic environmental stewardship groups are active across all of New York City's 205,000 acres. These groups directly manage, restore, and conserve greenspaces, as well as advocate for their investment and expand ecological awareness through educational programming and campaigns, and their work is more important as ever, with the growing impacts of climate change. This chapter will review three cases of community environmental stewardship, including a distributed community garden movement, restoration of a polluted waterway, and an emerging framework for adaptive coastal protection. Through these cases, we may understand the origins and frontiers of some of today's civic networks stewarding New York City's natural areas. These cases emphasize a socioecological view of the city's ecology. They show that we must consider green infrastructure and natural resources as places which have social and cultural meaning, not merely spaces with ecological functions. They highlight the labor and investments committed by community groups which require compensation and nurturing. Lastly, they demonstrate the importance of supporting social networks and local capacities in stewarding nature-based strategies and building resilient, adaptive, and equitable socioecological systems.

New York City’s status as a majority “minority” city is reflected in many local neighborhoods that exemplify the racial and ethnic diversity of the urban landscape in the 21st century. In this quintessential immigrant city, the relative share of foreign-born has reached levels not seen since the historic immigrant wave at the turn of the last century (Foner, 2000; Scott, 2002). While “all the nations under heaven” are represented among old and new New Yorkers, researchers find that patterns of residential segregation persist and in fact, have worsened especially for African Americans (Beveridge, 2001; Logan, 2001). The racial balkanization of New York City, however, is tempered by the expansion of “polyethnic” or “global” neighborhoods. These racially and ethnically diverse neighborhoods are found throughout New York City but their concentration in the borough of Queens is notable. Moreover, the magnitude of ethnic diversity in these neighborhoods has “no parallel in previous waves of immigration” (Foner, 2000, p. 58).

Laws geared toward regulating the employment relationship cling to traditional definitions of workplaces, neglecting the domain of the home and those who work there. Domestic workers, a population of largely immigrant women of color, have performed labor inside of New York City's homes for centuries and yet have consistently been denied coverage under labor law protections at both the state and federal level. This article traces out the exclusions of domestic workers historically and then turn to a particular piece of legislation – the 2010 New York Domestic Worker Bill of Rights – which was the first law of its kind to regulate the household as a site of labor, therefore disrupting that long-standing pattern. However, the law falls short in granting basic worker protections to this particular group. Drawing from 52 in-depth interviews and analysis of legislative documents, The author argues that the problematics of the law can be understood by recognizing its embeddedness, or rather the broader political, legal, historical, and social ecology within which the law is embedded, which inhibited in a number of important ways the law's ability to work. This article shows how this plays out through the law obscuring the specificity of where this labor is performed – the home – as well as the demographic makeup of the immigrant women of color – the whom – performing it. Using the case study of domestic workers' recent inclusion into labor law coverage, this article urges a closer scrutiny of and attention to the changing nature of inequality, race, and gender present in employment relationships within the private household as well as found more generally throughout the low-wage sector.

The interaction of urban cores and their rural hinterlands is considered from an ecological–economic perspective. The concept of ‘urban metabolism’ motivates discussion of urban dependence on geographic regions outside their borders for both sources of inputs and as waste sinks. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's 1989 Surface-Water Treatment Rule forces cities to consider the ecosystem services preserved by appropriate land-use management inside suburban and rural watersheds used for urban water supplies. A case study of New York City and its water supply from the Catskill–Delaware watershed system is used to explore these themes. Compensation from the city to watershed communities may be an effective way to motivate protection of those ecosystem functions. Both direct payments and investment in economic development projects consistent with water quality goals are reviewed as policy instruments.

Using visual materials to understand a social object requires the researcher to know that object's purpose, and this is true whether the object is an artifact, a restricted event, a small social world, or something as massive as the modern city. I argue that the purpose of the city as a settlement is driven by the need to safely sleep in peace at night while satisfying other basic biophysical needs during the day as conveniently as possible. An examination of these needs identifies 10 functional prerequisites for human settlement, entangling its inhabitants in involuntary community with entities and events other than themselves, whether they like it or not. In addition, the rise of the modern city exacerbates the challenge of living in a reluctant community and pressures its inhabitants to come to terms with the consequences for how these relationships affect daily life. I highlight nine challenges posed as questions that have been particularly salient in American urban history since the mid-nineteenth century. How these challenges have been addressed indicates not only what it takes to make a modern city a settlement suitable for satisfying human needs, but also just how deeply invested its residents are in making the city work. Finally, the 10 functional prerequisites and nine moral challenges not only provide a framework for researching the city, but also suggest a coherent outline for imagining a “shooting script” or guide for conducting visual research.