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What kinds of changes do mentoring programs initiate for children and their schools? According to a study by Public/Private Ventures which specializes in social policy, just under half of mentoring programs are based at a particular site (Herrera, 1999). Schools are the most common site recognized. Schools purchase the mentoring program examined in the study to follow. Adults work with children primarily on academic activities and they are paid to do so. The school pays half of the cost of the NSCC (National School and Community Corp) program and federal funds provide the remaining support. Herrera (1999, p. 11) has argued the most direct benefit of school-based programs is the mentor's integration into the school environment and the role of advocate that the mentor can play. Advocacy has been recognized as the critical task performed by mentors. As advocate, mentors develop a relationship with a child, which advances youth development and deters youth detrimental behavior (Herrera, 1999). This singular relationship, the advocate mentor and child, is challenged by research that follows. The advocate mentor recognizes a socialization model used in studying children that assumes the mentor as the active role taker shaping the child as passive recipient of mentoring. This model relies on an adult perspective, assuming the child to be an empty vessel serving as clay to be shaped (Waksler, 1994). Waksler (1994) has criticized this model, arguing that children must be taken seriously as a topic of study – not as objects of socialization. The interpretive model of childhood development by contrast is more useful for examining the data gathered in the following study. Rather than focus on the advocate mentor in relationship with a child, the interpretive model recognizes the child as actor and highlights the range of peer relationships sponsored through mentoring activities. This collective view as contrasted with the singular relationship assumes a different perspective on childhood development.

The term New Normal has become a buzzword to describe the anticipated changes in human life across the globe due to the impact of COVID-19. The paper's purpose is challenging the surrender for the notion of the “New Normal” and constructing a framework by which a call for understanding the practice of architecture, urbanism and city planning before the COVID-19 and contest its responsibility towards the city and the community.

Methodologically, literature review, analysis of emerging positions and interviews are the selected tools for conducting the research. The paper adopts a position perceiving COVID-19 has provided an opportunity for reflections and revisions about the way people dwell on Earth. The paper aims at analyzing the positive impacts of COVID-19 in sociological and urban perspective.

Consequently, the main finding of the paper, calls for reviving the forgotten normal in the way places, neighborhoods and cities are designed and planned. Lessons learned from the lockdown time and the actions taken will be analyzed with special attention to Gulf States.

In months, New Normal developed as the most used expression since the spread of the pandemic. The COVID-19 pandemic marked the year 2020 with one of the biggest public health crises of all time, threatening to take away millions of lives. It is already initiating a massive economic crisis, triggering further negative consequences for human life, wellbeing and lifestyle. Numerous researchers illustrate that through history, humans faced the challenges of epidemics and pandemics and were able to use their will, capacities, resources and courage to resist and survive.

Pandemics such as COVID-19 have caused a critical reassessment of urban spaces. This paper examines the city's relationship to concepts such as the individual, society, creativity, production and power to understand the causes and effects of urbanization. Cities, especially the globally significant ones – such as Wuhan, Milan, Madrid, Paris, London, New York, Los Angeles – are disproportionally affected. Thus, the pandemic is evolving into an urban crisis, forcing us to reconsider our deeply held beliefs about good city form and the purpose of planning.

The nature of the architectural, urban and planning theory and practice, is responsible for looking ahead, formulating visions and offering alternatives. Consequently, the methodological approach adopted in the paper is structured on three main pillars. First, observing, monitoring, and provide diagnosis (what we learned from isolation). Second, understanding the local, regional and global context as the COVID-19 crisis creates a ripple of change on all levels and requires both global and local understanding. Third, formulating visions and looking ahead

Suffering from epidemics and pandemics is new to our time and our contemporary experience but not new to the history of humankind. Revisiting the concepts of the New Normal vs. the Forgotten Normal and use the outcomes to construct an alternative framework for producing places in the post COVID-19 paradigm crystalize the value and originality of the paper.

This paper presents an alternative approach to urban development which emphasizes broad based citizen participation in identifying neighbourhood needs and skills as the basis for neighbourhood based development. Process and results of a survey of 444 urban households in Schenectady, New York, affirm the role resident participation can play in identifying development strategies which support social connections, despite existing communication and institutional barriers.

The facilitation of digital spaces, in lieu of urban material spaces, for social interaction through computer gaming and other play activities has become particularly important to children in the wake of the 2020–2021 Coronavirus pandemic, to combat the negative effects of physical lockdown restrictions. Pre-pandemic, autistic children living in urban areas may already experience exclusion from physical society and may consequently already be isolated from current imposed normative societal groupings due to their neuro-difference, sensory sensitivities to the surrounding environment, communication comprehension, and social understanding. However, an exploration into personally and independently chosen play activities by autistic youth has identified how such isolation can be overcome and positive social experiences created. A particular play practice, cosplay, and related companionable fandom activities are providing and creating digital spaces for autistic youth to be social. Character play is also enabling the use of limited physical spaces within urban contexts and as such combatting anxiety from sensory overstimulation. Thematic analysis of online content together with semi-structured interviews with autistic young people have indicated a positive connection between cosplay practice, increased social activity, and reduced levels of sensory overload, anxiety, and depression, with early findings suggesting transferrable elements that could inform more effective support for others with social, environmental, and communication challenges or restrictions.

The highly contagious coronavirus and the rapid spread of COVID-19 disease have generated a global public health crisis, which is being addressed at various local and global scales through social distancing measures and guidelines. This is coupled with debates about the nature of living and working patterns through intensive utilisation of information and telecommunication technologies, leading to the social and institutional acceptability of these patterns as the “new normal”. The primary objective of this article is to instigate a discourse about the potential contribution of architecture and urban design and planning in generating knowledge that responds to pressing questions about future considerations of post pandemic architecture and urbanism. Methodologically, the discussion is based on a trans-disciplinary framework, which is utilised for conceptual analysis and is operationalized by identifying and discoursing design and planning implications. The article underscores relevant factors; originates insights for areas where future research will be critically needed, through key areas: a) Issues related to urban dynamics are delineated from the perspective of urban and human geography, urban design and planning, and transportation engineering; b) Questions that pertain to socio-spatial implications and urban space/ urban life dialectics stem from the field of environmental psychology; and c) Deliberations about new environments that accommodate new living/working styles supervene from ethnographical and anthropological perspectives. The article concludes with an outlook that captures key aspects of the needed synergy between architectural and urban education, research, and practice and public health in a post pandemic virtual and global world.

This paper analyses the factors influencing the design of urban open space from the users’ perspective. A questionnaire survey has been carried out in Hong Kong to identify the importance of each design attribute with the aid of the analytic hierarchy process. The results show that microclimate is the most important criteria. Planting and sunlight rank the highest in the sub‐criteria indicating that natural environment is the most treasured by the users of urban open spaces. Accessibility is also one of the important criteria. Hard landscape, on the contrary, ranks the least. The findings imply that urban open space cannot be considered in isolation, but an urban integration approach is required.

The chapter tries to trace the development of concept of urban ecosystem as a problem-solving approach for urban problems, including the unwarranted problems caused by climate change. Urban management has increasingly shifted from infrastructure-based to a more regional-based approach. There has been a shift in the domain of urban ecosystem as well, from the established urbanized area to the aggregation of urban and surrounding rural area. Also, urban-rural linkages are given more attention in resource management in urban areas, thereby reducing the overall risk due to climate change. The chapter provides examples and challenges of urban ecosystem management from across the world.

The purpose of this paper is to examine perceptions of institutional encroachment and community responses to it. Specifically, it focuses on residents’ perceived effects of hospital and university expansion and the role of place making on gentrification in core city neighborhoods. This study offers insights into the processes driving neighborhood displacement and the prospects for grassroots efforts to curb it.

Data were collected through focus groups with residents and other stakeholders in working class, minority neighborhoods which were identified as being in the early stages of gentrification. Nine focus groups were held across three neighborhoods experiencing institutional encroachment. The analysis was guided by standpoint theory, which focuses on amplifying the voices of groups traditionally disenfranchized from urban planning and policy processes.

The findings suggest that residents perceived institutional encroachment as relatively unabated and unresponsive to grassroots concerns. This led to heightened concerns about residential displacement and concomitant changes in the neighborhoods’ built and social environments. Experiences with encroachment also increased residents’ calls for greater grassroots control of development.

This analysis illuminates how gentrification and displacement results from both physical redevelopment activities of anchor institutions and their decisions related to place making. The conclusions highlight the importance of empowering disenfranchized groups in the place-making process to minimize negative externalities at the neighborhood level.

“If you have come to help me, you are wasting your time, but if you have come because your liberation is bound with mine, then come, let's work together”. These words of Lill Watson, an indigenous activist, frame the context for this article. The purpose of this research was to examine the historical evolution of “grassroots movement leadership” model and its incarnation in the present time. A corollary purpose focused on how this model can transform urban schools by focusing on “movement” efforts of one large urban school district that espouses the values of this form of leadership. As part of a larger reform effort, the district engaged students, parents, teachers, school leaders and communities in becoming equal partners in urban school reform in an effort to co‐create schools and communities that might lead all of us toward liberation and learning.

Theory and practice come together through the lens of three researchers who operate from a similar philosophical stance for educational transformation, best described in the words of grassroots leader Ella Baker, who said, “We are the people we have been waiting for”. Qualitative research procedures (i.e. interviews, field notes and observations) were used to generate data on a “movement model” for grassroots leadership. This model is best demonstrated in various youth‐oriented initiatives (i.e. Student Exhibits, Action‐Research Projects, Algebra Project) within a local urban school district. This model, influenced by Civil Rights legend Robert Moses, has implications for educational leadership and urban school reform and simultaneously grounds our scholarship and research in liberation epistemology.

It is argued that children are often the victims of ideas, structures, and actions that come to be seen by the majority of people as wholly natural, preordained, and working for their own good, when in fact they are constructed and transmitted by powerful minority interests to protect the status quo that serves those interest. The words of Ella Baker epitomize the authors' struggles to steer away from models of hierarchal leadership in education and stay connected to the practice of excavating community wisdom through the “Movement Model”.

This study bears a substantive argument for community leadership efforts that focus on “grassroots leadership”. It further fosters new insights and propositions for future research in the form of a “Movement Leadership Model”.