“Sustainable Community Development Code Reform” Initiative

This initiative seeks to bring sustainability to the forefront as a land use issue and understand how local governments can support sustainable communities through innovative land use codes.

The Healthy Development Measurement Tool is a product of the Urban Health and Place Team at the Program on Health, Equity and Sustainability within the San Francisco Department of Public Health. As described in the background, the HDMT was developed as part of the Eastern Neighborhoods Community Health Impact Assessment (ENCHIA) project.

Livagreen is a design consortium for achitects, urban designers, environmentalists, planners, and citizens intended to: provide information to those interested in land use and transportation planning; and build bridges between academia and professional practice using theoretical and practical frameworks of sustainable, systems-oriented environmental design. Thank you for your interest. Feel free to contact us if you have inquiries, suggestions, thoughts, or creative ideas.

Two concepts that provide new directions for public policy, environmental justice and sustainability, are both highly contested. Each has tremendous potential to effect long-lasting change. Despite the historically different origins of these two concepts and their attendant movements, there exists an area of theoretical compatibility between them. This conceptual overlap is a critical nexus for a broad social movement to create livable, sustainable communities for all people in the future. The goal of this articleis to illustrate the nexus in the United States. The authors do this by presenting a range of local or regionally based practical models in five areas of common concern to both environmental justice and sustainability: land use planning, solid waste, toxic chemical use, residential energy use, and transportation. These models address both environmental justice principles while working toward greater sustainability in urbanized areas.

    Fallows’s article expresses that Bedford Falls is reflective of the contemporary political times that Arthur Schlesinger emphasizes in The Vital Center: The Politics of Freedom. In this view, there were three political viewpoints at the time of Truman’s presidency: progressive, liberal, and conservative. The progressives were too soft and were seen as irresponsible. The conservatives were seen as too cruel and invasive. The liberals were at the center, as Fallows describes, “between communism and fascism.” George Bailey embodies this liberal morality and acts on a check of the two extremes. Mr. Potter embodies the conservative right. He is greedy and oppressive, caring solely about money over physical needs. Naturally, when Clarence first sees Potter, he asks, “Who’s that, a king?” Uncle Billy, conversely, represents the progressive right. He is incompetent and weak. As a result, he accidentally provides Potter with the means to destroy Bailey. These two are single and both portrayed negatively. George and his father Peter are both shown as the righteous liberals. They are family men, which encompasses not only their own families but also their communities. They take care of the community while still being realistic in their goals. George does have experiences with progressive and conservative urges. He progressively wants to escape town and find adventure and idealistic freedom. Conservatively he has an urge to earn more money and power. He complains of his shabby house and his cheap car and even considers Potter’s job offer. However, he is able to subdue these extreme urges, demonstrating his ultimate success.
    This article is powerful in its ability to find exactly why George Bailey is the ideal character within the film. Not only is he charitable, but also he is the character that maintains a perfect balance. He is realistic in his goals and accomplishment and is caring in his interactions. He has conservative and progressive urges, but he suppresses them for the good of the community. While he may not originally see the value of this balanced way of life, he sees it in the end in the friendships that save him. George Bailey is not a failure because of the balance he has found in his life.

Fallows, Randall. “George Bailey in The Vital Center: Postwar liberal politics and It's a Wonderful Life” Journal of Popular Film & Television. 25.2 (1997) pg. 50-56

    In this article, Stricker emphasizes the value of the masses in five of Capra’s films: American Madness, Mr. Deeds Goes to Town, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, Meet John Doe, and It’s a Wonderful Life.  In each of these films, the hero is a small town person that conquers the establishment.  What is most notable, however, is that Stricker explains that the hero could not accomplish his goals without the help of the masses.  In the case of It’s a Wonderful Life, George Bailey and the Building and Loan could not have survived were it not for the masses of people that gave him money in a time of trouble.  These masses are only there for him because he was there for them.  Therefore, the underlying current is that both the hero and the masses need each other in order to survive. 
    This article is significant because it ties together a theme in five of Capra’s films. We come to the understanding for why George Bailey was actually saved.  He was saved because he inadvertently set himself up to be saved.  Bailey returned to his house with no expectations that the crowds would arrive to save him.  He had not spent his life helping people afford homes in order to save himself in the future.  However, good things happen to good people, and the masses were there to help him.  This article is especially significant because it does not overlook the role of everyone else.  Even with his resurrection to appreciate his own life, George Bailey could not have been saved without Mary’s assemblage and the townspeople’s money.  Therefore, this article emphasizes the parallel needs of George and those of the masses.

Stricker, Frank. "Repressing the working class: Individualism and the masses in Frank Capra's films." Labor History. 31.4 (1990) p. 454-467

In this introductory essay for the Symposium issue of the New York Law School Law Review, Noveck explores the role of law in virtual game worlds. In order to develop a foundation on which to base law, it must be acknowledged that cyber worlds are a social community and there is a delicate relationship between the game players and the game creators and owners. This relationship, when extended to ownership, remains blurry and incompletely outlined. Hence, there is growing debate over the application of the real world law to virtual worlds.

Online role-playing games steadily grew in popularity since their mainstream start in the early 1990s. The steep increase in fan base correlates with the acceptance of Internet connectivity as an essential component of the average household. In turn, game companies realized the earning potential of online multiplayer games. By investing in sophisticated game physics and functionality, popular games could lure in users for long-term play.

Virtual worlds, at their core, are social networks and communities. They have traits which mimic human interaction within real-life communities. Property is created, goods are accumulated, and currency is traded. Instead of simply studying the laws of virtual worlds, Noveck suggests study of laws in virtual worlds as a way of learning about how law functions. Virtual worlds do not have written laws which govern player interaction. In fact, they are similar to real-life law in which it is continually revised and developed by new situations and new circumstances. However, there exists a basic constitution which is rarely, if ever, touched. Recognizing this, it may be possible to simulate a fictional law system to test in virtual worlds. This represents an application of virtual worlds towards possible benefit in the real world. These trials show a modern method of applying technology in order to better serve current real-life law models.

See Book: Factories of Imagination

Gefen and Ridings, both local Philadelphia scholars, begin by recapping women's and men's sociolinguistic patterns of discourse as prior discussed in the literature. They hypothesize that women, more than men, will wish to both receive support from and give support to a virtual community in which they are participating.  In addition, they hypothesize that such support will influence women's assessment of the quality of that virtual community, and that women will more constantly than men rate their virtual community as having higher quality.  They surveyed 39 discussion boards, which they divided into men's, women's, and mixed boards.  As to be expected, women more than men were found to go to discussion boards for support. One of the interesting results they found is that the men surveyed also sought rapport and support, but did so more often in men's-only communities, presumably where an expectation of common language would be held, and did not rate them lower in quality, even though rapport-seeking can be considered as indicating inferior social status among men according to past sociolinguistic studies.  When the men did seek rapport in mixed-gender groups, it did not affect their assessment of the board's quality because there was an expectation of rapport-seeking inherent in the mixed-gender environment, since women were present and rapport-seeking is a characteristic of women's speech.  The authors admit that even as they tried to control for gender-bias in the chosen bulletin boards, that some of the communities were specifically support/rapport based (eg. cancer support) and that may have skewed the data towards women's speech and away from men's speech.

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Winter and Huff's study focuses on a 1996 survey of a women's only online bulletin board for computer scientists called SYSTERS. Although the study is 9 years old, it still brings voice to women who were previously marginalized as gender minorities in their field of work/study.  The authors discuss the issue of same-gender boards being both "havens" and "ghettos" for women online, and also provide some support for Cass Sunstein's theory that the internet allows for the consolidation of like opinions - both positive and negative, as in the case of women's forums and online sexual harassment, respectively.  Based upon their work, the authors felt that the differences between the genders in online communication was equal or magnified to that present in speech.

Shade's research, although not linguistic in nature, is useful to provide a background into women's roles in constructing the Internet.  She begins by reviewing research on gendered uses of various communications technologies, including the telephone, radio, and television. She discusses cyberactivism and feminism, as well as public policy determining women's access to the internet.  She cites a case study of women in China and internet access implementation and concludes with a discussion of whether women are merely consumers targeted by merchants or active citizens in an online sisterhood (discussions that we have held in class as well).