Michael Frisch

Recent stories in the press document the decline of LGBT institutions such as gay bars, lesbian bookshops and retail outlets.  These institutions used to serve as fixed place markers for queer space in the city.  In the past, neighborhoods could be identified by tracking the concentration of these places as listed in LGBT guides.  The decline of these places raises the issue of the decline of queer space.  As lesbian and gay couples in the US gain partnership rights, do they also gain homonormative status where queer space is no longer necessary?  Recent scholarship on LGBT communities in the US often used same-sex partner data to identify LGBT neighborhoods.  Using partner data to analyze LGBT neighborhoods and communities applies a heteronormative lens to queer space and place.  Instead, I develop an approach that applies the structured silences within US Census data to identify queer residential space in central cities and select suburbs at the Census Tract level.  This approach aims to develop a method that does not privilege homonormative partnership and marriage.  I find that this method can document displacement due to gentrification.  The method may provide an illustration of the lived queer experience beyond just the same-sex partner household.

... (6.) Michael Greenberg et al ... 519-543. (13.) Jurgen Brauer, "Do Militaary Expenditures Create Net Employment? The Case of US Military-nuclear Production Sites," in Jurgen Brauer and WilliamGissy, eds., Economics of Conflict and Peace (Brookfield, VT: Ashgate, 1997), pp. ...

How can successful partnerships for advocacy planning be formed and sustained in a postdisaster environment? What roles can university-community partnerships play to create a more equitable and sustainable city while retaining the qualities of local culture that make New Orleans distinct? This article describes an innovative partnership between The Urban Conservancy and the Department of Architecture, Urban Planning and Design at the University of Missouri-Kansas City that is focused on local culture as the foundation for ...

This report presents the results of a project to design and test a new type of trash disposal system for the Town of East Hampton, Long Island: the Intensive Recycling System. The system is intended to serve as the Town's primary means of regular trash disposal. The Intensive Recycling System is based on separation of regular trash, by households and commercial establishments, into four fractions: (1) food garbage and soiled paper; (2) paper/cardboard; (3) metal cans/glass bottles; (4) non-recyclables. Fraction 1, together with yard waste, is processed at a compost facility, yielding marketable compost. Fractions 2 and 3 are processed by a materials recovery facility (MRF) into marketable products: several grades of paper and cardboard; aluminum cans; tin cans; scrap metal; and color-sorted crushed glass (cullet). The non-recyclable components (fraction 4) and misclassified components rejected during processing are consigned to a landfill. This document is Volume 1 of two volume...

In the last three years, more than one hundred galleries have opened in an old warehouse district in the West Chelsea section of Manhattan. While the area has been the location of nightclubs and discotheques for several decades, few major art institutions were in the area before 1994. Now, galleries and living lofts are replacing auto repair shops and storage warehouses. Streets previously filled with rental trucks are now teaming with taxis and people dressed in black. Art is once again transforming a neighborhood of Manhattan. The rise of the West Chelsea art district has been surprisingly swift. Yet this phenomena is not new in New York City. Art districts developed in SoHo around 1970 and in the East Village in the eighties. In both cases, art district development led to gentrification. The stories of these two neighborhoods raise the questions necessary for understanding the redevelopment of West Chelsea. How does the art market work and why do artists and galleries concentrate...

ABSTRACT Is the sprawling modern American metropolis a product of individuals making choices about residential location and transportation in the free market, or does sprawl result from government regulation limiting what developers can build? Historians of technology may find this an odd question, especially if they know the history of urban planning in the United States. Zoning arose as a response to the disorder of the industrial city at the turn of the twentieth century. Zoning regulations adopted by local governments typically limit the use, height, and size of structures. They control the siting on a parcel and the orientation relative to the street. They often segregate areas of cities and suburbs into zones assigned only for one particular use. Within a commercial zone, developers create new commercial strips by combining one-story retail structures with parking areas designed for maximal automobile access. Add in an adjacent zone of mass-produced single-family structures with a minimum house and lot size laid out along cul-de-sacs and collector streets and you have two of the key elements of modern-day sprawl. Many economists and some planners have argued that sprawl is the "natural" result of market forces meeting public preferences. Jonathan Levine's book is an adept and relatively ahistorical argument that sprawl results from intense government regulation through land-use zoning. Fundamentally, it is about beating the economics-based policy analysts at their own game. Levine carefully sets out his agenda and plots a middle road. At the start he is very critical of anti-sprawl advocates, many of whom propose more intense planning regulations in response to sprawl. Defenders of automobile-based land-use development are left with the free-market argument. Building mass-transit systems and requiring higher densities and/or mixed-use development might then be seen as market interference. Levine shows that the urban policy and urban economics literature's conception of the present situation as free market arises out of theories about the marketplace of municipal jurisdictions and notions of zoning as a "collective property right." People fearing smart-growth policy interference in the market are actually scared of increased "permissiveness." Such policies include many smart-growth codes and, specifically, Portland's urban-growth boundary. Levine presents evidence that there is both a restricted supply of alternatives to sprawl and an unmet demand for these alternatives. He concludes by calling for the application of "a more consistent market-oriented philosophy" to the subject of metropolitan land use and transportation (p. 190). Historians of technology should read Levine if they want to trace the detailed history of the idea that the present system of land-use zoning results in a free market of place. Zoned Out is a critique of other policy analyses using the "scientific" tools of policy analysis. At times Levine's argument requires patience as he unwraps other writers' assumptions. Too often he uses odd analogies. Nor does he directly address the questions of how we ended up "zoned out." While he quotes the Supreme Court's Euclid v. Ambler and Belle Terre decisions, he does not discuss the cultural and political impact of segregating urban space into areas of legally defined "single family" homes. To provide context for Levine's argument, readers should consult Dolores Hayden's excellent history of suburbia, Building Suburbia: Greenfields and Urban Growth, 1820–2000 (2003). That said, Levine's book is a very useful tool in the present policy debate on sprawl. It illustrates the necessity of claiming the free market for one's own side in a policy debate. I suspect a more historical work would question market ideology about land-use decisions and travel preferences. Dr. Frisch is an assistant professor of urban planning and design in the Department of Architecture, Urban Planning and Design at the University of Missouri–Kansas City. He has written about how planning and zoning impact the lesbian and gay community.

ABSTRACT Environmental auditing is an evaluation technique often used in the private sector to increase compliance with environmental laws, identify operational liabilities, reduce costs, and review environmental management systems. Cities and regions perform many environmental management functions. They might also benefit from environmental audits. This study examines how environmental auditing techniques developed in the private sector might be applied in the public sector.

ABSTRACT Using an interregional econometric model, a comparative analysis was made of the economic impacts of providing funds for environmental management, education, and infrastructure to the regions surrounding four of the United States Department of Energy's massive former nuclear weapons sites in

This review takes Rebuilding Communities as a starting point to survey the community development literature, the community development field, and external environmental factors, in order to examine what has happened over the past fifteen years to shape the context in which urban community development corporations (CDCs) now operate. This paper is both a bounded literature review and an environmental scan. We identify categories of changes and influences on the community development field.

New York City's Theater District doubles as an industrial district and these two seemingly disparate designations inform and rely on each other. That's the premise of Timothy R. White's Blue Collar Broadway: The Craft and Industry of American Theater, which examines the theatrical craft history of Broadway from the late nineteenth century through the end of the twentieth within the greater context of New York City's urban development. White divides Broadway's development into distinct periods, beginning with the stock theater of the early/mid-nineteenth century, in which different plays were performed nightly by stationary theater companies using costumes and sets produced in-house. This localized type of craft production changed with the rise of combination companies, in which theater troupes travelled throughout multiple regions performing a single play, often with elaborate sets and costumes. However, it was not until the organization of the Theatrical Syndicate in the late nineteenth century that the intense concentration of New York's theater business gave rise to Broadway as an industrial powerhouse of theater production. The development of the theatrical distribution network allowed investment in bigger and more elaborate sets and costumes that in turn created a " Broadway " brand. By the early twentieth century, this process resulted in the concentration of theater trades in a very small area of Midtown Manhattan. The factory period of theater occurred in the early twentieth century. Although theater was threatened by the rise of film, radio, and television, a detailed study of the trade ingredients for the production of Oklahoma in 1940 showed that the theater trades remained highly concentrated geographically. The mid-twentieth century initiated a period of slow decentralization. White argues that changes in transportation, along with the planned deindustrialization of Manhattan, eventually led to a decline in the number of theater-related businesses in mid-Manhattan. White argues that the loss of industrial space was the result of pro-office policies presented in the Regional Plan Associations' first regional plan. Craft industries then were forced to move out of Manhattan. This process of geographical change occurred with the appearance of theatrical trade shops in the outer boroughs and New Jersey. Then a sharp decline in Broadway's dominance occurred after 1970. Publicly supported regional theaters, such as the Guthrie in Minneapolis, developed their own production elements. Off-Broadway developed as theater producers promoted productions downtown as a more avant-garde product than what was available on Broadway. Even worse, the development of Lincoln Center as a cultural district in New York drew high cultural organizations away from Broadway. These developments contributed to high rates of vacancy in the theater district and to the rise of a sexually oriented " adult entertainment district " in the very buildings that had housed theater trades two decades before. Today theater is a part of global entertainment. White's analysis of the location of the trades involved in the production of Evita in 1979 shows the beginnings of theater globalization, a process that continues today. International companies such as Disney create mega-musicals utilizing skilled workers from many countries around the world causing White to wonder whether there is a future for the backstage crafts in Times Square. White's combination of knowledge about theater production history and his use of historical business establishment location evidence allow him to develop this rich picture of the rise and decline of Broadway as an industrial district.