Gentrification, Abandonment, and Displacement: Connections, Causes, and Policy Responses in New York City

How can gentrification and abandonment take place at the same time, virtually side by side? This Article answers this question, and focuses on the relationship of each process to the problem of displacement

Residential Alienation, Home Ownership and the Limits of Shelter Policy

There is greater public confusion over housing policy today than there has been in any comparable period in the last thirty years. The Nixon-Ford administration\u27s wholesale program terminations and budget slashes only cloak the problem temporarily. Everyone agrees that the ostrich ought to get his head out of the sand, but few agree where he should go once he doel so. Housing allowances, at this point, seem to many the best answei; at least they haven\u27t been proven wanting yet. But others disagree, and certainly there is reason to be wary

Electro-optically tunable microring resonators in lithium niobate

Optical microresonators have recently attracted a growing attention in the photonics community. Their applications range from quantum electro-dynamics to sensors and filtering devices for optical telecommunication systems, where they are likely to become an essential building block. The integration of nonlinear and electro-optical properties in the resonators represents a very stimulating challenge, as it would incorporate new and more advanced functionality. Lithium niobate is an excellent candidate material, being an established choice for electro-optic and nonlinear optical applications. Here we report on the first realization of optical microring resonators in submicrometric thin films of lithium niobate. The high index contrast films are produced by an improved crystal ion slicing and bonding technique using benzocyclobutene. The rings have radius R=100 um and their transmission spectrum has been tuned using the electro-optic effect. These results open new perspectives for the use of lithium niobate in chip-scale integrated optical devices and nonlinear optical microcavities.Comment: 15 pages, 8 figure

Entpolitisierte Globalisierungsdiskussion: Informationszeitalter und Netzwerkgesellschaft bei Manuel Castells

The article reviews Manuel Castells widely considered work The Information Age. lt is criticized as backing off from Castells' earlier urban social and political critique, while retreating his forrner Marxist analysis from any radical political content, both analytically and in its prescription. Instead Castells now moves forward enthusiastically into the description of a hi-tech society he sees as the overwhelming event of the present period, conflated with a loosely defined discussion of globalization. lt ends up, Marcuse argues, not simply in a depoliticized but an anti-political analysis of urban conditions, and thus contributes to an effectively conservative posture on relevant social urban issues and implicitly supports the superficial social democratic „Third Way" rhetoric now dominant in governing circles in England, Germany, and other countries

The paradoxes of public space

This paper deals with one particular purpose for public space, the role it plays in permitting popular public participation in in democratic governance, democratic governance in a very political sense. For the United States, it might be called “First Amendment Space”, after the provision in the U.S.A. Constituting establishing the rights of free speech and free assembly. In a broader sense, public space should also be available democratically and based on equality of rights for a full range of social interchanges, for recreation, sports, picnicking, hiking, running, sitting, chatting, simply enjoyment, by all people, equally. Such uses, carried out democratically, are in turn necessary for democratic governance, but in a different way. Let me call them “Social Spaces”. And they may be divided between Convening spaces, where convening for the purposes of political effectiveness may be planned, and Encounter Spaces, where chance meetings and discussion may be take place without prior planning/convening. “Infrastructural Spaces” are also social spaces but in a different sense, not directly political: spaces for transportation, streets, sidewalks, recreational areas, parks, hiking trails, bicycles partially. he term “Third Space” is sometimes in fashion in a similar sense, and often defined as somewhere between public and private1. More on social spaces elsewhere. When public space is referred to here, it is in the sense of political public space, First Amendment space in the United States. Tahrir Square in Cairo, the Playa of Mothers in Buenos Aires, the Mall in Washington, D.C., Zuccotti Park in New York City, perhaps Central Park or Fifth Avenue, with its parades and marches, but also the fenced in space under the West Side highway at the time of the Republican Convention, and perhaps the indoor space of the Convention Center, as used for convening for discussions of alternate proposals for rebuilding after 9/11

Ein anderer Blick auf die Subprime-Krise

What is called the "subprime mortgage crisis" reflects an underlying crisis in the housing system: the inability of the market to provide adequate and affordable housing for large numbers of Americans. Household income is too low, and profit expectations by the private housing market are too high. Until today, this problem was met by government programs that tried to maintain the two causes of that inadequacy: promoting for lower-income households private home ownership, in homes supplied by the private market. Re-regulation of this market or mild answers like relief for distressed homeowners won't solve the problem. A radical change is needed. At the ideological level we need an educational campaign to illuminate the limits of home "ownership" and the range of available alternatives. At the economical level public financing has to cover the gap between even regulated housing costs and ability to pay until adequate incomes are guaranteed