Critics have long denounced the design of suburban communities for fostering political apathy. We disaggregate the concept of suburban design into four distinct attributes of neighborhoods. We then use tract-level Census data, the Social Capital Community Benchmark Survey, and multilevel models to measure the relationship between these design features and political participation. Certain design aspects common in suburban neighborhoods are powerful predictors of reduced political activity, illustrating a potential link between neighborhood design and politics. Yet low-density environments appear to facilitate some types of participation. Suburban designs vary, and so do their likely impacts on political participation.
Advocates of smart growth and other policies intended to constrain urban sprawl increasingly cite a desire to rebuild community as a primary objective of, and rationale for, reshaping America' s built environment. Authors Kaid Benfield, Jutka Terris, and Nancy Vorsanger write in their fine book Solving Sprawl that "smart growth helps restore a sense of community by building more compact neighborhoods that are walkable, with sidewalks and safe crossings as well as home and shop entrances close enough to the street to be convenient and inviting." 1 Recent publications of the Congress for the New Urbanism stress themes of "building social capital" and "reviving community" in making the case for pedestrian-friendly places modeled on a small town downtown, not on a strip mall.These claims by New Urbanist scholars and their allies have an intrinsic plausibility; a place that looks and feels like a coherent community should help produce citizens who are better able to identify with where they live and are more engaged in civic and political life. New Urbanists can also point to a handful of studies that seem to reinforce these claims. Perhaps most impressively, Robert Putnam' s analysis of national data on civic participation concluded that a ten-minute increase in the average commuting time of a locality is associated with roughly a 10 percent decline in the rate of civic participation in that locale. 2
The destabilizing forces wrought by economic globalization increasingly buffet local communities throughout America. This article explores a local policy strategy for coping with the effects of these forces and restoring some degree of stability to local economies. This strategy entails the creation of place-based ownership models of economic enterprise. With ownership and control held in a more collective or community-oriented fashion, such enterprises tend to anchor or root investment more securely in communities, providing a counterforce to globalization. We present and critically assess six place-based ownership models while providing illustrative examples to demonstrate how each model can work in practice.
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