Little Rock Main Street: From Poverty to Revitalization - Research Paper

Introduction

In the mid-1900s, Little Rock's Main Street was made part of a lousy downtown neighborhood. At the point when business organizations left downtown a couple of decades later, the plane encountered a decrease that kept going through the majority of the remainder of the century. As of late, Little Rock has reinvested in its downtown. In 2010, the city solicited assistance from EPA to create concept ideas for streetscape enhancements that could help catalyze redevelopment of the Main Street passageway.

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Working with the city, EPA's expert team held a workshop to realize what occupants and different partners needed and created structure ideas dependent on that input. The concept ideas offered alternatives for making Main Street progressively pleasant for pedestrians, consolidating appealing natural components to harness rainwater, and redeveloping tidied up, empty site. EPA recognized a few inherent advantages from this methodology: concentrating new improvement on the Main Street, as opposed to spreading it all through the district, it required ninety-two percent less land, diminished residents driving by around eighty-three percent, produces 142,000 fewer pounds of vehicle contaminations per day and requires approximately thirty-nine percent less energy used in households.

Lowa City

During the 2000s, Iowa City started arranging to rejuvenate a region along the Iowa River, south of its downtown, renamed the Riverfront Crossings District. At that point, in 2008, a notable flood crushed various areas of eastern Iowa, bringing about billions of dollars of damages, with the Iowa River rising right around 10 feet above flood stage in Iowa City. The flood constrained the city to re-examine its development vision for Riverfront Crossings while realizing that new strategies for the district would need to ensure against flooding in addition to propelling redevelopment. Lowa City asked for specialized help from EPA and the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) to help build up a vision for the Riverfront Crossings District and explore advancement approaches for the district that would encourage redevelopment and flood resilience. EPA previously worked with the city beginning in 2009. The town supported the policy choices that originated from the first round of help and got a second round of aid in 2010 that designed concepts for the area. The structures incorporated new riverfront park that would help avoid flooding; changing Gilbert Street into a lively, mixed-use area; and reestablishing a redirected brook to give increasingly green space for recreation. The plans have pulled in interest from developers and organizations, and the city designated $150,000 towards planning work that extended these idea plans to the whole downtown.

The city expects Riverfront Crossings to have significant environmental advantages in both the prompt region and the region. Centering this new development in Riverfront Crossings, as opposed to spreading it all through the area, will save undeveloped land and farmland, produce 66 percent less stormwater overflow, lessen pollution from driving, and help households utilize less energy because of more walkable and compact mixed-use development.

Williamson, West Virginia

Williamson, in the center of coal country, has had a significant decrease in employment and a steep ascent in levels of poverty. Also, its Residents have increased rates of diabetes and obesity. Williamson appealed for assistance from EPA to handle these difficulties, and the agency worked with Williamson via a workshop in the year 2012 to build up an action plan around locally produced food and health.

Propelled by the activity plan, elected local leaders remodeled a once empty structure on the Main Street and set up the Williamson Health and Wellness Center, a Health Center that is qualified on a federal level, to give medicinal services, educate about nutrition, and offered physical exercise classes for citizens who could not access this care. The center also set up a downtown farmer's market and gardens for the community where they grew and bought healthy local food.

With extra help from EPA in 2015, Williamson extended its work to build up a Health Innovation Hub, a project that supports health and resident food entrepreneurs as they begin their business ventures. Williamson citizens and different partners worked with federal, state, and charitable accomplices through these specialized help workshops to outline a way for future achievement (Greenberg et al., 134). Having national accomplices in the live with community leaders helped recognized administrative financing programs that can bolster Williamson's plans to make a culture of health.

Non-Profit Smart Growth Programs

The Orlando metropolitan district has had famously menacing roadways, particularly to pedestrians. A group from Orlando city devoted to elevating wellbeing started a demo project on Curry Ford Road, a business arterial with a background marked by accidents involving pedestrians and cyclists both the district's and city's wards (Boyle, Robin & Rayman, 681). By working together with elected leaders and with local Orange County staff, the group changed this speedway with five-lane into a three-lane street complete with a mid-block intersection with a painted pedestrian refuge and safeguarded cycle tracks. Although local entrepreneurs and close-by citizen supported the venture, commuting individuals in the area were impervious to the changes, which in turn brought up significant issues about the critical trade-offs between speed and wellbeing when planning for more secure roads for people.

Smart Growth Book Publications

The first book is titled The Smart Growth Manual co-authored by Andres Duany, Jeff Speck, and Mike Lydon. The Smart Growth Manual makes some first strides at characterizing a few parameters, more as recommendations, to determining the design procedure of a 'Smart growth' enterprise. Composed into a progression of groups, the authors have come up with a list of demonstrative characteristics, however not prescriptive to Smart Growth advancement. Given this specific list of writers, it isn't astounding that the majority of the lessons inside the book fit well into the umbrella of New Urbanism, a sub-organization of Smart Growth that the majority of the book's authors have aligned with.

The second book is the book A Pattern Language by Christopher Alexander. Alexander's endeavored to demonstrate that architecture associates residents to their surroundings in an infinite number of ways, the vast majority of which are subconscious. Hence, it was imperative to find what works; what feels wonderful; what is mentally nourishing; what attracts instead of repulsing. These arrangements, found mostly in vernacular architecture, were orchestrated into the "Pattern Language" around 20 years back.

Negative Consequences of Smart Growth Programs

This paper assesses different reactions to Smart Growth. It clarifies the idea of Smart Growth, compares it with sprawl, and depicts basic Smart Growth approaches. It analyzes different criticism of Smart Growth based on the cases that it brings harm to residents, violates freedom, air pollution and expands traffic congestion, causes social issues, increases housing unaffordability, hikes public service costs, demands uneconomical travel grants and is unjustified. Some particular critics' papers are analyzed. This analysis shows that numerous claims by these critics mirror their poor comprehension of Smart Growth or erroneous analysis. However they, critics, point out some real issues that must be looked into to advance Smart Growth, yet present no persuading proof to reduce support for Smart Growth. (Hawkins & Christopher, 2519)

The Community Digital Hub in Worcester City

This is a determined platform that will change how residents connect in the community, and will eventually help satisfy Worcester state's vital vision. Mental capacities control it, blockchain-based records and a smart data center point and goes past the siloes in city government to unite partners from across the private, public and non-profit sectors.

Smart Sustainable City (SSC) is a growing pattern in the world, both in developed countries and developing countries. Regardless of the distinctions in vision, strategies, and execution, the development of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) centers for SSC is an essential condition adapted by economies to accomplish better district in regard of social, environmental and economic (Grant &Jill L, 27). Today, urban cities communities are incubators of opportunities and innovation, numerous large urban districts, go about as industrial engines, with the most innovative communication programs and exceedingly talented workforce.

This undertaking goes for accomplishing the following goals:

1. To guarantee members will undoubtedly be able to recognize necessary conditions to deploy ICT SSC infrastructure in Worcester. This goal is aimed at improving understanding of favorable administrative policies, technological developments, policy frameworks, essential guide, and so forth which may empower the adoption of cutting edge ICT technologies for SSC.
2. To develop a structure for investigating critical components needed to help the improvement of SSC ICT framework in the city. This would incorporate distinguishing the ICT benefits that allow Smart Services and applications to deliver in Worcester. It would also include identifying the fundamental challenges the city's economy is encountering in encouraging the development of SSC ICT infrastructure. This goal is aimed gone at gathering materials to help the improvement of the recommendations in Objective 3.
3. To create proposals to enable economies to recognize and capitalize on the benefits, and address the significant challenges and difficulties identified in Objective 2 (see above). This would incorporate suggestions on good administrative and policy choices and practical technical solutions. This goal is aimed at supporting capacity building in the upcoming economies, with the end goal of connecting the digital divide and accomplishing adjusted improvement in the region.

Conclusion

Urban planning guided by smart growth principles covers various conservation and development strategies that safeguard the environment, health and wellbeing and still promote the attractiveness of the community making it stronger economically and socially diverse.

Works Cited

Boyle, Robin, and Rayman Mohamed. "State growth management, smart growth and urban containment: A review of the US and a study of the heartland." Journal of Environmental Planning and Management 50.5 (2007): 677-697.

Grant, Jill L. "Theory and practice in planning the suburbs: Challenges to implementing new urbanism, smart growth, and sustainability principles." Planning Theory & Practice 10.1 (2009): 11-33.

Greenberg, Michael, et al. "Brownfield redevelopment as a smart growth option in the United States." Environmentalist 21.2 (2001): 129-143.

Hawkins, Christopher. "Competing interests and the political market for smart growth policy." Urban Studies 51.12 (2014): 2503-2522.