The branding image of commercial streets can be an important factor for inviting new shops and attracting customers and visitors to the area. It can also contribute to changing the image of declining downtown shopping streets and regain tenants and customers. The images of commercial streets...

This thesis explores how organizations competent at harnessing the collective power of low-income immigrants might successfully combine their strategies to advance the well-being of their mutual constituencies. Based in Durham, North Carolina, the LCCU is a successful community development...

This thesis focuses on the concept of Collective Economics and develops a set of recommendations by which groups with common interests can effectively utilize their purchasing power for collective benefits. Working with Lawrence Community Works (LCW), the thesis provides an economic profile of...

Low Impact Development (LID) is a site planning approach that limits the environmental impact of development on the local hydrological regime. By preserving and mimicking natural landscape features, LID introduces a new site planning and stormwater management paradigm to mainstream real estate...

The economic distress of America's inner cities is one of the most pressing issues facing the nation. Many analysts have asserted the unmet retail demand in inner-city neighborhoods and the potential for translating this demand into investment. Tapping the unmet retail demand has been considered...

Downtowns have experienced decline since the 1990s in Japan and several strategies have been implemented to deal with it. This research focuses on one of such strategies-the Town Management Organization (TMO) model. Although the model was expected to achieve downtown revitalization through...

Financing public transport through public funds is a common practice that can be justified on different grounds: equity, natural monopoly and, particularly with the increasing motorization rate, externalities produced by private transport (congestion, pollution, road accidents) especially in...

Ever since the late 1950s, planners have lured large firms to lagging regions with the expectation that they will trigger local industrial activity. According to the literatures on unbalanced growth, growth poles, foreign direct investment, and global commodity chains, large firms can dynamize...

In this study, we examine the process of "late standardization," in which latecomers engage in standards activities in order to move towards and beyond the technological frontier. Based on case studies of latecomers in the semiconductor and mobile telecommunication industries in South Korea and...

In 1996, when Brazil was well-underway to privatising and liberalising its electric power industry, few would have predicted that within five years the reforms would be a shambles. Like its neighbors Argentina and Chile, Brazil based its electricity reforms on the orthodox therapies of...