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Do Planners Always Have to Make the Neighborhood Better ? Rethinking the Disturbing Tensions Between Redevelopment and Equity
Get PDFAmerica’s public sector planners are constantly trying to “make things better.” That has been true ever since planning became a profession. Planners are paid to think broadly about how emerging demographic, economic, environmental, and mobility trends will impact life in our communities, and then make recommendations and write regulations to respond to those trends in ways that make the city a better place. In fact, if planners were not doing that, it is not clear why cities should pay them. For the most part, the predominant focus by planners is making communities physically better through comprehensive, neighborhood, sector, and corridor plans. Unanswered in most plans and planning processes is the question “make it better for whom?” While there is often an implicit assumption that the neighborhood should be made better for those who live there, the problem is that if the plan succeeds in improving the physical environment, the current residents may not be the ones who benefit from the change. In this article, I address the disturbing tensions between redevelopment planning and social equity
Forfeiting IP
No full textCan IP rights be lost? That is, once IP rights are acquired, what--if anything--must owners do to keep those rights or risk forfeiting them. The answer varies widely across the IP landscape and has important consequences for follow-on innovation, competition, and the public domain. This article takes the first close look at forfeiture mechanisms throughout the five major IP regimes--utility patent, trade secret, copyright, design patent, and trademark. I demonstrate how IP forfeiture mechanisms (e.g., maintenance fees, monitoring obligations, and use requirements) have weakened or narrowed over time. Building on prior scholarship, I also delineate the important functions that IP forfeiture mechanisms serve. By forcing IP owners to decide if the cost and effort of maintaining IP rights are worthwhile, forfeiture mechanisms help eliminate low-value IP rights and enlarge the public domain, benefiting follow-on innovators and society at large. In addition, forfeiture mechanisms serve an important notice or signaling role by forcing owners to engage in acts that inform second comers about the existence and scope of IP rights. These functions are particularly important when it comes to functional or useful subject matter (e.g., innovations that make a product work). Given forfeiture\u27s role and its problematic narrowing across the IP landscape, I suggest the need for reform--particularly in design patent and copyright law, two areas that increasingly cover functional subject matter but lack any forfeiture mechanism
Text Mining for Bias: A Recommendation Letter Experiment
No full textThis article uses computational text analysis to study the form and content of more than 3000 recommendation letters submitted on behalf of applicants to a major U.S. anesthesiology residency program. The article finds small differences in form and larger differences in content. Women applicants\u27 letters were more likely to contain references to acts of service, for example, whereas men were more likely to be described in terms of their professionalism and technical skills. Some differences persisted when controlling for standardized aptitude test scores, on which women and men scored equally on average, and other applicant and letter-writer characteristics. Even when all explicit gender-identifying language was stripped from the letters, a machine learning algorithm was able to predict applicant gender at a rate better than chance. Gender stereotyped language in recommendation letters may infect the entirety of an employer\u27s hiring or selection process, implicating Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Not all gendered language differences were large, however, suggesting that small changes may remedy the problem. The article closes by proposing a computationally driven system that may help employers identify and eradicate bias, while also prompting a rethinking of our gendered, racialized, ableist, ageist, and otherwise stereotyped occupational archetypes
Advancing Children\u27s Rights Through the Arts
No full textAlthough the Convention on the Rights of the Child is the most widely ratified human rights treaty, threats to children\u27s rights persist globally. One reason is that states have not met their threshold obligation to ensure that children\u27s rights are widely known, so that they may be respected and ensured. This article argues that an important way to disseminate children\u27s rights among children and adults is to partner with the arts. The article examines the benefits of a partnership between children\u27s rights and the arts and discusses the key elements of a children\u27s rights approach to the arts, as well as challenges to address
Data Sharing to Combat Segregation
No full textData sharing between housing and education agencies will provide housing agencies with resources to assist them with efforts to decrease segregation and mitigate the adverse health outcomes experienced by people of color. The Fair Housing Act has the potential to fulfill its original integrationist purpose if housing and education agencies combine resources and data to create and implement fair housing plans. The Biden Administration\u27s restored rule to affirmatively further fair housing pursuant to the Fair Housing Act of 1968 which seeks to reduce segregation and increase housing equity. However, it omits most of the processes set forth by the Obama Administration whereby federal agencies provide the proper tools to housing agencies so that they are able to make data-based decisions about housing policies. This article advocates for the sharing of data between housing and education agencies to optimize the positive impact of fair housing not only within housing, but also on the education, employment, and health opportunities for communities of color
