This is a study of how a bureaucracy allocates a commodity or a service in this case, public housing. In the broadest sense, it seeks to understand how bureaucrats try to resolve two often conflicting goals of regulatory justice: equity (treating like cases alike on the basis of rules) and respon siveness (making exceptions for persons whose needs require that rules be stretched). It analyzes the extent to which such factors as bureaucratic norms, the task orientation of workers, third-party pressure, and outside intervention affect staff members' use of discretion. Many of the rules under...

The work of Harvey S. Perloff stands as a landmark in the evolution of Anglo American planning doctrine. It is impossible to fully capture the essence of the published work in a paragraph, page, or even an entire essay. Yet its highpoints can be identified. His work was innovative, reformist, comprehensive, and ori ented toward the future. In emphasizing the greater importance of people com pared to things, Perloff repeatedly prodded planners to be concerned with human needs and values. He was critical of the past. But inasmuch as he de voted more effort to envisioning what could lie ahead...

This book focuses on neighborhoods and the people living in them. It describes differences among neighborhoods in terms of their social and institutional structure, attitudes of the residents, quality of life, and the characteristics of the residents. The book is based on the results of a survey of almost 6,000 residents living throughout the city of Pittsburgh. As such it provides the basis for examining groups of people as well as whole neighborhoods. The communal aspects of urban living are discussed in Chapters 1 and 2; attachment toward the neighborhood in Chapter 3; importance of reli...

The conference on The Water Environment: Algal Toxins and Health was held at Wright State University in Dayton, Ohio, on June 29, 30, July 1, 2, 1980. Its principal objectives were to bring together, for the first time, researchers, public officials and interested parties in order to present and discuss what is known about algal toxins. The conference concentrated almost exclusively on toxins and toxic blooms of blue-green algae (Cyanobacteria). Since the most common Cyanobacteria bloom forming species are also the ones most likely to produce toxins, they are a problem in the maintenance of...

This book intends to be helpful to people-students and oth ers-who are beginning to think about how to change the world via that activity we call development planning. The issues of What is Progress? and How do we get it? are world-wide, although they appear in different form in societies like our own from the way they do in the Third World countries with their explicit development planning. These are two very big questions and have no easy or final answers. However, we can think about them in more rather than less effective ways. Thinking about them can be both a way of beginning to take...

Over the years I have conducted numerous neighborhood studies, alternately focusing on specific geographic areas, public programs, and types of citizen actions. Because most of these efforts were done on a project-by-project basiS, it did not readily occur to me that these separate investigations also represented an aggregate statement about American neighborhoods: the con tinuing and complex relationship between public policy and neighborhood life. A suggestion by Lloyd Rodwin, the senior editor for this series, prOvided the opportunity to reexamine the various manuscripts, and to select...

This book began as an exploration of collaborative work orga nizations. We knew about people in various occupations who had gotten together to form organizations of equals to man age the settings within which they did their work. Among these organizations were a teacher-controlled public school, a fishermen's cooperative, a potters' studio, a public-interest advocacy group, and an architectural firm. We wondered how these groups functioned, and whether and how they contributed to making work satisfying for the individuals in them. These groups were, of course, pretty small potatoes, but it...

This book's title betrays at once that it belongs in the forecast literature. Peering into the future is a notoriously treacherous venture. Nevertheless, it has become a prac tice endemic to the business and government worlds as well as to academia, especially economics. We like to be lieve that the enormous growth of forecasting in the face of some disappointments reflects real needs of decision makers (as well as the general public's well-warranted curiosity about the future). Fashion alone could hardly explain the sustained increase in the market for forecast services during the past few...

Curious about the images of the city that have been evolving in the different social sciences, we did what academics often do in such a situa- 1 tion: we set up a seminar on "Images of the City in the Social Sciences." From the start, we counted on the help of specialists in other fields to pursue their interests. Of the persons who agreed to participate, all but two came from the United States, and their analyses, in the main, reflect the experience of Western countries and the United States. In our formal instructions to our collaborators, we took fi>r granted that a variety of images of...