The Village Homes neighborhood in Davis, California is one of the few long-standing examples of sustainable community design. Mark Francis has been studying Village Homes for more than two decades and brings together existing research and writing on the community, studies about the children of Village Homes he conducted throughout the 1980s, and interviews with many parties involved with the project including designers, residents, gardeners, and maintenance people. Mark Francis takes a critical look at Village Homes, addressing its failures as well as its successes, and examines the question of why, despite its success, this development has not been replicated.

Village communities were the heart of the medieval countryside. But how did they operate? This book seeks to find some answers to that question by focusing on late medieval Drenthe, a region situated in a remote corner of the Holy Roman Empire and part of the prince-bishopric of Utrecht. Drenthe was an overwhelmingly localized, rural world. It had no cities, and consisted entirely of small villages. The social and economic importance of traditionally privileged sections of medieval society (clergy and nobility) was limited; free peasant landowners were the dominant social class. Based on a careful reading of normative sources (Land charters) and thousands of short verdicts given by the so-called 'Etstoel' or high court of justice in Drenthe, this book focuses on three types of conflict: conflicts between villages, feud-like violence, and litigations about property. These three types coincide with three levels of involvement: that of village communities as a whole, that of kin groups, and that of households. The resulting, comprehensive analysis provides a rigorous interrogation of generalized notions of the pre-industrial rural world, offering a snapshot of a typical peasant society in late medieval Europe.

Robert M. Franklin provides first-person advice and insight as he identifies the crises resident within three anchor institutions that have played key roles in the black struggle for freedom. Black families face a "crisis of commitment" evident in the rising rates of father absence, births to unmarried parents, divorce, and domestic abuse or relationship violence. Black churches face a "mission crisis" as they struggle to serve their upwardly mobile and/or established middle class "paying customers" alongside the poorest of the poor. Historically black colleges and universities face a crisis of "relevance and purpose" as they now compete for the best students and faculty with the broad marketplace of colleges. With clarity and passion, Franklin calls for practical and comprehensive action for change from within the African American community and from all Americans.

Does It Take a Village? focuses on the mechanisms that link community characteristics to the functioning of the families and individuals within them--community norms, economic opportunities, reference groups for assessing relative deprivation, and social support networks. Contributors underscore those features of communities that represent risk factors for children, adolescents, and their families, as well as those characteristics that underlie resilience and thus undergird individual and family functioning. As a society we have heavy investments both in research and in programs based on the idea that communities affect families and children, yet important questions have arisen about the validity of the link between communities, children, and families. This book answers the question of whether--and how--it takes a village to raise a child and what we can do to help communities achieve this essential task more effectively.