Direction Home follows seven homeless people over seven years until they have a home. They were Initially living in Welcome Arnold shelter in Cranston, RI until 2007 when Governor Carcieri decided to demolish the building to make way for a new State Police Headquarters that was ultimately never built on the site. The film tracks and periodically re-interviews the characters about where and how they are living. The film also chronicles the efforts of housing activists, tent city residents, and service providers. It reveals some of the reasons why people become chronically homeless, why Housing First and permanent supportive housing policies are ultimately effective in ending homelessness, and why rights for the homeless are so important. The film was made with the support of RI Council for the Humanities and Brown University and the assistance of Brown University students.

The restricted data of the report “creates a city within a city” and makes the East Side “a privileged island,” Bloch said. If the report had included crime statistics from the West Side of Providence, overall crime would appear to be much higher, he said, adding that the East Side is much safer than other areas of the city.

Recipients of the second round of Global Experiential Learning and Teaching grants have been announced. The GELT program, unveiled in the summer of 2014, provides support for faculty to embed an education abroad component into an on-campus course.

More than a bus stop: Providence’s Kennedy Plaza reopens as gathering place

Edited by Sandy Isenstadt, Margaret Maile Petty, Dietrich Neumann
January 2015
Routledge

The website, designed with the help of Ashley So, acts as a repository for student papers and projects from "Crime and the City" (URBN 1230), a course about the socio-spatial construction and understanding of contemporary urban criminality taught by Professor Stefano Bloch (Urban Studies).

A new bus-tour series hosted by the Urban Studies Program at Brown University aims to reveal the city through the eyes of Brown professors.

"Ten More Years: Gang Sentence Enhancement Legislation in Rhode Island" by Mika Kligler

A Ferguson teach-in was hosted on campus by the Center for the Study of Race and Ethnicity in America. Urban Studies Professors James Morone and Stefano Bloch were on the panel.

James A. Morone
September 2014
University Press of Kansas

The Providence Journal featured Dietrich Neumann's fall 2012 studio seminar, co-taught with Friedrich St. Florian of RISD and Ed Mitchell of Yale, on its front page (May 7, 2013). Teams of Brown and RISD students enrolled in "Land Use Planning: The I-195 Parcels" (URBN 1900) designed new uses for the downtown land left vacant by the dismantling and moving of the interstate highway. Their models were the subject of a catalog and exhibited to the public. The class and the publication were fully sponsored by Urban Studies.