ABSTRACT
In healthy neighborhoods there is homeostasis, a balance of many invisible influences encouraging residents and owners to maintain and fix up their communities. Homeostasis is a medical concept, denoting the balance of many forces joining to maintain an organism's equilibrium, that urban planners should learn more about. This chapter looks at neighborhood revitalization from a fresh angle, showing how private corporations can help coordinate the behavior of many diverse interests. It then provides some necessary conditions for a sustained recovery, and illustrates them with two examples of privately spurred revitalization in order to develop some general inferences helpful to promoters of recovery elsewhere. The chapter explores that the process involves more than the physical restoration that past public approaches pursued. Know-how, money, labor and materials, and the residents must all be brought together in appropriate ways to maintain communities and upgrade neighborhoods. Context is important to understand the Lincoln Life Improved Housing (LLIH) program.
