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Ten Commandments of urban regeneration: creating healthy, safe, affordable, sustainable, and just neighbourhoods

Social critic Paul Goodman (1960, p. 17) wrote in Growing Up Absurd, “A man has only one life and if during it he has no great environment, no community, he has been irreparably robbed of a human right.” This is the compass that continually informs my work and fuels the commitment in creating just and sustainable neighbourhoods. For the past 25 years, Sustainable Urban Neighborhoods (SUN) programme, along with my colleagues in the Kentucky Institute for Environment and Sustainable Development (KIESD) located at the University of Louisville, has brought in millions of dollars in competitive research and service grants to respond to the demands of residents in decaying neighbourhoods for sustainable urban regeneration (Agyeman 2005, 2013). SUN only goes into neighbourhoods that request organising assistance that empowers declining neighbourhoods with green urban science of what helps and hurts neighbourhoods (Capek and Gilderbloom 1992, Gilderbloom 2008). Why should Louisville be a compass for neighbourhood urban regeneration? The answer is simple. Louisville is representative of roughly 200 mid-sized cities in the USA. There are 191 neighbourhoods; several neighbourhoods are thriving while others are dying. Louisville is neither the worst nor the best of US cities; rather, it looks like many other mid-sized cities in America such as Sacramento, Reno, San Antonio, and St. Louis. Because of the similarities between Louisville and the other mid-sized cities, the experiences here are probably more relevant than those in the “star” megalopolises such as New York, San Francisco, Paris, or London. It is this ability to compare and contrast Louisville’s neighbourhoods that has allowed the city to serve as an urban laboratory for researching and testing ideas to identify what makes neighbourhoods live or die. Another advantage of Louisville is the ability to make more precise and reliable measurements without a lot of interference (statistical “noise”) from surrounding cities. Neighbourhood effects on health, prosperity, and fairness are more efficiently and accurately measured in Louisville for reasons listed earlier. It is an island in the middle of America with no large cities of 50,000 or more population within 100 miles (e.g. Indianapolis, Lexington, Cincinnati, and Nashville). Neighbourhood sustainability is measured by factors such as life expectancy, foreclosure rates, crime, poverty, and neighbourhood housing valuations. Louisville’s