Urban, Community and Regional Planning Commons^™

Main Streets And Green Spaces: Creating A Community Vision In Indian Orchard, Rebecca Bagdigian-Boone, Li-Ting Hsu, Remington Pointes, Muskaan Handa, Abby Derrick, Jake Harlow, Suzanne Warner

Landscape Architecture & Regional Planning Studio and Student Research and Creative Activity

Main Street and Green Spaces takes a focused look at the neighborhood of Indian Orchard and provides strategies for urban design and landscape architecture to support residents’ visions for the future. With the Studio’s partnership between the Indian Orchard Citizen’s Council, Grow IO (Wellspring Harvest), and the Springfield Office of Planning and Economic Development, the overarching goal for each design team was to create a cohesive, phased plan for redeveloping Main Street around the Oak and Main intersection and Parker and the Ludlow Bridge. Special attention was requested for exploring traffic calming measures and ways to support the local businesses …

Life On The Sidewalk: A Comparative Analysis Of Pratt Street And Park Street In Hartford, Connecticut, And Its Implications, Rocio Fernandez Gutierrez

Senior Theses and Projects

No abstract provided.

Restoring Dignity In The Gardens Of Ekhenana, Jordan Buser

Independent Study Project (ISP) Collection

This case study investigates the lived experiences of eKhenana, a shack settlement under the leadership of Abahlali baseMjondolo, as they attempt to navigate the increasingly unequal urban landscape. The research presented is focused on theories of urban marginality, food sovereignty, and dignity. I advocate that, in the margins, dignity can be restored through the implementation of a communal garden. Presented as a case study, this research centers the voices and experiences of the commune. The paper first depicts a brief timeline of eKhenana, and explains how they have created not just a place to live, but a community and a …

Murals & Mother Nature: Urban Environmental Art In Lisbon Reveals Great Concern And Appreciation For The Environment, Ana Gunther

Independent Study Project (ISP) Collection

Urban art is a novel dimension of the environmental movement. Utilizing highly trafficked areas, urban art has the potential to spread environmental messages both because of the size of the audience and because of the contrast between nature-centered art and the urban context. The paper discusses 15 environmental urban artworks in Lisbon and conducts a visual and thematic analysis. The analysis revealed five themes present in Lisbon: the power and beauty of nature, connection with nature, environmental loss and degradation, waste management, and climate change. The most prevalent theme in Lisbon was the connection with nature, followed by a tie …

Planning For Local Resilience, Natasia Peacock

All Theses

Planning for resilience to climate change within the comprehensive plan is a keyway to help protect local communities. State legislations provides the guidelines to local governments to if a comprehensive plan is needed for the community and what is required to be within the comprehensive plan. This research assesses state legislation for resiliency policies for comprehensive plans and assesses comprehensive plans to see if local governments are adequately applying the legislation.

Nine states across five geographic regions, were used in evaluation of state legislation. A variety of comprehensive plans were also evaluated at both city and county levels within these …

Cycling Safety Problems In Urban Context, Boushra Naim, Mary Felix

Architecture and Planning Journal (APJ)

Cycling as an urban peculiarity has been well-informed as far as quantifiable area plan characteristics like road lattices, cycle paths, misfortunes; in any case, there is less exploration that objectives the security issues in metropolitan climate. This review portrays the consequences of subjective examination led with bikers and other street users. This phase of exploration has been dominatingly 'descriptive', determined to give a guide of the scope of security related inspirations, perspectives, insights, and conduct among cyclists and other street users. Cycling meets with a scope of strategy issues, going from street wellbeing to difficulties and failures. The outcomes in …

Reviving The Neglected Urban Spaces Using Recreational Facilities, Malek Demashkieh

Architecture and Planning Journal (APJ)

Neglection is the act of failing to care about something, it is the act of carelessness and forgetting. Adding to that in the same context, neglected urban spaces are barren lands that have been forgotten by the government making these lands gaps scattered in the city like rivers that are natural freshwater streams that flow into a canal that leads to the sea, a lake, or another river. Harmonizing these areas into the society will offer opportunities for these spaces to become a liveable, social, urban public spaces. Unfortunately, forgotten, and neglected riverfronts areas are found in the cities, thus …

Role Of Public Spaces In Re-Activating The Cultural Identity, Reem Al-Zein

Architecture and Planning Journal (APJ)

Culture plays an important role in defining a society's values and identity. Craftsmanship has remained an important aspect of Lebanese cultural identity and history, contributing to the shaping of many public and private spaces as well as supporting families and people's livelihoods. Unfortunately, considering the significance of craftsmen cultural production in the country's social and economic development, it is still a lost field nowadays. Therefore, as result, this tradition is diminishing, threatening Lebanon's intangible cultural heritage. Therefore, this paper aims to develop convenient solutions to regenerate and to preserve the city's social, historical, and cultural image and identity through creating …

Brownfield Regeneration As An Urban Approach Resisting Economic Recession, Ahmad Saadeh

Architecture and Planning Journal (APJ)

Brownfield is a land that was used before for different purposes, then was polluted, and abandoned, this type of land is called brownfield. Brownfield regeneration consists of three main sustainable fields: economical, environmental, and social. Brownfield regeneration is a main key in sustainable urban development. Thus, suffering from an economic crisis that affected all the veins of the country and left people in a bad situation. That shortage made the citizens feel miserable, unproductive, less efficient, and unpleased. This research aims to examine the validity of using the brownfield areas to be proper lands as a tool for resisting economic …

Proposing Guidelines To Upgrade The Open Public Spaces In The Informal Settlements, Lena Hosni, Ayman Afify, Hiba Mohsen, Maged Youssef

Architecture and Planning Journal (APJ)

Informal Settlements have expanded rapidly in the last fifty years and have kept rising. With rapid population expansion has come an increase in haphazard urbanisation and informal settlements, frequently referred as slums. Defined as a settlement that was formed in an unplanned and uncontrolled way, which means they are mostly unrecognized. Unfortunately, focusing on the problem of current challenges in informal settlements, on the socio-cultural and environmental levels, which are facing a massive shift in the quality of life in these sites, this is reflected in urban fragmentations, social and infrastructures are lacking, service systems that have become progressively inefficient …

Structural Problems Of Latin American Cities 450 Years After Caracas’ Foundation, Fabio Capra-Ribeiro

Faculty Publications

Latin American cities face many problems that compromise them from different angles such as lack of infrastructure, government fragmentation, and environmental degradation. At the same time, each city tries to come up with its own solutions, but there are so many difficulties that in many cases it is difficult to keep attention and efforts focused on all these directions. For these reasons, this research aims to define some of the most common problems faced by cities in Latin America. Disseminating these similarities could help to face those problems, since, if local governments recognize that they face the same situations as …

The Eudaimonic Tree Pilot: A Study Of Public Engagement In Participatory Art At Three Sites, Olivia A. James

Masters Theses

In times of crisis, what tools do planners and designers have to inspire a sense of well-being? How can we heal community through dialogue, recognizing the ongoing need for connection with or without a crisis? Are there ways to uncover unknown concerns and values in a community? The engagement approaches many planners and designers rely on do not typically aim to access these deeper questions in society. Surveys, public meetings and focus groups seek tangible results that target specific issues. They are often conducted out of context, taking the public out of the environment at issue to answer questions on …

The Rise Of Southern Nevada As A Cluster For Metropolitan Transit Technology Innovations, Arthur C. Nelson

Policy Briefs and Reports

Southern Nevada is emerging as the nation’s leader in private sector-driven innovations in transportation technologies. From the humble beginnings of a monorail system serving a portion of major hotel and gaming venues along the Las Vegas Strip, now supplemented by an array of people movers, Southern Nevada continues to attract transit innovations in tunneling, Hyperloop, and driverless vehicle delivery technologies. The region may soon anchor a high-speed rail system connecting Southern Nevada to Los Angeles. The purpose of this briefing paper is to frame the nature of this emerging transportation cluster and the opportunities this creates for Southern Nevada to …

The Design Of An Agricultural Youth-Centered Rural Development Program In Rwanda, Laetitia Igiraneza Sinyigenga

Honors Theses, University of Nebraska-Lincoln

Rwanda is primarily a rural, young, and agriculture-based country. The referred variables- agriculture, rural population, and youth- can be creatively merged to engage and empower youth for rural development. This paper indicates the utilization of cross-disciplinary knowledge to design an agricultural youth-centered rural development program in Rwanda. The program uses the interdependence of economic sectors (agriculture and education) with resources (environmental & natural resources and human resources) to boost rural community development. The program’s main activities- mentorship, agribusiness training, tutoring, exposure visits, and community work- highly reflect the requirement for advancing the selected main economic sectors and resources. There is …

Presas Efímeras Of New Mexico, José A. Rivera Ph.D.

Faculty Publications

The main title of this paper mimics a groundbreaking investigation by anthropologist Teresa Rojas Rabiela and ethnohistorian Ignacio Gutiérrez Ruvalcaba titled: Las presas efímeras mexicanas, del pasado y del presente (Ephemeral diversion dams of Mexico, past and present). Their study inspired the addition of counterpart cases from Nuevo México, a former Mexican province directly north of the Juarez-El Paso border. The work here describes the traditional dams of the northern Río Grande region and also serves as a guide to future research and the development of historic preservation projects. After introducing readers to Las presas efímeras mexicanas, …

Reaching A Young Audience In City And Regional Planning, Kristie P. Woo, Vinnie P. Chen

City and Regional Planning

Currently, urban planning is a rare discussion topic in schools. The youth are often excluded in the planning process as most adults question their intellectual capacity and they hold little to no political power. However, this does not have to be the case - planning has the potential to change young minds when expressed in a medium children can understand.

Five Key Points In The Ipcc Report On Climate Change Impacts And Adaptation, Lisa Schipper, Vanessa Castan Broto, Winston T. L. Chow

Research Collection College of Integrative Studies

The latest report from the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) looks at the impacts, adaptation and vulnerabilities associated with the climate crisis, and we are three of the 270 scientists and researchers who wrote it. The document reports stark new findings on the way current global warming of 1.1℃ is impacting natural and human systems, and on how our ability to respond will be increasingly limited with every additional increment of warming.

Women And Water: Lessons Learned From A Humanitarian Intervention At Igusi Clinic, Matabeleland, Zimbabwe, Rachel C. Svetanoff, Ifeoma Ilobodo

wH2O: The Journal of Gender and Water

This article highlights the disproportionate impact of water scarcity on women and girls in Matabeleland, Zimbabwe. We emphasize one Zimbabwean woman's efforts to implement a sustainable water solution for a community of 20,000 citizens. Lumbie Mlambo, Founder and President of the nonprofit JB Dondolo, Inc., took action following reports that people in the community her father was aiding were falling ill, mothers could not carry their pregnancy to full terms, and infant mortality rates were rising. Before Lumbie's intervention, the only water available was contaminated by polluted soil. Moreover, the climate change-induced droughts and floods made the potable water hard …

Access To Clean Water For Women In Iraq: Accorded Rights, Bakir H. Amin

wH2O: The Journal of Gender and Water

After the Iraqi government was established in 1921, it had a little problem receiving a sufficient quantity of high-quality water from the Euphrates and Tigris Rivers. However, the upstream countries of Turkey, Syria, and Iran soon built dams and canal on the shared rivers in the latter half of the 20th century. Furthermore, engaged in prolonged military conflicts such as the Iranian-Iraq War of the 1980s, the Gulf War of the 1990s, the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003, and the ongoing ISIS occupation in the region, Iraq’s political, economic, and social infrastructures have been crippled in the wake of …

Law School News: National Housing Advocate Named To Lead Rwu's New Real Estate Initiatives 02/08/2022, Roger Williams University School Of Law

Life of the Law School (1993- )

No abstract provided.