Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

An Analysis Of Poverty Convergence: Evidence From Pennsylvania Counties, Angel Alcantara, Stephanie M. Brewer, James J. Jozefowicz

The Journal of Economics and Politics

This paper extends applications of unconditional and conditional β-convergence and σ-convergence analysis to poverty rates in a panel data sample of Pennsylvania counties during the period 1990-2019. Spatial structural breaks between rural and urban counties in Pennsylvania plus the possibility that Philadelphia County is an outlier are acknowledged to avoid spurious inferences. The findings support the existence of unconditional β-convergence in the pooled, urban, and rural samples with non-metropolitan areas exhibiting the greatest convergence. However, the largest conditional β-convergence is observed for urban counties, and this outcome is robust to the exclusion of Philadelphia County. Graphical evidence evinces a greater …

One Crisis Or Two Problems? Disentangling Rural Access To Justice And The Rural Attorney Shortage, Daria F. Page, Brian R. Farrell

Washington Law Review

We have all seen the headlines: No Lawyer for Miles or Legal Deserts Threaten Justice for All in Rural America. There is a substantial body of literature, across disciplines and for diverse audiences, that looks at access to justice in rural communities and geographies. However, in both the popular and scholarly imaginations, the access to justice crisis has been largely conflated with the shortage of local attorneys in rural areas: When bar associations, lawyers, and legal academics define the problem as not enough lawyers, more lawyers become the obvious solution. Consequently, programs aimed at building pipelines from law schools …

The Effect Of An Elephant Conservation Education Program On The Knowledge Base Of Children In Thailand, Angela Larios

Theses and Dissertations

Habitat fragmentation and human-elephant conflict (HEC) are two factors that have caused harm to both Asian elephants and humans in Thailand. Think Elephants International (TEI) is a non-profit organization whose goal is to educate children on these issues to encourage more interest in and knowledge about elephant conservation in the youth of Thailand. TEI has developed a systematic education initiative and established a method for assessing the program’s efficacy using a pre- and post-survey. The current study analyzes student responses from one open-ended question from this survey collected both before and after the students participated in the TEI program. This …

Urban And Community Tree Cover In The Mountain West, Zachary Billot, Zachary Walusek, Annie Vong, Caitlin J. Saladino, William E. Brown Jr.

Environment

This fact sheet examines data on tree cover and impervious cover in urban land for the United States and for the five states in the Mountain West: Arizona, Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico, and Utah. The original report includes data for each of the 50 states and the District of Columbia

Planning For The Preservation Of Biodiversity And Environmental Assets In Support Of Sustainable Planning In Urban Areas, Case Study: Batu Licin City, Tanah Bumbu Regency, South Kalimantan, Dharma Kalsuma, Hendricus Andy Simarmata

Smart City

Planning for preserving biodiversity and environmental assets in urban areas is crucial in supporting sustainable planning. This study aims to design a strategy for preserving biodiversity and environmental assets in Batu Licin, Tanah Bumbu Regency, South Kalimantan, to support sustainable urban planning. The method used is field observation and literature study. The results showed that the Batu Licin area has a relatively high potential for biodiversity and environmental assets. However, along with the growth of the Batu Licin urban area in the future, it will undoubtedly be a source of pressure on biodiversity. Several strategies can be implemented to overcome …

Public-Ish, Aliah Werth

Masters Theses

Climate change affects public space, and architecture must establish tenets that prioritize pedestrians in this difficult era. Greywater re-use can be a mechanism for creating shade, and in turn, public space.

As heat waves grow more intense, the vast swaths of asphalt that connect commercial zones pose greater risks to public health and to urban vitality. This thesis records the typical material, spatial, and lived conditions of strip malls in urban heat islands, and demands more from infrastructure in public-ish space.

Heat violence weaves through Los Angeles’ built form. Parking space minimums, required setbacks, and height restrictions pull buildings away …

Making Pla(Y)Ces: Softening The City Through Play, Shivani Pinapotu

Masters Theses

Cities that grow naturally over time integrate spaces of gathering that allow for serendipitous happenstance. However, the cities we design today instruct and codify through intentional planning and design; they assign use, hardening specific function to place. Such strategies lead to spaces devoid of spirit, inculcating in city-dwellers to a sense of disconnect from the city.

In contrast to this, the places we make as children, express our intuitive, direct, and unselfconscious relationships with space and one other. These spaces embody softness through their malleability and adaptability, borrowing from the world around them and imbuing the ordinary with imagination. …

Strategies To Increase Job Satisfaction In Remote Finance Urban Healthcare Workers, Kenna Johnson

Leadership Education Capstones

As the world changed with COVID-19, as did the future following it for workers in all fields. Working remotely has become a routine for many employees. Technology has allowed organizations to expand where employees work. Healthcare workers who were not on the front lines are now working remotely, including workers in finance. The research design was a qualitative study. The data obtained from this research focused on major themes of urban healthcare finance remote workers' challenges and what strategies can be implemented to increase job satisfaction overall. The crucial data points of challenges faced included the lack of communication between …

The Development And Psychometric Properties Testing Of Intolerance Of Uncertainty Scale For Indonesian Adults, Divani Aery Lovian, Dewi Maulina, Hilma Ramadina, Nathania Kusuma

Psychological Research on Urban Society

Uncertain situations have further exacerbated great vulnerability to stressors and a high risk of mental health problems in urban populations. The adverse effects of uncertainty on well-being have been increasingly concerning and heightened the need to understand intolerance of uncertainty (IU) as a factor that influences responses to uncertainty. However, few scales have been developed to measure IU, especially in Indonesia. To address this concern, the current study aimed to develop a reliable and valid Intolerance of Uncertainty Scale for Indonesian Adults (IUS-A). The scale was developed and validated using data from 588 participants aged 20–65 years (M = …

Exploring The Association Of Brownfield Remediation Status With Socioeconomic Conditions In Wayne County, Mi, Brendan F. O'Leary, Alex B. Hill, Colleen Linn, Mei Lu, Carol J. Miller, Andrew Newman, F. Gianluca Sperone, Qiong Zhang

Urban Studies and Planning Faculty Research Publications

Urban neighborhoods with locations of environmental contamination, known as brownfields, impact entire neighborhoods, but corrective environmental remedial action on brownfields is often tracked on an individual property basis, neglecting the larger neighborhood-level impact. This study addresses this impact by examining spatial differences between brownfields with unmitigated environmental concerns (open site) and sites that are considered fully mitigated or closed in urban neighborhoods (closed site) on the US census tract scale in Wayne County, MI. Michigan’s Department of Environment, Great Lakes, and Energy’s leaking underground storage tank (LUST) database provided brownfield information for Wayne County. Local indicators of spatial association (LISA) …

Comparing The Trajectory Of Urban Impervious Surface In Two Cities: The Case Of Accra And Kumasi, Ghana, Thomas Mumuni Bilintoh, Andrews Korah, Antwi Opuni, Adeline Akansobe

Student Publications

In this study, we present methods to assess newly developed urban impervious surface (UIS) datasets derived from satellite imagery of the cities of Kumasi and Accra, Ghana, at three different time points. Each city has three binary maps from 2000, 2011, and 2021, in which one shows the presence of UIS and zero shows its absence. We employed the binaryTimeSeries method to compare the gross gains and losses in the two cities. In addition, we show how three components of change—quantity, allocation, and alternation—compare across the two sites. The results show that both cities experienced a large proportion of gains …

Medicina Tradicional En La Urbe: El Funcionamiento Del Sistema De Salud Mapuche En Santiago, Mariko Yatsuhashi

Independent Study Project (ISP) Collection

En Santiago, Chile, una ciudad con más de 5 millones de personas, el pueblo originario Mapuche ha logrado la reconstrucción de su sistema tradicional de salud para servir la comunidad urbana de la comunidad mapuche. Hoy en día, la mayoría de gente mapuche viven en ambientes urbanos debido a una migración masiva desde su territorio ancestral en el sur, que creó una población distinta de gente mapuche llamada warriache, o gente de la ciudad. Después de una expansión nacional de los derechos básicos de pueblos originarios en los años ‘90, el pueblo originario Mapuche, junto con otros pueblos originarios, podía …

Developing A New Tool For Early Detection Of The Nutritional And Health Risk Factors Of Urban Workers’ Productivity, Hildagardis Meliyani Erista Nai, Arimbi Karunia Estri, Christina Ririn Widianti

Kesmas

Nutrition and health play vital roles in work productivity. This study aimed to develop a risk self-assessment tool called Early Detection of the Nutritional and Health Risk Factors on the productivity of urban workers. This study was conducted in two stages: 1) the development of the tool to determine the nutritional and health risk factors that affect productivity based on literature reviews and scoring systems and 2) the testing of validity and reliability. Finally, the tool contained 63 items, including 28 items on nutritional risk factors and 35 on health risk factors. The validity of the tool was assessed using …

Essays On The Economics Of Law And Crime, Zachary J. Porreca

Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports

The first chapter examines the connection between gentrification and urban violence. I demonstrate a positive and plausibly causal relationship between urban redevelopment and gun violence in Philadelphia. As the underlying mechanism, I focus on gentrification's displacement effect on local drug markets. Treating the city as a spatial network of city blocks and using two-way fixed effects differences-in-differences estimators, I show the gentrification of one block increases violence across the surrounding neighborhood. I find that some 2,400 (8%) of Philadelphia's shootings between the years 2011 and 2020 can be attributed to spillover effects from the gentrification of drug blocks. This effect …

Growing Pains: Toward A Coalition-Based Theory Of State Land Use Policy, Patrick Rochford

Honors Projects

In the decades following World War II, mass suburbanization remade the American landscape. While suburbs accounted for 83% of the nation’s growth between 1950 and 1970, cities bled their populations and natural resources dwindled. Treating the postwar era as a critical juncture, this thesis examines the political history of twentieth-century state land use policy to illuminate how competing interests have shaped policy outcomes across the United States. Specifically, the paper seeks to explain the passage of statewide growth management and smart growth programs. After providing a history of American suburbanization, the paper considers an emergent challenge to the postwar growth …

City Flags And The Politics Of Urban Revitalization: The Case Of Syracuse, Ny, Grace Risinger

Honors Theses

People tend to care about flags, but are not aware that their city has a flag. A recent wave of flag redesigns has been happening in the United States since a 2015 TED Talk was posted widely criticizing city flags. This subject prompted my professor, Daniel Alvord, to ask for a research assistant for his project to understand this phenomenon. For my thesis, I focus on a specific flag redesign initiative in Syracuse, NY, through an ethnographic case study. By applying previous urban sociological literature to my focus on flag redesigns, I can connect the Syracuse community member’s increased civic …

Earnings Gap Between Urban And Rural Migrant Workers In Vietnam, Kristen Le

Honors Theses

This thesis studies whether there is an earnings disparity between urban and rural migrant workers in Vietnam’s urban areas and whether that earnings gap is due to individual characteristics and human capital levels or other unobserved factors. In this paper, urban workers, or urban residents, are workers who have household registration status in the urban cities where they work. On the other hand, rural migrant workers, or rural-to-urban migrants, are defined as workers who live and work in urban cities but have their registered household statuses in other rural areas. Using the Vietnam Household Living Standard Survey (VHLSS) in 2008, …

Human–Black Bear Interactions And Public Attitudinal Changes In An Urban Ordinance Zone, Mark A. Barrett, Sarah E. Barrett, David J. Telesco, Michael A. Orlando

Human–Wildlife Interactions

Human–bear (Ursus spp.) interactions (HBI) commonly occur in residential areas throughout North America. Negative HBI can be alleviated by using bear-resistant garbage cans (BRC) and by securing other bear attractants (e.g., bird feeders). Since the early 2000s, human and Florida black bear (U. americanus floridanus) densities have increased substantially throughout Florida, USA, concurrently producing an increase in HBI. In central Florida, an area with high densities of humans and black bears, we surveyed 2 neighborhoods that occurred in an urban ordinance zone established in 2016 that required residents to secure anthropogenic food sources. Residents were supplied with …