Human Geography Commons^™

Analysis Of The Spatial And Temporal Dynamics Of Street Hawking: A Case Study Of The Accra Metropolitan Area, Alex Owusu Barimah, Stephen Abrokwah, Stephen Frimpong

Stephen Frimpong

To the street hawker, it is a means of making a living but to the managers of the metropolis, street hawking is a menace. These differences in perception have led to a game plan tied to spatio-temporal diurnal traffic regimes. While the city authorities plan may be to evict the street hawkers, the plan of the hawkers is to outwit the city authorities through make-shift hawking patterns in order to make a living. The difference in the two positions can be characterized by the city manager’s need for clean and less congested city streets, and the hawker’s desire to sell …

Gathering "Wild" Food In The City: Rethinking The Role Of Foraging In Urban Ecosystem Planning And Management, Rebecca J. Mclain, Patrick T. Hurley, Marla R. Emery, Melissa R. Poe

Environment and Sustainability Faculty Publications

Recent “green” planning initiatives envision food production, including urban agriculture and livestock production, as desirable elements of sustainable cities. We use an integrated urban political ecology and human–plant geographies framework to explore how foraging for “wild” foods in cities, a subversive practice that challenges prevailing views about the roles of humans in urban green spaces, has potential to also support sustainability goals. Drawing on research from Baltimore, New York City, Philadelphia, and Seattle, we show that foraging is a vibrant and ongoing practice among diverse urban residents in the USA. At the same time, as reflected in regulations, planning practices, …

Are Green Cities Nice Places To Live? Examining The Link Between Urban Sustainability And Quality Of Life, David S. Bieri

David S Bieri

The growing importance of nonmarket assets such as the environment, combined with the unprecedented availability of high-resolution data, has renewed broad interest in quantifying sustainability at different spatial levels. Policy-related decision making requires that potential sustainability measures meet three key requirements; (i) sustainability metrics need to be comprehensive such that they reflect the experience of representative households; (ii) sustainability indices need to be comparable across different geographic scales, and; (iii) measures of sustainability need to be economically meaningful, ideally tying into the larger system of national accounts. However, conventional sustainability indices do not tend to meet these criteria, rendering them …

Climate Change And Human Rights: A Case Study Of Vulnerability And Adaptation In Coastal Communities In Lagos, Nigeria., Idowu M. Ajibade

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Lagos, Nigeria is one the world’s megacities at risk from climate change. Communities along the coast have been hit hard by floods, storm surges, and rising seas, due to the city’s geographic location, inadequate infrastructures, and poor urban governance. These factors together with social inequality have been known to shape vulnerability to climatic hazards but less understood is the role of human rights.

The objective of this thesis is to develop a grounded understanding of the links between human rights and the vulnerability of people to climate change impacts (i.e. floods and storm surges). The study combined qualitative and quantitative …

Investigating The Housing Market For Student Tenants Surrounding An Urban University, Olivia M. Dobbs Ms.

Honors College Theses

The private housing market for students around Wayne State University, an urban campus in Detroit, Michigan, stands in a fast-changing period. The area has grown economically from institutional and medical center investment in the past few years, causing occupancy and rents to rise. This follows years of disinvestment that allowed rent rates to fall to comfortable rates for students. The University has published its interest in developing the “campus life” including more off-campus private market housing for students, while developers see potential for even higher rents for young professionals. This study assesses the current perceptions of a sample of rental …

Tourism In China With An Emphasis On Shanghai: A City Thriving Off Of The Future, Not The Past, Eileen Wu

Social Sciences

Tourism is an important industry throughout the world, not only does tourism create an influx of visitors to a certain destination, but it also creates millions of jobs around the world. Ever since China's opening reveal to the world in 1978, the tourism industry has increased and is a thriving business throughout the country. With the growing middle class of the Chinese population and their disposable incomes, tourism has increased not only internationally, but also domestically. More specifically, Shanghai has been a booming city with the recent renovation of Pudong, improvements in infrastructure for upscale accommodations, and the hosting of …

The Effectiveness Of The New Town Policy In Managing Growth And Congestion In Mega Cities: A Case Study Of Lagos, Nigeria New Town Policy, Abolaji Samson Olanipekun

Masters Theses

One of the major challenges facing municipal governments of megacities in developing countries is shortage of urban infrastructures relative to population growth. Because cities play important role in the economic development of every nation, problems confronting them require proactive policy measures by the government. One such mega city is Lagos, Nigeria. From 1962 to 2006, the population of Lagos grew from 1,135,805 to 17.5 million. Crammed on a 2200 square kilometer land area of which 18.9%, Lagos population is projected to reach 20.5 million by 2015, an explosion largely driven by the non-regulatory internal migration system. The result of this …

Uses And Perceptions Of The Neighborhood Open Space, Romain Cheynet

University of New Orleans Theses and Dissertations

This research investigates the uses and perceptions of the population of the East Carrollton Area in New Orleans so as to evaluate the possible outcomes of urban design intervention and policy changes. Using GIS, field notes, structured interviews and a population survey, this research evaluates how much the built environment influences the uses of the neighborhood open space. Subsequently, it evaluates how the neighborhood open space is perceived as a place as opposed to a transportation infrastructure.

Overall, the built environment affects the experience of the residents when they perform leisure activities in the neighborhood open space. Major deterrents to …

Negotiating Neoliberalism: Community-Based Organizations And The Production Of Urban Place, Caroline S. Devany

Geography Honors Projects

Focusing on two community-based organizations’ roles in producing urban place, this thesis contributes to the “New Urban Politics” literature that explores the neoliberal governance of space. Synthesizing participant observation, informant interviews and ideas introduced in Henri Lefebvre’s Production of Space my thesis explores the possibility of aesthetic practices rooted in everyday life to create alternate subjectivities of people and place. While both organizations engage urban governance in ways that do not directly contest neoliberalization, they each affirm participants as agents in the production of urban place in ways that can destabilize the marketization of everyday life.

Participatory Visual & Digital Methods, Aline Gubrium, Krista Harper

Krista M. Harper

Table of contents and introduction of Participatory Visual and Digital Methods by Aline Gubrium and Krista Harper. Available in paperback, hardcover, and e-book editions from Left Coast Press .

Whodata.Org 2012 Newsletter, Michelle M. Thompson, Darin Acosta, Alena A. Anderson, Brittany N. Arceneaux, Josh Baer, Brian J. Baldwin, Carl Seifert, Chandra Teddleton

Dr. Michelle M. Thompson, GISP, FRGS

WhoData.org, a community-focused public participation geographic information project, aims to share data that academic, public, private and non-profit organizations can use to assess, monitor and manage quality of life issues. WhoData empowers resident-led, non-profit or communityfocused groups, primarily in New Orleans, with training and resources to map and analyze data they collect on neighborhood conditions and trends. The community data information system, www.whodata.org, houses the results of property condition surveys. Residents are able to highlight priority properties that reflect indicators of blight, create customized maps and export property lists to share with the public and municipal leaders. Neighborhood profile reports, …

Arts Festivals, Urban Tourism And Cultural Policy, Bernadette Quinn

Books / Book chapters

Arts festivals are in the ascendant. Framed within an array of neo-liberal, culture-led urban regeneration strategies, they are now a mainstay of urban tourism and urban policy-making. As such, they face growing competitive pressures and competing agendas, and the need for a set of coherent goals and policy frameworks is vital. While a review of the literature clearly shows that arts festivals can deliver a series of benefits that separately meet the cultural policy and urban tourism policy objectives, there is little to suggest that cities normatively engage in comprehensive, integrated policy-making for urban arts festivals. This paper critically reviews …

Re-Placing Sprawl: Mapping Place In An American Suburb, Ryan M. Cooper

Theses and Dissertations--Geography

In the post-World War II era land development in the United States has largely been focused on the expansion away from urban centers and out into the surrounding suburbs. While the development of suburbs began with utopian ideals of spiritual wholeness, their actual manifestation on the American landscape has been subject to harsh critiques about their long-term economic and environmental feasibility, fostering of social alienation, and general placelessness. In this thesis I address the criticism of suburbs as placeless, asking ―What are the particular practices of place-making in North American suburbs?‖ Examining interviews, cognitive map surveys, participant observation, archival materials, …

Moveable Feasts: Locating Food Trucks In The Cultural Economy, Jessa M. Loomis

Theses and Dissertations--Geography

In this thesis, I consider the emergence of a new generation of food trucks and question their popularity, narration and representation. I examine the economic and cultural discourses that have valorized these food trucks, and pay attention to the everyday material and embodied practices that constitute them. This research is situated in Chicago, where proposed changes to the existing mobile food vending ordinance spurred contentious debates about food safety, regulations, rights to the city and livelihoods. I follow the myriad actors involved in the food truck movement to understand the strategies employed to change the mobile food vending ordinance on …

The State Of Food Insecurity In Maputo, Mozambique, Inês Raimundo, Jonathan Crush, Wade Pendleton

Hungry Cities Partnership

Food insecurity is a fact of life for the vast majority of households across Maputo’s poverty belt. The Maputo urban food security survey done by AFSUN as part of its baseline survey of 11 Southern African cities found that households exist in a constant state of food insecurity manifested in a lack of access to sufficient affordable food, poor dietary quality and undernutrition. Income is meagre and only those households with access to wage income have any chance of holding food insecurity at bay. With a vibrant informal food economy, Maputo’s poor are surrounded by fresh and processed food. Food …