Urban Studies and Planning Commons^™

Creating A Successful Wayfinding System: Lessons Learned From Springfield, Massachusetts, Yanhua Lu

Landscape Architecture & Regional Planning Masters Projects

The masters project presents findings from recent work the author completed related to wayfinding, and wayfinding systems. This work began as part of a graduate urban design studio, followed by work as a research assistant at the UMass Design Center in Springfield, on a new “demonstration” wayfinding system installed in Springfield, Massachusetts. The wayfinding project was done in association with the Pioneer Valley Planning Commission and the Springfield Office of Planning and Community Development, was implemented with the main goals of improving public health by encouraging more people to walk.

Wayfinding systems are increasingly seen as an important part of …

Uncovering And Mapping Place Attachment In Small Cities, Nicole L. Vaugeois, Alanna Williams, Sharon Karsten, Pam Shaw

TTRA Canada 2016 Conference

Understanding the connections that visitors and residents have to places is critically important for tourism development. Aided with this knowledge, authentic experiences can be developed, stories can be uncovered and told, and resident perspectives can be identified. This paper describes a case study to uncover and map place attachment in three small cities in Western Canada. The project was conducted in the cities of Courtenay, Port Alberni and Nanaimo, BC. A one day “walk about” in each community was used to record 1.5 minute videos (n=85) of residents speaking about a place in their downtown core where they felt connected …

Assembling Creative Cities In Seoul And Yokohama: Rebranding East Asian Urbanism, Changwook Kim

Doctoral Dissertations

By investigating institutional and cultural practices as well as the consequences of the creative industry-led development policy in Yokohama, Japan and Seoul, South Korea, this dissertation critically reexamines the key rationales of creative economy-driven urban development and considers social costs and tensions between the state, capital and citizens that are embedded within creative city policy discourses and practices. This dissertation intervenes in the conventional understandings, which consider the influx of neoliberalism as the key to explain the rapid global circulation of creative city policy, typically based on cities in the West. By considering the policy transfer as endless processes of …

(Between The Streets) In Worcester : Redefining Professional Education In Community Development To Cultivate Empathy Through A Community Theatrical Framework, Chiu Yi Hannah Yukon

International Development, Community and Environment (IDCE)

This research paper presents an alternative form of conducing Community Development Research. It highlights the gaps that currently exist in professional education with the community development and planning program at Clark University. The research paper employs a theatrical framework to encourage practitioners to ask more illuminating questions that informs the ‘human work’ that sometimes gets overlooked. In order to be authentic in the field of Community Development, practitioners need to be in touch with a less scientifically rational side of themselves, to truly embrace the complexities of the human condition. Drawing from my personal experiences, I wrote a play based …

Mining And Clustering Mobility Evolution Patterns From Social Media For Urban Informatics, Chien-Cheng Chen, Meng-Fen Chiang, Wen-Chih Peng

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In this paper, given a set of check-in data, we aim at discovering representative daily movement behavior of users in a city. For example, daily movement behavior on a weekday may show users moving from one to another spatial region associated with time information. Since check-in data contain both spatial and temporal information, we propose a mobility evolution pattern to capture the daily movement behavior of users in a city. Furthermore, given a set of daily mobility evolution patterns, we formulate their similarity distances and then discover representative mobility evolution patterns via the clustering process. Representative mobility evolution patterns are …

Afroreggae And Grupo Cultural Afro Reggae: A Study Of The Early Years, Sarah S. Ohmer

Publications and Research

The following study of AfroReggae and Grupo Cultural Afro Reggae (GCAR) calls attention to Brazilian presence and community organizing in the field of Hip Hop studies with a long memory framework: placing AfroReggae and GCAR in a long history of Africana resistance through music in Latin America. !990s GCAR group arises when reggae and Hip Hop music had become new global forms of solidarity among urban marginalized youths worldwide, making use of old and new strategies of social healing (Fernandes 2011). A close look at lyrics from the Hip Hop fusion band and the associated nonprofit organization shape the concepts …