Urban Studies and Planning Commons^™

Nevada Economic Development And Public Policy 2022-2026: A Sustainable Future For All Nevadans, The Lincy Institute, Brookings Mountain West

Policy Briefs and Reports

This report evaluates economic development efforts in the State of Nevada since the 2011 publication of Unify, Regionalize, Diversify: An Economic Development Agenda for Nevada; assesses demographic and economic trends for Nevada and its regions; examines how state and federal actions since the onset of COVID-19 can position Nevada and its regions to address long-standing economic, educational, and social deficits; and offers policy recommendations to be implemented in the next four years to facilitate a sustainable future for all Nevadans.

Evaluating Urban Parks Accessibility And Equity: A Case Study Of Hartford, Ct And New Haven, Ct, Natalie Roach, Mara Tu

Honors Scholar Theses

Public parks provide cities with environmental benefits, positive health effects, recreational opportunities, community building, educational spaces, and public amenities. However, certain populations have been systematically denied their fair share of these benefits because of unjust practices in the creation and maintenance of urban parks. With a lens of environmental justice, the goal of this research was to assess park quality and accessibility of two Connecticut cities, Hartford and New Haven, by gathering publicly available information as well as using GIS tools.

The Trust for Public Land (TPL) has an existing ParkScore rating system that evaluates the quality of a city’s …

"From The Neighborhood Up!": Neighborhood Sustainability Certification Frameworks And The New Urban Politics Of Scale, Alex J. Ramiller

Geography Honors Projects

Urban sustainability goals are closely tied to the current political context, in which the imperative to attract highly mobile global capital frequently steers the objectives of local government. In this paper, I argue for the incorporation of the neighborhood scale into contemporary understandings of “local” or “urban” sustainability policy, emphasizing the potential for multi-scalar certification frameworks to subvert the predominant global-local relationship. By shifting the conceptualization and implementation of sustainability from globally dependent urban regimes to a diverse array of discrete urban communities, neighborhood-scale initiatives are able to draw greater attention to issues of social equity, environmental justice, and spatially …

Capturing In-Situ Feelings And Experiences Of Public Transit Riders Using Smartphones, Rafik Said, Rafik Said

Theses and Dissertations (Comprehensive)

High-density urban environments are susceptible to ever-growing traffic congestion issues, which speaks to the importance of implementing and maintaining effective and sustainable transportation networks. While transit oriented developments offer the potential to help mitigate traffic congestion issues, transit networks ought to be safe and reliable for ideal transit-user communities. As such, it is imperative to capture meaningful data regarding transit experiences, and deduce how transit networks can be enhanced or modified to continually maintain ideal transit experiences. Historically speaking, it has been relatively tricky to measure how people feel whilst using public transportation, without leaning on recall memory to explain …

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 …

التنظيم المكاني للمجتمع الليبي المعاصر: حدود النمو الحضري, Mansour M. Elbabour

Mansour M Elbabour

Libya, which is well over 80% urban, is placed in the upper echelons of the most urbanized countries in the world as the majority of its citizens now live in urban areas of different sizes and functions. However, when rapid urban growth trends were examined more closely, serious problems come to the fore, depicting key challenges to the sustainability of both urban landscapes and elements of the natural environment. Specifically, unregulated urban growth and the proliferation of scattered housing in the urban fringe areas of many cities have resulted in land use conflicts and serious ecological problems.