Urban Studies and Planning Commons^™

Which Came First, People Or Pollution? A Review Of Theory And Evidence From Longitudinal Environmental Justice Studies, Paul Mohai, Robin Saha

Environmental Studies Faculty Publications

A considerable number of quantitative analyses have been conducted in the past several decades that demonstrate the existence of racial and socioeconomic disparities in the distribution of a wide variety of environmental hazards. The vast majority of these have been cross-sectional, snapshot studies employing data on hazardous facilities and population characteristics at only one point in time. Although some limited hypotheses can be tested with cross-sectional data, fully understanding how present-day disparities come about requires longitudinal analyses that examine the demographic characteristics of sites at the time of facility siting and track demographic changes after siting. Relatively few such studies …

Farm To School: Strategies For Urban Health, Combatting Sprawl, And Establishing Community Food Systems, Mark Vallianatos, Robert Gottlieb, Margaret Haase

Mark Vallianatos

Farm-to-school is a new, innovative strategy with multiple planning-related objectives. The article evaluates the significance of farm-to-school in relation to improving the health and nutrition of school-age children, particularly low-income youth; strengthening the capacity of local farmers, particularly those engaged in sustainable practices; adding to the toolkit of strategies designed to contain and ultimately reduce sprawl-inducing developments by helping preserve farmland; and helping establish a community food systems approach no longer entirely dependent on the global food system that has come to dominate food growing, processing, distribution, and consumption patterns around the world.

Provide Safe, Healthy Meal Options, Mark Vallianatos, Moira Beery

Mark Vallianatos

No abstract provided.

Connecting The Parks To The Community And The Community To The Parks, Andrea Azuma, Robert Gottlieb, Mark Vallianatos, Jessica Gudmundson, Amanda Shaffer, Peter Dreier

Mark Vallianatos

No abstract provided.

Food Justice And Food Retail In Los Angeles, Mark Vallianatos

Mark Vallianatos

No abstract provided.

Thinking Outside The Big Box: Food Access, Labor, Landuse, And The Wal-Mart Way, Mark Vallianatos, Amanda Shaffer, Moira Beery, Robert Gottlieb, Abby Wheatley

Mark Vallianatos

In just four decades, the Wal-Mart Company has transformed the retail sector, infl uenced the way we shop and work and shaped the nation’s rural, suburban and urban communities. Now Wal-Mart Supercenters, vast stores that house full-scale grocery stores within their walls, are beginning to affect the food system. After summarizing Wal-Mart’s labor and land use impacts, this working paper addresses an issue that has received less attention: the implications of the Supercenter model of food retailing on food access. The paper includes an examination of such issues as food selection, pricing and store accessibility, based on a case study …

Fresh From The Farm... And Into The Classroom, Margaret Haase, Andrea Azuma, Robert Gottlieb, Mark Vallianatos

Mark Vallianatos

No abstract provided.

Food Access, Availability, And Affordability In 3 Los Angeles Communities, Project Cafe, 2004-2006, Andrea Azuma, Susan Gilliland, Mark Vallianatos, Robert Gottlieb

Mark Vallianatos

Introduction Racial/ethnic minority communities are at increasingly high risk for chronic diseases related to obesity. Access to stores that sell affordable, nutritious food is a prerequisite for adopting a healthful diet. The objective of this study was to evaluate food access, availability, and affordability in 3 nonoverlapping but similar low-income communities in urban Los Angeles, California. Methods Using a community-based participatory research approach, we trained community members to conduct a food assessment to 1) map the number and type of retail food outlets in a defined area and 2) survey a sample of stores to determine whether they sold selected …

Connecting Communities And Creating Livable Places: A Policy Agenda For The Arroyo, Mark Vallianatos, Amanda Shaffer

Mark Vallianatos

No abstract provided.

Ngos, Community Associations, And Corporations In Partnership: Crosssectoral Collaboration In Serviluz, Fortalezace, Leila Reynolds

Independent Study Project (ISP) Collection

This study will explore the relationships between corporate funding partners, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), and the communities they work in (through the lense of community associations). Specifically I will examine the relationship between the NGO Instituto Povo do Mar (IPOM), the Associação dos Moradores do Serviluz (AMS), and the state controlled oil corporation PetroBras. PetroBras operates a refinery known as the Refinaria Lubrificantes e Derivados do Nordeste ( Lubnor ) within the neighborhood Serviluz, in Fortaleza, Ceara, and has become involved financially and socially in the neighborhoods surrounding the Lubnor . In this particular neighborhood, these three sectors work closely together …

Conveniently Located Disaster: Socio‐Spatial Inequality In Hurricane Sandy And Its Implications For The Urban Sociology Of Climate Change, Gordon Douglas, Liz Koslov, Eric Klinenberg

Faculty Publications, Urban and Regional Planning

Hurricane Sandy was a major event with major implications for how sociologists think about the relationship between climate change and crisis in urban areas. The storm’s impact on New York provides a valuable case for considering how to study the impacts of climate change on large, densely settled cities with vulnerable hard infrastructure and highly complex social conditions that produce differentiated experiences across many different communities. This working paper considers data at several levels of analysis with the aim of assessing neighborhood inequalities in the impacts of such extreme weather. Drawn from the authors’ ongoing research project on unequal vulnerability …

Ruin Porn And Urban Representation In Photography: The Aesthetic And Politics Of Appropriation In "The Ruins Of Detroit", Elyse Remenapp

Cultural Studies Capstone Papers

This project examines the politics of representation in The Ruins of Detroit, a book of photography by Yves Marchand and Romaine Meffre in order to understand Detroit as a privileged site of ruins photography, critically referred to as ruin porn. Examining the book as a representation of Detroit's decay reveals an implicit power dynamic which neglects Detroit's complex history and the lived experience of its residents. Paying particular attention to the dialectic of race and labor under capitalism, this project traces the urban history of Detroit in order to contextualize and reframe the state of ruin presented in the …

Urban Gardening Practices In Bangalore: Towards A More Localized Food System?, Delfina Grinspan

Independent Study Project (ISP) Collection

Localized Food Systems (LFS) have garnered much attention in recent years among civil society, research, and policy circles, among others. Increased attention and efforts to build more localized food systems are principally motivated by the awareness of the pressures exerted by increasing urbanization on food security and access, and concern for the ecological and social costs of the dominant globalized food system. In their varying purpose to address these two issues, LFS tend to be characterized by certain patterns of (localized) land, water, and other resource use; by direct marketing and distribution arrangements; and by the presence of extensive linkages …

Driving Away: A Macro And Micro View Of The Prague Car Transit System, Danny Meyers

Independent Study Project (ISP) Collection

The purpose of the this study is to understand the rise in auto traffic in the city center of Prague since the Velvet Revolution and to use this understanding to make my own recommendations for policies I believe the city should enact to limit traffic in the macro and micro scale. The theoretical framework was created through observations of three specific streets and through interviews with urban planning experts. Although there are many different strategies for calming down traffic in Prague, the most important are to execute long term planning and to focus on limiting the numbers of cars in …

Marginalidad Y Oportunidad: El Caso Del Vergel Alto Y Las Políticas Habitacionales En Chile, Ellie Driscoll

Independent Study Project (ISP) Collection

This investigation explores the relative success of Chilean housing policy in addressing and resolving the country’s urban slums. The investigation is grounded in the theory of marginality in Latin America, a theory that argues that the development and industrialization of Latin America in relation to the global north concentrated power in a small but dominant upper class and created social, political and most importantly economic systems that perpetuate the internal and external domination of the region. These relationships result in the permanent conditions of urban underdevelopment and social, political, and economic marginalization present in Chilean slums.

Over the last seventy …

Visions Of Public Space: Reproducing And Resisting Social Hierarchies In A Community Garden, Sofya Aptekar

Publications and Research

Urban public spaces are sites of struggles over gentrification. In increasingly diverse cities, these public spaces also host interactions among people of different class, race, ethnicity, and immigration status. How do people share public spaces in contexts of diversity and gentrification? I analyze the conflicting ways of imagining shared spaces by drawing on an ethnographic study of a community garden in a diverse and gentrifying neighborhood in New York City, conducted between 2011 and 2013. I examine how conflicts among gardeners about the aesthetics of the garden and norms of conduct reproduce larger gentrification struggles over culture and resources. Those …

Building On Social Capital To Improve Health: The Interactional Approach To Community Development, Matthew Charles Tomlin Mr

Stevenson Center for Community and Economic Development—Student Research

Since political scientist, Robert Putnam, (1995) brought the concept of social capital into popular discourse, there has been a surge in debate over its definition, causes, and consequences in a range of social science disciplines. While social capital has been found to support self-rated overall health at the state level (Kawachi et al, 1999), there is still a dearth of data and research on localities in different regions of the country. This study analyzes survey data collected in the United Way of McLean County’s 2014 Community Assessment to better understand the dynamic between social capital and health in one Central …

Carving A Walled Village To Keep Friends In -- An Ethnographic Account In The Cyberspace Of Ingress, Leung-Sea, Lucia Siu

Prof. SIU Leung-sea, Lucia

This paper investigates how new forms of classical social cohesion, as illustrated by Emile Durkheim, can be found in the mobile gaming community of Ingress. Ingress was a global game developed by Google that ran on mobile phones using location-based technologies. Gamers from two factions had to travel, cooperate and combat across actual geographical space to play. The paper investigates how the gaming community simultaneously possessed global connectivity and cultures of local enclave communities. It contains ethnographic records of a group of gamers from the satellite town of Tuen Mun, Hong Kong. The group used to build a symbolic wall …

Review Of Cities By Design, By Fran Tonkiss, Gordon Douglas

Faculty Publications, Urban and Regional Planning

A review of Cities by Design: The Social Life of Urban Form. By Fran Tonkiss. Malden, Mass.: Polity, 2014. Pp. vi+204. $24.95.

Mitigation And Beautification: Placing Rain Gardens In The Keystone Neighborhood Of Rock Island, Illinois, Rosalie K. Starenko

Independent Research Projects

With new stormwater management regulations, cities are looking for strategies to reduce urban runoff, and rain gardens are one of several strategies that capture runoff and encourage infiltration and evaporation. In doing so, pollution from runoff is mitigated and combined sewer systems experience fewer overflow events. I argue as well that the implementation of rain gardens would act as a movement for neighborhood beautification. This research develops a new methodology for placing rain gardens that: 1) maximizes the aesthetic value of the gardens by favoring high-visibility locations and 2) targets locations that would best benefit from reduced stormwater runoff. The …

City Profile Of Richmond, Julian Maxwell Hayter

Jepson School of Leadership Studies articles, book chapters and other publications

Cities are never blank slates. Every urban ranking and rating begs acknowledgement of lasting cultural legacies and histories. It is essential that any quantitative assessment not stand outside of context. At stake is the difference between possessing sheer quantities of information, on the one hand, and quality knowledge, or wisdom, on the other. In order to put data into a context for wise action, Thriving Cities has created distinct city profiles for its pilot cities.

These profiles are central in that they characterize a given pilot city in relation to the Project's distinctive "human ecology" framework and research design. In …

Ridazz, Wrenches, And Wonks: A Revolution On Two Wheels Rolls Into Los Angeles, Donald Parker Strauss

Antioch University Full-Text Dissertations & Theses

How can we make cities more livable? Los Angeles, in particular, is a notably challenging place to live. For many, it is hard to see Los Angeles—city or county—as anything other than a huge, sprawling, and some would say placeless place. Los Angeles is known by many as the place that tore up more than 1,000 miles of streetcar lines to make way for millions of cars and hundreds of miles of freeways. Because of this, Los Angeles is also known for its poor air quality and jammed freeways. Those who live in Los Angeles know that it can be …

Creating Healthy Community In The Postindustrial City, Brian A. Hoey

Brian A. Hoey, Ph.D.