Urban Studies and Planning Commons^™

The Case Of Santiago De Chile: Pedestrian Deaths, Neo-Liberal Urban Design, And Insufficient Traffic Policy Reform, Olivia Maurer

Honors Theses

Chile’s rate of road fatalities and pedestrian deaths, in particular, has remained a global outlier, even as comparable states have reduced occurrences. Santiago, one of the most urbanized cities in Latin America and Chile’s capital, serves as a unique product of competing urban design ideologies put forth by democratic and authoritarian governments throughout the 20th century, and the social and economic stratification created has continued to present challenges for solving urban planning issues in modern Santiago. Recent adjustments in traffic laws have begun a reduction in road fatalities, but they still do not account for the discrepancy between Chile and …

Family History, Cultural Custom, And Personal Preference: The Accents Of Food Access In Oxford, Mississippi, James Hirsch

Honors Theses

Contemporary food access literature in the social sciences centers on models of food decisions emphasizing income, prices, distance, and time. To challenge this analysis, this research conducts interviews with six residents of Oxford, Mississippi, focused on their food habits. These interviews have been summarized, and motivating factors have been extracted and compared back to the literature’s findings. The motivating factors found through the interviews include perceived differences in food quality, store opening/closing hours, partner/family preferences, family/cultural influences, and perceived risks from the COVID-19 pandemic. In contrast to the literature, spaciotemporal concerns were less dominating among participants than the above factors, …

Environmental Racism In Baltimore: A Geographical Study Into The Connections Between Environmental Toxins And Public Health, Genevieve Block

Honors Theses

An investigation into the relationship between environmental toxins and environmental racism in Baltimore City, Maryland.

“…To Represent The Needs Of The Residents—Not The Needs Of The Outsiders” California’S Housing Crisis And The Dilemma Of Local Control, Ravi S. Joshi-Wander

Honors Theses

This thesis examines the role played by city-level governments in determining the availability of housing within their locale. I propose an overarching hypothesis that features of government which provide greater opportunity for the public to influence their local governments will lead to a decreased availability of housing. This hypothesis is tested over the course of two chapters. First, through an analysis of cities throughout California, the effect of different structural features of government are tested against several dependent variables which measure housing availability in a series of linear regressions. A statistically significant positive correlation is found between the presence of …

Infill Development: A Contested Solution To California’S Crises, Conrad Hampson

Honors Theses

Infill development has become a contested term regarding California’s ‌perpetual housing crisis, the state’s fight against the ever-important climate emergency, and its efforts toward improving large social injustices. To define the contested term, infill development is the development or redevelopment of land that has been underutilized, in terms of being overlooked, abandoned, or left vacant, compared to the parcels surrounding the property, both directly abutting and within the more general locality. Regarding this concept and its trending nature, state and local governmental agencies, residential real estate developers, researchers, activist groups, and residents have each created their own narratives, taking up …

Measuring Rental Affordability Dynamics For The Southern United States With Constant Quartile Mismatch, Bradley Curtis

Honors Theses

This project centers on the topic of rental housing affordability for southern metropolitan areas in the United States. In an attempt to understand how rents have changed in relation to incomes in cities throughout the American south, this study uses IPUMS data to compare changes in the distributions of rents and incomes from 2000 to 2019 for each of the geographies in question. The Constant Quartile Mismatch metric employed in this project was first implemented in the study "A constant quartile mismatch indicator of changing rental affordability in US Metropolitan areas, 2000 to 2016". This thesis hopes to extend the …

Who Gets To Ride? A Case Study In Inequality And Public Transportation In Santiago, Chile, Melissa Sanguientti

Honors Theses

While the metro public transportation system in Santiago, Chile was intended to serve all citizens equally, this did not become a reality. Instead, the metro has become a symbol of the short comings and failures in the state's city planning and expansions, benefitting the richer areas of the city. With a grand promise that was never fulfilled, frustration grew over time. While smaller protests were targeting public transportation with the increase to the fare of the metro, protests sparked overnight in 2019. However, by looking at the travel patterns, commute times, spatial inequalities, decision-making of metro expansions, and comuna level …

Assimilation, Association, And Modernism In The Urbanism Of The French Third Republic, Thomas Bleeker

Honors Theses

The regime of settler-colonialism present in Algeria during the French Third Republic (1870-1940) facilitated a certain mythos of Republican French renewal. Given the value French culture places on aesthetics, the colonial architecture and urban forms in French colonies was treated quite seriously. the intense political conflict and directed acculturation which characterised European imperialism, the colonial city brings many of the interactions between culture and politics into sharp relief. This thesis adds to the previous literature concerning colonial urbanism by examining the colonial ideologies embedded within Le Corbusier's master plans for Algiers. His work remains influential and controversial within architecture and …

Going Green: A Comparative Analysis Of Green Urbanism In Paris And Shanghai, Jeanne Torp

Honors Theses

As climate change becomes more pressing with each day and as we scramble to slow down the challenges it poses, adapting the means of operation within our cities will become an invaluable tool for reducing humanity’s carbon footprint. This paper seeks to study the ways in which green infrastructure in global cities can be used to do just that—adapting to and mitigating the effects of challenges resulting from climate change. In order to provide a broad overview of the effectiveness of such green infrastructure systems across the globe, this research will focus on two cities that vary greatly in their …

Mississippi Downtowns: Examining The Relationship Between Downtown Revitalization And Place-Based Economic Development, Cade Slaughter

Honors Theses

This thesis aims to measure the relationship between downtown revitalization and place-based economic development theory in the downtowns of Hernando, Mississippi and New Albany, Mississippi. Collectively, people progress and cultural normalcies shift. This is a facet of life that has historically begotten movement away from the city cores that initially cradled the sole hub of social and professional life. Progression gave way to urban and industrial sprawl that has challenged the American downtown to maintain a spot of relevance and economic as well as social viability.

By analyzing the broad history of the American downtown and also extrapolating interview data …

Music Scenes, The Creative Economy, And Changing Your Backyard, William Ford

Honors Theses

City branding has become a popular tactic by cities looking to improve economic development, reputation, or attract tourists and businesses to move to its specific town or city especially with music branding. However, much of the research on city branding focuses on massive international cities.

This project focuses on how city branding can be implemented in a smaller setting, but more specifically how the uniqueness of a smaller town’s music scene can be the catalyst to an effective city brand. To do this, data from the Levitt Foundation was analyzed to get a better grasp on what qualities a smaller …

Urban Redevelopment: New Bedford Massachusetts, Michael C. Froman

Honors Theses

In 2010, 80% of Americans lived in urban areas with the number on the rise. Trends in the economy and people's desires affect the demographics of the United States and over recent years there has been a movement from rural to urban areas called urbanization. Throughout the history of the United States, cities have seen economic successes where the city thrived, along with turmoil where the city was plagued with unemployment and a stagnant economy. This study assesses the developments of New Bedford Massachusetts, a city with a population of approximately 100,000, located in South East Massachusetts. New Bedford's economic …

Visions For Waterville's Future: Perceptions Of Its Residents, Alex Wolansky

Honors Theses

Mills and factories in the United States have steadily been closing down as industry is outsourced in the globalized economy. Cities that were once prosperous face decay and often have no hopeful future outlook. Post-industrial towns face major unemployment and poverty and are not typically places for re-investment. But Rust Belt cities like Baltimore, Buffalo, Pittsburgh, Cleveland, Cincinnati, Detroit, Milwaukee and St. Louis are not the only post- industrial hubs that are struggling. Many small towns in rural areas once thrived from manufacturing and are becoming forgotten. Local governments, policy makers, urban planners, developers and scholars are working to figure …

A Microcosm Of The American Public Education Crisis Surrounding Race And Income, Janey Fine

Honors Theses

This thesis studies the effects that race and socio-economic status have on a student’s academic achievement in the American public education system. It compares the experiences of students from Schenectady, New York, a low-income, minority-populated small city, and neighboring Niskayuna, a predominately white, affluent community, by looking at graduation rates, school budgets and resources, teacher salaries, household income, and rates of poverty. Despite the annual budgets and student expenditures being similar amongst the two districts, the rates of poverty and racial disparities are dramatic. Therefore, this research exposes how there are countless variables outside of the school itself that impact …

The Manifestation Of Blight: Examining The Effects Of Inner City Decline On Populations In The Bronx, New York And New Orleans, Louisiana, Bianca R. Stewart

Honors Theses

Urban decline, and the developments that trigger a collapse among formerly prosperous cities, is a phenomenon that is capable of leaving a lasting mark on any urban system. The collapse and disintegration of the urban landscape carries a variety of facilitators, and with that, this research sought to examine two distinct representations of urban decline and the populations that shifted in tandem with blight: the New York City fiscal crisis of the 1970s and post-Katrina conditions in New Orleans, Louisiana. Through New York City’s fiscal crisis and the act of condensing a city in hopes of rectifying urban decline, known …

The N-Word : Comprehending The Complexity Of Stratification In American Community Settings, Anne V. Benfield

Honors Theses

The N-word’s remarkable durability, combined with American’s willingness to find uses for this epithet, illustrate the extent to which racial unease continues to permeate our culture. Its various definitions and spellings are continuously debated by academia, creating a dynamic topic for sociological evaluation. Overall, the N-word is alive and mobile, fluid and engraved in the American psyche, as a symbol. Some propose to condemn the word, while others attempt to rehabilitate and convert its meaning from a negative slur to a gesture of solidarity. The controversial debate of the N-word can be examined from multitudinous sociological theories, encompassing elements of …