Urban Studies and Planning Commons^™

Coordinating Code In Virginia’S Historic Districts, Drew Gruber

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis explores the evolution and limitations of regulatory and historic district overlay zones and the inherent conflicts between the two as applied in Virginia. Historic district overlay zoning and the establishment of local historic districts and design review boards has developed in response to the failures of traditional zoning techniques to adequately protect the architectural character of Virginia’s historic urban landscapes. After almost fifty years of practice and improvement in the fields of urban planning and historic preservation, synchronizing regulatory and historic district overlay zones still presents difficulties for municipal administrators. Several Virginia jurisdictions are highlighted in the thesis …

Building Dupont: Capitalism, Manufactures, And Place In Early America, 1800-1820, Christopher Manning

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

Though there is a rich literature dealing with the DuPont Company, the historiography remains dedicated to studies of the family’s life, corporate methods, working-class culture, and technological know-how. Rarely do studies engage the company’s wider economic position or regional influence in early America. This study analyzes the way early American culture guided and influenced DuPont’s growth and success. It also examines the company’s efforts to promote manufactures, create markets, and shape its surrounding landscape. As in other parts of the world, the development of industrial capitalism, and the wider acceptance of domestic manufacturers and large-scale industry in the United States …

Alignment Of Community Preferences, Economic Development Goals, And Policy: Considering Economic Development Goals, Their Expression, And Their Execution In Economically Struggling Communities, Rebecca Lynn Moryl

Graduate Doctoral Dissertations

Across the U.S., and particularly in the Northeast, cities known as former "mill towns" have been largely unsuccessful in attempts to revive their economic vigor. States and cities invest millions each year in efforts to reinvigorate these cities through economic development policies. Debates about the effectiveness of such policies in generating economic growth outcomes are prevalent in the literature. This thesis takes a different focus by considering the alignment of economic development goals and actions among citizens and government professionals. I consider, compare, contrast, and draw lessons from three Massachusetts cities of similar government structure. Each of these cities has …

Perceptions And Evaluation Of An Urban Environment For Pedestrian Friendliness: A Case Study, Elizabeth H. Lee

Master's Theses

Public health is an increasingly important issue addressed from both environmental and public health sectors for the future development of urban environments. From a planning perspective, one possible solution is to increase walkability throughout the cities. Many assessment methods are being developed and administered to evaluate the quality of existing urban environments to promote walkable cities/communities. The results from using these methods provide policymakers and stakeholders with valuable information regarding the existing physical conditions of the environment. Although several US cities started to develop and refocus plans toward pedestrian-oriented policies approaches, results from this particular study determined that the quality …

Mixed-Income Housing: Assumptions And Realities, Kimberly M. Hoving

Master's Theses

Current Federal, State, and local San Francisco housing policy advocates mixed-income housing as a positive approach to creating living environments for low-income families. Strategies for creating mixed-income housing environments include large-scale public housing re-development efforts, inclusionary housing policies, and the use of discretionary funding for mixed-income development projects. Researchers agree that there is not yet enough evidence to support that mixed-income strategies are achieving positive results and have noted that the expected outcomes for mixed-income strategies are founded upon a number of assumptions. It is assumed that a mix of households at varying income levels will result in greater stability, …

Community Gardens And Urban Agriculture: Reclaiming The Market Place, Sara Prendergast

Social Sciences

This paper will first explore the health of low-income communities living in inner cities. I will use obesity as one of the main indicators of poor health and explore the lack of access to holistic diets, high costs of fresh foods, and minimal education, with the aim of revealing how hunger is a consequence of a capitalist dominated market. Following, I will investigate how urban agriculture is a holistic solution in subduing the advent of food deserts and food insecurity by serving health, educational, and social needs in low-income communities, which further creates a more socially just market.

Environmental Planning For Water, Transportation And Land Use, Wendy Laumer

Social Sciences

An overview of environmental planning for water, transportation and land use.

Emergent Morphogenetic Design Strategies, Dawn Gunter

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Emergent morphogenetic designs provide a superior architectural response to programmatic, technical, structural, environmental and spatial requirements that conventional unit based architectural forms are too inflexible to fully address.

Architecture has reached an exciting stage in its development, where structures are attempting to behave more like nature, which does not function as a static state, but as a complex grouping of symbiotic processes which are constantly evolving to adapt to environmental changes.

Digital fabrication and materials engineering have promoted an explosion in formal architectural typologies. By utilizing these digital tools and enhanced materials to embrace a morphogenetic design strategy, architecture can …

Ac/Dc: Let There Be Hybrid Cooling, Christopher Podes

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

In today’s increasingly energy conscious society, the methods of providing thermal comfort to humans are constantly under scrutiny. Depending on the climate, and the comfort requirements of the occupants, buildings can be designed to heat and cool occupants with passive methods, as well as mechanical methods. In the subtropics, where buildings often need to be heated in the winter and cooled in the summer, a synthesis of these two methods would be ideal. However, there is a disconnect between the integration of passive cooling and mechanical air conditioning, in subtropical architecture.

A study of user attitudes, based out of Australia, …

A Case Study Of The Unaccompanied Refugee Minor Program With Commonwealth Catholic Charities In Richmond, Virginia, Shawn Greene

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis investigates how administrators and staff at a community service agency in Richmond Virginia perceive the needs of unaccompanied refugee children as they transition into the American way of life and the challenges associated with the relocation of these children into foster care setting, and how service delivery to meet these children’s needs might be improved. A common theme that emerged from interviews conducted with these administrators is that successful integration of unaccompanied refugee minors into American society requires from the very start culturally competent approaches to placement, language assistance, and mental health therapy. Options for improving resettlement of …

The Application Of Collaborative Planning Principles With A Content Management System And Web 2.0 Technologies, Craig Macivor

Theses and Dissertations

As urban planners have sought to move away from the rationalist approach that has been employed for decades, and to encourage more public participation than has traditionally existed in the planning process, they have consistently encountered obstacles in successfully communicating with other stakeholders. Likewise, many citizens do not feel they have enough access to planning-related information or adequate means of participation. These systemic problems are due in large part to the limitations of the media on which planning documents have always been printed; the structure and content of the paper-based comprehensive plan has meant that the rationalist process has, at …

Planning For Stop Spacing Under The San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency Bus Stop Consolidation Proposal, Erin Marie Cooper

Master's Theses

The purpose of this report was to analyze the elements of a bus stop consolidation program for the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency (SFMTA). This research shows that increasing stop spacing distances increases walking distances, but in places with high transit and stop density, most access distances will not be beyond a five to ten minute walk. In general, European cities with high transit mode shares recommend stops every 1300 feet. American guidelines recommend stops between approximately 800 to 1300 feet. According to the literature review, fewer stops can lead to a more reliable service. Time savings on the route …

Spatial Analysis Of Urbanization In The Salt Lake Valley: An Urban Ecosystem Perspective, John H. Lowry Jr.

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

Because urban areas comprise a variety of biotic (e.g. people, trees) and abiotic (e.g. streets, water) components that interact and are often interdependent upon one another, it is helpful to study urban areas as urban ecosystems.

Our goal in Chapter 2 is to measure and quantify the spatial and demographic structure of the urbanized portion of Salt Lake County, Utah. We use 18 metrics from four broad categories (density, centrality, accessibility, and neighborhood mix) to measure urban form for three age-based residential neighborhood types. Using analysis of variance (ANOVA) we test for differences in mean values for the 18 …

Religion And Regionalism : Congregants, Culture And City-County Consolidation In Louisville, Kentucky., Joshua D. Ambrosius

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Literature on religious involvement in public affairs typically examines the national scene, particularly public opinion and political behavior in presidential elections. Few scholars examine religious actors in urban politics and policymaking. Those who do study local politics emphasize morality policy and ignore issues of metropolitan governance and institutional design, central concerns of the urban politics field. This dissertation fills that gap by studying Louisville, Kentucky, site of the first large-scale city-county consolidation since 1969. I ask: does religion affect how people vote in a consolidation referendum and shape their opinions about merged government? I employ a survey instrument (N=807), collected …

Wayfinding In Architecture, Jason Brandon Abrams

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

In many of today’s modern educational institutions, architects have designed spaces that are disconnected and difficult for users to navigate. The underdevelopment of directional guides more accurately describes common issues of wayfinding. Wayfinding is a term used to describe user experience and orientation within an environmental context. When accomplished successfully, wayfinding contains order and simplicity achieved through five hierarchical components including; point of reference, location of information, determining a path to take, maintaining that path, and access or denial of the path chosen.

Currently, the Rietveld Academie in Amsterdam, a design institution of higher learning, lacks the components necessary to …

Case Studies In Community Vitality And Downtown Revitalization: A Focus On Maine’S Employment And Service Hubs, Matthew Klebes, Elizabeth Mclean, Kathy Lynn Tombarelli

Muskie School Capstones and Dissertations

The purpose of this research is to consider the efforts made by municipalities to revitalize their downtowns and improve community livability. Our primary focus will be on Maine municipalities, but we will include two case studies outside of Maine to provide a comparison.
We are also including communities in both northern and southern Maine, as well as both coastal and inland communities. By using this approach, we can identify common indicators of success, independent of geographic location.

Evaluations Of Procedural Justice: Evidence Of Group-Value Issue Influence In A Planning Context, Thomas W. Hooper

Master's Theses

Justice research in the field of social psychology has focused primarily on situations involving legal proceedings, dispute resolution, and hierarchal relationships within organizations. This study extends the work of social psychologist Tom Tyler and others to a planning context by demonstrating that participants in a planning process use group-value criteria in addition to control over decisions and decision making processes and the favorability of outcomes to define reactions to their experiences. While certain aspects of the case study from which survey interviews were conducted limited the ability to replicate specific results of the 1989 Tyler study used as a model …

Bus On Shoulder: Local Assessment Of Shoulder Transit Lane For Regional Buses In San Luis Obispo County, Jessica R. Berry

Master's Theses

The study looks at the applicability of integrating a Bus Only Shoulder (BOS) into the intermittently congested segment of US 101 in southern San Luis Obispo County. Policy, infrastructure and implementing criteria derived from case studies in Minnesota, Florida and California (San Diego) and the 2007 California Decision Document on BOS are applied to conditions in the region. One measure of performance, time savings, is projected to 2025 to determine the value of integrating the program by that horizon year. Given the substantial potential for time savings in that future year, recommendations are made to create the appropriate policy and …

Livable Streets: Establishing Social Place Through A Walkable Intervention, Jeffrey T. Flositz

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Some streets tend to lack a social sense of place. Since the invention of the automotive assembly line and post World War II development, street designs have shifted from centering around people and social situations to vehicular traffi c solutions. Streets are typically not thought of as social places, but rather as a means to effi ciently move automotive traffi c. The environment of these unlivable streets discourages social interaction. The majority of buildings are disconnected from the street with often nothing more than a parking lot.

A new model of streets is necessary, one that transforms streets into places …

The Rhetoric Of The Regional Image Interpreting The Visual Products Of Regional Plannning, Alissa Barber Torres

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The Rhetoric of the Regional Image: Interpreting the Visual Products of Regional Planning investigates the manner in which visual conventions and visual contexts of regional visioning scenarios affect their interpretation by urban and regional planners, who use visual communication to meet the technical and rhetorical demands of their professional practice. The research assesses Central Florida‘s ―How Shall We Grow?‖ regional land use scenario using focus groups and interviews with planning professionals, a corresponding survey of community values, and rhetorical analysis to explore the ―How Shall We Grow?‖ scenario as persuasive communication. The Rhetoric of the Regional Image proposes specific recommendations …

Adaptive Reuse Of Religious Buildings In The U.S.: Determinants Of Project Outcomes And The Role Of Tax Credits, Eugene Choi

ETD Archive

Adaptive reuse of historic buildings generates many tangible and intangible benefits. These benefits are not limited to the initiator (usually the developer) but are expanded to the community and the local government. This dissertation empirically investigates the role of tax credits in initiators' decisions to reuse religious buildings and their choice of reuse project outcomes, including the federal historic preservation tax credit, the low income housing tax credit, and the new market tax credit. Theses tax credits are the most commonly used tax credits in historic preservation projects. In addition, this dissertation also tests whether or not religious buildings were …

Urban College Graduates;Their Investments In And Returns For Strong Quantitative Skills, Social Capital Skills, And Soft Skills, Marie Ellen Haynes

ETD Archive

This case study examined strong quantitative skills, social capital skills, and soft skills of urban college graduates using data from the Multi-City Study of Urban Inequality Household Survey. The urban college graduates lived in Atlanta, Boston, or Los Angeles and had bachelor's, master's, PhD, and professional degrees. Among the three skills only strong quantitative skills was found to be associated with positive and significant returns. Those returns did not emerge because strong quantitative skills were used as a proxy for the ability to perform jobs that require frequent use of mathematics and frequent use of computers. Instead, strong quantitative skills …

The Association Of Spatial Accessibility To Health Care Services With Health Utilization And Health Status Among People With Disabilities, Hsin-Chung Liao

ETD Archive

The purpose of this cross-sectional analysis was to determine the importance of spatial accessibility to health care services utilization and to the health status of persons with disabilities. This study utilizes two datasets (Survey of Access to Outpatient Medical Service in the Rural Southeast and Ohio Family Health Survey) to analyze. ArcGIS 9.2 was use to measure spatial accessibility to health care services. Bivariate analysis for health services utilization and health status included t-tests, and Chi-square, as appropriate for the level of measurement. Logistic regression models identified for the three outcomes (health care visit, regular check up visit, and perceived …

Housing Choice Voucher Program;Patterns And Factors Of Spatial Concentration In Cleveland, Miseon Park

ETD Archive

Housing Choice Voucher Program is the single largest housing subsidy program in the USA with the goal of poverty deconcentration and race desegregation. This study aims to identify the presence and locations of voucher holders' spatial concentration, and to investigate the factors associated with the location outcomes of voucher recipients in Cleveland from 2005 to 2009. Analyzing voucher recipients' information from Cuyahoga Metropolitan Housing Authority, this dissertation found meaningful results for the voucher program performances. Hotspot analysis indicated that location patterns of voucher recipients do not show even distribution over the study area. Additionally, voucher holders have clustered together and …

To Reframe A Constitution: Public Service In A Consumptive State, Steven T. Salmi

ETD Archive

This normative analysis builds upon Ulrich Beck's world risk society theory to argue that the United States is making a shift of revolutionary proportions from an administrative state to a consumptive state. Public administration theory is assessed for its ability to address a consumptive state's unprecedented dynamics, e.g., accelerating technoscientific development and mega-hazards such as global warming. Qualitative evidence suggests that the field's adaptability has been limited by a continued, if generally unacknowledged, embrace of obsolete normative commitments such as to a politics-technoscience dichotomy, contempocentrism, and overconsumption. The sustainability movement, a discourse coalition with roots largely outside public administration, is …

Fundamentally Linked: Neighborhood Revitalization And School Quality In The City Of Cleveland, Angie Schmitt

ETD Archive

This paper examines the effect of poor school quality on neighborhood revitalization efforts in four Cleveland neighborhoods: Ohio City, Detroit Shoreway, Tremont and Downtown. The report employs survey research and real estate data analysis to examine the extent to which failing public schools encourage residents to leave the city for the suburbs, undermining efforts at revitalization. The research was particularly concerned with examining the effect on middle-class residents, or "residents of choice," who chose to live in Cleveland although other options are available to them financially. Original research bore out common assumptions about the impact of poorly performing local schools …

The Neopragmatist's Hammer: Forging Administrative Authority, David Oliver Kasdan

ETD Archive

Public Administration Is Challenged to Provide a Coherent Model of Authority in Modern Democratic Society. Authority Is Necessary for Governance, yet It Runs Against the Liberal State. Reconciling Administrative Authority with the American Polity Requires an Approach That Situates Governance as the Outcome of Communal Solidarity. This Reconciliation Includes Deflating the Metanarrative of Authority That Has Been Constructed on Traditions of Administrative Representation, Expertise, and Practice. These Traditions of Authority Must Be Redescribed in Current Contexts and Shaped by the Discourse Between Public Administration and the Polity as Equal Members of an Epistemic Community. Neopragmatism, the Postmodern Upgrade to Classical …

An Economic Impact Study Of The "Boom" Period Of Baseball Stadium Redevelopment, Emily Mcnab

CMC Senior Theses

The intention of this study is to analyze the economic impact of redeveloped Major League Baseball stadiums opened between 1991 and 2004. Using two empirical models, including an event study, this impact analysis captures the economic conditions of the cities during the opening year of the stadium, as well as the prior conditions leading up to the opening of the stadium, along with any lingering effects or gradual changes in conditions. The impact was measured in relation to the Metropolitan Statistical Areas corresponding to the 18 ballparks included, specifically looking at the impact on employment rates and per capita personal …

Examination Of Factors Affecting The Frequency, Response Time, And Clearance Time Of Incidents On Freeways, Indrajit Ghosh

Wayne State University Dissertations

Traffic incidents are the primary cause of non-recurrent congestion in urban areas, resulting in reductions in roadway capacity and significant safety hazards to other motorists, as well as first responders. Many communities have initiated incident management programs that detect and respond to incidents and restore freeways to full capacity by clearing the incident scene as soon as possible. In the Detroit metro area, the Michigan Department of Transportation (MDOT) operates a Freeway Courtesy Patrol (FCP) program as part of its larger freeway incident management program from the Michigan Intelligent Transportation Systems (MITS) Center in downtown Detroit. The MITS Center maintains …

Guild's Lake Courts : An Impermanent Housing Project, Tanya Lyn March

Dissertations and Theses

Guild's Lake Courts was built as temporary worker housing for the steel and shipyard industries during World War II. The massive housing development in Northwest Portland consisted of 2,432 units of housing, five community buildings, five childcare centers, a grade school and a fire station. Guild's Lake Courts was the eighth largest housing project built at that time in the United States. The peak population in January 1945 was approximately 10,000 individuals. Archival research, face-to-face oral histories, and resident reunions were used to explore the social, architectural and political history of Guild's Lake Courts. The lens for understanding how the …