Urban Studies and Planning Commons^™

Occupy Wall Street's Challenge To An American Public Transcript, Christopher Neville Leary

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation examines the rhetoric and discourses of the anti-corporate movement Occupy Wall Street, using frameworks from political ethnography and critical discourse analysis to offer a thick, triangulated description of a single event, Occupy Wall Street's occupation of Zuccotti Park. The study shows how Occupy achieved a disturbing positionality relative to the forces which routinely dominate public discourse and proposes that Occupy's encampment was politically intolerable to the status quo because the movement held the potential to consolidate critical thought and action. Because the "soft" means of re-capturing public consent were weak in 2011 because of the 2008 economic collapse, …

The Amphibious Public: A Historical Geography Of Municipal Swimming And Bathing New York City, 1870 - 2013, Naomi Miriam Adiv

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Since 1870, the city of New York has engaged in a project of building and maintaining enclosed sites for municipal bathing, including building floating `river baths' (1870 - 1942), indoor municipal baths (1901 - 1975), eleven enormous outdoor pools built with WPA funds (1936 - present), and outdoor pools of various sizes built under the Lindsay administration (1968 - present). This dissertation explores the changing rationale, over almost 150 years, for the municipal construction of public bathing places in New York City, and the ways in which the physical structures have taken on new social goals, meanings and ideals, both …

Public Space--Urban Spaces Of Multiple And Diverse Publics, Antti Moelsae

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Shopping centers, hotel lobbies and - as was recently reported - McDonald's restaurants have been appropriated as social and political spaces by the public, but then encounter resistance by the owners of those spaces. Shopping centers, which have come to replace urban public space around the world, are notorious for limiting the modes of use and actively prohibiting forms of political expression. The legal status of commercial spaces that substitute for traditional public spaces is still unclear. Much of the critique of privatization of public space has been directed towards these enclosed spaces, the ownership of which is unambiguously private. …

From Berlin To Broadacres: Central European Influence On American Visionary Urbanism, 1910-1935, Margaret Herman

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In the 1920s and 1930s, Eliel Saarinen, Richard Neutra, and Frank Lloyd Wright each designed plans for real and imagined American cities. Saarinen's Chicago and Detroit plans of 1923-1924, Neutra's Rush City Reformed of 1926, and Wright's Broadacre City of 1935 are stylistically unique but all contain a similar fascination with hypothetical transportation networks and high-speed expansion that reflect a common relationship to the development of urban planning as a discrete field in Berlin and Vienna around 1910.

This dissertation will highlight several features of turn-of-the-century Central European planning that played an outsize role in the development of these visionary …

In Harm's Way: How Philadelphia's Urban Renewal Practices Steered Marginal People To Marginal Land, Katera Ya'shea Moore

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The dumping of locally unwanted land uses (LULUs) on marginal communities has been well documented, however environmental justice scholars have rarely written about how marginal groups have come to occupy their landscapes, particularly when natural hazards lie beneath.

This dissertation research focuses on a broad definition of the environment that includes the built, social, and physical. I am interested in extending Logan and Molotch's Growth Machine theory to consider how the political and economic elite guided the urban renewal process to place particular communities on particular landscapes, despite the presence of a flooding hazard. To understand this issue, I examined …

Apotheosis Of The Public Realm: Civic Classicism In New York City's Architecture, Paul Andrija Ranogajec

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In the years around the consolidation of Greater New York in 1898, a renewed interest in republican political theory among progressive liberals coincided with a new kind of civic architecture. For the first time in American history, cities and the urban public emerged as crucial parts of democratic citizenship, at least for progressives such as Frank Goodnow, Frederic Howe, and Herbert Croly. At the same time, New York City was promoted as the nation's cultural and commercial capital: the "American metropolis," in Croly's words. Architects, too, played a key role in articulating the city's and the urban public's new status …

The Meaning, Experience, And Value Of 'Common Space' For Women And Children In Urban Poor Settlements In India, Anupama Reddy Nallari

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Housing and basic services in urban poor settlements have been the focus of bi-lateral agencies, national governments as well as NGOs and CBOs. However, little attention has been paid to understanding the value of "common spaces" in these settlements, or in the planning and design of "common spaces" in upgraded or redeveloped settlements. Common spaces include communal areas like childcare and play facilities, religious and cultural establishments, shops, physical infrastructure like roads and sanitation, and informal spaces like courtyards, steps, lanes, and corridors where women perform daily chores and interact and children play. This dissertation focuses on understanding the significance …

Suburban Heat Islands: The Influence Of Residential Minimum Lot Size Zoning On Surface Heat Islands In Somerset County, New Jersey, Jennifer Renee Cox

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The process of suburbanization blurs regional bounds, forms mega-regions and fosters the expansion of multifaceted environmental problems, such as the urban heat island (UHI) effect. Defined by differences in air- and surface- temperature between rural and urban areas, UHI is the result of the characteristics of urbanization which modify the land surface condition, urban geometry, thermal properties of construction materials, anthropogenic heat and air pollution, which increase storage and re-radiation of heat to the atmosphere. Climate change is predicted to worsen the UHI effect. Hence, the objective of this research to characterize the UHI effect as it pertains to suburban …