Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Southern Nevada Regional Industrial Study, Brookings Mountain West, Center For Business And Economic Research, Transportation Research Center

Policy Briefs and Reports

Recognizing the ongoing need to diversify the Southern Nevada economy, in 2023 GOED commissioned Brookings Mountain West, the UNLV Center for Business and Economic Research, and the UNLV Transportation Research Center to evaluate how Southern Nevada can leverage its geography and connectivity to neighboring states and metros at the megapolitan level to pursue industrial opportunities in the face of shifting global supply chains, diminishing developable land, the need for efficient management of the regional water supply, and the availability of unprecedented federal resources to support clean energy development, manufacturing, electrification of transportation systems, and supply-chain resiliency.

The study builds on …

Beneath I-280: Excavating A Neighborhood Lost To San José Freeways, Leila Ullmann, Gordon Douglas

Mineta Transportation Institute Publications

Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, thousands of people in San José, California were displaced from their homes as the state used eminent domain to purchase land and uproot neighborhoods for the construction of Interstate freeways. This report presents a multifaceted research and public knowledge effort that uncovers some of the communities buried beneath these freeways, in the area where I-280 and CA-87 meet today near downtown San José. The project builds primarily from previously unprocessed California Department of Transportation (CalTrans) archival documents, which this project studies for the first time. The records are rich in detail about valuation and sale …

Wild Hogs In The Water: Contested Infrastructural Ecologies Of Reservoir Storage In Texas, Sayd Randle

Research Collection College of Integrative Studies

Reservoirs are developed to store water in reserve for future use. But once built, reservoir sites inevitably hold more than just water, often serving as a key habitat for a range of species. This paper examines how one such animal has transformed water storage facilities and nearby landscapes into contested ground in urbanising areas of Texas, USA. Living around the reservoirs, feral hogs complicate the process of urbanisation by degrading the stockpiled water and infrastructure at the storage sites themselves and by damaging private property throughout the surrounding landscape. Tracking local efforts to manage the hogs, the case study illustrates …

Examining The Externalities Of Highway Capacity Expansions In California: An Analysis Of Land Use And Land Cover (Lulc) Using Remote Sensing Technology, Serena E. Alexander, Bo Yang, Owen Hussey, Derek Hicks

Mineta Transportation Institute Publications

There are over 590,000 bridges dispersed across the roadway network that stretches across the United States alone. Each bridge with a length of 20 feet or greater must be inspected at least once every 24 months, according to the Federal Highway Act (FHWA) of 1968. This research developed an artificial intelligence (AI)-based framework for bridge and road inspection using drones with multiple sensors collecting capabilities. It is not sufficient to conduct inspections of bridges and roads using cameras alone, so the research team utilized an infrared (IR) camera along with a high-resolution optical camera. In many instances, the IR camera …

Broadband Equity, Access, And Deployment In Nevada, Brad Wimmer

Policy Briefs and Reports

The $45.45 billion Broadband, Equity, Access, and Deployment (BEAD) program’s primary objective is to extend broadband service to all unserved and underserved locations in the U.S. and its territories. Several industry studies predict that the BEAD program can meet its goal of providing universal access to broadband service if eligible entities execute their grant programs well. My review of the BEAD program indicates that policy makers can enhance the likelihood of program success by designing competitive grant programs that give applicants the incentive to undercut the subsidies proposed by their rivals and provide applicants the flexibility to design networks that …

Disrupting The Grid: Encountering Fire And Smoke Through Energy Infrastuctures, Deepti Chatti, Sayd Randle

Research Collection College of Integrative Studies

Experiences of fires are mediated by energy infrastructures and refracted through social inequality and difference. In California, a state marked by increasingly intense and frequent wildfires, the grid is a source of fire risk, with historically marginalized groups bearing the brunt of exposures to wildfire smoke. Drawing on research conducted by one of the co-authors in collaboration with California’s Karuk Tribe and Blue Lake Rancheria Tribes, this empirically grounded review article expands our understanding of grids. Extant scholarship presents the grid as a networked infrastructure mediating access to energy and one’s relationship to a collective and the state. We extend …

Law School News: Rwu Alumni Named To Pbn's 2023 40 Under Forty List 7/5/2023, Stacey Pacheco

Life of the Law School (1993- )

No abstract provided.

The Art Of Not Being Freshened: The Everyday Politics Of Infrastructure In The Mekong Delta, Timothy Gorman

Department of Sociology Faculty Scholarship and Creative Works

With the growing threat of climate change, states are increasingly turning to large-scale infrastructure projects in order to control environmental conditions, especially in coastal areas. These projects are often planned and implemented in a centralized, top-down manner and sometimes fail to achieve their stated objectives in the face of “everyday resistance” from local residents and farmers. This study draws on interviews and secondary research to examine the contentious everyday politics of infrastructure in the Mekong Delta region of Vietnam, focusing specifically on how small-scale, surreptitious acts of “counter-infrastructuring” on the part of farmers, such as the construction of illicit wells …

Governing Smart Cities As Knowledge Commons - Introduction, Chapter 1 & Conclusion, Brett M. Frischmann, Michael J. Madison, Madelyn Sanfilippo

Book Chapters

Smart city technology has its value and its place; it isn’t automatically or universally harmful. Urban challenges and opportunities addressed via smart technology demand systematic study, examining general patterns and local variations as smart city practices unfold around the world. Smart cities are complex blends of community governance institutions, social dilemmas that cities face, and dynamic relationships among information and data, technology, and human lives. Some of those blends are more typical and common. Some are more nuanced in specific contexts. This volume uses the Governing Knowledge Commons (GKC) framework to sort out relevant and important distinctions. The framework grounds …

Strengthening Urban Resilience: Understanding The Interdependencies Of Outer Space And Strategic Planning For Sustainable Smart Environments, Ulpia-Elena Botezatu, Olga Bucovetchi, Adrian V. Gheorghe, Radu D. Stanciu

Engineering Management & Systems Engineering Faculty Publications

The conventional approach to urban planning has predominantly focused on horizontal dimensions, disregarding the potential risks originating from outer space. This paper aims to initiate a discourse on the vertical dimension of cities, which is influenced by outer space, as an essential element of strategic urban planning. Through an examination of a highly disruptive incident in outer space involving a collision between the Iridium 33 and Cosmos 2251 satellites, this article elucidates the intricate interdependencies between urban areas and outer space infrastructure and services. Leveraging the principles of critical infrastructure protection, which bridge the urban and outer space domains, and …

Hawker Culture And Its Infrastructure: Experiences And Contestations In Everyday Life, Lily Kong, Aidan Marc Wong

Research Collection College of Integrative Studies

Hawker foods characterize urban Asia, with similarities and differences across cities that forge both cultural commonalities and distinctions. From the itinerant to the fixed location, from the temporary sites to the purposebuilt, hawker foods are served in informal settings, with varying degrees of tradition and innovation, hygiene and squalidness, local authenticity and globalized influence. In the side-streets of Beijing where local delicacies such as scorpion are served, to the abundant food cart vendors on Bangkok streets, to the warung (small, typically family-owned eateries) in Surabaya, and the carefully planned and designed hawker centres in Singapore, hawker culture is a distinctive

High-Metabolism Infrastructure And The Scrap Industry In Urban China, Adam Liebman

Sociology & Anthropology Faculty publications

Abstract

Rapid urbanization in 21st-century China has been fraught with contested demolition, overdevelopment and shoddy infrastructure with short lifespans. By viewing this infrastructure as having “high metabolism” and examining the urban scrap trade that is fuelled by its material outputs, this article challenges a common assumption that such a form of urbanization is merely wasteful and problematic. Crucially, such urbanization also puts rural migrants and scrap into motion in a way that helps to reproduce its form. This occurs by generating socio-material nodes of scrap trading wherein migrants make the most of temporarily stable situations with entrepreneurialism. The nodes are …

Rural America Is Still Technologically Behind: Why It Matters Now More Than Ever, Paul Force-Emery Mackie

Social Work Department Publications

No abstract provided.

Infrastructure's (Supra)Sacralizing Effects: Contesting Littoral Spaces Of Fishing, Faith, And Futurity Along Sri Lanka's Western Coastline, Orlando Woods

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

This paper explores the ways in which infrastructural development can cause the sacred to become a source of political legitimacy, and sacred authority to become a politically charged construct. For resource-dependent communities, the ecological damage caused by infrastructural development can cause ostensibly profane issues to be imbued with sacred meaning and value. With sacralization comes the expectation that figures of sacred authority will campaign for justice on behalf of the communities that they represent. However, when the authority evoked comes from outside the boundaries of institutionalized religion, processes of suprasacralization come into play. By exploring infrastructure’s (supra)sacralizing effects, I demonstrate …

The Evolution Of The Southern Nevada Healthcare Economy: Building The Unlv Academic Health Center, The Lincy Institute

Lincy Institute Events

With the successful launch of the Kirk Kerkorian School of Medicine at UNLV and the completion of its medical education building, Southern Nevada is positioned to expand its healthcare infrastructure - and its healthcare economy - to create a comprehensive, integrated healthcare system to serve our fast-growing community. As UNLV moves forward with the development of an integrated academic health center within the Las Vegas Medical District, understanding the economic and social benefits of such a transformational project is important to stakeholders throughout the region.

The Lincy Institute hosted representatives of Tripp Umbach - the nation's leading consultant on community …

The Case For Dynamic Cities, Brian J. Asquith, Margaret C. Bock

Upjohn Institute Working Papers

Cities today are confronting never-before-seen challenges to their top spot in the economic hierarchy. In this chapter, we lay out four challenges, past and future, that cities face today and identify policies that can help address the problems we identify. We call attention to the need for many U.S. cities to redevelop the large amount of aging postwar single-family housing, while reforming past exclusionary zoning and infrastructure decisions that exacerbated inequality. Cities will have to fix these past mistakes against the backdrop of an aging population and the rise of remote working, both of which undercut cities’ traditional source of …

Blockchain And Distributed Autonomous Community Ecosystems: Opportunities To Democratize Finance And Delivery Of Transport, Housing, Urban Greening And Community Infrastructure, William Riggs, Vipul Vyas, Menka Sethi

Mineta Transportation Institute Publications

This report investigates and develops specifications for using blockchain and distributed organizations to enable decentralized delivery and finance of urban infrastructure. The project explores use cases, including: providing urban greening, street or transit infrastructure; services for street beautification, cleaning and weed or graffiti abatement; potential ways of resource allocation ADU; permitting and land allocation; and homeless housing. It establishes a general process flow for this blockchain architecture, which involves: 1) the creation of blocks (transactions); 2) sending these blocks to nodes (users) on the network for an action (mining) and then validation that that action has taken place; and 3) …

Evaluation Of Sustainability Determinants To Develop A Sustainability Rating System For California Infrastructure Construction Projects, Joseph Kim, Patricia Mccarthy

Mineta Transportation Institute Publications

This study evaluates the important sustainability determinants that affect factors’ success in meeting their sustainability goals when conducting infrastructure construction projects in California. The study implemented the online survey method to evaluate the sustainability characteristics that infrastructure industry professionals currently are aware of under the current situation in California. A data set of 25 validated survey responses is used for statistical data analysis using analysis of variables, Kruskal-Wallis tests, and two sample t-tests. The analysis results showed that the median response values for the six major sustainability categories do not show any significant difference. The results also showed that no …

Transforming Minnesota's Early Care And Education Infrastructure, Nicole Frethem

Student Scholarship

In 2021, the Minnesota legislature authorized the Great Start for All task force to present recommendations for how the state can provide “access to affordable, high-quality early care and education that enriches, nurtures, and supports children and their families,” to “all families” in Minnesota.

The early care and education landscape in Minnesota has experienced dramatic changes in programming and investments over the last twenty years. In the early 2000s, the state’s primary child care subsidy program, the Child Care Assistance Program (CCAP), was moved from the Department of Children, Families and Learning to the Department of Human Services in an …

Infrastructure Development And Gentrification: A Case Study Of The 2017 Q Line Extension In New York City, Harrison Shoaf

Honors College Theses

An examination of the 2017 Q Line subway extension in New York City and the potential causal relationship between its implementation and rental rates and gentrification in the surrounding area. Analysis of data covering the timeframe from 2007 to 2019 allows for utilization of OLS regression to determine if the area subject to the implementation experienced a change in rental rates and instigation of gentrification afterward compared to areas that were not subject to the implementation. Results indicate a decrease in rental rates (and by extent, no instigation of gentrification) in the area subject to the extension after it was …

Structural Problems Of Latin American Cities 450 Years After Caracas’ Foundation, Fabio Capra-Ribeiro

Faculty Publications

Latin American cities face many problems that compromise them from different angles such as lack of infrastructure, government fragmentation, and environmental degradation. At the same time, each city tries to come up with its own solutions, but there are so many difficulties that in many cases it is difficult to keep attention and efforts focused on all these directions. For these reasons, this research aims to define some of the most common problems faced by cities in Latin America. Disseminating these similarities could help to face those problems, since, if local governments recognize that they face the same situations as …

Ecosystem Duties, Green Infrastructure, And Environmental Injustice In Los Angeles, Sayd Randle

Research Collection College of Integrative Studies

In Los Angeles, water managers and environmentalist NGOs champion green infrastructure retrofits, installations intended to maximize the water-absorbing capacity of the urban landscape. In such arrangements, the work of water management is necessarily spread among a more-than-human community, including (but certainly not limited to) humans, plants, soils, and gravels. This article analyzes the human labor within these collaborations, tracking when and how this work gets enrolled in networks of water management and circuits of value. I develop the term ecosystem duties to characterize these exertions and as a useful analytic for assessing emergent dynamics of environmental justice.

Ccrpc Bicycle Count Data Analysis And Count Program Design Strategies, Gregory Rowangould, Eliana Fox, Rose O'Brien, Julia Clarke

University of Vermont Transportation Research Center

In 2017, the Chittenden County Regional Planning Commission (CCRPC) completed the most recent update of the region’s Active Transportation Plan (ATP) with the goal of creating “a safe, comfortable, and connected regional network of pedestrian and bicycle routes that appeal to all ages and abilities”. Developing a “robust” bicycle count program was one of the key non-infrastructure recommendations in the ATP (CCRPC, 2017). The UVM Transportation Research Center (“TRC”) was contracted to evaluate current bicycle data collection efforts in the region, identify gaps and limitations and make recommendations on how to develop a comprehensive bicycle count program that could better …

Kentucky Annual Economic Report 2022, Michael W. Clark, James P. Ziliak, Simon Sheather

Kentucky Annual Economic Report

This report is one of the important ways that the Center for Business and Economic Research fulfills its mission to examine various aspects of Kentucky’s economy as directed by the Kentucky Revised Statutes (KRS 164.738). The analysis and data presented here cover a variety of topics that range from a discussion of Kentucky’s current economic climate to a broad presentation of factors affecting the economy.

The report covers numerous dimensions of Kentucky’s economy including the effects of COVID-19. As the pandemic approaches its third year, COVID-19 continues to dominate the economic narrative. Many aspects of the economy have improved substantially …

Dirtiest Cities In The Mountain West, 2021, Olivia K. Cheche, Kristian Thymianos, William E. Brown Jr., Caitlin J. Saladino

Environment

This fact sheet presents rankings of the dirtiest cities in the Mountain West, as originally reported by LawnStarter in “2021’s Dirtiest Cities in the U.S.” The original report examines various measures for 200 major U.S. cities. Twenty-five Mountain West cities are included in the original report and are showcased here.

The Times Of Splintering Urbanism, Jean-Paul Addie

USI Publications

The twentieth anniversary of Splintering Urbanism’s publication is an apropos moment to consider the significance of time in, and for, critical infrastructure studies. This commentary brings Splintering Urbanism into dialogue with Lefebvre’s Rhythmanalysis to explore how time and temporality can (re)frame, extend, and challenge how we engage and analyze the networked metropolis. As an empirical concern, conceptual framework, and methodological approach, “infrastructure time” discloses commonalities and contradictions emerging across the infrastructure turn, enriching our understanding of the production of infrastructure space and helping us pose questions about urbanization, urban politics, and the urban condition in new and generative ways

The Kind Of Solution A Smart City Is: Knowledge Commons And Postindustrial Pittsburgh, Michael J. Madison

Book Chapters

This case study brings new attention to a critical but under-appreciated dimension of so-called “smart” cities: how smart city governance builds and relies on institutionalized sharing of data, information, and other forms of knowledge across all sectors of public administration. Those smart city practices are referred to here as knowledge commons and systematized using the Governing Knowledge Commons (GKC) research framework. That framework extends and modifies Ostrom’s research tradition as to community-based resource governance. As with other GKC-focused research, this work relies on a qualitative case study. It draws a detailed, context-specific portrait of a smart city as knowledge commons …

A Study Of Selected Makerspaces: An Overview, Anjali Sandesh Kale Dr.

Library Philosophy and Practice (e-journal)

Makerspace is a recent phenomenon. It is defined as a place where people interested in similar things come together to work and share ideas and equipment. Due to its widespread benefits, it has been incorporated in schools, colleges, universities, and libraries all over the world. In India, the number of makerspaces is increasing steadily, but not much is known about them. So to enhance the understanding of the makerspace, a study of selected makerspaces was conducted to understand its functioning. It was found that most of the selected makerspaces were established between 2010 to 2017. The majority of selected makerspaces …

Battling Over Bathwater: Greywater Technopolitics In Los Angeles, Sayd Randle

Research Collection College of Integrative Studies

In Los Angeles, domestic wastewater recycling ("greywater") systems are controversial, loved by local environmentalists and disdained by the city's water agencies. Drawing on fieldwork among greywater advocates and public water agency workers, this article examines how greywater systems function as nodes that unsettle relations between residents and the public agencies that manage the city's water grid. Elaborating the longstanding frictions over greywater reuse in LA reveals how these fixtures are mobilized by advocates to rescript the roles of both individuals and the state within the urban waterscape. Detailing public agency workers' resistance to this form of selective disconnection from the …

On Aqueducts And Anxiety: Water Infrastructure, Ruination, And A Region-Scaled Anthropocene Imaginary, Sayd Randle

Research Collection College of Integrative Studies

This paper explores popular expectations for and meanings of the U.S. West's environmental future, as articulated through recent artistic representations of the Los Angeles's expansive water provision network. Weaving together material from participant observation and readings of creative works, I show how infrastructural imagery is used to index anxieties about a future of water scarcity. Presenting familiar, currently functional water infrastructures as ruins-in-the-making, these artists use the physical stuff of water provision networks to advance critiques of longstanding modes of development and the material basis of urban-rural relations in the U.S. West. Doing so, these imagined ruins draw the global-scale …