Geography Commons^™

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 …

We Work, We Eat Together: Anti-Authoritarian Mutual Aid Politics In New York City, 2004-2013, David Spataro

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

New York City's neoliberal restructuring has fundamentally transformed the city's labor market and privatized many important aspects of a once robust municipal welfare system. In this research I examine one radical response to these changes: anti-authoritarian mutual aid groups that blend Do-It-Yourself (DIY) culture with direct action politics. These are projects where activists attempt to build strong communities of resistance by organizing collective forms of social reproduction. I find that these projects are a threat to neoliberal urbanization because they reorganize reproduction beyond the household scale while simultaneously criticizing the social relations of capitalism as the root of household insecurity. …

Historical Relationships Between Land Elevation And Socioeconomic Status In New York City: A Mixed Methods Gis Approach, Jennifer Brisbane

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The role that topography has played in the development of New York City is essential to understanding its present urban form and foreseeing its changes. Geographers and economists have generally agreed that for cities in the United States, socioeconomic status increases with land elevation. This seemingly simple relationship between elevation and class, however, is complicated by factors such as technological innovations, economic shifts, politics, cultural perceptions, and the idiosyncrasies of cities and the neighborhoods within them. The lack of comprehensive research in this area coupled with conflicting findings warranted further exploration into the complex and changing relationships between elevation and …

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 …

Gravity Modeling Of Casinos In The United States: A Case Study Of Philadelphia, Moira Conway

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Recently, casino gaming has emerged in the United States in a variety of new locations as a source of economic development. Despite this, in the United States there has been only a very limited amount of research that has examined gambling from a spatial perspective. An important concern identified in international gambling research is that of problem gambling. This project seeks to examine the potential impacts of casinos in the major metropolitan area of Philadelphia, which is currently the largest city in the United States with an open commercial casino. There are three additional casinos in the metropolitan region. In …

"A New Way Of Doing Politics": The Movement Against Cafta In Costa Rica, Jeremy Rayner

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In October of 2007, Costa Ricans voted in a referendum to ratify a Free Trade Agreement with the United States (DR-CAFTA, or CAFTA). The first referendum in their nation's history--and the first referendum ever held on a Free Trade Agreement--marked the culmination of a cycle of contention over liberalization that transformed practices and expectations of politics in a country often considered an exemplar of representative democracy. In this dissertation I provide an account of the opposition to CAFTA (the NO), based on two years of ethnographic research with the Patriotic Committees (Comites Patrioticos), the decentralized, grassroots network at the heart …

Scaling Food Security: A Political Ecology Of Agricultural Policies And Practices In Bukidnon, Philippines, Ryan Ehrhart

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Debates over food security strategies in the Philippines have pitted the neoliberal paradigm of trade liberalization, export cropping, and chemical and biotech agricultural methods against the food sovereignty paradigm of protectionism, staple cropping, and sustainable agriculture methods.

The Philippine government has long pushed for yield increases of staples. However, there has been dissonance between governmental desires for rice self-sufficiency and pursuit of a more export-oriented agricultural economy. The World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, the Asian Development Bank, and the World Trade Organization have pressured the government of the Philippines to adopt various tenets of neoliberalism (trade liberalization, privatization, deregulation, …

From Property Abandonment To Predatory Equity: Writings On Financialization And Urban Space In New York City, Desiree Justina Fields

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Financial markets, actors and imperatives are increasingly central to today's global capitalism, even in areas of the economy traditionally distinct from finance, such as real estate. This financialization changes the role of mortgage capital in urban space from building place-bound wealth to facilitating the extraction of value from place. This dissertation addresses questions about how financialization operates in the rental market, specifically its relation to: earlier processes of urban disinvestment, ongoing social and political struggles around urban space, the meaning of home and social reproduction. These questions correspond to broader theoretical debates about the contingent relationship between today's urban context …

Claiming Space, Redefining Politics: Urban Protest And Grassroots Power In Bolivia, Carwil Bjork-James

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation analyzes the role of space-claiming protests by primarily left grassroots social movements in Bolivia's current political transformation. Space claiming includes mass protests that physically control or symbolically claim urban space through occupations of plazas and roads, sit-ins, blockades, and other measures. As a theoretical construct, space claiming brings together tactics of collective action and meanings of public spaces, and looks at the consequences of their interaction. This dissertation is based on ethnographic engagement and oral interviews with protest participants and their state interlocutors during twelve months of fieldwork and archival research. By using detailed ethnographic evidence--of social life …

Tiebout Sorting And Jurisdictional Homogeneity: Empirical Validity And Ethical Implications, Lee Hachadoorian

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In a seminal paper, Tiebout (1956) argues that a large number of small local governments will function as a market in local services, leading to efficient allocation of local public goods. This result only obtains if households actually move in response to local fiscal differences. Spatial dependence of socioeconomic variables confounds attempts to infer Tiebout-motivated residential choice from observed socioeconomic homogeneity. I correct for this by focusing on socioeconomic difference across local government borders. In an investigation of socioeconomic sorting in Queens and Nassau Counties, NY, I find strong evidence of income sorting at the level of small suburban municipalities …

The Bloomberg Way: Development Politics, Urban Ideology, And Class Transformation In Contemporary New York City, Julian Brash

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation explores the links between a development project, a particular urban ideology, and processes of class transformation in contemporary New York City. The city's postindustrial transformation, especially since the 1970s fiscal crisis, has created a newly dominant corporate elite consisting of executives and high-level professionals. This ruling class alliance has begun to supersede the city's older, real estate-centered traditional growth coalition, as emblematized by the political rise of billionaire ex-CEO Michael Bloomberg. Mayor Bloomberg, along with other ex-corporate executives in his administration, implemented a private-sector inspired corporate, technocratic, and antipolitical approach to governance in general and urban and economic …