Urban Studies Commons^™

Ticket To The Past: A Political History Of The Mexico City Metro, 1958-1969, Maxwell E.P. Ulin

Grand Valley Journal of History

This essay outlines the historic political battle between Mexico's longest serving mayor, Ernesto Uruchurtu, and the nation's president, Gustavo Diaz Ordaz, over the construction of what would become the second largest subway system in the Western Hemisphere, The Mexico City Metro. The conflict, which eventually resulted in Uruchurtu's resignation, was characterized by latent political tensions between the PRI and Mexican middle class that would erupt in 1968 and lead to the ultimate decline of PRI hegemony. I thus argue that the new Metro project did not reflect Mexico's democratic modernization--as its supporters meant it to do--but rather the vestiges of …

The Intersection Of Culture And Activism In The Filipino Community In Soma, Ericka J. Martynovych

Master's Theses

My research analyzes the intersection between culture and activism, through oral histories with participants and organizers of SoMa Pilipinas, the Filipino cultural heritage district in the South of Market neighborhood of San Francisco. I analyzed the impact of the establishment of the Filipino cultural heritage district on the Filipino community in the South of Market neighborhood. I examined what motivates members of this community to be politically active by organizing and attending protests and rallies, speaking at Planning Commission hearings at City Hall, attending planning meetings for SoMa Pilipinas, building relationships across organizations and fields, and providing resources for community …

Gentrification As Injustice: A Relational Egalitarian Approach To Urban Housing, Tyler J. Zimmer

Philosophy Faculty Publications

This paper focuses on the nature of the landlord/tenant relationship in uncontrolled rental housing markets. I argue that relational egalitarianism--the view that our social and political relations to one another ought not involve arbitrary power asymmetries--gives us moral reasons to criticize this relationship. In particular, I try to show that landlord/tenant relationships involve objectionable forms of economic subordination--more specifically, relations that involve exploitation and marginalization--as well as political inequality. I conclude the paper with some reflections on policy solutions to the problems I identify. Contrary to the consensus among most economists and government officials at least, not to mention landlords, …

Half The World: Refugees Transform The City Of Trees, Todd Shallat (Editor), Kathleen Rubinow Hodges (Editor), Errol D. Jones (Editor), Laura Winslow (Editor)

Faculty & Staff Authored Books

Nearly 1 out of every 100 people worldwide is a person displaced and seeking asylum, imperiled by persecution and war. Half the World takes measure of that staggering crisis in stories from a city transformed.

Community Land Trusts: A Help Or Hindrance To Community Development In The United States, Andrew Kuka

Student Research – Stevenson Center

The availability of affordable housing in the United States continues to be an issue for Americans who are on the brink of homelessness, rely on housing subsidies, or struggle to pay their mortgages or rents. These issues, as well as the gentrification threat that community development poses to low-income residents can have deleterious effects on democratic participation and community development efforts. One proposed solution to these problems is the implementation of more community land trust programs nationally. This paper will assess the practicality of CLTs, and what such an implementation would mean for individuals, government entities, community members, and community …

A Synthesis Of James Howard Kunstler’S Themes Of Urbanization And The Impending Oil Crisis In The Geography Of Nowhere, Home From Nowhere, The City In Mind, And The Long Emergency, William S. Humphrey

Tenor of Our Times

This paper examines and synchronizes the thoughts put forth by American social critic and author James Howard Kunstler in his four books, The Geography of Nowhere, Home from Nowhere, The City in Mind, and The Long Emergency. Kunstler asserts that human beings are losing their sense of being while simultaneously facilitating daily life, thus leaving a world rife with nothingness. A large portion of Kunstler’s argument deals with how humans have knowingly increased suburban sprawl while depleting valuable resources; such activity, left unchecked, will worsen the state of the world. The United States, in particular, is the most problematic. …

Effect Of The Relocation Policy Of Public Agencies In South Korea, Chan Ho Kim

MPA/MPP/MPFM Capstone Projects

In 2005, the government announced the relocation policy of public agencies to non-capital regions. The main purpose of the policy was to decentralize population in the SMA (Seoul Metropolitan Area) through building regional competitiveness. The transfer of 98% of the public institutions was completed in April 2017 (MOLIT 2017). However, unlike the blueprint for the initial plan for the relocation of the agencies, there may be an increase in social cost and insufficient contribution to the regional economic development.

This study empirically examines effectiveness of the policy and its impact on regional economic growth and on how differently the policy …

Effective Traffic Noise Policy Of Urban Development Projects In South Korea, Jaechang Jo

MPA/MPP/MPFM Capstone Projects

In 1980, South Korean government built a large scale apartment complex in the Seoul metropolitan area because of consecutive urbanization and rapid industrialization. However, in late 1980, as the housing market surged rapidly, the government constructed several huge new towns. These new towns and urban development projects contributed to stabilizing the housing market, but residents in new towns began to suffer from traffic noise and this became social problems.

Traffic noise is caused by tire friction and also influenced by various factors such as vehicle volume and traffic speed. There are two primary measures to mitigate the traffic noise; reducing …

History In Collaboration: Equalizing The Arts And The Humanities In San Francisco, Nicole C. Meldahl

Master's Projects and Capstones

Historically, there has been a critical imbalance in the way history and preservation organizations are civically supported in comparison with the amount of funding that is available to arts organizations in the United States. To correct this imbalance in San Francisco, I propose the creation of a San Francisco Department of Culture that would place the San Francisco Arts Commission equally alongside a San Francisco History Commission within a department that absorbs responsibilities currently managed by other divisions with in city government, such as the Planning Department and the Office and Economic and Workforce Development. City government necessarily takes time …

Communities Of Opportunity: Pursuing A Housing Policy Agenda To Achieve Equity And Opportunity In The Face Of Post-Recession Challenges, Kalima Rose, Teddy Kỳ-Nam Miller

Trotter Review

Where we live directly impacts our ability to achieve our full potential. Access to good schools, quality jobs, reliable transportation, and healthy food is fundamental to achieving communities of opportunity. Unfortunately, communities of color, and urban black communities in particular, are disproportionately residing in neighborhoods locked out of opportunity, or disproportionately burdened by housing costs —spending over half of their income on housing. In 2015, PolicyLink undertook a research project to understand the changing post-recession housing landscape, to characterize the forces that were undermining housing security for communities of color, and to characterize the policy opportunities that could address the …

Introduction: The Gentrification Game, Barbara Lewis

Trotter Review

In real estate talk, there are only three things that matter, and they are location, location, location. The same is true in dispossession, which translates into the freeing up of location so that it can be possessed by others. Another term that has cropped up fairly recently, much in use in the crossover between the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, is gentrification, which has a benign face as well as one that is not so kindly, like the paired tragic and comic masks of classic drama.

In this issue of the Trotter Review, we explore gentrification and its alternate, dispossession, …

The Politics Of Race, Class, And Gentrification In The Atl, Keith Jennings

Trotter Review

Methodologically, the essay uses a multidisciplinary approach to examine gentrification from a race, class, and gender perspective. Within the essay a number of the dynamics directly associated with Atlanta’s political economy and the impact those dynamics are having on issues such as affordable housing, poverty, and Black employment and underemployment are analyzed. While not a central focus of the essay, the changes taking place outside of Atlanta in several counties, as a result of the push and pull effect in the metropolitan region, are briefly discussed.

Uncovering The Buried Truth In Richmond: Former Confederate Capital Tries To Memorialize Its Shameful History Of Slavery, Howard Manly

Trotter Review

Richmond Mayor Dwight C. Jones had the noblest of intentions.

With Virginia’s capital having a poverty rate of nearly 25 percent, no one blamed Jones, a child of the sixties and preacher by calling, for trying to develop prime riverfront property to generate revenue to create more jobs, better schools, and housing.

But when Jones unveiled a proposal in 2013 that included building a new baseball stadium near one of the city’s historic slave burial grounds in Shockoe Bottom, it was, by all accounts, troubling to historic preservationists and Black community activists. “Shameful” was one of the words most often …

Gentrification As Anti-Local Economic Development: The Case Of Boston, Massachusetts, James Jennings

Trotter Review

Activists and political leaders across the city of Boston are concerned that gentrification in the form of rapidly rising rents in low-income and the poorest areas are contributing to displacement of families and children. Rising home sale prices and an increasing number of development projects are feeding into this concern. There is also a growing wariness about the impact that this scenario can have on small and neighborhood-based businesses and microenterprises whose markets are represented by the kinds of households facing potential displacement. This potential side-effect suggests that gentrification could actually emerge as anti-local economic development in Boston. It can …

“Separatist City”: The Mandela, Massachusetts (Roxbury) Movement And The Politics Of Incorporation, Self-Determination, And Community Control, 1986–1988, Zebulon V. Miletsky, Tomás González

Trotter Review

November 4, 2016, marks 30 years since the historic referendum in which close to 50,000 citizens of Boston living in or near the predominantly Black area of “Greater Roxbury” voted on whether the area should leave Boston and incorporate as a separate municipality to be named in honor of former South African president Nelson and Winnie Mandela, or remain a part of Boston. The new community, what planners called “Greater Roxbury,” would have included wards in much or all of the neighborhoods of Roxbury, Dorchester, Mattapan, Jamaica Plain, the Fenway, the South End, and what was then known as Columbia …

Book Review: Desire And Disaster In New Orleans: Tourism, Race And Historical Memory By Lynnell L. Thomas, Casey Schreiber

Trotter Review

Desire and Disaster in New Orleans: Tourism, Race and Historical Memory, by Lynnell L. Thomas, challenges the racial messages embedded within dominant tourism narratives in New Orleans. From tour guides, to websites, to travel brochures, Thomas extracts and analyzes a variety of messages to document how competing representations of race—desire and disaster—are two frames through which New Orleans tourism narratives represent black culture. Thomas leads readers to question the extent to which alternative tourism narratives can be constructed to more justly address constructions of blackness.

Community Land Trusts: A Powerful Vehicle For Development Without Displacement, May Louie

Trotter Review

In the Great Recession of 2007–2009, Boston’s communities of color were hit hard. A 2009 map of foreclosures looked like a map of the communities of color—Roxbury, Dorchester, and Mattapan. The one island of stability was a section of Roxbury called the Dudley Triangle—home to the community land trust of the Dudley Street Neighborhood Initiative (DSNI).

Originally established to respond to the community’s vision of “development without displacement,” the land trust model was adopted to help residents gain control of land and to use that control to prevent families from being priced out as they organized to improve their neighborhood. …

From Disinvestment To Displacement: Gentrification And Jamaica Plain’S Hyde-Jackson Squares, Jen Douglas

Trotter Review

In this essay, I offer a place-based history of socioeconomic and demographic change in Hyde Square and nearby Jackson Square (henceforth “Hyde-Jackson Squares”). I document the area’s ongoing gentrification and describe the distribution of gentrification pressures. I situate this contemporary process against the socio-spatial patterns carved out by the area’s historical rise as an industrial suburb, its struggle amid decades of disinvestment, and the community efforts that ultimately stabilized the neighborhood. In these sequential transformations is the story of how Latinos and Blacks entered, departed, and have strived to remain in the neighborhood.

Coastal Louisiana: Adaptive Capacity In The Face Of Climate Change, Tara Lambeth

LSU New Orleans Theses and Dissertations

Extreme weather events can result in natural disasters, and climate change can cause these weather events to occur more often and with more intensity. Because of social and physical vulnerabilities, climate change and extreme weather often affect coastal communities. As climate change continues to be a factor for many coastal communities, and environmental hazards and vulnerability continue to increase, the need for adaptation may become a reality for many communities. However, very few studies have been done on the effect climate change and mitigation measures implemented in response to climate change have on a community’s adaptive capacity.

This single instrumental …

How The City Of Indianapolis Came To Have African American Policemen And Firemen 80 Years Before The Modern Civil Rights Movement., Leon E. Bates

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This study explores a series of events that occurred in the spring of 1876. The relationship between the Indianapolis city government, the Marion County Courts, the Indianapolis Police Department, and the African American community came together to usher in changes never before envisioned. The Indianapolis Police Department (IPD) was formed in 1855, then disbanded 12 months later in a political dispute. From 1857-to-1876, the IPD was all white. These changes took place as the Reconstruction era was coming to a close. The first Ku Klux Klan was at its apex, terrorizing black communities, and Jim Crow was coming into its …

Homelessness, Shelter, And Human Rights In California And New York, Rebecca Wilson

Student Scholar Symposium Abstracts and Posters

The purpose of this project is to discuss the issues of homelessness and lack of shelter in the United States, specifically in the states of California and New York, as a human right. Due to the majority of California’s homeless population going unsheltered and the large majority of New York’s homeless population receiving shelter, there are ways that California can learn from the system that New York has developed in order to more efficiently and justly provide shelter to its homeless population. This paper analyzes what has worked and what has not worked in either state in providing the human …

After Houselessness: Queer Youth Of Color Severed From Cultural And Spiritual Community, Carrie Fuentes, Miriam Abelson

Student Research Symposium

Within the Portland Oregon Houseless Youth Continuum, to what extent are the particular needs of Queer Youth of Color being served by existing programs? There is a gap between the nature of houseless youth services and the need for Queer Youth of Color to rebuild the missing connections resulting from cultural or spiritual rupture that creates a disconnection from their ancestry and community estrangement. Programs exist that offer assistance to QYOC in crisis but these programs lack in a positive connection to spiritual and cultural legacy that will support long term self-efficacy.

The proposed research goal is to examine these …

Northside, Jesse L. Houk

Theses and Dissertations--English

The Northside of Lexington, Kentucky is an area with its own culture, community and art. While living in this community I was able to learn, grow and develop alongside this newly renovated area. The people and their lives intersect in such a way that creates a tension at times. However, many social awareness advocates vie for the success of this neighborhood for many years to come. The objective of studying such an area as the Northside in Lexington is to focus on the similarites rather than the differences in culture, community and artistic endeavor. With a collection of essays and …

Art Education In My Backyard: Creative Placemaking On An Urban Farm, Jodi Kushins

Artizein: Arts and Teaching Journal

An art educator describes how she used her knowledge and experience of artistic and educational initiatives that forefront collective activity in real world settings to transform her backyard into an urban farm with the help of friends and neighbors. She combines an autoethnographic account of her experiences, including original photographs, with research on conceptual artists, participatory culture, and creative placemaking to position her work as participatory environmental art education. The paper is organized around the major steps one undertakes in planting a garden – siting, amending, seeding, tending, and harvesting - to draw parallels between the processes of maintaining a …

Patriarchy, Empire, And Ping Pong Shows: The Political Economy Of Sex Tourism In Thailand, Kristen Kelley

Cultural Studies Capstone Papers

This project provides a postcolonial feminist analysis of the prosperity and reputation of the sex tourism industry in Thailand. It examines the ways in which Western imperialism created the space for the globalization of sex work, as well as providing a postcolonial analysis of the hegemonic structures which have existed throughout Thailand's history that enable the sex tourism industry to thrive today. This project also explores how policy making and enforcement in Thailand affects the sex tourism industry, as well as the ways in which activism works to change or support these policies, and how this affects individuals who are …

Ua68/10/1 Potter College Of Arts & Letters Sociology Publications, Wku Archives

WKU Archives Collection Inventories

Publications created by and about Sociology. Including Sociology, Anthropology & Social Work while a part of Potter College.

Ua1c2/4 Proposed Building Photographs, Wku Archives

WKU Archives Collection Inventories

Images of proposed buildings.

Renewing Spokane: A Study Of Motivating Forces Behind Downtown Revitalization Projects, Kara K. Mowery

All Master's Theses

This study examines the motivating forces behind downtown urban renewal projects through qualitative interview research. Using Spokane, Washington, as a case study, interviews were conducted with key players in downtown revitalization, including public administrators, private developers, and non-profit representatives. While neoliberal theory indicates that economic return serves as the primary motivation for investment, interview questions were designed to uncover whether additional motivating factors stimulate renewal work. Results indicate that those conducting renewal projects are primarily motivated by economics, but additionally cite heritage preservation values and community development as significant factors. Moreover, contemporary renewal projects are found to be small-scale endeavors, …

An Interpretive Plan Guide For Wilderness Park In Lincoln, Nebraska, Rachel J. Ward

Community and Regional Planning Program: Professional Projects

Wilderness Park, located in Lancaster County, Nebraska, is a public park of unique ecological and historical value to the city of Lincoln and to the surrounding region. The natural and historical features of the park present an opportunity to communicate environmental and historical topics that are relevant on local, national, and global levels, as well as inspire a lively sense of pride in the community. The problem is that many topics relevant to Wilderness Park are not currently being interpreted at the park, and that there are relatively few interpretive resources available to park visitors.

The purpose of this project …

La Langue De Banlieue : De L’Oral À L’Écrit, Christelle Lottereie

Présence Francophone: Revue internationale de langue et de littérature

Behind the existence of a social malaise in the suburbs and of numerous stereotypes, a linguistic innovation characteristic of young people has developed. Most of these young people, who consider themselves excluded from society, have created their own social and linguistic space. They have appropriated the French language and transformed it after introducing their own identity marks. The resulting language turns out to be a linguistic refuge for identity, which leads to the finding of a subjective stability.