Urban Studies and Planning Commons^™

College Of Engineering Senior Design Competition Fall 2010, University Of Nevada, Las Vegas

Fred and Harriet Cox Senior Design Competition Projects

Part of every UNLV engineering student’s academic experience, the senior design project stimulates engineering innovation and entrepreneurship. Each student in their senior year chooses, plans, designs, and prototypes a product in this required element of the curriculum. A capstone to the student’s educational career, the senior design project encourages the student to use everything learned in the engineering program to create a practical, real world solution to an engineering challenge.

The senior design competition helps to focus the senior students in increasing the quality and potential for commercial application for their design projects. Judges from local industry evaluate the projects …

Culvert Material Cost Comparison, New England Environmental Finance Center

Water

The following tables provide a detailed look at the role that culvert material and culvert diameter play in the overall cost of a culvert replacement project.

Gloucester Marine Station: Future Development Feasibility Study, Jack F. Ahern, Ben Eli Webb

Landscape Architecture & Regional Planning Studio and Student Research and Creative Activity

The study commenced in July 2009 with historical research about the site and its context, site analysis, including the existing conditions and development regulations. This analysis included: topography, soils, vegetation, structures, utilities, easements, property deed, and city, state, and federal regulations. From this analysis an assessment of future development potentials was made based on the existing data/documents from UMass files, public records, Mass GIS data, site visits, and interviews with Gloucester, Commonwealth of Massachusetts, and other officials and stakeholders. From the assessment we identified potential future uses, building locations, and feasible alternative layouts of the site. These alternatives were summarily …

Local Surface Water Policy Under Conditions Of Climate Change, Elizabeth Brabec, Elisabeth Hamin, Chingwen Cheng

Elizabeth Brabec

Climate change means two things for local stormwater managers – that storm events will become more severe, and rainfall will, in many instances, become more erratic, causing enhanced periods of drought and flood. Two approaches are needed to deal with the eventualities: mitigation and adaptation.

While urbanization increases stormwater runoff and decreases the lag time of stormwater discharge, there is also a resulting lack of infiltration and reduction in evapotranspiration (Brunke and Gonser 1997). Stormwater detention, retention and infiltration have attempted to compensate, resulting in the concentrated point location infiltration of stormwater, which replenishes groundwater and baseflow. Equally important to …

College Of Engineering Senior Design Competition Spring 2010, University Of Nevada, Las Vegas

Fred and Harriet Cox Senior Design Competition Projects

Each student in his or her senior year chooses, plans, designs, and prototypes a product in this required element of the curriculum. The senior design project encourages the student to use everything learned in the engineering program to create a practical, real-world solution to an engineering challenge.

A highlight of the year-long senior design project is the senior design competition. This competition, which usually takes place the week before finals each semester, helps focus the senior students on increasing the quality and potential for commercial application for their design projects.

Judges from local industry evaluate the projects on innovation, commercial …

Simplicity And The City: Understanding The Voluntary Simplicity Movement In Melbourne, Gershwin Penn

Independent Study Project (ISP) Collection

The purpose of this study was to understand the lifestyle of members of the voluntary simplicity movement in an urban setting. I sought to understand how they practiced simplicity in their day to day lives, how simplicity effected their emotional life, how simplicity influenced their values, how simplicity influenced their interaction with the city, and what their general ethos was. This study was conducted to understand how it is possible for individuals to live ecologically and socially responsible lives in settings that, by in large, reject their values. I conducted fifteen face to face in-depth interviews in Melbourne in April …

Relating Bike Racks And Bike Ridership, John Sens

Department of Environmental Studies: Undergraduate Student Theses

Abstract The purpose of this thesis was to investigate the relationship between bicycle ridership and bike racks in a given area. The goal was to discern whether or not the density of bike racks determines the number of riders in the area. I predicted that there would be higher ridership in the areas with a denser bike rack concentration. To investigate this point, I set up five different areas of varying sizes with a similar number of bike racks, and then observed them over a period of 5 business days. By using a simple tally of the bikes found on …

Distribution Of Rain Gardens In Lincoln Nebraska: Are Rain Gardens More Likely To Be Built Near Bodies Of Water, Eric Voecks

Department of Environmental Studies: Undergraduate Student Theses

Abstract Rain gardens are an important tool in reducing the amount of stormwater runoff and accompanying pollutants from entering the city’s streams and lakes, and reducing their water quality. This thesis project analyzed the number of rain gardens installed through the City of Lincoln Nebraska Watershed Management’s Rain Garden Water Quality Project in distance intervals of one-eighth mile from streams and lakes. This data shows the distribution of these rain gardens in relation to streams and lakes and attempts to determine if proximity to streams and lakes is a factor in homeowners installing rain gardens. ArcGIS was used to create …

Local Land Use Scenario Formulation Using The Ipcc Sres Climate Change Scenarios Within Nevada, Scott Bassett

2010 Annual Nevada NSF EPSCoR Climate Change Conference

23 PowerPoint slides Convener: Darko Koracin, DRI Session 5: Climate Modeling Abstract: -Develop a methodology for downscaling SRES for use in land use drivers at a regional scale (metropolitan city scale) -Integrate land use drivers into urban growth models (UGMs) and land use change models -Link land use based demand models with river operations to assess potential future water allocations

Research Poster: Downscaling The Ipcc Sres Emissions Scenarios Into Future Local Land Use Scenarios, Michael R. Dolloff

2010 Annual Nevada NSF EPSCoR Climate Change Conference

Research poster

Bolivia's Coca Headache: The Agroyungas Program, Inflation, Campesinos, Coca And Capitalism In Bolivia, John D. Roberts

Masters Theses 1911 - February 2014

Bolivia in the 1980s was wracked by monetary inflation approaching levels of the German Weimar Republic. Immediately following this time of great financial crisis in Bolivia, the U.N. founded a project through the U.N.D.P. to encourage peasant farmers in Bolivia to switch from growing coca (the plant used manufacture cocaine) to growing other cash crops for market. This crop substitution and development program, called the Agroyungas Project, lasted from 1985 to 1991 and is the focus of this study. While many U.N. pundits and journalists considered the program’s initial small successes promising, it has been considered since its conclusion to …

An Analysis Of Temperature Variations Using Remote Sensing Approach In Lokoja Area, Fanan Ujoh Mr, Olarewaju O. Ifatimehin Mr, Sunday Ishaya Mr

Dr. Fanan Ujoh

This study investigates the thermal variations of the different land use/cover types in urban Lokoja town retrieved from Landsat TM imagery of 1987. Band 2, 3, 4 and 6 of the imagery were used in the classification, estimation of NDVI, land surface emissivity values, and satellite sensor temperature. The Qin et al’s mono window algorithm was employed to obtain the land surface temperatures of the different land use/cover types classified. The results indicate that there is a significant variation in temperatures among the different land use/cover types in Lokoja. The built up area and the vacant area have the highest …

Sustainability Initiatives In East Bayside Neighborhood Portland, Maine, Garvan Donegan, Henry Heyburn, Caitlyn Horose, Matt Klebes, Jennifer Riley, Damon Yakovleff, New England Environmental Finance Center

Planning

This is a bundle containing research on sustainability initiatives that could be implemented in the East Bayside neighborhood of Portland, ME. These six essays were prepared by the Spring, 2010 Sustainable Communities Class known as CPD 602 at the University of Southern Maine. The class is part of the core curriculum of the Community Planning and Development program of the Muskie School of Public Service at the university. The instructor for the class was Samuel Merrill, Ph. D. who is also director of the New England Environmental Finance Center at the University. These papers were prepared in conjunction with Alan …

Integrating Education, Evaluation & Partnerships Into Large-Scale Sustainable Stormwater Management Programs, Vivek Shandas, Anne Nelson, Carine Arendes

Urban Studies and Planning Faculty Publications and Presentations

Integrated stormwater management using green infrastructure shows promise in saving money and mitigating environmental impacts caused by urban development. Equally important are the potential community benefits, including better understanding of ecological systems, increased access to urban green spaces, safer and healthier neighborhoods, and informed residents that are equipped to take action to improve watershed health. As a partnership between the City of Portland Environmental Services, Portland State University, and residents of the Tabor to the River (T2R) neighborhood, we conducted a survey to understand the role of civic ecology in green infrastructure projects. The survey results indicate a high interest …

Caretakers Of The Garden Of Delight And Discontent: Adirondack Narrative, Conflict, And Environmental Virtue, Eric Richard Holmlund

Antioch University Full-Text Dissertations & Theses

This dissertation concerns a widely recognized natural area, New York's Adirondack Park, that serves both as an international model for conservation and as a context for persistent conflict over natural resources, space, wealth and esthetics. It employs narrative inquiry as a method to examine the sources and the function of narratives or stories explaining the history and the present status of social groups in the Park. Narrative theorists maintain that we borrow from such socially circulating narratives to craft our own identities, and then repeat them until we believe them, almost without regard for the factual basis in history or …