Urban Studies and Planning Commons^™

Frameworks Of Recovery: Exploring The Intersection Of Policy & Decision-Making Processes After Hurricane Katrina, Kim Mosby

University of New Orleans Theses and Dissertations

This study seeks to understand how local and national newspaper articles and African American residents frame obstacles to returning to New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. It explores how recovery planning processes and policy changes influenced the decision-making processes of African Americans displaced to Houston through a content analysis of the media and qualitative interviews with displaced and returned residents. The study shows the media and participants framed disaster recovery policies as creating opportunities and gaps in assistance that varied by location. Participants described how policy decisions that created gaps in assistance compounded the difficulty of returning for working- and middle-class …

Of Rats And Men, Thomas S. Walsh

Capstones

This capstone is a data-driven investigation into New York City's rat problem. By using publicly available government data to map rat activity in NYC, I identified several socio-economic variables that correlate with rat populations at the community district, borough, and city-scale. I used these findings (mainly that rat problems are linked to lower incomes) as the basis of an investigation, which includes interviews with residents, experts, and city officials. Prof. Bobby Corrigan, urban rodentologist and formerly with the NYC Department of Health criticizes the city's efforts for the first time on the record.

https://thomasseiyawalsh.wixsite.com/ratstone

Planning Cities, Economically Or Communally: A Comparative Study Of Amsterdam And San Francisco, Raina Dawn Whittekiend

Master's Theses

Globalization has spun “community” off its axis. What once defined community is no longer the current state of the community. Increased economic transactions have led to the instability of communities that once depended on one another at the local level. These communities are now dependent on systems that do not know nor understand their actors. This lack of relationship between development and subject is witnessed and highly scrutinized in developing countries all over the world and has been intensely researched in academic literature. This thesis intends to better understand why in modernized global cities these same processes of development and …

In Brownsville, A Struggle For Revitalization Without Displacement, Katherine Warren

Capstones

As many parts of Brooklyn buzz with a startling rate of economic resurgence, Brownsville seems like a neighborhood left behind.

Struggling with poverty, poor health statistics, unemployment and high crime rates, and with the highest concentration of public housing in the city, it has not seen the same commercial and real estate revival as Williamsburg, Bushwick, Crown Heights and other areas of Brooklyn.

“In Brownsville, which has had challenges battling negative perceptions of this community, most of the residents are lower income and investors in the past have deemed this community as not being as good as an investment as …

A Closer Look At Water Quality, Illegal Dumping And Community Engagement In The Coney Island Creek, Molly Nugent

Capstones

According to data science and policy blog I Quant NY, the Coney Island Creek is one of the dirtiest waterways in the city. It’s filthier than the Newtown Creek or the Gowanus Canal, which are both designated as federal superfund sites. The creek is a sanctuary for residents who want it to be cleaner and want to be in the know when it comes to dangerous levels of bacteria in the water.

What my reporting partner and I, Kyle Mackie, found was that the community has largely been kept in the dark. The DEP has been investigating both small and …

Urbanization, Land Rights And Development: A Case Study Of Waterfront Communities In Lagos, Nigeria., Gideon Olaniyi Omoniyi

Master's Theses

The aim of this study is to examine the root causes of forced evictions and displacement through the current urbanization process in Lagos, Nigeria. My particular attention is devoted to the legal complexities and how ethnolinguistic identities shape land laws, influence land tenure, and construct urban citizenship. Through this process, competing claims to land ownership provide fertile ground for forced evictions and displacement. Existing scholars suggest that poor urban residents lack rights to stay in their neighborhoods, while a powerful capitalist class has emerged and dispossessed the poor from their lands. Yet these existing approaches derived from the neoclassical and …

Access To Healthy Foods: A Descriptive Analysis Of Farmers’ Markets, Food Deserts & Usda Food Assistance Programs In Tennessee Census Tracts, Twanda D. Wadlington

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Food deserts are a growing problem in the United States, and occur in areas of low-income where people have limited access to healthy foods. In response, the presence of farmers’ markets has grown exponentially, and improved healthy food access. Additionally, the USDA has strived to connect families to healthy foods through food assistance programs such as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children (WIC), and the Senior Farmers’ Market Nutrition Program (SFMNP). This study investigated the relationship between farmers’ markets, their acceptance of food assistance benefits, and their locations within Tennessee …

A Summer At Azavea Working With Nonprofit Organizations: The Summer Of Maps Fellowship, Sarah Gates

International Development, Community and Environment (IDCE)

This report details my experience as a Summer of Maps Fellow at Azavea during June 2017 to August 2017. As a Summer of Maps Fellow I worked with nonprofit organizations, the Fair Tech Collective and the World Resources Institute, on two geospatial analysis projects. For the Fair Tech Collective I analyzed data on refinery flaring pollution, air toxin concentrations, and sensitive receptor populations to produce a series of maps and infographics detailing the impacts of petrochemical pollution in the San Francisco Bay Area. For the World Resources Institute I used data-driven methods to analyze conservation efforts in the Central African …

Greening The Gateway Cities: Summer Internship With The Clark University Human Environment Regional Observatory (Hero) And Massachusetts Department Of Conservation And Recreation (Dcr), Zhiwen Zhu

International Development, Community and Environment (IDCE)

This report provides a detailed account of my internship experience with the Clark University Human-Environment Regional Observatory (HERO) and Massachusetts Department of Conservation and Recreation (DCR) in the summer of 2017. This internship concerns the urban tree health assessment in three ‘Greening the Gateway’ cities in Massachusetts. During the internship, I conducted tree survey field work, database management, mapping, tree survey data analysis and urban tree plantation benefits microclimate simulation. During the internship I worked with the professors and students at Clark University and University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and the staff from Department of Conservation and Recreation (DCR), Worcester Tree …

Contentions At The Human-Wildlife Interface: An Analysis Of Chicago’S Coyote Management Plan, Ilanah Taves

International Development, Community and Environment (IDCE)

Urbanization and habitat fragmentation cause animal species to either adjust to human- dominated landscapes or suffer population loss. This paper examines the municipal challenges associated with coyotes, an animal successfully adapting to cities throughout North America. The presence of predators in highly developed areas challenges conceptual and spatial attempts to separate cities from nature. This report’s introductory sections critically examine the alienation of wildlife from the urban form. Theoretical perspectives from the discipline of animal geographies are employed to deconstruct problematic relationships between cities and animals, and reimagine a metropolis that considers the presence of nonhuman others. Engaging Jennifer Wolch’s …

Cluster Approach: Gaps And Shortcomings In Un Coordination Of Humanitarian Actors In Post-Earthquake Haiti And Implications For Policy Concerns Of The New Humanitarian School Of Thought, Naomi Vinbury

International Development, Community and Environment (IDCE)

This research analyzes the role of the UN OCHA Cluster Approach in the context of Haiti after the 2010 earthquake. Gaps and shortcomings of the current humanitarian model are identified and the Sustainable Livelihoods Approach is considered as a model to be used as an instrument to inform the New Humanitarian school of thought. A recent history of Haiti and the political relationship to the international community will be reviewed as context that outlines the vulnerabilities that created a risk society leading up to the disaster. A brief history of the recent trajectory of humanitarian aid will be reviewed and …

The Impact Of Casino Revenue-Sharing On Tourism Efforts In Niagara Falls Usa: 2006-2016, Anthony L. Astran

Public Administration Master’s Projects

This qualitative case study examines the intersection of a Native-owned casino, revenue-sharing with its host community, and the impact of tourism marketing efforts vis-à-vis funds provided to the community’s tourism agency. Specifically, this report studies downtown Niagara Falls USA from the time period between 2006 and 2016, and seeks to determine whether and how funds from Seneca Niagara Resort & Casino boosted tourism marketing efforts by Niagara Tourism & Convention Corporation (NTCC). Background research and a series of elite interviews with city officials and tourism agency leaders uncovered overall positivity in terms of growth in Niagara Falls USA’s tourism efforts …

Digitally Segregated Understanding Technology Readiness In Preparation For Higher Education Success, Gloria D. Mullons

Dissertations

The Digital Divide is the gulf between those that have access and use of technology and those that do not. The Digital Divide is a multilayered issue impacting low-income persons, low literacy persons, seniors, and persons with disabilities. The new emphasis is on whether people know how to use technological devices and the Internet for multiple purposes, especially to function and progress in daily society. This dissertation study focuses on technology readiness in preparation for higher education, specifically examining: 1) experiences students had prior to attending the HP3 program, 2) factors that influenced student preparedness for engaging in college-level technology …

Understanding The Linkages Between Urban Transportation Design And Population Exposure To Traffic-Related Air Pollution: Application Of An Integrated Transportation And Air Pollution Modeling Framework To Tampa, Fl, Sashikanth Gurram

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Rapid and unplanned urbanization has ushered in a variety of public health challenges, including exposure to traffic pollution and greater dependence on automobiles. Moreover, vulnerable population groups often bear the brunt of negative outcomes and are subject to disproportionate exposure and health effects. This makes it imperative for urban transportation engineers, land use planners, and public health professionals to work synergistically to understand both the relationship between urban design and population exposure to traffic pollution, and its social distribution. Researchers have started to pay close attention to this connection, mainly by conducting observational studies on the relationship between transportation, urban …

Improving Service Level Of Free-Floating Bike Sharing Systems, Aritra Pal

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Bike Sharing is a sustainable mode of urban mobility, not only for regular commuters but also for casual users and tourists. Free-floating bike sharing (FFBS) is an innovative bike sharing model, which saves on start-up cost, prevents bike theft, and offers significant opportunities for smart management by tracking bikes in real-time with built-in GPS. Efficient management of a FFBS requires: 1) analyzing its mobility patterns and spatio-temporal imbalance of supply and demand of bikes, 2) developing strategies to mitigate such imbalances, and 3) understanding the causes of a bike getting damaged and developing strategies to minimize them. All of these …

Comprehensive Exploratory Analysis Of Truck Route Choice Diversity In Florida, Trang D. Luong

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This thesis presents a comprehensive exploratory analysis of truck route choice diversity in the state of Florida, for both long-haul and short-haul truck travel segments. We employ six metrics to measure three different dimensions of diversity in truck route choice between any given origin-destination (OD) pair. These dimensions are: (1) number of distinct routes used to travel between the OD pair, (2) the extent of overlap (or lack thereof) among the routes, and (3) the evenness (or the dominance) of the usage of different unique routes. The diversity metrics were utilized to examine truck route choice diversity from over 73,000 …

The Government Role In Creating Innovation Technological Clusters In Developing Countries (The Case Of Saudi Arabia), Khalid Mahmoud Dashash

Doctoral Dissertations

Many governments around the world are committed to the idea of creating high-tech industries in their territories. Often they do so by imitating other well-recognized models such as the Silicon Valley. This dissertation investigated three countries economic development plans to understand how government policies could support or hinder the establishment of an Innovation Systems in developing countries. This dissertation claims that to create a successful high technological innovation cluster in any area, a successful innovation needs to be existed to support these clusters. This study used a comparative qualitative pragmatic method that implemented both case study and process tracing to …

An Integrated Framework For Modeling And Predicting Spatiotemporal Phenomena In Urban Environments, Tuc Viet Le

Dissertations and Theses Collection (Open Access)

This thesis proposes a general solution framework that integrates methods in machine learning in creative ways to solve a diverse set of problems arising in urban environments. It particularly focuses on modeling spatiotemporal data for the purpose of predicting urban phenomena. Concretely, the framework is applied to solve three specific real-world problems: human mobility prediction, trac speed prediction and incident prediction. For human mobility prediction, I use visitor trajectories collected a large theme park in Singapore as a simplified microcosm of an urban area. A trajectory is an ordered sequence of attraction visits and corresponding timestamps produced by a visitor. …

How Transportation Network Companies Could Replace Public Transportation In The United States, Matthew L. Kessler

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The quantity of cell phone applications or mobile apps have seen an upsurge at an exponential rate in under a decade. Many have been created for a variety of industries, including transportation. The advent and subsequent commercialized implementation of near-instant transport by a middleman-type of app is now known as a Transportation Network Company or TNC. Examples of the more renowned TNCs are Uber, Lyft and Sidecar.

In recent years, TNCs have cultivated a tremendous following, to the degree of taxicab desertion. Moreover, the massive success of TNCs led to expansion of its capacities into public transportation.

The TNC’s expeditious …

Celebrating The Polish Immigrant Community: Strengthening Cultural Bonds And Representation In Westfield, Ma, Alexandra Smialek

Masters Theses

Immigrant communities are a part of every city and town in the United States. Sentiments towards immigrants, however, continue to vary, but in recent years, anti-immigrant sentiments have become more widely encountered, especially because of the recent presidential election (Southern Poverty Law Center, 2016). A lack of knowledge and representation of diverse cultures, along with recurring negative rhetoric, may influence how immigrant populations are received. This report argues that acknowledging culture and heritage can strengthen cultural bonds, create and celebrate a unique city identity, and improve cultural representation. The City of Westfield, Massachusetts, located in Hampden County, will be studied …

Making A Case For Social Innovation As A Structural Counterpart To Public Participation In Regional Planning, Manju A. Adikesavan

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Multi-locational living – working, shopping, playing, learning and commuting across administrative and, sometimes even political boundaries is an essential aspect of metropolitan living. Although it is anticipated that everyday experiences of the physical, social and economic inter-connectedness between urban communities and peri-urban hinterlands would automatically engender a regional outlook in planning and governance, it is currently not the case. In the New York City region, a lived regional experience does not translate into support for a regional governance structure.

While strong legislative support has ensured the public its rightful place within metropolitan regional planning, it has regrettably bred a procedural …

Never Forgets: Traumatic Trace Within Public Space, Jan Descartes

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This paper will interrogate the ways in which ephemera from events affects the human and non- human environment and how the absence, manipulation or presence of traumatic trace weaves itself into the atmosphere of the past, present and future. It will look at space and the ways that trace manifests itself in hierarchal spaces and Lebbeus Woods’ concept of heterarchial spaces, which are organic and/or horizontally organized. A thread throughout is the question that if trace from trauma can exist in the visual field, i.e. the physical or digital landscape, in a way that maintains a discourse without perpetuating oppression. …

Affective Afterlives: An Ethnography Of Activism Between Movements, Manissa Maharawal

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This ethnographic project starts at the end of Occupy Wall Street in New York City and ends at the beginning of Black Lives Matter in Oakland, CA. In between these two movements it looks at a variety of political projects that focused on issues of housing and anti-gentrification in New York City and San Francisco. Throughout I favor a view of social movements that understands the messy trajectories of activism. This methodological privileging of what activists are doing, and the places and spaces in which they ground their work seeks to de-center bounded social movements in the study of politics …

Imagining The Unimagined Metropolis: Privilege, Liminality, And Peripheral Communities In The Contemporary Urban Situation, Colton R. Sherman

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Various works of psychogeographic literature explore privileged and non-privileged communities and spaces through narrative and character development. Novels of this sort—specifically those by China Miéville, Neil Gaiman, and J.G. Ballard—feature narratives where their respective protagonists undergo a liminal metamorphosis and transform from a monotonous, albeit privileged urbanite into a free-associating inhabitant of the urban periphery: the unimagined, non-privileged space of urban detritus. By engaging with these authors’ novels alongside the works of the Situationists, Walter Benjamin, Rob Nixon and others, the goal of this thesis is to explore how the dominant urban epistemologies are subverted—whether or not they should be …

Decoding Nopd's Thin Blue Line, Thomas Harrington

University of New Orleans Theses and Dissertations

The New Orleans Police Department history dates back to the 1800’s. Since its inception, the department has been pledged by misconduct, low morale, and low public opinion. This research used Akers Social Structure, and Social learning theory or SSSL to understand the socialization process of the department and determine if the process could attribute for misconduct, the blue wall of silence, and the thin blue line.

A case study was conducted in which twenty former NOPD officers on the department from 1979 to 2004 were interviewed. They were only identified by race, gender, and the number of years on the …

Inequity In Rebuilding After Disasters, Sara Brown

International Development, Community and Environment (IDCE)

Natural disasters are becoming more and more frequent. Policies that help rebuild residential areas after disasters need to be equitable. The five residential programs researched are The Road Home Homeowner Assistance Program, The Road Home Small Rental Property Program, LIHTC Piggyback Program, Hazard Mitigation Gram Program, and Non- Profit Rebuilding Pilot Program. Through a case study of the Lower Ninth Ward in New Orleans this research reviews five residential rebuilding programs to see if its goals were written equitably. This research then compares the Lower Ninth Ward with the entire City of New Orleans as well as two other planning …

A Moment Became The Season: An Exploration Of Trauma Narrative Within The Community Development Context, Lydia Berry

International Development, Community and Environment (IDCE)

This research explores current methods of psychological trauma intervention within the community development context, namely the understandings that bound the clinical and diagnostic side of trauma, and the more recent victim centered approach: the trauma informed care method. The shortcomings of these approaches is that they individually lack the ability to establish the victim back into their sense of self or community, accordingly. This research argues that a narrative approach, a process by which a survivor of trauma has full agency to express their experience, used in conjunction with existing practices can rectify the shortcomings of both methods. The researcher …

The Urban Morphology Of Northwest Arkansas: A Geospatial Analysis, Jason Mccollum

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Research on the impacts of transport infrastructure is limited, and most of it is either focused on

rural areas or on developed areas before modern geospatial technologies were available. This study aimed

to fill this gap in transport research by providing a holistic look at the regional changes that occurred due to

new transport infrastructure construction in Northwest Arkansas between 1980 and 2011.

The National Land Cover Database was used to create a time-series of land cover across the

region between 1992 and 2011. These data were then used to predict future growth in the region.

Additionally, growth patterns of …

A Cross-Sectional Exploration Of Household Financial Reactions And Homebuyer Awareness Of Registered Sex Offenders In A Rural, Suburban, And Urban County., John Charles Navarro

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

As stigmatized persons, registered sex offenders betoken instability in communities. Depressed home sale values are associated with the presence of registered sex offenders even though the public is largely unaware of the presence of registered sex offenders. Using a spatial multilevel approach, the current study examines the role registered sex offenders influence sale values of homes sold in 2015 for three U.S. counties (rural, suburban, and urban) located in Illinois and Kentucky within the social disorganization framework. Homebuyers were surveyed to examine whether awareness of local registered sex offenders and the homebuyer’s community type operate as moderators between home selling …

Bloody Bay: Grassroots Policeways, Community Control, And Power In San Francisco And Its Hinterlands, 1846-1915, Darren A. Raspa

History ETDs

“Bloody Bay: Grassroots Policeways, Community Control, and Power in San Francisco and its Hinterlands, 1846–1915” follows the history of San Francisco’s spectrum of formal and informal policing from the American takeover of California in 1846 during the U.S.–Mexico War to Police Commissioner Jesse B. Cook’s nationwide law enforcement advisory team tour in 1912 and San Francisco’s debut as the Jewel of a new American Pacific world during the Panama Pacific International Exposition in 1915. These six decades functioned as a unique period wherein a culture of popular justice and grassroots community peacekeeping were fostered. This policing environment was forged in …