Urban Studies and Planning Commons^™

Describe The City You Live In, Jingfei Hu

Masters Theses

I dive into the fields: frequency (sound), wavelengths (light), shapes (conversation): they build connections. What is action without reflection? Now I’m a city drifter. Through art making and dialogue I try to drop the anchor into the futuristic turbulent ocean (of society, speed, and the status quo ). Did I drop it? Not sure. I grew up in the most fast- paced city in China, Shenzhen. I feel pressured there. Do I feel that pressure here? of a precarious, unpredictable future? These questions push me out of the turbulent ocean to grab the present.

There are three stages of time: …

Weathering The Storm: Navigating Urban Ecologies Of Communication In Times Of Crisis, Austin Hestdalen

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This project explores cities as urban ecologies of communication in which crises emerge and are given significance within the dialogic relations cultivated among public actors attempting to make a living, together, within the shared historical-cultural contexts of everyday life. To describe cities as urban ecologies of communication is to describe them in terms of urban communication and its interdisciplinary foundations in the study of rhetoric, philosophy, planning, policy, architecture, sociology, geography, and media. The first chapter introduces the challenges of urban risk and crisis management within the complex ecologies of communication constituted by cities and reviews how ‘risk’ and ‘crisis’ …

Public History Is Now, Sarah E. Dougher

Amplify: A Journal of Writing-as-Activism

A walking tour of downtown Portland in August 2021 raises questions for the writer about the purpose of “memory activism,” its relation to writing-as-activism. Drawing on critiques of urbanist Jane Jacobs and interrogating the concept of “reckoning,” the essay explores ways in which the streetscape and people there can deliver meaning and pose questions about systemic racism and unsheltered existence.

Re-Imagining Design For Affordable Housing In Mexico, Kenza Fernandez Dominguez

Scripps Senior Theses

Since the presidency of Enrique Peña Nieto, affordable housing developments in Mexico have been produced in a massive, unsustainable scale. The speed at which these developments are produced equates to the carelessness that goes into their planning. At large, the developments’ monotonous design is aesthetically dehumanizing and fails to promote a sense of community. These developments lack basic infrastructure, and their residents have abandoned them, which has incentivized increased criminal activity.

In this paper, I will be looking at successful models of affordable housing globally, exploring the histories of communal living, and function of architectural collages. Based on my findings, …

Integrative Sonic Urbanism: Artist-Led Strategies For Urban Sound Design In The Contemporary City, Sven Anderson

Doctoral

This doctoral research advances the fields of urban sound design and acoustic planning, presenting new ways of exploring the interrelationship between individual and collective sonic experience, the dynamic potential of the urban sound environment and the complex evolution of the contemporary cityscape. It links urban sound art practices with larger urban design processes, revealing how sound contributes to the production of urban space. The research progresses by crafting a dynamic, integrative methodology that activates contrasting sonic perspectives to critically reassess the role of sound in the public realm. As it discloses this methodology, the research navigates the tension between new …

Green Spots In The Heart Of Town’: Planning And Contesting The Nation’S Widest Streets In Georgia’S Fall Line Cities, J. Mark Souther

History Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

La Sostenibilidad De La Reconstrucción 2014-2019 Tras El Gran Incendio En Valparaíso: Una Mirada Desde La Habitabilidad, Resiliencia Y Preparación En La Gestión De Desastres, Dana Kulma

Independent Study Project (ISP) Collection

The beautiful port city of Valparaíso, Chile is home to 42 colorful hills that overlook the Pacific Ocean. This unique city, however, is also home to multiple disasters, including urban and forest fires, tsunamis, landslides and earthquakes. This descriptive study explores the case of the 2014 “mega-fire” that destroyed 3,000 homes and affected the lives of 11,000 residents. Through five semi-structured interviews and the review of several academic and official documents, the present study analyzes the process of post-disaster reconstruction, seeking to understand the habitability and the resiliency of the reconstructed houses and neighborhoods. In order to understand the challenges …

Commemorative Bodies: (Un)Making Racial Order And Cuban White Supremacy In Little Havana's Heritage District, Corinna Jeanne Moebius

FIU Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This dissertation unearths memory- and place-making practices, processes and “racializing regimes of representation” in Little Havana’s heritage district, now a major tourism destination in Miami, Florida. It draws on extensive ethnographic fieldwork, interviews, and consultations of various archives that span decades back to the 1960s and trace the origins of the district in plans for a “Latin Quarter.”

My analyses borrow from and combine various bodies of scholarly work to examine and deconstruct the use of always multi-vocal “commemorative bodies” for the production of racial narratives that are embedded in--and give shape to--acts of memorialization and commemoration.

By examining the …

“In Principle” Versus “In Reality”: Assessing The Potential Of Adaptive Urban Governance Toward Urban Flooding In Ho Chi Minh City’S District 7, Cindy Pham Nguyen

Independent Study Project (ISP) Collection

Flooding has become the new normal in Ho Chi Minh City (HCMC). During the rainy season, many areas of the city experience severe inundation that seriously impacts infrastructure, traffic, and economic transactions. As the effects of climate change unpredictably and rapidly manifest in Southern Vietnam, the frequency and impact of urban floods are projected to increase. In addition, within the last few decades, HCMC has rapidly developed and urbanized, transforming itself into the economic center of Southern Vietnam. However, previous studies and international experts have determined that rapid, poor development may be exacerbating urban flood issues.

In recent years, city …

Who Wins And Who Loses? How Gentrification Caused By Public Transportation Is Felt Differently Across Race, Rosina Shipman

Politics Summer Fellows

When does a public good become harmful? And who does it harm? To tackle these questions I take a detailed look at how public transportation affects housing prices. Public transportation is a common good utilized by people of all different socioeconomic levels, but scholars have found that the presence of a new public transportation stop can be a catalyst for gentrification, raising housing prices and displacing previous residents. While this positive relationship between housing prices and public transportation is well documented, there is a lack of literature on how gentrification, caused by public transportation, affects neighborhood-housing prices across race. In …

Telos Haunts Billboards, Colin Post

Proceedings from the Document Academy

This piece is an excerpt from an ongoing hypertext poem, akhilleus, which chronicles the activities of a network of characters interacting with the built world via text. This particular piece follows Telos, a seer of ends, as they appear before a billboard. Telos contemplates billboards as a kind of document, a succession of information planes along the roadway, echoing into and past each other, and also shares a premonition of the end of billboards.

An Ethno-Historical Account Of The African American Community In Downtown Knoxville, Tennessee Before And After Urban Renewal, Anne Victoria

Masters Theses

Urban renewal programs that applied large-scale removal of community urban space and structures, have a long history of differential impact to its community members. These effects persist. Furthermore, current redevelopment projects continue to negatively adjust the landscapes for African Americans. Most research on these impacts tends to focus on the economic failure of downtown, or the displacement of community structures, such as businesses, homes, and churches. Less is studied on the human experience before and after the change. Based on an ethno-historical account of three African American communities in downtown Knoxville, Tennessee, this thesis examines the memories of the landscape …

This Land Is My Land: The Evolution And Future Of Urban Homesteading In The United States, Emma Brennan

African & African American Studies Senior Theses

No abstract provided.

Public Policy And Sexual Geography In Portland, Oregon, 1970-2010, Elizabeth Morehead

Dissertations and Theses

Drawing on the concept of sexual geography, this study examines the social and political meanings of sexualized spaces in the urban geography of Portland, Oregon between 1970 and 2010. This includes an examination of the sexual geography of urban spaces as a deliberate construct resulting from official and unofficial public policy and urban planning decisions. Sexual geographies, the collective and individual constructions of sexuality, are not static. Nor are definitions of deviant sexual practices fixed in the collective consciousness. Both are continuously being reshaped and reconstructed in response to changing economic structures and beliefs about sex, race and class. Primary …

Socio-Spatial Constructs Of The Local Retail Food Environment: A Case Study Of Holyoke, Massachusetts, Walter F. Ramsey

Masters Theses 1911 - February 2014

This mixed-methods study addresses the relationship between the availability of food and realized food access by studying the retail food landscape of Holyoke, Massachusetts – a small, socio-economically diverse city. While a large body of empirical research finds that low-income communities and communities of color are especially likely to lack adequate access to healthy foods and experience increased vulnerability to food insecurity, few studies explore urban food environments through a mixed-methods case study approach. Through the use of food store mapping, store audits, and resident interviews, this research is a nascent attempt to articulate how the unique development histories and …

The Fall Of The 1977 Phillies: How A Baseball Team's Collapse Sank A City's Spirit, Mitchell J. Nathanson

Mitchell J Nathanson

Too often, the Philadelphia sports fan has been dismissed as a lout, a boorish dolt immune to reason, his vocabulary whittled down to a singular “boo.” This is particularly true when it comes to Phillies fans, who are more likely to turn on their team than any other in the city. Although the Eagles, Sixers and Flyers may hear it from the rafters when they’re not going well, only the Phils will hear it when they are. The strained relationship between the city and the Phillies, however, has deep historical and sociological roots; roots that directly correlate with the city’s …

European Spatial Development, The Polycentric Eu Capital, And Eastern Enlargement, Carola Hein

Growth and Structure of Cities Faculty Research and Scholarship

Over five decades a new decentralized model for the European capital city has emerged through the distribution of European Union (EU) institutions and agencies, but as the result of national compromise and competition rather than the implementation of a vision of Europe. More than a purely administrative issue, the location of EU headquarters opens questions on the nature of European spatiality, the relation between politics and space and the role of headquarters cities in that space. To date, the decentralized unplanned structure has brought economic and symbolic benefits to the host cities and nations, but has also caused—notably in Brussels—the …

Homegirls In The Public Sphere By Miranda, Marie (Keta) Review By: Yost, Bambi, Bambi L. Yost

Bambi L Yost

Abstrat is not available. Citation: Homegirls in the Public Sphere by Miranda, Marie (Keta) Review by: Yost, Bambi Children, Youth and Environments Vol. 15, No. 1, Environmental Health, and Other Papers (2005) , pp. 406-413 Published by: The Board of Regents of the University of Colorado, a body corporate, for the benefit of the Children, Youth and Environments Center at the University of Colorado Boulder Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.7721/chilyoutenvi.15.1.0406

Democratic Economic Participation And Humane Urban Development, Jessica Gordon-Nembhard

Trotter Review

Humane economics, democratic economic participation, and democratic economic control are words not often combined and terms rarely used by traditional economic developers and urban planners, especially when addressing inner-city redevelopment. Most often, discussions about economic development and the elimination of poverty focus on job creation, workforce development, and access to job opportunities - promoting the corporate model of growth and fortifying big business's penetration into and control of community economics. Income receives a bit of attention, in the peripheral discussions about "living wages' or family-supporting wages and "good" jobs. However, concepts such as a guaranteed income or payment for the …

Economic Spin-Off From The Arts, Chester Smolski

Smolski Texts

"It was the variety of people there that was most noteworthy. There were the construction men, the account executives in their three-piece suits, the poor, the old, the young, the blacks, the Asians, the college professors and the unfortunates who frequent downtown parks and benches."

Providence: Arts Can Improve The Image, Chester Smolski

Smolski Texts

"Providence has an image problem. Whether one asks as state resident or a Providence native about our capital city, the response is usually negative. And the image of our city held by non-Rhode Islanders is one that should not make us proud."

Time To Appoint A City Artist, Chester Smolski

Smolski Texts

"During the past several weeks, while Providence's new mayor has been sorting out priorities and charting new directions for the first new administration in a decade, a plethora of suggestions has been advanced for ways to make Providence a better place in which to live."

The Block Signal System, Henry Maxon Brightman

Student and Lippitt Prize essays

A history of the railroad system, different types of railroads, their current stopping methods and suggested stopping methods which would ensure passenger safety.