Urban Studies and Planning Commons^™

Pedestrian-Friendly Streets: Assessing Overall Success On Well-Being With Post-Evaluations, Ariana Ordoñez

Student Works

Today, well-being has taken a central role in urban planning, emphasizing the significance of pedestrian-friendly streets for the overall welfare of a city's residents. Pedestrian-friendly streets are vital elements of urban design that enhance mobility and contribute significantly to people's quality of life. This study examines the impact of pedestrian-friendly streets on the well-being of individuals through a post-evaluation approach. The research focuses on two projects: the 12 Avenue South project, completed in April 2022, and the Madison Station Boulevard project, completed in August 2022. The study uses a well-being questionnaire encompassing physical, psychological, social, and environmental domains by conducting …

Learning From Land Use Reforms: Housing Outcomes And Regulatory Change, Noah Kazis

Law & Economics Working Papers

This essay serves as the introduction for an edited, interdisciplinary symposium of articles studying recent land use reforms at the state and local level. These papers provide important descriptive analyses of a range of policy interventions, using quantitative and qualitative methods to provide new empirical insights into zoning reform strategies.

After situating and summarizing the collected articles, the Introduction draws out shared themes. For example, these essays demonstrate the efficacy of recent reforms, not only at facilitating housing production but at doing so in especially difficult contexts (like when producing affordable housing and redeveloping single-family neighborhoods). They point to the …

Converting Vacant Lots To Parks: Shamokin Survey Results, Matt Mcmullen, Shaunna Barnhart

Student Project Reports

No abstract provided.

1. On Adapting Local Food Systems, Nelson Lobo

WWU Honors College Senior Projects

Local food systems are central to climate change adaptation. Without adequate systems of production, distribution, and consumption, cities and countries run the risk of food insecurity spreading across economic classes. Implementing urban food production complemented by restoration agriculture principles is a solution worthy of consideration for municipal governments. At the same time, institutions and the public need a reconceptualization of the fundamental worldview attached to the dichotomization of humans and nature. Indigenous cultures provide a significant blueprint for tending to and caring for nature that should be reflected in any urban land management strategies utilizing restoration agriculture.

Kulpmont Pocket Park Survey Results, Matt Mcmullen, Shaunna Barnhart, Steve Motyka

Student Project Reports

No abstract provided.

Preserving Historic African American Cemeteries: Strategies For Richmond, Virginia, William T. Teeples

Master of Urban and Regional Planning Capstone Projects

Historic cemeteries across the United States are facing a crisis. These culturally and historically significant spaces have faced significant degradation over time without the means of preservation. Historic Black and African American Cemeteries have been particularly impacted by the combined negative impacts of weathering, vandalism, and development pressures alike. These cultural landscapes have the added hindrance of little to no access to the complex resources necessary for preservation and restoration afforded to most White cemeteries. However, many activists, descendants, and volunteers toil on saving these spaces from the onslaught of time and ensure that cultural spaces are preserved for generations …

Designing An Eco-Resilience Community In Brentwood, Washington D.C., Nadya Syazsa

Master of Urban and Regional Planning Capstone Projects

As the world urbanizes at a dangerously rapid pace, this Professional Plan helps with addressing the need for urban resilience – the ability of a city’s systems to withstand and adapt to the shocks and stresses it may endure, such as natural disasters.

The purpose of this Plan is to design a network of green infrastructure projects (GIs) as part of establishing an eco-resilient community in Brentwood, Washington D.C. These projects are meant to be low-impact developments (LIDs) in order to minimize disruption to the existing fabric of the Brentwood community, yet still aid residents by increasing their capacity to …

Trolley Line Trail Creative Placemaking Plan, Courtland Caldwell

Master of Urban and Regional Planning Capstone Projects

The Trolley Line Trail is a planned multi-use trail along the historic Richmond-to-Ashland Trolley corridor. The purpose of this plan is to identify potential creative placemaking locations and installations to highlight the trolley's unique past and present. This plan sets forth a vision for creative placemaking by gathering community feedback, analyzing properties along the Trolley Line Trail, and making recommendations for placemaking and public art. Ultimately, the recommendations laid out in this plan aim to preserve and acknowledge the community's unique identity while creating a safe, accessible experience for all users.

Sharing Vision For Shared Spaces: Mobile Immersive Planning And Community-Led Design Of Green Spaces In Richmond’S Southside, Maria T.E. Dougherty

Master of Urban and Regional Planning Capstone Projects

This plan seeks to demonstrate the potential of immersive technologies, specifically augmented reality, in strengthening public engagement and enabling the collaborative, community led design of local green spaces.

Community engagement, while now a focal point of urban planning education, is still implemented in uneven strategies that often further distance the public from the process and understanding of city vision; new paradigms of outreach and community-government knowledge sharing must be explored to overcome common constraints of time, expertise, and language that prevent public participation in projects that directly impact their health. Immersive urban planning offers a way to bring people into …

Evaluating Urban Parks Accessibility And Equity: A Case Study Of Hartford, Ct And New Haven, Ct, Natalie Roach, Mara Tu

Honors Scholar Theses

Public parks provide cities with environmental benefits, positive health effects, recreational opportunities, community building, educational spaces, and public amenities. However, certain populations have been systematically denied their fair share of these benefits because of unjust practices in the creation and maintenance of urban parks. With a lens of environmental justice, the goal of this research was to assess park quality and accessibility of two Connecticut cities, Hartford and New Haven, by gathering publicly available information as well as using GIS tools.

The Trust for Public Land (TPL) has an existing ParkScore rating system that evaluates the quality of a city’s …

Anticipatory Resilience Bringing Back The Future Into Urban Planning And Knowledge Systems, Tischa A. Muñoz-Erickson, Kaethe Selkirk, Robert Hobbins, Clark Miller, Mathieu Feagan, David M. Iwaniec, Thaddeus Miller, Elizabeth M. Cook

Sustainable Futures Lab Publications

Anticipatory thinking is a critical component in urban planning practices and knowledge systems in an era of unpredictability and conflicting expectations of the future. This chapter introduces “anticipatory resilience” as a futures-oriented knowledge system that intentionally addresses uncertain climate conditions and explores alternative, desirable future states. It suggests a portfolio of tools suitable for building long-term foresight capacity in urban planning. Examples of knowledge systems interventions are presented to explore the trade-offs, constraints, possibilities, and desires of diverse future scenarios co-generated in settings with people that hold different perspectives, knowledge, and expectations.

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 …

Opportunities And Challenges Of Geospatial Analysis For Promoting Urban Livability In The Era Of Big Data And Machine Learning, Anna Kovacs-Györi, Alin Ristea, Clemens Havas, Michael Mehaffy, Hartwig H. Hochmair, Bernd Resch, Levente Juhasz, Arthur Lehner, Laxmi Ramasubramanian, Thomas Blaschke

GIS Center

Urban systems involve a multitude of closely intertwined components, which are more measurable than before due to new sensors, data collection, and spatio-temporal analysis methods. Turning these data into knowledge to facilitate planning efforts in addressing current challenges of urban complex systems requires advanced interdisciplinary analysis methods, such as urban informatics or urban data science. Yet, by applying a purely data-driven approach, it is too easy to get lost in the ‘forest’ of data, and to miss the ‘trees’ of successful, livable cities that are the ultimate aim of urban planning. This paper assesses how geospatial data, and urban analysis, …

Responding To Extremes: Managing Urban Water Scarcity In The Late Nineteenth-Century Straits Settlements, Fiona Williamson

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

In 1877, the major towns of the Straits Settlements - Singapore, George Town, Penang Island and Malacca - suffered a drought of exceptional magnitude. The drought’s natural instigator was the El Niño phase of the El Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO), a climatic phenomenon then not understood by contemporary observers. The 1877 event has been explored in some depth for countries including India, China and Australia. Its impact on Southeast Asia however is less well-known and the story of how the event unfolded in Singapore and Malaysia has not been told. This paper explores how the contemporary British government responded to …

Urban Politics And Policy, Susanna F. Schaller

Open Educational Resources

This class will focus on urban politics and policies as they relate to the economic, social and spatial development of metropolitan areas. We we will ask why cities and place matter and explore patterns of urban spatial development in the US. We will investigate the politics and policies that have led to “urban sprawl” and uneven development, particularly in post World War II period. We will discuss the social, economic, political implications of this form of development, focusing especially on the politics of race and class. By inserting cities, especially NYC, into the global context, we will read about neoliberal …

Using Multi-Sensory And Multi-Dimensional Immersive Virtual Reality In Participatory Planning, Mahbubur Meenar, Jennifer L. Kitson

School of Earth & Environment Faculty Scholarship

In the last two decades, urban planners have embraced digital technologies to complement traditional public participation processes; research on the impact of smarter digital instruments, such as immersive virtual reality (IVR), however, is scant. We recruited 40 focus group participants to explore various formats of spatial planning scenario simulations in Glassboro, NJ, USA. Our study finds that the level of participation, memory recalls of scenarios, and emotional responses to design proposals are higher with multi-sensory and multi-dimensional IVR simulations than with standard presentations such as 2D videos of 3D model simulations, coupled with verbal presentations. We also discuss the limitations …

Google-Truthing To Assess Hot Spots Of Food Retail Change: A Repeat Cross-Sectional Street View Of Food Environments In The Bronx, New York, Nevin Cohen, Michael Chrobok, Olivia Caruso

Publications and Research

Google Street View (GSV) images can be used to “ground-truth” current and historical food retail data from approximately 2007 - when GSV was launched in a few US cities - to the present, facilitating analyses of food environments over time. A review of GSV images of all food retailers listed in a government database of licensed establishments in the Bronx, New York enabled records to be verified, businesses classified, and retail change quantified. The data revealed several trends likely to affect food access and health: increasing overall numbers of food retailers; the growth of dollar stores; and numerous openings, closings, …

Lessons From New York City’S Struggle Against Amazon Hq2 In Long Island City, Steve Lang, Filip Stabrowski

Publications and Research

For three months between November 2018 and February 2019, the entire world, it seemed, was watching Long Island City, Queens. On November 12, 2018, nearly two years after Amazon announced that the company would be holding a contest for its second corporate headquarters (Amazon HQ2), New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio and New York State Governor Andrew Cuomo jointly announced that Amazon had selected Long Island City as one of its two HQ2 locations. The project, outlined in a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) between Amazon and New York City and State, would provide up to $3 billion in public …

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.

The Housing Crisis And The Rise Of The Real Estate State, Samuel Stein

Publications and Research

This article — an excerpt from my book, Capital City, with elaborations on a number of key points — argues that the housing crises endemic to contemporary capitalism must be understood as a result of the concentration of global capital into real estate and the the re-orientation of state planning capacities around the demands of the real estate industry. The first half of the article explains the dimensions of the crisis in the US and the rise of "the real estate state." The second half explores policy alternatives to contemporary urban neoliberalism and the kinds of movements necessary to …

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 …

Food Access In Petersburg, Virginia: Final Report And Recommendations, Ursp 666 (Commercial Revitalization), Logan Ashby, Chesley De Leon, Shekinah Mitchell, Michael Nixon-Garrison, Gabriella Pino-Mareno, Elizabeth Roderick, Jeff Smith

Urban and Regional Studies and Planning Reports

The City of Petersburg has long suffered with issues of limited access to food and food insecurity. Food deserts, or areas underserved by retail food options, are prevalent throughout the City. As a result, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation has ranked the city last of Virginia's 133 counties in their annual health rankings.

For the Fall 2019 semester, students from Virginia Commonwealth University's L. Douglas Wilder School of Government and Public Affairs, through Dr. John Accordino's Urban Commercial Revitalization course, focused on planning solutions to address food deserts in commercial areas, with the City of Petersburg being one of their …

Increasing Access To Food: A Comprehensive Report On Food Supply Options, Ursp 666 (Commercial Revitalization), Logan Ashby, Chesley De Leon, Vegas Krane, Eric Mai, Shekinah Mitchell, Michael Nixon-Garrison, Gabriella Pino-Moreno, Elizabeth Roderick, Chloe Rote, Jeff Smith, Charlie Wilson, Will Wilson, Hunter Wood

Urban and Regional Studies and Planning Reports

Access to food is one of the most important aspects of a healthy, sustainable community. Grocery stores and other suppliers can serve as an economic anchor to provide social benefits to communities. Unfortunately, many communities do not have convenient and/or affordable access to grocery items, particularly fresh produce.

As part of Virginia Commonwealth University's Fall 2019 graduate course on Urban Commercial Revitalization, class members researched 13 retail and other food access options, which are described in this report. Each chapter covers a food access option and provides basic information that will be useful to individuals, organizations, or government agencies that …

Shacklefords Commercial Development Analysis, Ursp 666 (Commercial Revitalization), Chloe Rote, Charlie Wilson, Will Wilson, Vegas Krane, Hunter Wood, Eric Mai

Urban and Regional Studies and Planning Reports

King and Queen County believes that economic development is crucial to ensuring a stable economy and high quality of life for residents of the county. With an out-commuting rate of 71% for the entire Middle Peninsula region, residents and businesses are spending their money outside of the region due to a lack of job opportunities and commercial development. However, the intersection of Route 33 and The Trail at Shacklefords within King and Queen County provides a major economic development opportunity for King and Queen County and the Middle Peninsula region.

Through a one-semester research project, students in a VCU Commercial …

Centroid-Amenities: An Interactive Visual Analytical Tool For Exploring And Analyzing Amenities In Singapore, Xue Qian Jazreel Siew, Sean Jia Ming Koh

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Planning for civic amenities in a fast-changing urban setting such as Singapore is never an easy task. And as urban planners look toward more data-driven approaches toward urban planning, so grows the demand for more flexible geospatial analytics tools to facilitate a more iterative and granular approach toward urban planning. Such specific tools however, are not always readily available as plugins for traditional desktop GIS software, as numerous customizations must be made to model specific temporal planning scenarios for quick analysis, which could prove both costly and time-consuming. Hence, to address this need, open-source tools such as R Shiny could …

Justice Served Fresh: Associations Between Food Insecurity, Community Gardening, And Property Value, Micajah Daniels, Courtney Coughenour Ph.D

McNair Poster Presentations

Numerous stakeholders in Nevada have used a variety of efforts to combat the growth of food insecurity facing Nevadans. The purpose of this research project is to understand the association between food insecurity, community gardens, and property value. Following the wealth of scholarship on these topics and data collected from community garden agencies in Southern Nevada, the research questions for this project include: (1) Where are community gardens located in SNV? (2) What efforts community gardens agencies are doing to address food insecurity (most interested in their efforts using community gardens)? (3) What are the perceptions of supports and barriers …

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 …

Libbie & Grove Urban Design Plan, Planning Studio Spring 2018, Kathryn Benedict, Alexander Cline, Ben Jones, John Mattingly, Billy Mcgregor, Brett Meadows, Sara Rozmus, Josh Young

Urban and Regional Studies and Planning Reports

This plan was created for the City of Richmond Department of Planning and Development Review to serve as a recommendation for urban design improvements and suggested changes to zoning ordinances for the Libbie and Grove commercial area located in the Westhampton neighborhood. To begin, an in-depth demographic analysis was conducted for the Westhampton neighborhood. Special attention was paid to socioeconomic factors and trends in census tracts directly surrounding the Libbie and Grove commercial corridor.

Based on these analyses and new development occurring in the Libbie and Grove commercial corridor, we were able to allocate six sites or “study areas” as …