Urban Studies and Planning Commons^™

The Intentional City: Shaping London’S Urban Future (Event Transcript), Zack Taylor

Centre for Urban Policy and Local Governance – Publications

Edited transcript of remarks made at a public roundtable celebrating the launch of the Centre of Urban Policy and Local Governance held at Western University on November 23, 2018. Participants included Pierre Filion, Professor in the School of Planning at the University of Waterloo and an expert in mid-sized cities; Arielle Kayabaga, Councillor-Elect for City of London’s downtown Ward 13; Michelle Baldwin, Executive Director of London’s Pillar Nonprofit Network and Co-Founder of Innovation Works; John Fleming, Managing Director of Planning and City Planner for the City of London; and Neil Bradford, Professor and Chair of …

The Intentional City: Shaping London’S Urban Future, Zack Taylor

Centre for Urban Policy and Local Governance – Publications

Summary of remarks made at a public roundtable celebrating the launch of the Centre of Urban Policy and Local Governance held at Western University on November 23, 2018. Participants included Pierre Filion, Professor in the School of Planning at the University of Waterloo and an expert in mid-sized cities; Arielle Kayabaga, Councillor-Elect for City of London’s downtown Ward 13; Michelle Baldwin, Executive Director of London’s Pillar Nonprofit Network and Co-Founder of Innovation Works; John Fleming, Managing Director of Planning and City Planner for the City of London; and Neil Bradford, Professor and Chair of the …

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 …

Bike Lanes, Not Cars: Mobility And The Legal Fight For Future Los Angeles, Ernesto Hernandez-Lopez

William & Mary Environmental Law and Policy Review

In 2015, the City of Los Angeles adopted the controversial Mobility Plan 2035. The Plan restructures city transportation planning by emphasizing alternatives to cars for the next twenty years. Predictably, bike lanes became its most polemic aspect. The Plan envisions dramatic increases in bike lanes throughout car-obsessed Los Angeles. This bike lane increase was challenged in court, with objectors claiming that eliminating car lanes would increase congestion and compromise air quality. These arguments are ironic, since environmental justifications typically motivate bike projects.

The Mobility Plan illustrates how law supports and challenges bike lane projects. This Article argues that although this …

Re-Live Downtown Pine Bluff, Community Design Center

Project Reports

Once a prosperous cultural urban center in the Mississippi River delta, but now the nation’s second fastest shrinking city, Pine Bluff (population: 42,700) is Arkansas’ Detroit. Indeed, a study of black wealth conducted by famed sociologist W. E. B. Du Bois in 1899 found that Pine Bluff had the fourth highest rate of black wealth in the nation behind Charleston, Richmond, and New York City. The school’s community design center prepared a downtown revitalization plan, Re-Live Downtown Pine Bluff, a housing-first initiative focused on building neighborhoods around downtown “centers of strength”. While the revitalization approach is triaged around a …

Willow Heights Livability Improvement Plan, Community Design Center

Project Reports

Willow Heights is a 43-year old public housing complex owned by the Fayetteville Housing Authority (FHA) within the federal public housing portfolio administered by the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD). The school’s design center was commissioned by a local foundation to study an alternative to the FHA’s plan to sell the downtown Willow Heights complex to a developer of high-income housing, necessitating relocation of low-income residents to another complex outside of downtown. Using equity as a driver of decision making, the studio introduced scenario planning to organize reluctant stakeholders in considering transformations to the five-acre complex.

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 …

Finding Homeplace: Exploring The Experiences Of Black Women In The City Of Richmond, Mariah Williams

Theses and Dissertations

The planning efforts of African-Americans in the United States remained largely hidden throughout much of early planning history. Although African-Americans engaged in unique planning practices of their own, ones that significantly shaped the social and economic fabric within their communities, planning literature has tended to problematize them within the urban environment instead of celebrating their unique differences and experiences. Black women, despite their significant contributions to the urban fabric of numerous American cities, remain even more silenced throughout the planning profession. The unique ways they experience the urban environment, what they value in the built environment and how they speak …