Urban Studies Commons^™

Climate Change, Smart Growth, Racial Oppression, And White Privilege, Laura Stivers

Collected Faculty Scholarship

In this paper I will examine how people of differing environmental perspectives—namely anti-growth preservationists and environmental justice advocates—frame their responses to smart growth, using Marin County in the San Francisco Bay Area as a case study. Then I will offer a race analysis of these frameworks based on the thesis that to address climate change through smart growth we need to challenge the ways certain groups try to retain their white privilege. As foundation for this thesis I will develop the norms of reparations and restoration to argue for an equitable smart growth approach that entails structural transformation to address …

Coming Of Age At The End Of Nature: A Generation Faces Living On A Changed Planet, Amy K. Coplen

Urban Studies and Planning Faculty Publications and Presentations

This chapter appears in "Coming of Age at the End of Nature: A Generation Faces Living on a Changed Planet," published by Trinity University Press.

Coming of Age at the End of Nature explores a new kind of environmental writing. This powerful anthology gathers the passionate voices of young writers who have grown up in an environmentally damaged and compromised world. Each contributor has come of age since Bill McKibben foretold the doom of humanity’s ancient relationship with a pristine earth in his prescient 1988 warning of climate change, The End of Nature.

What happens to individuals and societies …

The Impact Of Transit-Oriented Development On Social Capital, Robert B. Noland, Orin T. Puniello, Stephanie Dipetrillo

Mineta Transportation Institute

This paper focuses on the ability of Transit Oriented Development (TOD) to improve social capital and interactions within a community. The expectation is that TOD has a positive impact on the lifestyle and activities of individuals who reside, work, and frequent these locations, and that this can include increases in social capital. Using data from a survey of transit station locations in New Jersey, the authors examine how proximity to the station and various built environment variables are associated with different measures of social capital, derived from responses to survey questions. These questions inquire about respondents’ perceptions of their neighborhood …

The Consequences Of The State Implementation Of A Nationally Standardized Teacher Performance Assessment As A Certification Requirement: A Mixed Methods Study, Deborah Greenblatt

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The edTPA (Teacher Performance Assessment) is a nationally distributed and scored standards-based teacher performance assessment being promoted throughout the country (AACTE, n.d.-a). This mixed methods study investigated the experiences of New York City teacher candidates and teacher educators with the elementary education edTPA portfolio. It was found that teacher candidates experienced various supports and challenges based on their personal demographics, school of education, and student teaching placements. Additionally, the edTPA affected participants' personal, professional, academic and student teaching experiences. Furthermore, the study revealed ways that implementation of the edTPA affected teacher educators and the teacher education curriculum.

Based on the …

Integrative Public Transport In A Segmented City: Reflections From Jerusalem, Galit Cohen-Blankshtain

PSU Transportation Seminars

Jerusalem is perhaps an extreme case of residential and travel market segmentation. It is comprised of four different 'cities', which partially overlap in space: The Jewish-Zionist city; the Palestinian city; the Jewish ultra-orthodox city and the global-tourist city. While the specific delineation of these cities is unique, Jerusalem can be seen as representative of other cities where ethnic and religious tensions create highly segmented urban spaces and travel markets.

In recent years particular emphasis has been placed on integrating transport systems, both across modes and with land use, in order to facilitate and encourage the use of public transport. Spatial …

Communities Of Opportunity: Pursuing A Housing Policy Agenda To Achieve Equity And Opportunity In The Face Of Post-Recession Challenges, Kalima Rose, Teddy Kỳ-Nam Miller

Trotter Review

Where we live directly impacts our ability to achieve our full potential. Access to good schools, quality jobs, reliable transportation, and healthy food is fundamental to achieving communities of opportunity. Unfortunately, communities of color, and urban black communities in particular, are disproportionately residing in neighborhoods locked out of opportunity, or disproportionately burdened by housing costs —spending over half of their income on housing. In 2015, PolicyLink undertook a research project to understand the changing post-recession housing landscape, to characterize the forces that were undermining housing security for communities of color, and to characterize the policy opportunities that could address the …

Introduction: The Gentrification Game, Barbara Lewis

Trotter Review

In real estate talk, there are only three things that matter, and they are location, location, location. The same is true in dispossession, which translates into the freeing up of location so that it can be possessed by others. Another term that has cropped up fairly recently, much in use in the crossover between the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, is gentrification, which has a benign face as well as one that is not so kindly, like the paired tragic and comic masks of classic drama.

In this issue of the Trotter Review, we explore gentrification and its alternate, dispossession, …

The Politics Of Race, Class, And Gentrification In The Atl, Keith Jennings

Trotter Review

Methodologically, the essay uses a multidisciplinary approach to examine gentrification from a race, class, and gender perspective. Within the essay a number of the dynamics directly associated with Atlanta’s political economy and the impact those dynamics are having on issues such as affordable housing, poverty, and Black employment and underemployment are analyzed. While not a central focus of the essay, the changes taking place outside of Atlanta in several counties, as a result of the push and pull effect in the metropolitan region, are briefly discussed.

Uncovering The Buried Truth In Richmond: Former Confederate Capital Tries To Memorialize Its Shameful History Of Slavery, Howard Manly

Trotter Review

Richmond Mayor Dwight C. Jones had the noblest of intentions.

With Virginia’s capital having a poverty rate of nearly 25 percent, no one blamed Jones, a child of the sixties and preacher by calling, for trying to develop prime riverfront property to generate revenue to create more jobs, better schools, and housing.

But when Jones unveiled a proposal in 2013 that included building a new baseball stadium near one of the city’s historic slave burial grounds in Shockoe Bottom, it was, by all accounts, troubling to historic preservationists and Black community activists. “Shameful” was one of the words most often …

Gentrification As Anti-Local Economic Development: The Case Of Boston, Massachusetts, James Jennings

Trotter Review

Activists and political leaders across the city of Boston are concerned that gentrification in the form of rapidly rising rents in low-income and the poorest areas are contributing to displacement of families and children. Rising home sale prices and an increasing number of development projects are feeding into this concern. There is also a growing wariness about the impact that this scenario can have on small and neighborhood-based businesses and microenterprises whose markets are represented by the kinds of households facing potential displacement. This potential side-effect suggests that gentrification could actually emerge as anti-local economic development in Boston. It can …

“Separatist City”: The Mandela, Massachusetts (Roxbury) Movement And The Politics Of Incorporation, Self-Determination, And Community Control, 1986–1988, Zebulon V. Miletsky, Tomás González

Trotter Review

November 4, 2016, marks 30 years since the historic referendum in which close to 50,000 citizens of Boston living in or near the predominantly Black area of “Greater Roxbury” voted on whether the area should leave Boston and incorporate as a separate municipality to be named in honor of former South African president Nelson and Winnie Mandela, or remain a part of Boston. The new community, what planners called “Greater Roxbury,” would have included wards in much or all of the neighborhoods of Roxbury, Dorchester, Mattapan, Jamaica Plain, the Fenway, the South End, and what was then known as Columbia …

Book Review: Desire And Disaster In New Orleans: Tourism, Race And Historical Memory By Lynnell L. Thomas, Casey Schreiber

Trotter Review

Desire and Disaster in New Orleans: Tourism, Race and Historical Memory, by Lynnell L. Thomas, challenges the racial messages embedded within dominant tourism narratives in New Orleans. From tour guides, to websites, to travel brochures, Thomas extracts and analyzes a variety of messages to document how competing representations of race—desire and disaster—are two frames through which New Orleans tourism narratives represent black culture. Thomas leads readers to question the extent to which alternative tourism narratives can be constructed to more justly address constructions of blackness.

Community Land Trusts: A Powerful Vehicle For Development Without Displacement, May Louie

Trotter Review

In the Great Recession of 2007–2009, Boston’s communities of color were hit hard. A 2009 map of foreclosures looked like a map of the communities of color—Roxbury, Dorchester, and Mattapan. The one island of stability was a section of Roxbury called the Dudley Triangle—home to the community land trust of the Dudley Street Neighborhood Initiative (DSNI).

Originally established to respond to the community’s vision of “development without displacement,” the land trust model was adopted to help residents gain control of land and to use that control to prevent families from being priced out as they organized to improve their neighborhood. …

From Disinvestment To Displacement: Gentrification And Jamaica Plain’S Hyde-Jackson Squares, Jen Douglas

Trotter Review

In this essay, I offer a place-based history of socioeconomic and demographic change in Hyde Square and nearby Jackson Square (henceforth “Hyde-Jackson Squares”). I document the area’s ongoing gentrification and describe the distribution of gentrification pressures. I situate this contemporary process against the socio-spatial patterns carved out by the area’s historical rise as an industrial suburb, its struggle amid decades of disinvestment, and the community efforts that ultimately stabilized the neighborhood. In these sequential transformations is the story of how Latinos and Blacks entered, departed, and have strived to remain in the neighborhood.

Developing High-Resolution Descriptions Of Urban Heat Islands: A Public Health Imperative, Jackson Voelkel, Vivek Shandas, Brendon Haggerty

Urban Studies and Planning Faculty Publications and Presentations

Extreme heat events affect the most vulnerable human populations and are a lethal health hazard to urban dwellers globally; in the United States, extreme heat causes more deaths annually than all other weather events and natural hazards combined (1). Previous studies described urban heat islands as isolated, static, monolithic areas of cities. We challenged this contention by hypothesizing that diurnal temperature cycles and diverse landscape features create variation in places that amplify heat (2). A temporal description of urban heat islands would identify populations that are susceptible to heat stress, particularly at night, when most people are asleep and unable …

Understanding Social Media Program Usage In Public Transit Agencies, Jenny H. Liu, Wei Shi, O. A. Elrahman, Xuegang Ban, Jack M. Reilly

Urban Studies and Planning Faculty Publications and Presentations

Social media has been gaining prominence in public transit agencies in their communication strategies and daily management. This study aims to better understand recent trends in social media usage in public transit agencies, to examine which agencies use what kind of social media programs for what purposes, and how they measure their programs. A survey was conducted of the top transit agencies in the nation, and results are examined through descriptive statistical analysis, correlation analysis and regression modeling. We found that while most agencies still lack clearly-defined goals and performance metrics to guide their social media development, many are increasing …

Developing A Model For Transit Oriented Development In Latino Immigrant Communities: A National Study Of Equity And Tod, Gerardo Francisco Sandoval

TREC Final Reports

This research project is a continuation of a previous NITC-funded study. The first study compared the MacArthur Park TOD in Los Angeles to the Fruitvale Village TOD in Oakland. The findings from this new study further validate the key findings from the first study. This new comparative case study analyzed the extension of Los Angeles’ Gold Line into Boyle Heights and the revitalization linked to Boyle Heights due to two TODs built in that neighborhood. I conclude from all four cases that TODs can help serve as catalysts for neighborhood revitalization in low-income communities by paying attention and building upon …

Residential Electricity Demand In El Paso: 1977-2014, Thomas M. Fullerton Jr., David R. Macias, Adam G. Walke

Border Region Modeling Project

This study analyzes the demand for residential electricity in El Paso, Texas, USA. Annual data are provided by El Paso Electric Company covering the period from 1977 to 2014. This study reports a negative long-run income elasticity for residential electricity demand. Per customer residential electricity usage declines by 0.68 percent for every 1-percent increase in real per capita income over the long run, indicating that electricity is treated as an inferior good by households in this metropolitan economy. That result runs counter to many earlier studies, but corroborates recent empirical evidence for Seattle, Washington and other regions of the United …

Does Urban Form Influence Grocery Shopping Frequency? A Study From Seattle, Washington, Usa, Junfeng Jiao, Anne Vernez Moudon, Adam Drewnowski

Research Collection College of Integrative Studies

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to ascertain how elements of the built environment may or may not influence the frequency of grocery shopping. Design/methodology/approach – Using data from the 2009 Seattle Obesity Study, the research investigated the effect of the urban built environment on grocery shopping travel frequency in the Seattle-King County area. Binary and ordered logit models served to estimate the impact of individual characteristics and built environments on grocery shopping travel frequency. Findings – The results showed that the respondents’ attitude towards food, travel mode, and the network distance between homes and stores exerted the …

The Limits Of Liberal Planning: The Lindsay Administration's Failed Plan To Control Development On Staten Island, Jeffrey A. Kroessler

Publications and Research

Staten Island grew rapidly after the Verrazano Narrows Bridge opened in 1964. Mayor John Lindsay introduced a plan to control and guide development there, and encouraged planned unit development. The Rouse Company, then building Columbia, Maryland, was contracted to plan new communities for the southern third of Staten Island to more than double the borough’s population. State Senator John Marchi introduced legislation for the South Richmond Development Corporation in 1971. The plan called for the city to use eminent domain to buy property and transfer it to the Rouse Company, which would also construct residential towers on landfill in Raritan …