This study explores local plans as primary source documents outlining resident-requested, City-approved projects that may help reduce neighborhood-level barriers to physically active transportation and recreation. Emerging evidence suggests a link between the built environment and physical activity, but any causal relationship remains uncertain. This report begins with a literature review to discover neighborhood traits currently under investigation for correlation with higher activity levels. This is followed by an analysis of Austin Neighborhood Plans to identify community-prioritized Action Items pertinent to physical activity. Next, crime data are reviewed to assess objective and perceived safety levels in the study neighborhoods, Chestnut and East César Chávez. Finally, planners and residents are interviewed to explore how health and safety were addressed in the planning process, discover methods by which plan items have been implemented, and identify common barriers to project completion that the public health community may help bridge. Findings indicate that residents’ concerns regarding personal safety and crime may outweigh other neighborhood barriers to physical activity. Planning and health departments would be advised to address crime and safety levels as part of larger built environment efforts to encourage active transportation and recreation. / text

Baltimore is one of the most notable examples of a city that has revitalized and improved its downtown core to become a world-class destination. In the 1950s, Baltimore faced a slate of problems similar to many other cities across the country: a declining manufacturing and industrial base, increasing rates of suburbanization and sprawl, and the advent of the superhighway. Downtowns large and small were losing businesses, residents, and investments to the hinterlands at an alarming pace. Planners attempts to intervene, while sincere, generated short term gains but produced deleterious consequences over the long term. The foresight of Baltimore’s population and it's elected officials allowed the city to take a different path than that of other post-industrial cities whose fortunes continued to decline well into the 1970s and 80s. Turning an eye towards their natural surroundings, Baltimoreans transformed their harbor front into a front yard, turned their Central Business District into a vibrant, mixed-use 24 hour neighborhood, and emphasized the charms and historic value that had been notoriously undervalued and unappreciated for many decades. Today, Downtown Baltimore is the crown jewel of the region, with a growing residential base, ample services and attractions, and host to more than 22 million visitors annually. In addition to looking at the specific elements that made Downtown Baltimore’s turnaround a reality, this paper will delve into strategies and procedures that other cities and communities can utilize in order to revive and reinvigorate their downtown districts. Each community faces its own unique set of demographics, trends, and future challenges. It must be stressed that the intention of this paper is not to imply a one size fits all solution to planning issues, but that certain measures, when appropriately tailored to a local setting can have beneficial outcomes. Urban downtowns in particular require a distinct approach due to their function as a regional focus for jobs, energy, and infrastructure. The success or failure of a city's core can have geographically far-reaching implications, and this paper will examine the strategies and mechanisms that promote a healthy, viable downtown that can serve as a positive anchor for a city and a metropolitan region. / text

For over a century, researchers have studied methods for revitalizing urban communities. Many studies show that entrepreneurship plays a vital role in sustaining valuable resources that are necessary for community development. The current study adds to previous research by identifying factors that are related to self-reliance and lower crime. I analyze data from the 1991 National Race and Politics Study, which explored attitudes on various issues related to community development and politics. My findings indicate that jobs, more say in government decisions, and hard work are significantly related to self-reliance, while small business, neighborhood organizations, care for the homeless and job training are significantly related to lower crime. These results support the work of previous researchers by showing that crime and neighborhood organizations play important roles in community development. The study goes a step further to identify additional attitudinal variables that are related to self-reliance and lower crime. These results should assist policy makers in determining what factors may help revitalize urban communities that suffer from high levels of unemployment and crime. / text

Ambient monitoring and air quality modeling of air toxics concentrations at the neighborhood-scale level is a key element for human exposure and health risk assessments. Since 2005, The University of Texas at Austin (UT) has operated a dense ambient monitoring network that includes both hourly automated gas chromatographs as well as threshold triggered canister samples and meteorological data in the Corpus Christi area. Although Corpus Christi is in attainment with the National Ambient Air Quality Standards for both ozone and fine particulate matter, its significant petroleum refining complex has resulted in concerns about exposure to air toxics. The seven site network, incorporating both the industrial and residential areas in Corpus Christi, provided a unique opportunity to further the development and understanding of air quality modeling for toxic air pollutants at the neighborhood-scale level. Two air dispersion models, AERMOD and CALPUFF, were used to predict air concentrations of benzene for one of the UT operated monitoring sites (Oak Park monitoring site: C634) and the predictions were compared to the observed benzene concentration data at the Oak Park monitoring site to evaluate model performance. AERMOD and CALPUFF were also used to predict benzene concentrations in populated areas and at sensitive receptor locations such as schools and hospitals. Both AERMOD and CALPUFF were able to reproduce the early morning high benzene concentration and the northern wind effect except under strong NNE wind conditions, where the observed data indicated elevated high benzene concentration which AERMOD and CALPUFF failed to predict. These under-predictions could be due to the NNE strong wind condition at that time of these occurrences or could be attributed to different types of emissions other than the point sources emissions from the 2005 TCEQ Photochemical Modeling inventory, such as mobile sources or accidental emission events. These preliminary analyses could be expanded by modeling longer periods, by including other emission sources and by inter-comparisons with observed data from other CCNAT monitoring sites. In addition, fundamentally different modeling approaches (eulerian, rather than lagrangian) could be considered. / text

I conducted a case study analysis of Dubai, exploring multiple urban design tactics for a more sustainable development approach to Dubai’s pattern of development. Particularly, this dissertation identifies sustainable urban form design principles and strategies for a Dubai neighborhood. The research addresses the question: which form-based urban design strategies effectively deliver greater environmental, social, and economic coherence in Dubai’s neighborhood development? In addition, this research addresses the question of whether certain urban form design principles contribute comparatively more than others to sustainability. I used two rounds of the Delphi technique, a structured communication technique utilizing multiple rounds of questioning, to obtain experts’ knowledge and opinions to redefine urbanism in Dubai towards more ecological and social responsive practices. My analysis of the Delphi reveal that in Dubai, the most sustainable neighborhoods are those emphasizing more public participation in the initial planning process, i.e., connectivity and multiple transportation options; adequate diversity; green, open, and social nodes in the urban fabric; culturally-relevant urbanism and architecture; climate-sensitive urbanism and architecture; eco-balanced design applications; and adaptability, all integrated with one another in the compactly arranged urban fabric. Approaches to sustainable development must stress elements other than just design itself, such as grasping the nuances of the cultural traditions, politics, and implementation constraints. Therefore, this research also involved collecting survey responses from local and expatiate residents in Dubai and interviewing Dubai government officials in order to identify and to understand the relevant political and cultural aspects as well as obstacles associated with the experts’ design recommendations. In particular, survey responses were used to: (1) identify the public opinion surrounding some of the Dubai neighborhood design ideas suggested by an international and local panel of experts; and (2) understand how the public value and prioritize the suitability of the proposed design strategies to Dubai’s cultural environment. Interviews with the local authorities in Dubai facilitated (1) the determination of troublesome challenges and constraints for implementing some of the urban design strategies defined by experts in the Delphi; and (2) identification of implementation opportunities and possible policy initiatives that might support the implementation of the proposed strategies. I also synthesized all research data to identify areas of overlap and disagreement among research participants (the experts, public, and government officials). Finally, the last chapter discusses two major obstacles challenging different aspects of sustainability. I also detail a potential solution to prevail over the challenges, and introduce potential areas of future research. / text

Online Social Networks (OSNs) such as Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube are among the most popular sites on the Internet. Billions of users are connected through these sites, building strong and effective communities to share views and ideas, and make recommendations nowadays. Therefore, by choosing an appropriate user-base from billions of people is required to analyze the structure and key characteristics of the large social graphs to improve current systems and to design new applications. For this reason, node sampling technique plays an important role to study large-scale social networks. As a basic requirement, the sampled nodes and their links should possess similar statistical features of the original network, otherwise the conclusion drawn from the sampled network may not be appropriate for the entire population. Hence, good sampling strategies are key to many online social network applications. For instance, before introducing a new product or adding new feature(s) of a product to the online social network community, that specific new product or the additional feature has to be exposed to only a small set of users, who are carefully chosen to represent the complete set of users. As such, different random walk-based sampling techniques have been introduced to produce samples of nodes that not only are internally well-connected but also capture the statistical features of the whole network. Traditionally, walk-based techniques do not have the restriction on the number of times that a node can be re-visited while sampling. This may lead to an inefficient sampling method, because the walk may be "stuck" at a small number of high-degree nodes without being able to reach out to the rest of the nodes. A random walk, even after a large number of hops, may not be able to obtain a sampled network that captures the statistical features of the entire network. In this thesis, we propose two walk-based sampling techniques to address the above problem, called K-Avoiding Random Walk (KARW) and Neighborhood-Avoiding Random Walk (NARW). With KARW, the number of times that a node can be re-visited is constrained within a given number K. With NARW, the random walk works in a "jump" fashion, since the walk starts outside of the N-hop neighborhood from the current node chosen randomly. By avoiding the current nodes neighboring area of level-N, NARW is expected to reach out the other nodes within the entire network quickly. We apply these techniques to construct multiple independent subgraphs from a social graph, consisting of 63K users with around a million connections between users collected from a Facebook dataset. By simulating our proposed strategies, we collect performance metrics and compare the results with the current state-of-the-art sampling techniques (Uniform Random Sampling, Random Walk, and Metropolis Hastings Random Walk). We also calculate some of the key statistical features (i.e., degree distribution, betweenness centrality, closeness centrality, modularity, and clustering coefficient) of the sampled graphs to get an idea about the network structures that essentially represent the original social graph. / Graduate / 0984 / shahed.anwar@gmail.com

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Mobile wayfinding and guide applications have become indispensable tools for navigating unfamiliar urban spaces. Such applications address locations targeted, “just-in-time” queries, This thesis reports on research examining mobile tool requirements for discovering neighborhood. In the first phase of the research a preliminary study examining how existing online tools were used for neighborhood exploration. We conducted a second study, considering a home buying scenario in two different two areas, to assess limitations of Google Maps. There were issues with switching between spatial views, search, or Street View required the user to switch to Map View. From these and other results we derive a set of design requirements for mobile tools for neighborhood discovery and present a prototype application called Block Party that addresses a number of these requirements. Block Party supports itineraries with numbered waypoints, easy transitions between synchronized spatial views. Future work will evaluate Block Party’s design in another study.

The Greater Vancouver Region is in an era of growth, fundamental change, and reexamination of regional and local quality of life. Within this context, the complete community policies of the Livable Region Strategic Plan have been developed to help achieve a region where human community flourishes within the built and natural environment. At the same time as these policies respond to change, they also demand significant alterations to community and regional priorities and practices. Accepting and pursuing complete community objectives of compactness, diversity and choice in existing suburban communities represents particular challenges. While regional policy reflects a general appreciation of this fact, understanding these challenges from a local perspective is essential to successfully weaving complete community goals into the existing regional fabric, and is the problem addressed by this thesis. Through both a literature review and case study approach, the research sought to identify the factors which support and constrain progress towards more complete communities through local planning in established neighbourhoods. The thesis focuses on the case study of the Lynn Valley community planning process in order to explore how the local perspective might modify inherently regional complete community goals and expectations. The study concludes that achieving a balance between regional goals and local interests is most critical in the Greater Vancouver metropolitan setting. The Lynn Valley case suggests that factors affecting community planning outlined in the literature are realistic and valid in practice. It further suggests that the prospects for achieving complete communities in established neighbourhoods will be influenced by local perspectives on: growth, change, aging in place, and a spirit of fairness in accepting change among local communities. The complete community vision resonates at the local level. Complete community objectives and strategies may be accepted locally to the degree they are seen as a means to achieve community aspirations and improve the quality of life of residents over their life cycle.

This dissertation examines the topological properties of simplicial complexes that arise from two distinct combinatorial objects. In 2003, A. Björner and M. de Longueville proved that the neighborhood complex of the stable Kneser graph SGn,k is homotopy equivalent to a k-sphere. Further, for n = 2 they showed that the neighborhood complex deformation retracts to a subcomplex isomorphic to the associahedron. They went on to ask whether or not, for all n and k, the neighborhood complex of SGn,k contains as a deformation retract the boundary complex of a simplicial polytope. Part one of this dissertation provides a positive answer to this question in the case k = 2. In this case it is also shown that, after partially subdividing the neighborhood complex, the resulting complex deformation retracts onto a subcomplex arising as a polyhedral boundary sphere that is invariant under the action induced by the automorphism group of SGn,2. Part two of this dissertation studies simplicial complexes that arise from non-attacking rook placements on a subclass of Ferrers boards that have ai rows of length i where ai > 0 and i ≤ n for some positive integer n. In particular, enumerative properties of their facets, homotopy type, and homology are investigated.