<p> The main objective of this research is to examine the effect of city-level urban characteristic, such as urban form and trip generation factors, on traffic safety in general and pedestrian safety in particular. For this purpose, the information for 100 major Urban Areas (UAs) in the United States in 2010 is studied. Factor analysis is applied to construct latent variables from multiple observed variables to measure and describe urban form, macro-level trip generation, citywide transportation network features and traffic safety. Structural Equation Modeling (SEM) is then used to investigate how city-level urban form and trip generation affect traffic safety directly and indirectly (through mediators of transportation network features).</p><p> Based on the statistical analysis, it is found that encouraging the use of non-driving transportation modes and controlling traffic congestion, as significant mediators, are effective policies to increase overall traffic safety and pedestrian safety, respectively. In this regard, urban areas with a more even spatial distribution of job-housing balance (more polycentricity), more uniform spatial distribution of different social classes, higher urban density (less sprawl), and more connectivity in their transportation network (more accessibility) have the safest urban form designs.</p><p> Moreover, mixed land-use designs with provided local access to services and amenities, food and beverage centers, and religious organizations, followed by strict pedestrian safety standards for neighborhoods are the safest type of land use designs in urban areas. In addition, regulating the off-peak hours allowed time for heavy vehicles and changing the work schedule of workers who do not reside in the urban area can also help city planners to increase traffic safety.</p>

<p> This thesis connects the lived experience of displacement to the greater paradigm of neoliberalism. The presence of neoliberalism is insidious and ubiquitous and yet even its existence is disputed in the literature. Neoliberalism is not only capitalism on steroids, bigger and in more places, but a new regime of logic that reduces human relations to profit, naturalizes competition and pushes responsibility onto the individual. Urban space in America and especially the process of gentrification, the reshaping of the built environment to facilitate profit, is a powerful space of expression of neoliberal policies in everyday life. Displacement is a violent and dehumanizing realization of the commodification of land. This research follows the lived experience of families displaced from a mobile home park in Flagstaff, Arizona. Residents received a letter of eviction a week before Thanksgiving of 2017 and the mobile home park was boarded up by July of the following year. Through in-depth interviews with the residents and participant observation in the ensuing movement to keep these families in their homes, this research compiles the lived experience of these individuals and provides an analysis of their situation. Paulo Freire argued that every person has the ability to understand and build solutions to their reality in them. This research hopes to illuminate the lived experience of neoliberalism, gentrification, and offer a powerful message of generative solidarity collaboratively distilled from the experience of the displaced residents.</p><p>

<p> Traditional avenues of influencing planning decisions are not intuitive for diverse, historically underrepresented community residents in many neighborhoods and many immigrant residents come from societies where engaging in public discourse is discouraged or dangerous. The focus of this study, the Planning Outreach and Engagement Liaison (POEL) program, was designed to address these discrepancies, yet whether the program was successful is unknown. Using participatory democracy as the theoretical framework, the purpose of this case study was to explore whether the POEL program brought diverse residents together to participate in the neighborhood planning process. Data were collected through semi structured interviews with planners, community coordinators, public outreach and engagement liaisons, and members of non-governmental organizations (<i>n</i> = 10) and official government records and documents. All data were deductively coded and then analyzed using a thematic analysis procedure. Six themes emerged from the study including (a) measures of program success, (b) outreach and communication, (c) collaboration, (d) intimidation and fear, (e) time limitation, and (f) building relationships. POELs identified and understood that barriers such as lack of time, lack of child care, persistent fear of government intentions, and religious and cultural norms inhabit the process, but found that using outreach and communication promotes interest in and participation in neighborhood planning. When neighborhood residents are empowered and given information about the process, they make informed choices. The study promotes positive social change by showing that mitigating some of the barriers to participation supports greater inclusion of underrepresented persons in the neighborhood planning process.</p><p>

Urban planning in Sweden goes back to a prolonged tradition, and even since the beginning of the 16th century there´s been general plans for urban planning for cities in Sweden. Nowadays every municipality has a directive from the government to establish or re-new the general master plan covering the whole municipality every 4th year. The aim of this paper is to illustrate and shed light on the extent for the planning document and guidelines, and how they change from every active period and in what extent the provisional planning reaches its visions regarding the outcome of the actual city growth. This study was completed by studying the position of every apartment building that’s been constructed for the chosen area over the years of 2000 - 2014 and draw comparisons between the current master plan main visions regarding constructions – and comparing the two separate visions to pin out the differences in the same subject. The result shows that there are some deviations from the plans but not as much as one would have thought in the city growth, and some deviations from the different planning documents. Some of the deviations was greater than others but overall the visions was about the same.

The purpose of this project is to create a simplifiedtool for urban planning, to illustrate how differentparameters affect each other. The municipality ofUppsala and the company Atkins have investigatedthe possibility to implement several themes andaspects in a digital tool. Since urban planning has acomplex structure, only a few aspects are selectedin this report. This is a case study which examineshow an implementation of a carpool in a residentialarea affects the parameters ground use, carbondioxide emissions and social aspects such asridesharing and car ownership. A model has beencreated in MATLAB to visualize the environmentalimpact of a carpool compared to traditional parking.The results show that the environmental impactdecreases as the number of cars in the areadecreases. Further, the sensitivity analysis showsthat social factors may have a great impact on theenvironmental aspects. A decreased car usage andincreased ridesharing, where only traditional parkingis used, can result in an environmental improvementalmost corresponding to an area with only a carpoolsolution with the current car usage and ridesharing.

<p> A rating system known as Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design for Neighborhood Development, LEED-ND, was developed in 2007 to assess sustainability at the neighborhood scale. Although at this time LEED for buildings is a well-known and well-established program in the United States, LEED for Neighborhood Development is less widely recognized since it was developed in 2007 as compared to LEED for buildings. LEED-ND requires that certified developments meet credit areas in three main categories: a) smart location and linkage (SLL), b) neighborhood pattern and design (NPD), and c) green infrastructure and buildings (GIB). LEED-ND goes above and beyond singularly requiring sustainable mobility, traditional neighborhood design, or green building; rather, it incorporates the above three categories into a single rating system. To date, prior LEED rating systems (New Construction and Existing Buildings) have focused on the building scale, as have most critiques of such metrics. Few authors have ventured to analyze the neighborhood rating system with the exception of Garde (2009) and Ewing et al. (2013) and Sharifi and Murayama (2013), who have only used only secondary scorecard data and other aggregated data to assess the success or predict outcomes of LEED-ND neighborhoods. No post-occupancy studies have been conducted to date that take into consideration the resident&rsquo;s perception and stated preferences. Additionally, no studies have examined in detail the provision of affordable housing within LEED-ND developments. </p><p> LEED-ND has been rapidly adopted as the de-facto green neighborhood standard and is now used to measure the sustainability of neighborhood design around the world. Like the previous LEED green building rating systems, LEED-ND is heavily reliant on physical &amp; environmental design criteria (measures such as compact urban form and transit accessibility), and is based on an expert-generated point system. LEED-ND thus excels in measuring &lsquo;environmental sustainability&rsquo; through its stringent environmental performance criteria. However, it fails to critically address important livability factors&mdash;namely social and economic factors&mdash;and there has not been a critical examination of how to properly weigh the various factors in response to user preferences. Scholars have emphasized that the major weakness of sustainable development agendas, emphasizing that although assessment of <i>environmental</i> sustainability is quite thorough, often sustainable development projects fail to adequately address or operationalize social and economic sustainability. Ultimately, creating metrics for <i>social</i> and <i>economic </i> sustainability is more complicated than developing metrics for environmental sustainability, which can be reduced to direct built environment performance measures. At the neighborhood scale, socio-cultural and socio-economic concerns&mdash;such as affordable housing&mdash;become magnified for residents. Accordingly, this dissertation argues that socio-cultural and socio-economic factors and user preferences require a more significant foothold in neighborhood scale rating systems, if such systems purport to fully support all three tiers of sustainability: social, economic and environmental (Wheeler 2004). Specifically, this study examines affordable housing as a proxy for social equity and social sustainability in LEED-ND neighborhoods, and determines the extent to which principles of social sustainability are being upheld. </p><p> This dissertation advances the emerging field of sustainable neighborhood rating systems, by illustrating and evaluating a significant gap in current sustainable neighborhood evaluation systems. Cutting across planning, landscape architecture, architecture, psychology and sociology in both Canada and the US, the study critically questions the LEED-ND rating system as the epitome of sustainable development. This dissertation illustrates that in order to be truly sustainable, developments must consider social-cultural and socio-economic livability factors alongside environmental factors, including post-occupancy evaluation. This dissertation also asks the question if social equity and affordability issues can be singularly addressed by a voluntary, market-based rating system, or if a broader range of strategies is needed to ensure the provision of affordable housing in new sustainable developments. Ultimately, this study provides recommendations to improve the rating system, with a specific focus on affordable housing.</p>

<p> Political protest is an increasingly frequent occurrence in urban public space. During times of protest, the use of urban space transforms according to special regulatory circumstances and dictates. The reorganization of economic relationships under neoliberalism carries with it changes in the regulation of urban space. Environmental design is part of the toolkit of protest control. </p><p> Existing literature on the interrelation of protest, policing, and urban space can be broken down into four general categories: radical politics, criminological, technocratic, and technicalprofessional. Each of these bodies of literature problematizes core ideas of crowds, space, and protest differently. This leads to entirely different philosophical and methodological approaches to protests from different parties and agencies. </p><p> This paper approaches protest, policing, and urban space using a critical-theoretical methodology coupled with person-environment relations methods. This paper examines political protest at American Presidential National Conventions. Using genealogical-historical analysis and discourse analysis, this paper examines two historical protest event-sites to develop baselines for comparison: Chicago 1968 and Dallas 1984. Two contemporary protest event-sites are examined using direct observation and discourse analysis: Denver 2008 and St. Paul 2008. </p><p> Results show that modes of protest policing are products of dominant socioeconomic models of society, influenced by local policing culture and historical context. Each of the protest event-sites studied represents a crisis in policing and the beginning of a transformation in modes of protest policing. Central to protest policing is the concept of territorial control; means to achieve this control vary by mode of protest policing, which varies according to dominant socioeconomic model. Protesters used a variety of spatial strategies at varying degrees of organization. Both protesters and police developed innovations in spatial practice in order to make their activities more effective. </p><p> This has significant consequences for professionalized urban design. Both protester and policing spatial innovation involves the tactical reorganization and occupation of urban space. As urban space plays a constituent role in protest and policing, environmental designers must be aware of the political consequences of their designs.</p>

<p> A growing body of research emphasizes the development of an understanding of the relationship between older adults and their physical and social environments (Wahl &amp; Weisman, 2003). Researchers, planners, policymakers, and community residents have been increasingly interested in shaping urban environments as places that foster active aging and independence among older adults. Senior centers have served a critical role in their communities as focal points for older adults, as individuals or in groups, to participate in services and activities that support their independence and encourage their involvement in and with the community (NCOA, 1979). The aging of the population and influx of baby boomers into the older demographic, along with declines in participation rates and funding, are challenging senior center staff to be innovative and adaptive in order to demonstrate senior centers&rsquo; relevance to future older adults while maintaining the programming and services for their current participants. This research is a multiple-case study of five unique senior centers located throughout the Portland metropolitan area in Oregon. Different types and models of senior centers are represented by the selected cases, as they operate under different governance structures and vary in aspects such as administration, funding, participant characteristics, community partnerships, transportation options, physical environments, and range of services and programs offered. This study aims to better understand challenges, strengths, and future directions for different types of senior centers serving a metropolitan area. Data collection at each site included interviews with staff as well as focus groups with senior center participants. Interviews with key informants enriched the findings and provided outside perspectives of senior center experiences. Data analysis revealed challenges and strengths that were common across and unique to the different senior centers in this study. This research contributes to the literature in urban studies, community development, and gerontology by exploring potential opportunities for urban senior centers to adapt and continue to serve older adults. Recommendations were developed for how senior centers might capitalize on these opportunities and for how their communities might provide mechanisms of support to facilitate the continuation and contributions of senior centers in metropolitan areas.</p>

No description available.

No description available.