"Urban Legends: The South Bronx in Representation and Ruin" examines the construction of the South Bronx in the American imagination during the 1970s and 1980s--a time when the South Bronx was synonymous with the failures of urbanism. The project attempts a multidisciplinary excavation of the cultural manifestations of urban ruin as articulated through the histories, literatures, and visual arts produced within and inspired by the ruins of the Bronx. The dissertation contends that Bronx ruins offered a site for visual artists, writers, and photographers to create new ways of understanding the production and perception of urban environments, while shaping the forms and styles that these creations took. The project theorizes the emergence and legacy of these forms alongside what it terms "municipal art": public works of city governmental bodies which, themselves, responded to ruin, and that might also be read as art. The dissertation's first part places the building cuts of the artist Gordon Matta-Clark in dialogue with the trompe l'oeil window decals of New York's "Occupied Look" program. It argues, on one hand, that Matta-Clark's artworks employ the tactics and effects of trompe l'oeil, and, on the other, that the seemingly failed "Occupied Look" project presents, upon close examination, vastly more interesting questions about temporality, duration, stasis within the built environment. The dissertation's second part views 1980s New York City Department of Finance tax assessment photographs within and against documentary and conceptual art contexts to reveal aesthetic debts owed by photographers and artists to "administrative" or systematic modes. The dissertation argues that these tax photos, despite their empirical intention, are inevitably productive of narrative, and demand an empathetic model of viewership that gestures at historic ruin-gazing while puncturing mythological understandings of urban ruin. The dissertation's third part examines how the popular fiction of Tom Wolfe and Don DeLillo imagined the Bronx built environment. The dissertation argues that the infrastructures that animate these portions of their fiction--abhorred in one and celebrated in the other--bind the South Bronx to city, making it less an alienated nowhere than one that is intimately tied to the world around it.

The Atlanta BeltLine is an innovative redevelopment project re-shaping Atlanta residents’ access to, multi-use trails, parks, public transportation, housing and employment opportunities. The primary purpose of this project was to develop a research proposal to study and analyze the health benefits associated with multi-use trails within BeltLine communities. A secondary purpose of this project was to evaluate the multi-sectoral and multi-institutional partnership that was formed to develop the research proposal and study the influence of the BeltLine on health outcomes. In August 2010 representatives from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Emory University, Georgia Institute of Technology, Georgia State University, the Atlanta BeltLine Inc. and the Atlanta BeltLine Partnership formed the BeltLine Health Proposal Committee. Two online surveys using Survey Monkey were conducted to evaluate how this committee was operating, if roles and responsibilities were clear and to determine if this committee was an effective mechanism to integrate health and the built environment. Findings from the survey indicated that committee members believed this group was a unique partnership comprised of dedicated professionals sharing a common interest. Survey findings indicated there were several challenges that needed attention including improving communication, resolving competing interests, and identifying a lead organization. Findings from this evaluation can help resolve these issues and help the committee transition into a Health Advisory Group. The Health Advisory Group will serve as formal body that will review research proposals, conduct research, leverage funding and disseminate key health findings related to the BeltLine.

Safe Routes to School is a national program funded by the Department of Transportation. The goal of the program is to increase children’s active transport to and from school, primarily by walking, in response to the epidemic of childhood obesity. Implementation at the state and local level has had varying success. In my capstone presentation, I discuss the creation, implementation, and ongoing success of the program at Oak Grove Elementary, a local public school in Georgia. The program is comprised of the 5 Es: Education, Encouragement, Enforcement, Engineering, and Evaluation. Each of these five components will be focused on, as well as ongoing challenges in the struggle to retrofit a school to make it more walker-friendly in a car-dependent environment.

From 2000 to 2007, the five core county area of Metropolitan Atlanta (Fulton, Dekalb, Clayton, Cobb and Gwinnett) experienced 1,871 incidents involving child pedestrians. Nearly one-third of these incidents occurred during school-commuting hours. This study examines the geospatial locations of these incidents, with regards to the location of all 647 public schools within the study area. A GIS is used to analyze the spatiotemporal arrangement of these incidents in order to find risk factors and patterns in the data. Aspects of the built environment are then considered in areas with higher frequencies of child pedestrian-vehicle incidents. A walkability assessment is conducted to assess risk factors involved in the increased incident frequencies in an area of Stone Mountain. A correlation with the location of parks, recreation centers and other destinations are found. Improvements and installation of crosswalks are suggested in order to improve safety and walkability of child pedestrians in these areas.

Wide health gaps exist between Canada’s Inuit population and their non-Indigenous counterparts in nearly all categories. Two basic public health protection principles in any community worldwide are access to safe drinking water and sanitary wastewater management. The purpose of this research was to explore the relationships between public health and municipal water and wastewater systems in Coral Harbour, Nunavut. Using a qualitative case study approach, I conducted 37 interviews with residents and key informants and thematically analyzed the data. Findings suggest that crowded households experiencing domestic water shortages may result in negative health consequences. As well, pre and early settlement water customs are influencing current public health risks thereby requiring special consideration by municipal planners. Given these findings, recommendations include increasing domestic water access, strengthening source water monitoring programs, and establishing intergovernmental public health policies that co-benefit water resource management agendas as well as other priority issues in Nunavut.

The objective of this research project was to gain a better understanding of the language, policies and collaborative actions undertaken by planning and public health professionals that are relevant to the design of active communities. The overarching aim of this research was to develop resources to facilitate the collaborative efforts of planners and public health professionals working together to create active communities. To this end, three studies were undertaken. In the first study, publicly available documents, websites, and published reports from five Government of Ontario ministries were reviewed. The review produced 136 terms for inclusion in a joint glossary of terms for planners and public health professionals. In the second study legislation/strategies from the same five government ministries were reviewed and interviews were conducted with 10 government policy-makers to identify priorities, challenges and inter-sectoral collaboration to enhance the design of active communities. This process produced a policy inventory of 39 Ontario laws/strategies that govern planners and public heath professionals working to enhance the design of active communities and identified challenges related to achieving inter-ministry collaboration and coordination towards a provincial active communities’ agenda. The third study recruited planners and public health professionals working in the province of Ontario to participate in a concept mapping process to identify ways they currently work together to enhance the design of active communities. This process generated 72 actions that represent collaborative efforts planners and public health professionals engage in when designing active communities. These actions were then organized by importance and feasibility, resulting in the development of a coordinated action framework that features four planning actions for planners, nineteen proximal and six distal coordinated actions for planners and public health professionals and six public health actions for public health professionals. Collectively, results from these three studies contribute to our understanding of the language, policies, and collaborative actions employed by planning and public health professionals that are relevant to the design of active communities. The resources developed from this project are intended to support and facilitate the collaborative efforts of planners and public health professionals working to create active communities. / Thesis (Ph.D, Kinesiology & Health Studies) -- Queen's University, 2012-06-04 14:33:13.672

No description available.

This thesis investigated the role that local environmental factors play in influencing perceptions of crime and safety across three neighbourhoods within the Region of Peel, Ontario. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with local experts to examine their perceptions of crime and safety, and elements of the built and social environment that may influence these perceptions and identified dimensions of social capital that serve as pathways through which broader environmental determinants of crime and safety can become embedded at the local neighbourhood level. Findings of this research revealed that the perceived relationships between the social and built environment and crime are complex and that dimensions of social capital such as informal social ties serve as a mediator between the environment and perceptions about crime and how perceived and actual crime may be reduced by modifying elements of the built and social environment in order to strengthen local dimensions of social capital.

This thesis investigated the role that local environmental factors play in influencing perceptions of crime and safety across three neighbourhoods within the Region of Peel, Ontario. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with local experts to examine their perceptions of crime and safety, and elements of the built and social environment that may influence these perceptions and identified dimensions of social capital that serve as pathways through which broader environmental determinants of crime and safety can become embedded at the local neighbourhood level. Findings of this research revealed that the perceived relationships between the social and built environment and crime are complex and that dimensions of social capital such as informal social ties serve as a mediator between the environment and perceptions about crime and how perceived and actual crime may be reduced by modifying elements of the built and social environment in order to strengthen local dimensions of social capital.

Introduction: Physical activity (PA) in Canadian adolescents is low, and active travel to school is an important source of PA. Neighbourhood walkability is linked to youth PA, and may also be related to school travel behaviour. Therefore, the aim of this thesis was to explore the association between adolescents’ school travel-PA, school travel mode, and walkability in urban and suburban neighbourhoods. Methods: Adolescents (n=234; grade 8-10) were sampled from schools in a high walkability urban (n=52) and a low walkability suburban neighbourhood (n=182). PA was measured by accelerometry (ActiGraph; ≥4d 600 min·d-1), and converted from activity counts to minutes of moderate-to-vigorous PA (MVPA). Travel-PA was derived from minutes of MVPA accrued during the hour before and after school. Travel mode was self-reported (i.e., walk, bike, transit, school bus, car). Analyses were stratified by sex and travel mode (Stata v.10). Results: Valid travel data were provided by 224 participants (49.6% girls). Prevalence of travel modes differed significantly between urban and suburban boys (χ2=25.4, p<0.001) and girls (χ2=21.0, p<0.001). Valid PA and travel data were available for an analytical sample (n=91, 58.2% girls). Differences in collapsed modes (active vs. passive) were not significant between cohorts for boys (χ2=1.5, p=0.22) or girls (χ2=0.3, p=0.61). Minutes of travel-PA were significantly higher in urban than suburban boys for both active (29.4±9.2 vs. 11.0±9.2, p<0.001) and passive travel (22.6±2.7 vs. 8.8±7.4, p<0.001). There were no significant differences in girls. Conclusion: These results suggest that neighbourhood walkability may be associated with school travel-PA in boys, regardless of travel mode. More research is needed to understand this association in girls. The research also showed travel modes were different between neighbourhood cohorts, but when modes were collapsed into larger categories (passive and active) they were not. Future research should analyse school travel-PA by detailed travel modes whenever possible. / Graduate / 0573 / afrazer@uvic.ca