Regional planning and management are problematic in many countries. Control over land and natural resources is fragmented among different levels of government and agencies with narrow missions. Interorganizational collaboration is advocated as a solution, but research to date has predominantly involved case studies with little theoretical rigor. The main objective of this study is to identify the determinants of success in interorganizational collaboration. There is extensive literature on why organizations collaborate, but what factors make collaborations successful is not well documented. To add to the knowledge of this field, this research integrates theory and empirical research from organizational theory, management studies, public administration, urban and regional planning, and environmental planning and natural resource management to define operational measures of successful collaborative planning and applies multivariate analysis to assess hypothesized determinants of success. Natural resource management provides a very good opportunity to examine this due to the fragmentation of administrative structure. However, the implications of the results are not limited to natural resource management. The findings will be useful in understanding collaborative planning and decision making in many other interorganizational settings including regional planning, metropolitan area planning, economic development, and growth management. Understanding what makes collaborations work is important, because despite the documented need to collaborate, many efforts take years to bear fruit, and most do not achieve much. I believe this is due to poor understanding of the collaboration process and its elements. If this process is thoroughly examined and the factors that lead to success are determined, it will help future collaboration efforts immensely by identifying the circumstances in which collaboration is most likely to succeed and the factors that can be manipulated to enhance the likelihood of success. The research methodology includes multivariate analysis of a mail survey of participants in 70 collaborative natural resource planning processes. Representatives of 3 to 4 organizations that collaborated in the development or revision of a management plan for one of six natural resource management program types were surveyed: (1) Remedial Action Plan development under the Great Lakes Water Quality Agreement, (2) the National Estuary Program of the United States Environmental Protection Agency Office of Water, (3) the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's National Marine Sanctuary Program, (4) Habitat Conservation Plan development under the Endangered Species Act, (5) the Surface Water Improvement and Management Program of Florida Water Management Districts, and (6) National Estuarine Research Reserves administered by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. The survey included questions on the measures and determinants of success identified from the collaboration literature as well as open-ended questions designed to help identify other ways to define success and other determinants of success. The dependent variable, success, is measured objectively and subjectively and includes responses to single survey questions as well as arithmetic average indices of four major theoretical categories (realization of goals, satisfaction of collaboration participants, enhanced interorganizational relations, and efficiency) and component-based scales. Principal Component Analysis was utilized to determine the elements of the components and their weights. The independent variables, determinants of success, are also grouped together by arithmetic average indices based on theoretical groupings as well as component-based scales. The determinants of success include member factors that are related to the participants in the collaboration, process factors that are related to discretion over the process of collaborating, and resource factors that may be beyond the control of the collaboration participants. The results of the multivariate regression analysis support the hypothesis that most of the member factors, process factors and resource factors influence the success of interorganizational collaboration. However, due to multicollinearity between the independent variables it is not possible to investigate the individual contributions of each factor to success. The models show clearly that the relationship between the parties, equity in decision making, participant characteristics (inclusion of all affected stakeholders, proportional representation, and effective leadership), agreement between the participants on ground rules and the scope of the collaboration, and ripeness of the issue are important for collaboration success no matter how success is measured. / A Dissertation submitted to the Department of Urban and Regional Planning in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. / Degree Awarded: Spring Semester, 2004. / Date of Defense: December 11, 2003. / Natural Resource Management, Interorganizational Collaboration, Interorganizational Cooperation, Collaborative Planning, Collaboration Success / Includes bibliographical references. / Robert E. Deyle, Professor Directing Dissertation; Richard C. Feiock, Outside Committee Member; Bruce Stiftel, Committee Member.

Decentralization strategies have been applied widely in both developed and developing countries. Previous research analyzes decentralization from above by dealing with two aggregated levels of government: the state and the local. Measures adopted by previous studies fail to reflect the various dimensions of decentralization. They do not show how decentralization is performed at the local level or whether local governments are empowered and able to make independent decisions without direct of indirect intervention from the central government. In this research, I argue that local power over decision-making for comprehensive planning reflects governmental decentralization and captures its economic, political, and administrative dimensions. This research develops and tests a set of empirical measures of local agency power over decision-making for comprehensive planning. The measures analyze decentralization from below by investigating the extent of agency power over decision-making for comprehensive planning at the municipal level. It deals with local governments as disaggregated units, which enables us to compare and trace levels of power over decision-making across municipalities and over time. Major questions of the research are: what are empirical measures of local agency power over decision-making for comprehensive planning? and to what extent do proposed measures of local agency power succeed in reflecting levels of governmental decentralization? Florida was selected as the case study, because it has experienced xiii changes in its governmental decentralization levels since the adoption of its growth management system in the late 1960s. The unit of analysis is a governmental planning agency within municipalities having 10,000 or more inhabitants. A Delphi study was conducted to develop measures of each major dimension of local agency power over decision-making for comprehensive planning. Dimensions of power include agency legal authority, relative autonomy, control over local planning actions, and capacity to make planning decisions. Agency capacity consists of four sub-dimensions: technical, fiscal, institutional, and enforcement capacity. The proposed set of measures of local agency power over decision-making was tested empirically in Florida. Its applicability as an indicator of governmental decentralization was investigated by contrasting the model with measures of decentralization proposed by previous studies. The proposed empirical measures succeed in: 1) analyzing decentralization from below by dealing with local governments as disaggregated units, 2) demonstrating the variation in levels of power across Florida's municipalities, and 3) providing a comprehensive picture of decentralization by capturing its economic, political, and administrative dimensions. The research indicates that Florida's growth management system has shaped the structure of power over decision-making for comprehensive planning. The Department of Community Affairs (DCA) has been given a dominant role in the process of local planning. Regional planning councils (RPCs) have no power over decision-making despite their responsibilities as technical assistants, facilitators, and negotiators. Local governments have been required to prepare local comprehensive plans/plan amendments consistent with state and regional plans. Sanctions are used to ensure local compliance xiv with state requirements and standards. Therefore, the growth management system of Florida has reduced the power of local governments over decision-making for comprehensive planning, which increases levels of centralization in Florida. This research fills partially a gap in the literature of international development planning by presenting a tool to analyze decentralization from below, which enables us to design better strategies to establish decentralization at the local level. The research also contributes to the field of growth management by providing empirical measures of local agency power over decision-making for comprehensive planning. These measures should be addressed in policy analysis of growth management in order to improve planning systems and practices. / A Dissertation submitted to the Department of Urban and Regional Planning in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. / Degree Awarded: Fall Semester, 2002. / Date of Defense: August 9, 2002. / Florida, Comprehensive planning / Includes bibliographical references. / Petra L. Doan, Professor Directing Dissertation; William Serow, Outside Committee Member; Rebecca Miles, Committee Member; Richard RuBino, Committee Member.

Much research has been done on transportation accessibility of the central-city minorities and its impacts on income, automobile ownership, and employment. The proportion of people using transit for any purpose in the U.S. is so minuscule that most of these studies consider accessibility to jobs by automobile as general transportation accessibility. However, few studies reveal that transit accessibility to jobs could be an important factor for the employment outcomes of the welfare recipients as they are dependent on public transit, and not on automobile. This study investigates the impacts of transit accessibility to jobs on the employability of the welfare recipients in Broward County, Florida, expressed by a surrogate variable 'length of stay in the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) program by the welfare recipients' and measured in 'number of months.' The study develops an OLS regression model that includes both the aggregate data at traffic analysis zone (TAZ) level and disaggregate data at individual welfare recipient's level. To these, the variable transit accessibility to jobs is added, and its contribution is examined statistically. The study uses an ArcMap GIS for geocoding the welfare recipients' addresses in each specific TAZ, and then relates the TAZ features to those of the individual welfare recipients by spatially joining the maps. The study finds that most of the welfare recipients live in the TAZs associated with high accessibility indices instead of concentrating only in the inner city areas. Some also reside in the TAZs attached to low accessibility indices. It finds that the people living in accessible-rich TAZs stay shorter period of time in the TANF program, and vice versa. It leads to the inference that transit accessibility to jobs of a TAZ has inverse impacts on the employability of the welfare recipients living in that specific TAZ. The study also finds that the women and the U.S. citizens have direct effects while the blacks and the neighborhood quality variable the ratio of number of vehicles to number of households at TAZ level has significant inverse effects on the employability of the welfare recipients. / A Dissertation submitted to the Department of Urban & Regional Planning in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. / Degree Awarded: Summer Semester, 2005. / Date of Defense: April 27, 2005. / Welfare/TANF recipients, transportation modeling, employability, geographic information systems, transit accessibility to jobs / Includes bibliographical references. / Gregory L. Thompson, Professor Directing Dissertation; Keith Ihlanfeldt, Outside Committee Member; Charles E. Connerly, Committee Member; Jeffrey Brown, Committee Member.

No description available.

This thesis contributes to discourses concerned with urban space and performance practice. It identifies ways in which built environments become performative; how the built environment performs meaning(s) within the urban context and how spatial practices of contemporary performance engage with city-spaces. The programming and order of urban space tends to fix meanings; increasingly regulated and singlepurpose city-spaces seem unable to react to informal or unplanned activities. However, this thesis suggests that urban space entails inherent opportunities for conceiving and practising space otherwise and looks at a spatial spectrum – from leftover spaces to London’s landmarks. It analyses incomplete presences in the built environment and their unexpected (re)uses, which make urban space an arena of ideas, interaction and creativity. It examines how spatial practices of performance, such as site-specific performance, audio-walks and installations, inform our (re)thinking of space, its meaning and its re-appropriation. It argues that through performative concepts and actions, space manifests a changeable and dynamic quality, rather than motionlessness and inertia. The thesis involves an interdisciplinary approach employing geography, urban, architectural and performance studies. It looks at four types of built spaces that have been used for performance purposes; a disused warehouse at 21 Wapping Lane, the converted power station housing the Tate Modern art gallery, the exterior of the National Theatre’s building and the London district of Wapping. All of these sites are awaiting, or are undergoing, major alterations in their design or planning, involving reconstruction and expansion, or total demolition. The uncertain future of these sites and buildings, the inevitable decay of their material, and the temporality of the built environment invite questions of architectural design and urban planning in terms of performance. The examination of these sites at this moment of change and the potential impact of the redevelopment plans on city life make this research timely, since the thesis emphasises the imperative of re-defining concepts of space, planning strategies, and design processes so as to imagine a less determinate, more creative urban space.

Thesis. 1977. M.Arch.A.S.--Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Dept. of Architecture. / MICROFICHE COPY AVAILABLE IN ARCHIVES AND ROTCH. / Bibliography : p. 61-63. / by Merle W. Hansen. / M.Arch.A.S.

Typescript (photocopy). / Digitized by Kansas Correctional Industries

“Spirit of Improvement” explores the social, economic, and architectural consequences of waterfront improvement initiatives undertaken in Boston, New York, Philadelphia, and Charleston from the waning years of the colonial period through the passage of the first federally-sponsored warehousing act in 1846. City-dwellers replaced a haphazardly-constructed warren of crooked streets, wooden storehouses and buildings, and dilapidated wharves of the colonial period, with orderly streetscapes, brick and stone buildings, and expanded infrastructure dedicated to local and international commerce. Though in each city, construction differed in scale and regional form, improvements everywhere were a daunting physical, financial, and political task. This dissertation seeks to present the stories of men and women throughout American cities to uncover the social and economic complexities that lay at the heart of improvement initiatives in the colonial and early national periods. Merchants and speculators sought new forms of government authorization and the consent of property holders to reorder the landscape. Architects and engineers drafted cutting-edge designs for warehouses and harbors that looked to European examples and embraced the aesthetics of neoclassicism, industrial technology, and emerging theories of public health and disease prevention. White and black laborers dredged harbors, extended docks, and erected brick and stone warehouses. Female boardinghouse and shopkeepers established businesses adjacent to the wharves. Not only did residents confront the persistence of improvement projects in their midst, they also confronted their personal relationships to the abundance of interests jostling for prominence in the early-national marketplace. As a result, these initiatives proved highly contentious both for the elites who could afford to fund competing projects, as well as for the artisans, free and enslaved laborers, small business and property holders, and families living and working on the margins of society. As the cities’ poor and middling sorts witnessed the transformations occurring around them, many were left to grapple with the question, “Improvement, but for whom?” Today, inhabitants of America’s port cities will find many of these themes all-too familiar: the presence of corporate development along shorelines; the role of celebrated architects and planners in the design and construction of expensive waterfront buildings; the ousting of long-term residents and businesses in the face of high rents or shifting clientele; and the emergence of a socially invisible, but economically essential, service-sector workforce who provide the necessary labor to keep these ventures afloat. “Spirit of Improvement” seeks to uncover the complex historical roots of America’s fascination with waterfront development—a phenomenon that stretches back to the improvement initiatives of the early republic, when merchant-entrepreneurs began to truly exploit infrastructure’s economic potential. In the early nineteenth century, capitalist development served the interests of merchants and businessmen involved international trade and commerce. Today, we look to the future of our urban waterfronts and confront the historical foundations on which these physical and social structures stand.

Urban violence represents one of the greatest development challenges for Latin American countries. During the past two decades, Mexico has witnessed an alarming increase of violence levels heavily associated with homicides and crimes related to drug trafficking. The way this extreme violence problem has been framed has had implications regarding the focus of studies which, from a variety of disciplines, are concerned in understanding the socio-economic causes, the regional security, and governance consequences as well as the national, sub-national and local government policy responses to this phenomenon. In this context, the multifaceted ways in which daily violence manifests in the urban space have been less studied. Aiming to shed light on how varied types of violence and insecurity are experienced at the local level, this research adapts an ecological framework in an attempt to disentangle the impact that urban planning has on the perceptions that citizens living in inner cities and peripheral settlements have of their own urban space, and what the implications for future violence reduction policies may be. Through a comparative study of two Mexican cities, and using participatory methods including transect walks, auto-photography and risk mapping assessments, the research explores the perceptions of violence and insecurity and their link to urban space, highlighting the role that physical and spatial interventions have played. A main finding of the research is that, while these interventions are seen by policy makers and city planners as an answer to violence, failing to include residents' perceptions of violence and insecurity in the design and implementation of these responses limits their effectiveness and outcomes. Moreover, implementation of generic socio-spatial solutions in Mexican cities tends to obscure the real causes of violence, and in some cases, worsens residents' feelings of insecurity. In this sense, urban planning seems to have exacerbated the experiences and manifestations of insecurity and violence.

Thesis (M.Arch.A.S.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Architecture, 1980. / MICROFICHE COPY AVAILABLE IN ARCHIVES AND ROTCH. / Bibliography: leaves 122-126. / by Pierre Louis Raynaud. / M.Arch.A.S.