Food access has become a popular area of concern in both urban planning and public health as both fields are directing increasing attention to the role that uneven neighbourhood food environments play in diet practices and health outcomes. This research investigates two food access expansion projects underway in New York City by looking at how they are implemented in the neighbourhood of Brownsville in the borough of Brooklyn. One, the Brownsville Youthmarket, run by the city-wide nonprofit GrowNYC, is a farmers' market intervention that increases access to fresh fruit and vegetables by hiring neighbourhood youth to sell regional produce. The second, Shop Healthy, is an initiative run by the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene (and its District Public Health Offices). It encourages bodega owners to stock healthier items in their stores, including fruits and vegetables. By drawing on concepts of environmental justice and biopower, this research shows how these programs are characterized by competing motivations and strategies. While the stated rationale for these food access programs is to improve food environments by bringing more healthy items into underserved neighbourhoods, they rely upon nutrition education and cooking skills programs that indicate that the underlying problem is a lack of knowledge about what food is healthy and how to prepare it. This gap between motivations and strategies reveals a great distance between city-level actors and the residents of the neighbourhoods that they aim to help. Program designers fail to understand the true barriers to healthy eating in predominantly poor and minority communities and thus intervene with programs that do little to meaningfully change the food environment in ways that address residents' needs.

Road traffic crashes are a leading cause of death and injury worldwide and in the US. In New York City, there are about 60,000 annual traffic casualties, including over 200 deaths. Area-wide traffic calming can improve traffic safety, pedestrian and cyclist comfort, and quality of life in neighborhoods (Elvik, 2009). This dissertation examines an area-wide traffic calming program, New York City’s “Neighborhood Slow Zones” (NSZs), in terms of environmental justice, traffic safety, and street design. The dissertation consists of three distinct but interrelated empirical studies. The first one asks if the NSZ program furthers environmental justice in New York City. It examines the locations of the 28 zones in terms of minority and low-income areas, as well as the inclusion of these populations in the process that led to the siting of the zones. This chapter concludes that the NSZ program improves environmental justice in New York City, both because the zones are equitably distributed in poor and minority areas, and because the planning process that led to the siting of the zones was inclusive of these populations. The second study examines the effectiveness of the zones at reducing traffic casualties. This analysis uses a quasi-experimental, before and after research design, with a treatment group (the Neighborhood Slow Zones) and a comparison group (similar zones that did not receive the treatment). The analysis does not detect statistically significant reductions in traffic casualties associated with the NSZs. The final empirical uses a policy transfer approach to compare street design in New York City’s 20-mph zones to similar zones in London. London’s “Slow Zones” were found to be effective at preventing traffic casualties (Grundy et al., 2009), and were the inspiration for New York’s Neighborhood Slow Zones. This study analyzes the traffic calming devices transferred from the zones in London to those in New York. While street designs in London’s 20-mph zones included a robust implementation of traffic calming devices, New York’s NSZs had a much more skeletal implementation of these devices. This suggests that the nature of the transfer of street design from London to New York City contributed to the disappointing results of 20-mph zones in the latter city. Despite these findings, I argue that the NSZ program has had partial success.

This project examines urban renewal efforts in Eisenhüttenstadt, a German city on the border between Germany and Poland founded in 1950 as a socialist utopian project. Originally called Stalinstadt, Eisenhüttenstadt was planned as a steel manufacturing hub and worker’s paradise. Its products would enable the rise of cities across the Eastern Bloc and its design, focused on the needs of young families, would be a model of humane urban living. Under East German rule the city thrived. Then, in 1991, came German reunification. Today Eisenhüttenstadt suffers from urban blight, massive unemployment, and depopulation. At the same time, state and private actors are working together to revitalize Eisenhüttenstadt, imprinting on the city a new utopianism as they transform it into a new urban paradigm: an environmentally sustainable city that caters to an aging and shrinking population.  My research uses ethnographic, archival, and visual methods to examine these efforts, and asks how new urban futures can be imagined in deindustrializing cities when traditional engines of growth disappear. I observe how architects and municipal officials draw on Eisenhüttenstadt’s legacy of socialist ethics in urban planning—prioritizing an attention to community cohesion, population density, and the economical use of resources both natural and financial—as they address contemporary crises: unemployment and urban emptiness, rising energy costs, an aging population, and an influx of Syrian refugees. My two primary theoretical interests are, broadly, temporality and materiality. I ask how the 20th century’s industrial and material legacies are being reimagined and redeveloped, what logics stand behind those changes, and how those logics—and legacies—are understood by the people who encounter them. I ask how people use their interactions with the built environment to situate themselves in history, as well as how people’s perception of the past influences their imagination of urban futures. And I ask how, as federal mandates are interpreted at the local level, the socialist ethics which influenced Eisenhüttenstadt’s officials reemerge in the present day. I do so over the course of five chapters. Chapter One examines how socialist urban planning was defined in East Germany and how residents of Eisenhüttenstadt experienced the transition from socialism to capitalism. Chapter Two focuses on one element of the urban landscape called the Wohnkomplex and how it is being rebuilt, according to socialist logics, to accommodate the needs of the elderly. Chapter Three examines street names, and how history comes to be experienced or erased in the urban landscape. Chapter Four examines street lamps, whose partial privatization in 2015 set off robust debate about the failure of local government to prioritize citizens’ well-being over financial gain. Chapter Five focuses on the refugee housing crisis and how residents and municipal officials in Eisenhüttenstadt responded to the unexpected need to house thousands of new residents

Thesis (M.C.P.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Urban Studies and Planning, 1982. / MICROFICHE COPY AVAILABLE IN ARCHIVES AND ROTCH / Thesis (M.S.)--M.I.T., Dept. of Architecture, 1982. / Bibliography: leaves 78-80. / by Pui Leng Woo. / M.C.P.

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.

Thesis. 1976. M.C.P.--Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Dept. of Urban Studies and Planning. / Microfiche copy available in Archives and Rotch. / Bibliography: leaves 113-114. / M.C.P.

La pobreza urbana es uno de los factores de la ciudad de Buenos Aires más complejos para estudiar. A menudo desestimada meramente como epifenómeno del desarrollo desigual del capitalismo, la pobreza urbana ha jugado, por el contrario, un rol clave en la conformación tanto del paisaje físico como del discurso cultural argentino a lo largo del siglo XX. La definición de la pobreza es quizás el principal problema para quien se enfrenta a su estudio. Existen, por un lado, aproximaciones desde la sociología, la economía y la teoría política. Pero, por otro, también hay una percepción cultural, influenciada por prejuicios, estereotipos, figuras y sentidos. Como imagen y relato, la pobreza tiene mucho peso en moldear nuestra comprensión de la ciudad. Esto es especialmente fuerte en el caso de la ciudad de Buenos Aires. Visiones de Buenos Aires encara esta cuestión, centrándose en las maneras en que los estratos más bajos de las clases populares —cirujas, inmigrantes, villeros y cartoneros— han sido integrados en diferentes prácticas artísticas, desde la literatura hasta el cine, la fotografía y las artes plásticas. Al analizar de cerca varias fuentes primarias, esta tesis examina las imágenes de la pobreza como un elemento de la ciudad en que se descubren las tensiones que afianzan la modernización urbana. Aunque numerosos estudios críticos sobre las ciudades latinoamericanas han reconocido la importancia del planeamiento urbano para analizar la historia cultural, esta investigación contribuye a esta discusión al volver a imaginar el peso cultural de la pobreza para comprender el imaginario de Buenos Aires y su desarrollo. Visiones de Buenos Aires cuestiona las interpretaciones generalmente jerárquicas del planeamiento urbano, señalando, en línea con los trabajos de Henri Lefebvre, Paola Berenstein Jacques y Nestor García Canclini, la necesidad de confrontar los planes oficiales de transformación urbana con las formas en que la cultura y el arte recogieron la presencia de la pobreza en la ciudad. Esta tesis examina la historia de la Buenos Aires del siglo XX a través de la descripción detallada de cuatro momentos fundamentales de su construcción material. En el primer capítulo describo la representación de los conventillos y el asentamiento informal del Barrio de las Ranas en los diarios de viaje de Enrique Gómez Carrillo y Jules Huret y en las fotografías de Harry Olds. Al considerar este corpus en el contexto del modelo que el Estado proyecta para la Buenos Aires asociada con el Centenario de 1910, demuestro cómo la representación de la pobreza y el planeamiento urbano estaban relacionados: ambos conformaron una manera particular de ver la ciudad como una escenografía. En el siguiente capítulo examino los modos en que el pueblo aparece en el cine de los años cincuenta. En específico contrasto estos retratos cinematográficos con el modelo urbano peronista dirigido a rediseñar Buenos Aires como ciudad obrera. Aquí planteo que la interpretación cultural de la pobreza y el planeamiento estatal colaboraron en crear una visión mítica de la ciudad. En el tercer capítulo me concentro en los años sesenta para analizar cómo los planes estatales para erradicar la pobreza constituyeron las premisas para fomentar el interés de la cultura en las villas miseria. Artistas distintos como Fernando Birri, Antonio Berni y Bernardo Verbitsky se preocuparon por construir una imagen de estos espacios de pobreza como territorios llenos de vida y objetos frente a la política estatal de vaciamiento. Esta narración termina con el modelo de la ciudad neoliberal que se produce en el enfrentamiento entre los planes de remodelación de Puerto Madero, los proyectos de urbanización de algunas villas miseria y la simultánea comodificación del pobre en la explosión de productos culturales que lo retratan. Al trazar las formas diferentes en que las clases bajas entraron, a través de las representaciones culturales, al imaginario urbano, esta tesis examina la historia, todavía no contada, del rol cambiante que la pobreza y las villas miseria ejercieron en las principales imágenes que se produjeron de la Buenos Aires del siglo XX.

This dissertation provides three examples of how considering interactions across transport modes as well as land use systems is important for addressing the biggest challenges in sustainable development, particularly climate change and growing inequality. In the first essay, I explore path dependency in urban form for U.S. cities built around rail transit prior to the automobile. I find that these cities continue to be denser and have lower per capita transportation emissions than cities that came of age after the automobile. I estimate the size of the effect and how long it lasts. The built environment is durable, and urban infrastructure is costly to alter post-construction, so land use and transport decisions made early in a city’s history can have a lasting environmental impact. The second essay exploits a natural experiment to quantify the impact of bikesharing on bus transit ridership in New York City. This work demonstrates one way in which shared modes impact pre-existing public transit systems, which is particularly important as these systems are expanding and operating outside of traditional public agencies. The way these modes work together determines the overall quality of the transport network. The third essay discusses the concept of accessibility and how accessibility measures can be used in the case of Nairobi to explore the dynamics of social exclusion across modes, residential location, and income. This dissertation provides three examples of how sustainability goals may fall short if transportation is not viewed as a multimodal system that interacts with and shapes urban form.

Thesis (M.Arch.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Architecture, 1982. / MICROFICHE COPY AVAILABLE IN ARCHIVES AND ROTCH. / Bibliography: p. 216-224. / This thesis attempts to present the structure of Japanese towns as the connection between physical amenity and use, and the meaning of spatial structure as it is formed and textured by the people who inhabit it. This is organized into four sections, the first, a discussion of Japanese culture and worldview as it relates to a sense of space. This section develops a framework and conceptual model for the later parts: a presentation of six towns in different parts of Japan; an analysis of these places as town, house, and street as they rela·te to this conceptual/ cultural model; and, the development of a language of form and structure of one of these towns through a series of design explorations. / by Patricia A. Seitz. / M.Arch.

Thesis (M. Arch. A.S.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Architecture, 1972. / Rotch copy is a photocopy, 22 x 28. / Title as it appeared in M.I.T. Graduate List, June 1972: Alternative policy for low-income housing in Tunisia. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 213-215). / by Wassim Ben Mahmoud. / M.Arch.A.S.