ABSTRACT Specific Plans: An Implementation Tool for Downtown Revitalization A Specific Plan Proposal for Downtown Delano, California Emily Suzanne Henderson This study builds off the assumption that downtowns are socially and economically important to cities and the people who live, work, and visit them. For these reasons, many suffering downtowns are pursuing revitalization strategies. The strategies summarized in this paper represent mainstream revitalization techniques currently practiced by cities, planners, and developers. The strategies and techniques presented in this paper are supported by two case study specific plans. The case studies serve as model specific plans that were able to successfully utilize multiple of the proposed revitalization strategies. This paper demonstrates the potential for specific plans to be used as an implementation tool for downtown revitalization. These comprehensive documents are able to combine multiple regulatory processes in order to achieve the overarching goals of a city’s general plan and the detailed community goals generated through public outreach and participation. The case studies exhibit how cities have been able to complete revitalization projects in their downtowns through the use of specific plans. The proposed strategies and case study findings were used in the creation of a Specific Plan Proposal for Downtown Delano, California. In early 2008 the City of Delano underwent a community participation planning process to improve their downtown. The resulting Downtown Delano Concept Plan urged the City of Delano and the Community Development Department to produce a Downtown Specific Plan as soon as possible. The Downtown Delano Specific Plan Proposal contains a summary of the Concept Plan’s findings and recommendations. The plan begins with a vision statement and a set of goals created from community input received during public meetings. The plan includes proposed land uses for the downtown project area. A circulation concept is presented for the major downtown streets and thoroughfares. Form Based Codes include design guidelines for new development and redevelopment projects. The proposal concludes with project cost estimates and suggested financing mechanisms. The attached Downtown Delano Specific Plan Proposal is a guide for the future completion of a Specific Plan for Downtown Delano.

Lack of access to information on the cost and timeframe for the permitting and interconnection of distributed renewable energy generation facilities may hinder renewable energy capacity development. This issue is examined within the specific context of solar photovoltaic systems developed for participation in the Feed-in Tariff (FIT) program hosted by the Marin Energy Authority (MEA). A guide on the permitting and interconnection of solar PV generators for participation in the program was produced for the host agency. This guide seeks to assist property owners and solar developers in overcoming existing informational challenges. By providing an overview of the procedural requirements and process, as well as reference tools that highlights helpful resources and documents, the guide provides readers with an introductory tool for overcoming existing non-market barriers to participation in the MEA FIT program. In addition, a Recommendations Report has also been produced to provide the MEA with a discussion of existing procedural challenges faced by program participants. This report, which details the issues identified by those stakeholders that participated in the development of the guide, concludes with a series of recommended actions that the MEA may take to enhance the ability of potential FIT participants to accurately estimate and plan for the costs and timeframes associated with permitting a solar PV facility.

This research investigates the demographic and local government permit characteristics of communities with high levels of solar adoption in the San Diego Region. Utilizing a statistical model, this research illustrates which communities have been able to benefit from the current solar incentive programs in a robust market with an abundant solar resource. In San Diego, zip codes with large proportions of people over 65 have the highest correlation with high levels of residential solar adoption. This potentially illustrates that the life changes associated with retiring, including accumulated wealth, stable homeownership, and a fixed income, make residential solar systems accessible and appealing. Moving forward solar policy should expand to better facilitate installations for renters, sharing between neighbors, and clear pathways to retrofit older homes.

The urban waterfront areas of the United States have grown increasingly neglected and derelict due to changes in traditional industrial uses and their physical severance from the downtown core. A revived interest in urban living has brought downtown property values up, including waterfront areas, and has jump-started a movement towards waterfront revitalization. In an effort to understand the specific characteristics that make some waterfront revitalization projects more sustainable over time than others, this paper employed a case study approach. Baltimore’s Inner Harbor, San Francisco, and Seattle’s Central Waterfront were selected for analysis based on three specific perspectives: recreation; development; and tourism. Using criteria determined from the literature review in conjunction with key player interviews and documentary evidence, the three case study waterfronts were analyzed for their ability to sustain revitalization. The results indicate that waterfronts must provide a balance and mix of uses, assimilate with the surrounding city, provide connections between attractions and with the city and region, continuously reinvent themselves, provide attractions that draw both locals and tourists, and have a clear identity. These findings, while quite broad, are intended to provide a foundation that will be relevant to any city undertaking new waterfront revitalization projects.

Over the past twenty years bicycle use as a mode of transportation has grown considerably in the United States. Other studies have examined the individual bicyclist’s risk in proportion to the growth in cycling across cities, a phenomenon referred to as ‘safety in numbers.’ This study expands from that research and examines the effect of cyclists on road safety for all road users. The study examines the roles of bicycle modal split, a city wide analysis, and bicycle infrastructure, a site based analysis, in road safety outcomes. For the city based analysis, twenty years of crash data in 12 California cities were analyzed over a 20 year period. This study primarily used census data and State wide Integrated Traffic Records System (SWITRS) data. This study concludes that as bicycle modal split increases in a city, the traffic fatalities tend to decrease and the relationship is an exponential function. The site based analysis focuses on the effects of installing a bicycle lane on a street and examined its effect on injury crashes. 20 sites in San Francisco, CA that had bike lanes installed on them were compared to 25 control group sites, also in San Francisco, that did not have any bike lanes or other significant changes. An Empirical Bayes method of analysis was done to test its effects and determined that the effects were statistically significant.

Climate migration has been identified as an urgent issue that will likely add greater complexity to existing climate change planning efforts (Black, 2011; Ahsan, 2011). Existing climate migration literature has primarily focused on international migration and the Global South, offering limited applicability to internal conditions in developed countries due to the issue’s high context dependency (Hoffman, 2020). Local and municipal planners have a responsibility to pursue evidence-based climate adaptation strategies (Mitchell, 2020). Yet, planners lack reliable data to forecast potential changes to regional migration based on repeated exposure to climate stressors. To date, research has been primarily qualitative in nature, leaving a need for quantitative, spatial studies to detect larger patterns in comparison to survey and interview-based findings (Piguet et al., 2018). Within developed countries, research that integrates environmental factors into typical migration estimation methods used by community development and economic planners is needed to determine the extent that rapid environment change may alter existing migration trends. In beginning to address this gap, this study tests the relationship between wildfire displacement events (i.e. evacuation events) and household out-migration rates amid a host of competing socioeconomic factors for all western US counties during years 2016-2019. Wildfire displacement data from the Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre (IDMC) is combined with out-migration estimates from the IRS SOI program in a times series, then joined to cross-sectional census data on county demographics to form a panel dataset for investigation. Modeling results show an expected 1.5% decrease in household out-migration rates for county-years experiencing repeated wildfire displacement events in comparison to non-treatment county-years. These results suggest a potential lowering of mobility capacity or desire within impacted communities for areas experiencing repeated wildfire. Whether this is linked to impacts on economic resources, i.e. exaggeration of underlying vulnerabilities, or suppressed desire to move is unclear. Direct implications for planners depend on greater understanding of causality. The study suggests that climate-related wildfire migration in the US warrants continued research, especially with focus on equity implications of unequal access to migration as a method of climate adaptation.

Comprehensive planning can help communities engage in purposeful and sustainable land use development. Previous research has indicated that Indian reservations in the United States often face unique roadblocks to these planning efforts: checkerboard patterns of tribal and nontribal ownership, and the presence of both tribal and local governments exercising land use authority within the same shared space. These roadblocks can lead to uncooperative, uncoordinated, or unsustainable development. Despite these noted problems, there remains an important gap in the current literature regarding solutions to overcome these roadblocks. The purpose of this study was to address that gap. Guided by Forester's critical planning theory to critically examine the social and historical roots of planning within a particular community, this qualitative case study examined government records and conducted 18 interviews of tribal and local government officials. Data analysis consisted of coding data to reveal emergent themes relating to cooperative land use planning in the future. These themes included: (a) approaching planning with a regional philosophy in mind, (b) strengthening interpersonal relationships, (c) finding ways to fairly compensate each other for government services, (d) continuing to acknowledge each government's ability to govern within this shared space, and (e) refraining from asserting authority over a neighboring government. This research is an important contribution to the existing literature and enhances social change initiatives by providing guidance for tribal and local government officials to increase cooperative land use planning.

How does transportation shape the cities we live in? This paper takes a close look at the practice of transit-oriented development to assess its implications for the future of urban areas. Through the design of a hypothetical light rail station in the suburb of Redmond, WA, this paper demonstrates how targeting sustainable development around transit has the potential to influence entire towns to “go green,” and proposes that, moving forward, cities be designed to maximize mobility, livability, and sustainability.

Through my Creative Non-Fiction Writing thesis, I have attempted to challenge the boundaries of the genre, after D’Agata and the works of other contemporary creative non-fiction writers. However, I have also challenged the boundaries of our own frame for reality that defines the human experience. As I began writing this, I asked myself: can we write about spaces or do we write spaces ourselves, interlacing the city into an imagined space? I didn't realize that I had forgotten the most important question of all: do spaces write us? These stories are predominantly about my search for “authentic” space, for the “real” city—and I have tried to challenge the idea of authenticity through the style of my writing, in addition to the narratives, lyric essays, and arguments in my thesis. I’ve lived in six cities over the past five years, and yet, each time, in the end, I return to Munich. There is something about the urban fabric there, a tear I can sense, or perhaps it is inside of me, waiting to be filled. And somewhere along the way, I started to have this idea that I could write about this city, collecting the pieces of my experiences. I was left with a collage of moments, moments of a city that was mine—not knowing that the city is bigger than any of us, a character that cannot be captured by any means. Not knowing the impact the city might have on me.

The German government is experiencing difficulties housing and assimilating Syrian refugees in its borders. Erecting temporary shelters on location is one way to deal with the current crises. This thesis attempts to use Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) to determine the optimum combination of materials and construction methods to be used in the shelter’s walls in order to improve the living conditions of the refugees and to ensure that the cost is acceptable to the German government. This thesis compares six existing wall panel products from China, which have the lowest cost on the worldwide market. The R-value, strength, price, weight, durability, ease of assembly, assembly time, maintenance costs, comfort, resale value, and appearance were evaluated. Assumptions were made on what the German government would require and on standard building practices in Europe and America. The analysis indicates that the steel frame house from YONGYANG Steel best satisfies the needs in this situation. This thesis produced an AHP template, which is flexible. This model that was developed for the German scenario can be effectively applied to differing emergent situations in other parts of the world.