Making up one quarter of the current United States population, some 80 million Generation Y-ers are changing the ways in which we live, work and play. Dubbed “Millennials” this population is comprised of those individuals born between 1980 and 2000. This generation is the first to have been raised with cell phones, the internet, and reality television. The “Selfie” or “Me Generation” is snubbed for narcissism and an instant gratification attitude. Yet on the whole Millennials have progressive values, are well educated, are conscious of their health and are optimistic about the future despite coming of age during the Great Recession. Millennials are also the most diverse, most informed and most well connected generation the United States has ever seen.They are supporters of the locavore movement and conscious of the environment. Their habits and tastes - constant Facebook status updates and Instagram posts - are much more communal in nature than narcissistic, the highest value of which is not “self-promotion, but it’s opposite, empathy -- an open-minded and hearted connection to others.” In this way Millennials are using social media and technology to build community in a new way - virtually. Before there was Facebook or Instagram, people found community in “third places” - social places independent of work or home in which to fraternize and build relationships. In his book, The Great Good Place, Ray Oldenburg examines the difference between the sociological functions of first place (the home), second place (the workplace) and third place. Third place can be described as the social place, a place independent of the home and workplace in which to fraternize and build community. Oldenburg argued that these places are in general decline, and more recent articles have noted that those brick and mortar third places are now being “hollowed out” by “cyber nomads”, those people in coffee shops and bookstores listening to headphones, typing away on a computer or talking on the phone. James Katz of Rutgers argues that these “physically inhabited by psychologically evacuated” places leave people feeling “more isolated than they would if the cafe were empty.” How do designers create spaces that support Millennials empathetic desire connection, that encourage interaction and that overcome the obstacle of becoming "psychologically evacuated" places?

The project suggests an alternative means for living in Qatar. It proposes the development of a transient, floating community a man-made, transitory archipelago of floating housing units located at the ‘soon to be abandoned’ docks a short distance from the Museum of Islamic Art and the Doha Corniche. The design, through a variety of bespoke dwelling options, can provide both more and less nomadic housing to accommodate a variety of dif- ferent lifestyles and social units. Clustered around three permanent islands (containing a cultural/activity center, three adaptable ‘work-unit’ towers, and a park/commercial area), the design provides a wide set of adaptive layout patterns within which the mobile units can be arrayed. Directly plugged into the city, the community functions as a floating appendix to downtown Doha: an adaptable and flexible city-supplement that can expand or contract ac- cording to need, whether to aid in the accommodation of guests for various large-scale sporting or other events, or merely to provide an alternative locale for long or short stay visitors to Doha alike.

The St. Charles streetcar is an important transit line in the city of New Orleans, with about 65,000 people living within a ½ mile walking distance from it. However, the line experiences a very high streetcar/automobile crash rate due in large part to the large number of grade vehicle crossings over the tracks that lack signalization. Through traffic modeling, the closure of many of these vehicle crossings and the diversion of automotive traffic to the remaining, signalized crossings is analyzed to determine traffic impacts on street network. The result is a modest increase in traffic, about 7-8%, at the remaining signalized intersections.

As cities worldwide plan for increasing urbanization levels, new challenges in mobility will arise. Any approach taken to address these new issues will need to consider how to move more people with declining resources, thus the need for a sustainable solution arises. This thesis examines the growing trend of cities creating public bicycle systems as a means to add sustainability to a transportation system and identifies what are the criteria and indicators of a sustainable public bicycle. The criteria and indicators are used to examine data collection techniques of three Public Bicycle Systems in the United States: Capital Bikeshare in Washington, D.C., Nice Ride in Minneapolis, Minnesota and Denver B-Cycle in Denver, Colorado.

Land use grain is a commonly-used measure of the mixture of land uses in the urban environment in transportation planning and public health, but there is no standard measurement practice in place. This thesis examines the meaning and common measurements of land use grain in these subfields. The entropy-based equation, the jobs-to-housing ratio, and the Herfindahl-Hirschman Index (HHI) are among the most common measures of land use grain, but results from these metrics differ depending upon how researchers choose a sample area and upon how land use categories are defined. All three metrics are performed, in a single context with varying assumptions, using the neighborhoods of Roxbury and Dorchester in Boston, MA. The entropy-based equation was deemed the most appropriate measure in a general context, with the HHI and the jobs-to-housing ratio potentially appropriate in specific contexts.

This research examines the feasibility of a gasoline and diesel consumer subsidy phase-out in Venezuela from a transportation planning perspective. It surveys the literature and discusses case studies from Iran, Brazil, and Bolivia in order to identify the lessons that Venezuela can learn from these countries’ successes and mistakes. It examines how strengthening and investing in the public transportation system can be used as a means to gain public support for the reform. I discuss the current political, social, and economic conditions that make a fossil-fuel subsidy reform difficult, and offer suggestions from a transportation planner’s perspective on how the transition can be made as smoothly as possible. Finally, I explore the opportunities that present themselves to transportation planners in shaping the country’s future approach toward transportation.

Beginning with the development of Seaside (Walton County, FL), Kentlands (Gaithersburg, MD), and Laguna West (Elk Grove, CA), New Urbanist developments have set aside parcels for civic structures, many of which now house congregations. Using interviews with developers, planners, and church officials, this thesis examines the rationale behind including congregations within New Urbanist developments in four southeastern states (Alabama, Georgia, North Carolina, and South Carolina). The expectations of New Urbanist developers largely mirror those found within key New Urbanist texts: congregational structures help create a legible landscape through typological architecture and conspicuous siting while providing space for public gathering. The thesis ultimately argues that New Urbanism requires a more robust sociological model, one which captures the influence of institutions on forms of social interaction. Moreover, such a model might provide insight into the ways in which developers and congregations might collaborate to fulfill the social goals of New Urbanism.

Housing requisition (Fangwu Zhengshou) is defined as the power to take residents’ property for public use by the state. Between 1995 and 2010, one million residential units were relocated from the inner city of Shanghai to the outskirts of the city or suburban counties. Historically, residents have been excluded stakeholders in large-scale urban renewal in post-reform China. Starting in 2011, Shanghai requires residents to vote on property takings for inner-city renewal. In March 2013, residents voted down the Block 59 project in the North Bund area in Shanghai, which marks the first housing requisition project for inner-city redevelopment rejected by residents in Shanghai. This research illustrates how citizen participation frames or structures the relocation decision-making and whether participation matters. This dissertation investigates four lines of inquiry: 1) How are housing requisition regulations and negotiations shaped at the district level in Shanghai? 2) What roles do the state and local authorities play, and how is this associated with urban redevelopment regimes under neoliberal governance? 3) Do the more “participatory” approaches to housing requisition for urban redevelopment address power relations and conflicts among local groups in different districts? If so, how? 4) What strategies do residents use to negotiate inner-city redevelopment? I utilize qualitative methods to recognize the complexities of citizen participation in urban renewal in Shanghai, and to develop an understanding of the dynamics of citizen participation and governance structures. The 2011 regulations provide a more transparent, open and interactive process for community residents directly affected by housing requisition projects. However, the term “public interest” is ambiguously defined under the 2011 regulations. Findings suggest that state-led participation in housing requisition is a tool for the government authorities to facilitate economic growth through requisition and strengthen the legitimacy for requisition among the relocated residents. The shift of compensation from counting the number of people in a household to considering the size and value of the apartment illustrates the shift from a social welfare approach to a market approach. The participation schemes promote fairness in a certain way that people who hold out for more compensation lose the power.

Researched during the summer of 2006 in a collaborative effort between Carnegie Mellon University's Urban Lab and East Liberty Development, Inc. this thesis seeks to develop a model for evaluating the impact of progressive urban design strategies in an existing community by measuring the costs and potential returns of public investment in progressive urban infrastructure. Using the case study of East Liberty as a laboratory, this study identifies clear baseline assumptions for the costs of urban infrastructure, as well as estimated public returns based on private investment leveraged and new residential and commercial tax revenue streams. Aimed at providing urban designers a facilitation tool in arguing for public investment in progressive urban infrastructure that reconnects fragmented com m unities, this study suggests that clear financial and com m unity returns are "hidden" in urban infrastructure investment.

This dissertation charts the contested political and cultural meaning of urbanization in the emerging plantation societies of Virginia and Maryland. Scholars have long asserted that Chesapeake planters' desire for lucre led them to patent huge tracts of land, disperse across the landscape, and completely dismiss urban development. However, through 17 pieces of legislation, colonists, governors, and London administrators actually encouraged towns in the Chesapeake through the seventeenth century. Despite the environmental and agricultural constraints of tidewater tobacco, both colonies wrestled with a perceived need for towns, which consistently appeared to represent the best means to engineer the region's political economy and local social order. Shifting demographics, a changing labour system, religious conflict, and increasing imperial pressure for control created an atmosphere in which the promise of urbanization could be a powerful tool for various Atlantic actors seeking to shape the emerging plantation system to their purposes. They shared a desire to urbanize the region, but quarrelled because they had contradictory definitions of precisely what a town was, how it should function, and how it should be governed. These divergent visions sprang from and contributed to a contemporaneous European contest between ancient boroughs and modern cities, civic humanism and the emerging nation-state. Towns in the Chesapeake only became widespread in the mid-eighteenth century, once the broader questions of political order in England's boroughs and its plantation empire had been resolved.;Piecing together a range of sources, this dissertation emphasizes the political, economic, and cultural context of the region's many urban plans---and especially the subtle differences in context between Virginia and Maryland---in order to demonstrate how and why town building remained a vital weapon in broader constitutional and commercial disputes. its transatlantic source base connects the Chesapeake's planners and proposals with the contests in English boroughs and Whitehall; spatial, ceremonial, sensory, and cultural analyses uncover the overlooked significance of urban foundations that remained only paper plats or collections of warehouses. The project highlights how proto-urban spaces fit within, or challenged, the emergence of a plantation landscape on the physical, cultural, and political levels.;Part 1 explores urban plans in seventeenth-century Virginia, their connections to English commercial and political rivalries during the Civil War, their role in provoking Bacon's Rebellion, and finally their part in a 1680s transatlantic contest over corporate government. Part 2 offers a parallel story of town-founding efforts in Maryland, exploring how Lord Baltimore's proprietary authority distinguished the complexion of urban development there. Part 3 addresses the entire Chesapeake region after 1689 (once both colonies had fallen under royal control), tracing Governor Francis Nicholson's efforts to reshape the definition of urbanity in the empire by founding Annapolis and Williamsburg and demonstrating how they pushed the concept of the imperial city to the centre of Atlantic political discourse. The fault lines of this debate had become so entrenched by the 1710s that it was abandoned entirely, and during the eighteenth century both colonies developed new kinds of plantation cities, freed from the bitter Atlantic disputes of the previous century.