<p> The transspecies city concept was developed in opposition to traditional anthropocentric urban policies. This research seeks to determine whether or not perceptions of survey participants taken from the St. Louis area are compatible with the goals of the transspecies city, which focus on integration of animals into human communities rather than their removal. The transspecies city also indicates a need for moral concern for animals in human actions which affect them. </p><p> Participant responses were classified into perception categories. These perceptions were then analyzed and discussed to determine their compatibility with the transspecies city, concluding that humanistic and moralistic perceptions are most compatible. Negativistic, naturalistic, and ecologistic perceptions all are found to have some incompatibilities with the transspecies city. In spite of these incompatibilities, this research concludes by examining the ways these perceptions could be addressed, or ways in which the transspecies city could modify itself to have a better chance at actualization.</p>

<p> Since China's shift to market socialism, many marginalized by this process work as informal street vendors where they reappropriate public space in order to survive&mdash;a practice at odds with urban authorities' modernizing agenda. In relation to these competing logics concerning public space's use value versus its exchange value, this dissertation examines the practices, experiences, and agency of informal street vendors working in Sanjingwuwei, an ordinary, yet rapidly gentrifying, neighborhood of Nanchang, capital and largest city of southeastern China's Jiangxi Province. After describing the growth of an informal economy in modern China and providing a history of street vending, I describe the everyday practices of vendors and their reappropriation of public space in Nanchang and the Sanjingwuwei neighborhood. I then provide the socio-demographic details of Sanjingwuwei&rsquo;s vendors and use their voices to demonstrate how city image protection, a burgeoning informal sector, and the globalization of urban space bring challenges to their already precarious work in the streets. The dissertation concludes by linking the practices and agency of Nanchang&rsquo;s vendors into a theoretical discussion concerning the agency of informal street workers. Despite daily attempts by the local state to remove them, this study shows how Nanchang's street vendors, continue to actively engaging in alternative forms of urban space-making through reappropriating of public space. Therefore, this dissertation shows how vendors challenge the city as a system by downscaling, slowing down, decommodifying, and ultimately, deglobalizing urban space to neighborhood-level through their reappropriation of public space.</p><p>

<p> The competition for resources between increasingly commodified pets (especially dogs) and human needs has often been qualitatively studied as an aspect of gentrification. This research is a quantitative, GIS-based case study that tests the hypothesis that there are spatially correlated effects on the urban environment where populations owning highly commodified pets cluster. The research began by identifying and mapping populations favorable for possessing commodified pets in the City of Chicago and continued with mapping the distributions of pet-centric and other specific businesses and amenities. The study examined the relationships between the spatial distributions of probable commodified pet owners, various businesses, and amenities. The results indicate commodified pet ownership does affect the urban landscape and may be indicative of a diversion of resources from established public facilities and amenities to those that are dependent on pet ownership. This is a serious issue to examine, especially in times of tighter municipal budgets for publicly funded facilities.</p>

This dissertation is a geographical analysis of the Dutch Green Urbanism planning paradigm and its origin, evolution and spatial implementation in Almere New City, the most recently planned and built city in the Netherlands. This morphological study of planned development examines the essence of the Dutch metropolitan planning process in the latter half of the twentieth century and its influence on Almere's conceptual development that began in the late 1960s and actual spatial development that began in 1975. This study is set in the context of both international and national efforts to create “green urbanism”—a revised approach to urban planning that captures both the central and environmental dimensions of a more ecological and aesthetic planning process that emphasizes the important role of cities and positive urbanism in shaping more sustainable places, communities, and lifestyles. “Green Urbanism” is a term that was first used by Timothy Beatley (2000), and it builds upon a series of approaches to urban planning. This concept is applied throughout this dissertation and encapsulated in my urban morphological analysis of planned development and urban form in Almere New City, the Netherlands.