Master of Arts / Department of Geography / Douglas G. Goodin / My thesis characterizes the temporal and spatial behavior of ozone and fine particulate matter in the Kansas City metropolitan area. I also investigate the capability of a synoptic weather typing scheme, the Spatial Synoptic Classification, to characterize and explain the behavior of ozone and fine particulate matter in the Kansas City area. Daily maximum ozone concentrations from nine active ozone monitoring stations and daily average particulate concentrations six active PM2.5 monitoring stations were compared to daily SSC weather type records from 2004-2010. Analysis of Variance (ANOVA) tests were conducted on the ozone and PM2.5 data to analyze temporal and spatial behavior. A non-parametric recursive partitioning technique was used to create a conditional inference tree-based regression model to analyze the association between the different SSC weather types and the selected pollutants. The ANOVA results showed significant seasonal trends with both pollutants. In general, ozone concentrations are typically lower in the spring and autumn months and higher during the summer months. PM2.5 concentrations were not as dependent on the season, however, they did tend to be higher in the late summer months and lower in the autumn months. The results also showed significant differences for both pollutants in average concentration depending on location. The ozone concentrations generally tended to be higher in the areas that are located downwind of Kansas City and lowest at the station located in the middle of the urban area. Fine particulates also seemed to be highest in the downwind portion of the urban area and lowest in the region upwind of the city. The conditional inference tree showed that higher concentrations of both pollutants are associated with tropical air masses and lower concentrations are associated with polar air masses.

Doctor of Philosophy / Department of Sociology, Anthropology, and Social Work / László J. Kulcsár / In the United States, many are critical of agricultural policies and economic incentives that support large-scale food production and the dominant actors in the mainstream agrifood system. Critics point out that at the same time agribusinesses and very large-scale farmers receive support, there are those in poverty who struggle to meet their food needs. Critics question what that relationship should be between civil society and the agrifood system. A variety of activities are addressing concerns of social injustices in the system. For example, participation is increasing in civic and urban agriculture. Civic agriculture is the interrelated activities of small-scale, socially and environmentally sound practices of food production and consumption that aim to increase community sustainability. Urban agriculture is food production in and near cities. By focusing on Kansas and the Kansas City metropolitan area, this dissertation addresses the following questions: How do the relations between civil society and the U.S. agrifood system impact the level of fairness in the system? To what extent are urban agricultural activities fostering fairness in the agrifood system, including access to fresh foods, civic engagement, and fulfilling careers, while also benefiting the environmental health of the city? Survey and interview data collected by a research team on agriculture in Kansas sets the context for my examination of urban agriculture in Kansas City’s urban core. In addition to participant observations and primary and secondary data analysis, I conducted 38 semi-structured interviews with growers (27), food advocates (4), community organizers (4), and governmental employees (3). In Kansas City, many of the activities and programs in place are building community, strengthening civil society, and promoting food justice for the poor and for people of color, for example, in food deserts, which are locales where people particularly face challenges in meeting their food needs. While some participants are more focused on their immediate communities and less so on overt widespread change, others feel a part of a social movement aiming to change the agrifood system. Diverse people from various social classes and races are increasingly becoming involved in growing food and food advocacy to expand fairness in the system.

Master of Landscape Architecture / Department of Landscape Architecture/Regional and Community Planning / Katherine Nesse / Many cities around the United States struggle with racially segregated neighborhoods (USA on Race 2013). The existence of isolated neighborhoods continues to reinforce racial distrust and promotes stereotypes. Some of the primary negative consequences associated with residential segregation include unequal job opportunities, greater health risk, high concentrations of poverty, educational constraints, and high building and lot vacancy rates. Residential segregation is an issue in Kansas City, Missouri along Troost Avenue. Troost Avenue is a stark racial dividing line within the city core. West of Troost Avenue, whites account for 88 percent of the population while blacks make up 93 percent of the population to the east (Troost Village Community Association 2013). The intent for this project is to create a resource to help establish and promote social interaction within the Troost Avenue neighborhoods by creating a purpose-driven community garden at the St. James Place apartment complex. The site’s unique location, positioned adjacent to other apartment complexes and subdivisions in the Citadel Neighborhood, had the potential to attract many types of users to the garden site. Through a process of literature review, surveys, interviews, and precedent study analysis, design goals were established. The design proposals for the St. James Place Community Garden focus on increasing site activity, establishing accessibility, and promoting originality.

Typescript (photocopy). / Digitized by Kansas State University Libraries

Call number: LD2668 .T4 1979 W37 / Master of Landscape Architecture

Master of Landscape Architecture / Department of Landscape Architecture and Regional & Community Planning / Jessica Canfield / Kansas City is in the midst of an urban renaissance, with a construction boom within the downtown core in excess of $4.5 billion over the past several years (CVA 2012). In 2010, Kansas City’s Greater Downtown Area Plan (GDAP) was implemented to guide the future transformation and development of the city. Despite its long-term vision and specific goals, including activating the public realm and fostering a strong urban community (City Planning et al. 2010), the GDAP fails to address opportunities for short-term strategies for interim ‘place-making.’ Yet, temporary gatherings are critical to fostering and sustaining a sense of ‘place.’ Kansas City currently has an emerging, vibrant urban culture, but it lacks amenities and spaces to support and celebrate spontaneous social activity. To address this issue, this project proposes a series of prototypical fluxspaces – small, temporary interventions activated by the presence of food trucks - throughout Kansas City’s downtown area. These new temporary acts exploit the potential of underutilized urban surfaces in the short term while re-invigorating social activity and celebrating an emerging urban culture in the long term. Sites are linked to existing mobile food vending hot spots and interventions are timed in conjunction with major Kansas City events and festivals; this grounds the proposed system in Kansas City’s population of temporary users. A detailed schedule ensures that Kansas City’s fluxspaces feature a dynamic, rotating population of food trucks, while fluctuating amenities promote diverse, exciting, and attractive temporary places. Kansas City’s new fluxspaces accommodate spontaneous social gatherings and celebrate their vital importance in fostering a vibrant urban environment. //fluxspace activates Kansas City’s latent urban surfaces, filling the gap between Kansas City’s immediate need for places of temporary gathering and the long-term goals inherent in the vision for Kansas City’s future.

Master of Regional and Community Planning / Department of Landscape Architecture and Regional and Community Planning / Jason Brody / This report acts as an independent study which contributes to the author’s participation in the 2012-2013 Kansas City Design Center planning and urban design studio. The project focuses on Independence Avenue in Kansas City, MO, the commercial and transportation backbone of seven neighborhoods, collectively known as Northeast Kansas City. Residents of these neighborhoods place great value in the “diversity” which exists in their neighborhoods, and have made it clear that this should be encouraged as a major part of the Northeast’s identity. This inspired the author to pursue a deeper understanding of the idea of diverse neighborhoods, how they fit into the “sustainable development” consciousness, and ultimately how one can plan and design for neighborhood diversity. The resulting study consisted of two levels of analysis. First, analyzing the mixture of age, sex, household type, race, and income level at the regional, city, and neighborhood scale, in order to understand what social diversity means in the Kansas City context, and define how diverse Northeast Kansas City neighborhoods are. The second was an analysis of conditions in the built environment. Using the Scarritt Renaissance and Lykins neighborhoods, and a common commercial district/social seam between the two as a case study, the author intended to analyze how successful or unsuccessful the typical Northeast neighborhood is at encouraging diverse populations. Ultimately, these analyses yielded two main conclusions. The first is that neighborhood diversity means drastically different things depending on how you define and measure the term. The second is the notion that social seam commercial districts are a unique spatial typology, which requires special design consideration, and can be most catalytic to setting the tone for future growth. Finally, the author concludes with the idea that one cannot necessarily plan or design for diverse neighborhoods, but they can do so in ways which empower diversity, and be conducive to things which support diverse neighborhoods. However, the built environment only makes up a portion of the things which influence neighborhood diversity, requiring an involved and invested community who values social diversity in their neighborhood.

Master of Landscape Architecture / Department of Landscape Architecture/Regional and Community Planning / Timothy Keane / Kansas City’s outdated sewer system is presently incapable of capturing and treating the increased runoff volumes in Turkey Creek Basin during rainstorm events. As a result, 2.66 billion gallons of untreated sewer system overflow is released annually into the Kansas River and nearby properties. In 2002, the Environmental Protection Agency issued a civil action requiring the City of Kansas City, Missouri, to take appropriate and necessary actions needed to prevent or minimize the discharge of untreated sewage. In response, the City of Kansas City adopted a comprehensive Overflow Control Plan intended to reduce sewer system overflow volumes in Turkey Creek Basin by 85% at a cost of approximately $244 million. Initially, the City of Kansas City seriously considered implementing stormwater best management practices (BMPs) in place of sewer system improvements. Stormwater BMPs infiltrate, filter, store, and evaporate stormwater runoff close to its source, preventing stormwater runoff from reaching the sewer system. Subsequently, many BMPs were eliminated from the Overflow Control Plan and replaced with conventional sewer system technologies because of performance concerns. However, the Overflow Control Plan acknowledged that BMPs located on private property would indirectly benefit Kansas City’s stormwater management strategy. Using geographic information system (GIS) analysis, suitability maps were generated for twelve different BMPs to determine suitable locations in Turkey Creek Basin for reducing stormwater runoff. Analysis concluded that the most effective strategy for sustainable stormwater management would be to locate BMPs at higher elevations within the watershed to prevent upland runoff from flooding sewer system pipes at lower elevations. Areas having the highest suitability are located primarily on residential land, implying that Kansas City could benefit most from encouraging its residents to equip their properties with site-appropriate BMPs. This can be achieved through educational initiatives, policy adoption, and homeowner incentives. Therefore, policies and incentives targeting Kansas City’s residents should be implemented to reduce sewer overflow volumes and prevent future costly improvements to Kansas City’s sewer system.

Master of Landscape Architecture / Department of Landscape Architecture and Regional & Community Planning / Jessica Canfield / The Kansas City downtown area is experiencing a population influx, which is projected to increase over the next few decades, requiring new residential areas and increased parkland in the downtown. The Kansas City West Bottoms, located between the downtowns of Kansas City Missouri and Kansas City Kansas, is an urban district plagued by vast tracts of underutilized land, poor connectivity, and vulnerability to flooding. To address the issues of the West Bottoms and the area’s need for new urban development, this project proposes the implementation of a new urban park that both supports and is supported by a new urban district. In order to transform the West Bottoms into a vibrant mixed-use community, the park and redevelopment will be phased in over a period of 33 years. Intermediate natures, landscapes that temporarily occupy and improve parts of the city undergoing transformation, will be used to preserve current open space, which will later transition into parkland as the district grows. Ultimately, West Bottoms 2048 will draw users and activity to the district while generating a lasting environmental and economic impact on the downtown area.

Doctor of Philosophy / Department of History / Sue Zschoche / In the last two decades, the study of postwar American cities has gone through a significant revisionist reinterpretation that overturned an older story of urban decay and decline beginning with the tumultuous 1960s and the notion that a conservative white suburban backlash politics against civil rights and liberalism appeared only after 1966. These new studies have shown that, in fact, American cities had been in jeopardy as far back as the 1940s and that white right-wing backlash against civil rights was also much older than previously thought. This “urban crisis” scholarship also directly rebutted neoconservative and New Right arguments that Great Society liberal programs were at fault for the decline of inner-city African American neighborhoods in the past few decades by showing that the private sector real estate industry and 1930s New Deal housing programs, influenced by biased industry guidelines, caused those conditions through redlining. My case study similarly recasts the history of American inner cities in the last half of the twentieth century. It uses the Greater Kansas City metropolitan area, especially Kansas City, Missouri and Kansas City, Kansas, as a case study. I deliberately chose Kansas City because traditional urban histories and labor histories have tended to ignore it in favor of cities further east or on the west coast. Furthermore, I concur with recent trends in the historical scholarship of the Civil Rights Movement towards more of a focus on northern racism and loczating the beginning of the movement in the early twentieth century. In this study, I found evidence of civil rights activism in Kansas City, Missouri as far back as the late 1860s and 1870s. I trace the metropolitan area’s history all the way back to its antebellum beginnings, when slavery still divided the nation and a national railroad system was being built. I weave both labor and changes in transportation over time into the story of the city and its African-American population over time.