This thesis takes as its starting point the proposition that the restricted development of law centres in the United Kingdom has been a result of the exercise of power by the legal profession. This was based on the evidence of the legal profession's influence on the initial development of public legal services policy and the profession's active opposition to the emergence of the first law centres in the United Kingdom. However, law centres remained on the margins of public legal services policy, despite the retreat of the profession from its original position. Thus, it was suggested that the key issue was not simply the power of the profession, but also the power of the dominant paradigms of legal practice, legal needs and legal services. This is reflected in the private practice and casework orientation of the legal aid system. Law centres challenge the dominant paradigms in many ways. They offer a multi-faceted approach to the resolution of the legal and socio-economic problems of the poor and do so in a not-for-profit, community-controlled and often collectivist context. Through quantitative and qualitative techniques employed in a multiple case study setting, this study sought to test the 'power hypothesis' empirically. Focusing on all of the law centres operating at any time between 1974 and 1997 in Strathclyde and the West Midlands, detailed accounts of significant events and periods in each centre's birth, life and, where appropriate, death were constructed. The thesis provides for the first time a social historical narrative of the development of law centres in these two locations. These accounts reveal that the profession and the dominant paradigms have had an impact on law centres in many significant ways. However, several of the greatest difficulties faced by law centres cannot be explained by reference to this conceptual framework. Accordingly, the thesis concludes that a wider theoretical framework is required to explain the development of law centres. This wider framework must draw on several existing traditions. It should recognise the importance of community, local and ethnic politics; social exclusion and ethnicity; and organisational and change management. However, it must also recognise the power of the legal profession and the dominant paradigms, as the additional challenges this brings distinguish the experience of law centres from that of other radical, community organisations.

This paper is about the current state of gated subdivisions in East Baton Rouge Parish, Louisiana. It provides a list, map, and relevant census data of the gated subdivisions in each of the three cities in the parish in which they are found—Baton Rouge, Central, and Zachary—and the unincorporated areas of the parish. It also examines comprehensive plan elements that relate to gated subdivisions, and whether actual gated developments adhere to the plan’s principles. It is important to examine gated developments in East Baton Rouge Parish because they have an effect on the social, fiscal, and public health of their inhabitants and the surrounding communities. The population of East Baton Rouge Parish is growing, which means that new housing units will be built in the near future, many in new subdivisions. The characteristics and placement of housing are major components of an area’s quality of life, and the governments in East Baton Rouge Parish have the opportunity and the responsibility to influence future quality of life by carefully and thoroughly considering their residential developments. An understanding of gated neighborhoods in the area will add to citizens’ and governments’ ability to thoroughly consider future residential development. No comprehensive list or map of gated subdivisions exists for any part of the parish. By mapping them now, and providing a “state of the parish” report, interested citizens and planners at all levels of government can track the increase or decrease of gated communities. Showing that there is sometimes a difference between a comprehensive plan’s stated objective and the reality of gated communities may encourage closer scrutiny before future gated developments are approved. / text

The purpose of this report is to analyze the zoning change process in Austin, Texas. The report examines Austin's type of city government followed by an overview of zoning in the United States and Austin. The report chronicles the evolution of the Austin Tomorrow Comprehensive Plan and the Neighborhood Planning Area during the time period 1979-1997. Since 1997, zoning change protocol has become intertwined with neighborhood planning such that both must be discussed in detail. The extreme real estate cycles from 1982 to the present are also discussed. Economic conditions played a key role in the slow enactment of neighborhood planning in Austin. The report examines the jurisdictional boundaries of Austin and the governmental bodies charged with hearing zoning cases. After discussing the motivations of the market participants seeking zoning changes, the report analyzes four case studies to illustrate the basic types of zoning cases today. Finally, the report draws conclusions and offers suggestions for improving the efficiency and fairness of the zoning change process in Austin, Texas. / text

When one researches the city, the neighborhood appears as an indispensable building block. Kevin Lynch, In The Image of a City, suggests that neighborhoods are "the basic element of the city" and the main way "most people structure their city". Furthering the idea of the neighborhood as a building block of the city, Sidney Brower discusses the need for different types of neighborhoods to allow for a diverse social setting to create diversity in the city. The research put forward by Lynch and Brower shows the idea of the neighborhood as a strong concept in older cities. However, the concept of the neighborhood has become less apparent in the modern cities and should be revisited in order for the neighborhood to once again be a substantial entity in the city. In The Great Good Place, Ray Oldenburg discusses the idea of three realms of life and the balance needed to live a fulfilling life. The first realm centers on the domestic, the second on the productive, and most significantly, the third realm centers on the social aspect. In modern neighborhoods, the idea and the architecture that make the social realm has been lost and must be reintroduced. The significance of reintroducing the third realm is the creation of a strong socially defined neighborhood and one that becomes a more identifiable part of the city. With the concept of the third realm in mind, this thesis posits the introduction of a fully integral layer of social programming that responds to a specific neighborhood condition. This way of conceiving the neighborhood and building upon the existing Main Street, the third realm will serve to facilitate a greater sense of neighborhood place.

Nanomanufacturing is critical to the future growth of U.S. manufacturing. Yet the process yield of current nanodevices is typically 10% or less. Particularly in nanomaterials growth, there may exist large variability across the sites on a substrate, which could lead to variability in properties. Essential to the reduction of variability is to mathematically describe the spatial variation of nanostructure. This research therefore aims at a method of modeling and estimating nanostructure morphology variation for process yield improvement. This method consists of (1) morphology variation modeling based on Gaussian Markov random field (GMRF) theory, and (2) maximum likelihood estimation (MLE) of morphology variation model based on measurement data. The research challenge lies in the proper definition and estimation of the interactions among neighboring nanostructures. To model morphology variation, nanostructures on all sites are collectively described as a GMRF. The morphology variation model serves for the space-time growth model of nanostructures. The probability structure of the GMRF is specified by a so-called simultaneous autoregressive scheme, which defines the neighborhood systems for any site on a substrate. The neighborhood system characterizes the interactions among adjacent nanostructures by determining neighbors and their influence on a given site in terms of conditional auto-regression. The conditional auto-regression representation uniquely determines the precision matrix of the GMRF. Simulation of nanostructure morphology variation is conducted for various neighborhood structures. Considering the boundary effects, both finite lattice and infinite lattice models are discussed. The simultaneous autoregressive scheme of the GMRF is estimated via the maximum likelihood estimation (MLE) method. The MLE estimation of morphology variation requires the approximation of the determinant of the precision matrix in the GMRF. The absolute term in the double Fourier expansion of a determinant function is used to approximate the coefficients in the precision matrix. Since the conditional MLE estimates of the parameters are affected by coding the date, different coding schemes are considered in the estimation based on numerical simulation and the data collected from SEM images. The results show that the nanostructure morphology variation modeling and estimation method could provide tools for yield improvement in nanomanufacturing.

The gender difference in crime is indisputable. In an attempt to explain gender differences in adolescents' involvement in crime, secondary data analysis of middle and high school students and their neighborhoods will be examined. Feminists have identified the concept of patriarchy as the root of gender differences in all behavior and particularly in criminal behavior. Hagan's Power-Control Theory incorporates the concept of patriarchy through measures within home to examine how differences in occupational authority between parents affects the gender difference in delinquency through differential controls placed on sons and daughters. However, it has been suggested that the measure of patriarchy be extended into the public sphere (Walby, 1990). Specifically, this study compares a traditional private patriarchy model to a public patriarchy model in order to determine which approach better explains the gender gap in crime. Patterns of findings were not substantively different between private and public patriarchy models; however, a number of theoretical implications point to the fact that alternate measures of patriarchy could lend support for power-control theory that it currently lacks.

African Americans, Hispanics, and other minorities in the U.S. continue to face conditions of residential and educational segregation, lower socioeconomic status, and higher rates of mortality than whites. Better theory-based research that uses community and individual level factors to explain how health disparities are created and perpetuated is needed. The Community Context and Health Disparities Model, which extends the work of Schulz and Northridge (2004) with elements described by Williams and Collins (2001), is described. This framework identifies the pathways by which characteristics of the physical, built, social, economic, and healthcare environments impact health and are mediated by individual traits. Two measures of the healthcare environment, physician density and emergency room hospital accessibility, are created using Geographic Information Systems (GIS), compared to traditional measures of these concepts, and contrasted across racial and ethnic populations. The Community Context and Health Disparities Model is implemented to understand physical and mental health disparities among a sample of older adults in Miami-Dade County who were participants in the Survey of Older Floridians using hierarchical linear modeling (HLM). Exogenous measures of each community domain, including the healthcare measures created, are used as community-level predictors of self-rated health and number of depressive symptoms. The results show that community poverty rate predicts self-rated health, but is no longer significant after individual attributes are controlled. There is a significant interaction between Hispanic ethnicity and community poverty associated with self-rated health. Hispanics are negatively impacted by community poverty but other ethnic groups are not. Depressive symptoms are found to be primarily explained by individual characteristics. Future research, practice recommendations and policy implications of these findings are described.

This dissertation presents the results of a study to (1) determine the census of the nearby southern M dwarf stellar population via three types of distances and (2) determine the multiplicity rate of nearby M dwarfs using two different search methodologies. The first part of this work reports three types of distance calculations (photographic, photometric, and trigonometric) for 1748 southern M dwarfs. Distances were estimated for 500 red dwarfs using photographic plate BRI magnitudes from SuperCOSMOS, while estimates were made for 667 stars using CCD VRI magnitudes. Both BRI and VRI were combined with 2MASS infrared JHK magnitudes. Distances for an additional 581 red dwarfs were derived from trigonometric parallaxes, 124 of which were measured for the first time during this work. For the second portion of this thesis, an all-sky sample of 1122 M dwarfs, known via trigonometric parallaxes to lie within 25 pc of the Sun, was surveyed for stellar companions at separations of 2" to 600". I-band images using primarily the CTIO/SMARTS 0.9m and the Lowell 42in telescopes were obtained in order to search these systems for companions at separations of 2" to 180". A complementary reconnaissance of wider companions to 600" was also done via blinking SuperCOSMOS BRI images. We find a stellar multiplicity fraction of 27.4 $\pm$ 1.3% for M dwarfs. Using this new gauge of M dwarf multiplicity near the end of the stellar main sequence, we calculate a multiplicity fraction of 30.1% for stellar systems of all types, implying that most systems are single. We find a peak in the separation distribution of the companions at 26 AU, i.e., distances on the scale of our Solar System, with a weak trend of smaller projected separations for lower mass primaries. A hint that M dwarf multiplicity may be a function of age/composition was revealed, with faster moving (and generally older) systems being multiple slightly less often. We calculate that at least 16% of M dwarf mass is made up of the stellar companions of multiple systems. Finally, we show that the mass function for M dwarfs increases to the end of the main sequence.

This dissertation explores the symbolic structure of the metropolis, probing how neutral spaces may be imbued with meaning to become places, and tracing the processes through which the image of the city can come to be - and carry real consequences. The centrality of the image of the city to a broad array of urban research is established by injecting the question of image into two different research areas: crime and real estate in Washington, DC and the spatial structure of grassroots visual art production in Boston, Massachusetts. By pursuing such widely diverging areas of research, I seek to show the essential linkage between art and crime as they related to the image of the city and general urban processes of definition, distinction, and change. And yet, the research pursued here offers a mixed appraisal of strategies that pin urban prospects to image and image manipulation, from the great crime decline of the past two decades to the rise of the creative economy and application of urban branding campaigns. Across the analyses, I highlight tension between expectations of change and the essentially conservative forces of image. Far from rebranding the city, culture is shown to play a key role in locking in inequalities, undermining revitalization efforts, and generally explaining the reproduction and persistence of place over time, following the logic of the "looking glass neighborhood." Thus, culture is not nearly the tool to revalorize, relabel, and transform place so well depicted in studies nor do the buzz of cultural events shape markets and communities as effectively in "offcenter" cities. Place is not fixed for good, and can be "re-accomplished," albeit through decades-long demographic, cultural, and political processes. / Sociology

In drylands, it is essential to maximize the coupling of social and ecological systems in order to achieve sustainability, particularly in human dominated landscapes such as cities. The enhanced use of greenspace in cities in drylands provides unique opportunities to maximize the coupling of social and ecological systems. It maintains the functioning of ecological systems while involving civil society in the conservation of biodiversity and improving human wellbeing in urban settings. The provision and access to greenspace in cities is determined by neighborhood design. The access for the human use of greenspace can be enhanced through walkability, or the characteristics of the built environment that influence physical activity. Walkable neighborhoods that provide access to greenspace can be catalysts for activity and health and have the potential to increase the level of conservation support in urban residents. The purpose of this research is to look for wellbeing and conservation synergies between walkable neighborhoods and the enhanced use of greenspace. To accomplish this research, first we assess walkability in the built environment through an interdisciplinary literature review that integrates the findings on walkability from several research domains. We create a conceptual framework that organizes the neighborhood design elements that influence physical activity into nine walkability categories: connectivity, land-use, density, traffic safety, surveillance, parking, experience, greenspace, and community. We call this the Walkability Framework. This analysis allows us to identify gaps and strengths of walkability in the Leadership for Energy and Environmental Design for Neighborhood Development (LEED-ND) certification system. After a quantitative and qualitative analysis, we propose an enhanced version for walkability that we call LEED-NDW+ (walkability plus). The next step is to test if the Walkability Framework can be used as a model to measure the interactions between the built environment and physical activity. We accomplish this through the use of a questionnaire (N=486) that captures the perceptions, attitudes and behaviors of residents in Tucson, Arizona. Significant correlations between all the walkability categories and physical activity support the use of the framework as a model. We call this the Walkability Model. The final stage of this research uses the Walkability Model to evaluate walkability in four neighborhood design types in Tucson that include traditional development, suburban development, enclosed community, and cluster housing. We then look for wellbeing and conservation synergies between walkable neighborhoods and the enhanced use of greenspace. Results from this study suggest that neighborhoods with a high level of walkability have the potential to enhance the use of greenspace, which in turn provide important wellbeing and conservation synergies that can contribute to healthier communities and increase the support for conservation of biodiversity within and beyond cities. The enhanced use of greenspace maximizes the coupling of social and ecological systems in cities in drylands, which increases resilience in the face of climate change.