Poster exhibited at GPSC Student Showcase, November 7th, 2014, University of Arizona. Winner of the Arid Land Resource Science Award.

published_or_final_version / Politics and Public Administration / Doctoral / Doctor of Philosophy

Neighborhood design affects lifestyle physical activity, and ultimately human wellbeing. There are, however, a limited number of studies that examine neighborhood design types. In this research, we examine four types of neighborhood designs: traditional development, suburban development, enclosed community, and cluster housing development, and assess their level of walkability and their effects on physical activity and wellbeing. We examine significant associations through a questionnaire (n = 486) distributed in Tucson, Arizona using the Walkability Model. Among the tested neighborhood design types, traditional development showed significant associations and the highest value for walkability, as well as for each of the two types of walking (recreation and transportation) representing physical activity. Suburban development showed significant associations and the highest mean values for mental health and wellbeing. Cluster housing showed significant associations and the highest mean value for social interactions with neighbors and for perceived safety from crime. Enclosed community did not obtain the highest means for any wellbeing benefit. The Walkability Model proved useful in identifying the walkability categories associated with physical activity and perceived crime. For example, the experience category was strongly and inversely associated with perceived crime. This study provides empirical evidence of the importance of including vegetation, particularly trees, throughout neighborhoods in order to increase physical activity and wellbeing. Likewise, the results suggest that regular maintenance is an important strategy to improve mental health and overall wellbeing in cities.

No description available.

Thesis (M.Arch.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Architecture, 1981. / MICROFICHE COPY AVAILABLE IN ARCHIVES AND ROTCH. / Bibliography: p. 52. / In the traditional small community, people learned how to maintain their own homes by watching activities in which the elements of their physical environment were made. This work was done out in the open, where everyone could see it as they walked by. People grew up knowing how to take 'responsibility' for the maintenance and modification of their own home. During and after the Renaissance , when these small independent communities merged with other communities, and a specialized economy developed, the integration of functions which supported learning from the environment began to disappear. This is a study of a neighborhood in Rome, where the traditional characteristics which support the transfer of knowledge, still exist . The streets are arranged in a hierarchy from most public to most private. When work places, or retail shops, or residences, occur on a public street, they are large. When they occur on a private street, they are small. 'A hierarchy of building typologies corresponds to the hierarchy of activity sizes. The buildings which are large and located in the public zone, where people are moving quickly, have large openings. The buildings which are small and are located in private zones, where people spend time in the street, have smaller openings. The result is that the building facade exposes the appropriate amount of the work process to the residents, as they use the neighborhood. With this combination of hierarchies, Trastevere supports the transfer of knowledge, from the activities to the residents of the neighborhood. / by Elizabeth Alexa Chapman. / M.Arch.

Neighborhood social disorganization has been found to be related to crime and deviance. In explaining this relationship, most have focused on specific factors of informal social control and collective efficacy. Using data from the 2000 National Household Survey on Drug Abuse (n = 12,800), the relationship between social disorganization and delinquent outcomes was examined by looking at extra-curricular activities as intervening mechanisms with logistic regression in SPSS. While the effect of social disorganization on delinquency remained significant, results indicated some evidence of mediation when accounting for extra-curricular activity measures predicting binge drinking. Specifically, the coefficient for social disorganization was reduced and significant at a lower threshold once extra-curricular activity measures were added in the models. Also, findings indicated different patterns of relationships found among the various extra-curricular activity categories concerning delinquent outcomes. Unlike other types of extracurricular activities, increased involvement in athletic activities was related to increased participation in delinquency.

Thesis (M.A.)--Ohio University, June, 2005. / Title from PDF t.p. Includes bibliographical references (p. 74-75)

Research on reporting crime to the police on the individual- and incident- levels has received much attention over the years. However, many studies examining neighborhood-level effects on reporting are limited in scope. The current study examines the relationship between neighborhood characteristics central to social disorganization theory and police notification. Data for this study were derived from Warner’s (2004) study entitled “Informal Social Control of Crime in High Drug Use Neighborhoods in Louisville and Lexington, Kentucky, 2000.” The analysis uses OLS regression models to isolate how different neighborhood characteristics impact reporting. Findings indicate that disadvantage and mobility have a positive effect on reporting but are mediated by social cohesion. Social cohesion has a negative effect on reporting while confidence in police had no significant effects. Suggestions for future research are also discussed.

As distance from a house to retail sites decreases the price of a house should increase, ceteris paribus, because of increased shopping convenience. On the other hand, as distance decreases price should also decrease because the house is exposed to increased spillover of disamenities noise, light, traffic, etc. from the retail use. The study uses Computer Assisted Mass Appraisal data and a parcel level Geographic Information system map from King County (Seattle) Washington. An hedonic process is used to estimate the price effects of both the expected positive and negative price effects. Travel distance is a proxy for convenience and Euclidian distance is a proxy for negative spillovers. Standard hedonic housing price variables are used for control along with distance to other classes of non-residential uses and indexes of neighborhood street layout and connectivity. In traditional gridiron neighborhood, both convenience and negative spillovers have the expected effect on housing price. The net effect is a price effect curve with a net decrease in price at very short distances between houses and retail sites. But, beyond a short distance to the extent of convenient walking distance (about mile) the net effect is positive. In a non-traditional edge city type neighborhood, there is no effect, either positive or negative. This is due to the much greater distances between residential uses and retail uses in this type neighborhood that result from zoning that segregates land uses and long travel distance resulting from curvilinear street layout.

One of the very interesting demographic features in the US over the last several decades is the persistent racial educational gap between blacks and whites and the reverse gender education gap as a result of the rapid rise in women's educational attainment. This dissertation is to investigate the reasons behind it. I first investigated the educational gap between blacks and whites. I propose a new model to identify if and how much the educational attainment gap between blacks and whites is due to the difference in their neighborhoods. In this model, individuals belong to two unobserved types: the endogenous type who may move in response to the neighborhood effect on their education; or the exogenous type who may move for reasons unrelated to education. The Heckman sample selection model becomes a special case of the current model in which the probability of one type of individuals is zero. Although I cannot find any significant neighborhood effect in the usual Heckman sample selection model, I do find heterogeneous effects in our type-consistent model. In particular, there is a substantial neighborhood effect for the movers who belong to the endogenous type. No significant effects exist for other groups. On average, I find that the neighborhood variable, the percentage of high school graduates in the neighborhood, accounts for about 37.7% of the education gap between blacks and whites. This dissertation sheds some insight about women?s educational attainment by studying the motivations of education for women: to pursue higher wages and to find highly educated spouses. The identification strategy is that the college education is exogenous to the partner choice if education is driven by pursuing higher job market return (the type of marry-for-romance), and is endogenous if the education decision is driven by marriage market return (the type of marry-for-money). I find that the marry-for-romance type has higher education than the other type and given everything else the same, with the same education level, the women who marry for money have a higher probability of finding a highly educated husband than those marrying for romance. Therefore, the reversal educational gap could be the result of more marry-for-romance women.