New York’s transit system serves millions of riders each day; the local newspapers complain about the lack of funding for infrastructure projects; and the City Council regularly hosts hearings about Bus Rapid Transit, bike-share, road safety, e-hail taxis, and gondolas. Transportation issues matter to New Yorkers, but these debates, at the policy level, often focus on technology, budgets, and regulations rather than the needs and experiences of passengers. This focus on “technical” matters allows planners and politicians to confine transportation debates to the realm of experts rather than engage the broader public in them. The failure to address the needs of passengers in Brooklyn and Queens has led to the development of dollar vans. Dollar vans are hybrid bus-taxis, also known as jitneys, that provide vital transportation links to more than 120,000 riders per day and operate beyond the control of the formal transit system governed by the Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA). While this ridership pales in comparison to the daily ridership on the subway or bus, it does rival bus ridership in cities like Dallas and Milwaukee and dwarfs the 50,000 peak ridership achieved by Citi Bike, New York’s celebrated bike-share system. More important, the durability of the vans reveals the failures of the existing formal system to serve all New Yorkers. I argue that this failure is important for three reasons. First, the vans respond to a geographically specific problem: adequate access to inadequate service. The vans thrive in busy transit corridors where MTA-owned buses come too infrequently, are overcrowded, or are regularly stuck in traffic. On these busy routes, the vans provide a more reliable ride and alternative for transit-dependent populations looking to bypass the faltering bus system. Second, regulations fail to reflect daily practice. This gap between practice and policy leaves van operators and passengers in an awkward limbo that criminalizes an industry and jeopardizes the mobility of entire neighborhoods. Third, since the vans operate outside of the formal system, traditional metrics, such as ridership, travel time, vehicle revenue miles, etc., are not collected and compared against the metrics of other modes operated by the MTA. As long as the vans remain an unknown quantity, it is impossible for the City and State to serve transit-dependent populations in Brooklyn and Queens. In this dissertation, I use a mixed-methods research design to probe the world of the vans and argue that continued regulatory uncertainty, long the friend of the vans, has the potential to upend them as development pressures and capital investment in Central Brooklyn intensifies.

In this study, I examined musical recordings from the jazz idiom that relate to events or ideas involved in the Civil Rights Movement during the mid-1950s through the mid-1960s. The study focused on the four following musicians' recordings: Charles Mingus, Fables of Faubus; Sonny Rollins, The Freedom Suite; Ornette Coleman, Free Jazz; and John Coltrane, A Love Supreme. The study relies primarily on the aforementioned recordings, critics analysis of those recordings, and events that took place during the Civil Right Movement. The study concludes that these recordings are not only commentary about ideas and events but historically representative of the movement as well.

This thesis introduces <em>Interstitial Urbanity</em> as a strategy for addressing issues of urbanity and place within New York's peripheral developments. Driven primarily by market forces, these developer led office and condominium complexes are currently being constructed along the post-industrial shorelines of New York's outer boroughs. Interstitial urbanity proposes an urban centre: a fragment of place within a non-place settlement. The theory is manifested in the design of an interstice that sits within the Queens West development on the Long Island City waterfront. Taking the form of a multi-layered public space, the interstice is comprised of a waterfront market square flanked by a commuter train terminal and an arts centre housed in a turn of the century power plant.

This thesis introduces <em>Interstitial Urbanity</em> as a strategy for addressing issues of urbanity and place within New York's peripheral developments. Driven primarily by market forces, these developer led office and condominium complexes are currently being constructed along the post-industrial shorelines of New York's outer boroughs. Interstitial urbanity proposes an urban centre: a fragment of place within a non-place settlement. The theory is manifested in the design of an interstice that sits within the Queens West development on the Long Island City waterfront. Taking the form of a multi-layered public space, the interstice is comprised of a waterfront market square flanked by a commuter train terminal and an arts centre housed in a turn of the century power plant.

No description available.

Housing approximately half a million residents, the New York City Housing Authority (NYCHA) has long been cast as the exception to the rule of ‘demolish and replace’ models of public housing in the United States. Yet as NYCHA faces a dire fiscal and administrative crisis, it has proposed a suite of privatization efforts that threaten its successful reputation. With a focus on NYCHA’s effort to allow private developers to construct mixed-income ‘infill’ projects on existing ‘underutilized’ public housing land through the NextGeneration NYCHA and NYCHA 2.0 plans, in this dissertation, I ask: how do various stakeholders, including residents, the housing authority, private developers, elected officials, and non-profit and advocacy stakeholders justify, react to, and resist NYCHA’s plans for redevelopment? While most studies consider the impacts of mixed-income housing on residents after lease up of a development, interpreting it as either a de facto beneficial policy or as a tool for state-led gentrification, this work differs in its focus on the range of viewpoints about the plan prior to construction. In so doing, it straddles the literature on mixed-income housing and urban planning processes through the lens of pragmatism. A pragmatic approach centers those most impacted in planmaking and considers how diverse stakeholder experiences co-exist and contrast in public deliberation processes. In other words, this dissertation considers how the housing authority’s various publics have reacted differently to the plans for its transformation with the goal of informing how to craft more restorative, equitable, and deliberative planning processes. Using data from over a year and a half of participant observation, interviews, and media and policy sources, I craft a qualitative narrative case of the deliberations surrounding NYCHA’s first five years of redevelopment from a variety of stakeholder perspectives. Using narrative and framework analysis, I organize this dissertation around three empirical chapters: 1) an anatomy of the formal and dialogical channels of engagement between speakers and NYCHA officials at 10 public meetings following the NextGeneration NYCHA plan’s release; 2) an account of the housing authority’s stop-and-start approach to pursuing infill set amidst its various crises, including an analysis of the viewpoints of public officials and a private developer selected for a pilot infill site; and 3) a description of residents’ opposition to the plan, which includes descriptions of spaces of contestation citywide and at a specific pilot infill development on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. I find that while multiple stakeholders agree on the end goal of repairing existing public housing, actors promote a series of contradictions in their means to fix it, shaping a hotly contested landscape that has eroded public trust and further delayed action. Despite critiquing the housing authority for their management practices, residents launched a campaign to keep their homes publicly-operated that extended beyond the walls of their developments to citywide and even national progressive issues. This dissertation contributes to the housing policy and urban planning literature in three ways. First, it proposes an understanding of mixed-income housing that eschews past binary approaches and shows its perceived benefits and risks as highly dependent on the values and goals of the stakeholder. Second, it looks at conflicting attitudes to planmaking outside of a traditional consensus-based models, inviting a contextual understanding of power dynamics while also placing value on the experiences and actions of the majority Black and Latinx public housing residents who are the most impacted by the infill plans. Lastly, this dissertation also serves to profile pragmatism’s power–and limits– for theorizing more equitable redevelopment processes in planning.

Literature has found that some minority groups with diabetes have a negative perception of medical professionals when a health problem occurs. This trend is particularly problematic with the diabetes epidemic in the United States. African Americans are more than 2 times as likely to die from diabetes than are Whites, and diabetes prevalence has increased exponentially in New York City where a majority of Afro-Caribbeans live. To address this problem, a cross-sectional design was used to recruit Afro-Caribbeans diagnosed with type 2 diabetes across 7 churches to examine whether shared knowledge, attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors about diabetes screening and its complications exist, and whether they would attend a type 2 diabetes class or workshop at their church. A 114-item questionnaire, adapted from reliable and validated national health surveys, was administered to a convenience sample of 67 participants aged 35 to 90 to collect demographic, health, and cultural belief information. The conceptual frameworks of the social ecological and cultural consensus models were used for discovery of social influences and shared knowledge of type 2 diabetes. A cultural consensus analysis of 28 eligible participants was used to infer trustworthy answers to cultural questions. Participants demonstrated an above-average knowledge of type 2 diabetes, with a level of agreement of .52 ('.192 SD); further, 85.2% reported that they would attend a diabetes class or workshop at their church. These findings promote social change by educating Afro-Caribbeans about diabetes, and by facilitating partnerships between churches and doctors. Future community-based research with churches could help to improve glycemic control and delay the onset of type 2 diabetes.

The purpose of this multiple case study was to explore strategies small physical commodities firm owners need to establish a distribution channel within the commodities market to enhance profits. The general business problem was that importing physical commodities from emerging markets was not profitable. The specific business problem was some small physical wholesale commodities firm managers lacked strategies to establish distribution channels for imported commodities. The information presented in this study is important to suppliers, manufacturers, distributors, and retailers of organic cacao products to identify strategies to enhance their distribution channels. Disruptive innovation and the theory of constraints grounded the conceptual framework to relate ideas presented in this study. The central research question guiding the study concerned strategies small physical wholesale commodities firm owners used to establish distribution channels within the commodities market. Participants included 6 small business owners who gave recorded responses during in-depth, face-to-face interviews. The 6 interview recordings were transcribed, then coded and interpreted. Data analysis revealed 6 themes, which included price point strategy, B2B relationships, differentiation, strategic locations, sufficient operating capital, and customer relationships. Enhancing profits in the distribution channels of small organic cacao companies requires a holistic approach in the New York City area. The social implications of this study may draw attention to organic cacao, which is a healthy alternative to confectionery chocolate. Strategies introduced to enhance profits may increase economic growth in the local communities in the New York Tri-State area.

No description available.

No description available.