With growing urban populations and increasing concerns over the effects of climate change on water supplies, there has recently been a significant amount of interdisciplinary research focused on identifying the drivers of urban water use. Due to unavailability of individual or household level data, these studies are often limited to using spatially aggregated data. There is concern that this aggregation of data may be leading to misrepresentations of the drivers of urban water use, yet there have been few studies that have addressed this concern. As in all spatial quantitative analyses, studies in this area should consider how the spatial scales chosen for analysis are affecting the results. The purpose of this research is to use a case study of single-family residential (SFR) water use in Portland, Oregon to determine the extent to which scale variation significantly affects the patterns of SFR water use, and whether household scale water use is influenced by neighborhood and census tract characteristics. The results of this analysis provide evidence that aggregating household scale water use data can mask meaningful patterns in SFR water use and potentially provide misleading information on what is influencing water use habits. This research also shows that using the chosen exploratory variables, there is a statistically significant, but not substantial, cross-scale influence on household scale water use by neighborhood and census tract characteristics.

This thesis draws from research done in a particular urban setting, and illustrates the foundations of a type of social structure called "respite community". "Respite community" is a specifically urban phenomenon which can be defined as temporal, ad hoc, face to face, an aggregate of people who seek temporary relief from social stresses and support through socialized interaction.

This dissertation is an historical case study of a highly publicized investigation of vice and official corruption which took place in Portland, Oregon from 1954 to 1958. Three major relevant areas of social science literature are reviewed. These are: historical material on American reform and corruption, criminology and political science. This literature suggests both the ubiquity and usefulness of vice and corruption in the urban situation. A set of propositions regarding vice, corruption and reform was developed from these works. These propositions were then examined in terms of the vice probe and political situation in Portland, Oregon. The triangulation method of this study involves three separate data sources: popular accounts in the print media; government documents, including material from the Oregon State Archives, the City of Portland and the U.S. Senate Select Committee on Improper Activities in the Labor or Management Field; interviews conducted by the author (1979-1981) with persons who had intimate knowledge of the vice situation, political arrangements or corruption in Portland. This case study has utility and general application beyond the single case illustrated. It demonstrates the functions and limits of corruption and reform. While historical in nature, this study offers insight into processes seen in many cities today.

Over fifty percent of humans live in cities. The environmental cost of this is massive, as is the potential for utilizing privately held yards as an integral part of conservation in urban areas. The Backyard Habitat Certification Program (BHCP) in Portland, Oregon, was established to reduce invasive plants, support wildlife, and promote conservation. The program involves > 3000 yards certified at three tiers. While onsite inspections are required to verify compliance, there has never been an assessment of the value of these yards to wildlife. Chapter 1 examined the relationships between the urban landscape and bird distributions outside of yards. Chapter 2 evaluated the ability of the program to separate yards by assessing differences in vegetation structure and composition. Chapter 3 tested if avian abundance, richness and diversity in yards are a product of responses to yard or landscape vegetation structure. Avian data was collected at 146 yards and 73 random locations in 2013 and 2014. Public landscape data was used to collect yard data in the field. Avian abundance, richness, and diversity were affected negatively by urbanization (especially impervious surface) and population density, but positively by tree cover. The BHCP was effective at distinguishing platinum yards from others, but overlap was relatively high among gold, silver and uncertified yards. Avian abundance, richness and diversity within yards was less affected by yard vegetation than the structure of habitat in the surrounding landscape. Species responded individualistically to yard vegetation and the urban landscape, and response was a continuum of tolerance to urbanization. Ultimately, the ability of yards to support wildlife will depend on wide scale neighborhood participation.

Urbanization has contributed to the fragmentation and alteration of natural habitats around the globe, and is rapidly increasing. In this context, forested parks play a critical role for many species by providing patches of usable habitat within the urban matrix. Such patches may be particularly valuable to forest-specialists like woodpeckers (Picidae). Yet many woodpeckers require large forest patches, which are limited in fragmented landscapes. Despite their recognized value as ecosystem engineers and keystone species, almost no research exists on woodpecker ecology or space-use in urban settings. What habitat components influence woodpecker abundance and what are their functional minimum area requirements in anthropogenic landscapes? As urban development continues to expand, it is imperative that these gaps in knowledge be filled. I examined the habitat and area requirements of five woodpecker species in 36 forest patches throughout Portland, Oregon. Woodpeckers were surveyed over two consecutive breeding seasons (2015-2016) using point counts and audio broadcast surveys. Vegetation surveys and geospatial analysis were conducted to describe the habitat and landscape composition within and around each patch. The relationship between habitat variables and woodpecker abundance was analyzed for each species using generalized linear models. Minimum area requirements were estimated based on incidence functions plotting the probability of woodpecker occurrence in forest patches of varying size. Abundance of all five woodpecker species increased as a function of forest area and understory vegetation. The amount of tree cover in the landscape surrounding parks was important for the two largest species (Pileated Woodpeckers [Dryocopus pileatus] and Northern Flickers [Colaptes auratus]), although this variable influenced their abundance positively and negatively, respectively. Surprisingly, the degree of urbanization in the surrounding landscape was unrelated to woodpecker abundance for any species except Red-breasted Sapsuckers (Sphyrapicus ruber). Four of the five species I studied reached higher levels of abundance in natural areas (i.e. greenspaces with multistory vegetation) than traditional parks (i.e. parks managed for recreation, with cleared understories). I recommend that large, multistory forested parks be created and protected to benefit woodpeckers. Minimum area requirements were generated for each species based on the forest patch size at which their predicted probability of occurrence reached 0.5. This corresponded to an area requirement of 51 ha for Pileated Woodpeckers and 34 ha for Hairy Woodpeckers (Picoides villosus). None of the other three woodpeckers exhibited strong area-sensitivity. These findings provide much needed information on woodpecker ecology in urban landscapes, and may offer direction for park management as rates of urbanization continue to increase.

This dissertation is a case study of the history of urban transportation policy in Portland, Oregon, between 1872 and 1970. The emphasis is on mass transit policy formulated and implemented by the private and public sectors as response to crises within both the local transit industry and the urban political economy. These crises are placed in the context of the continuing conflict between the industry's right to profit and its obligation to meet the competing demands of its constituencies: ridership's demands for low fares and comprehensive service; labor's demands for competitive wages; downtown businesses' demands for peak-hour service; and the regulatory demands imposed by the city and state. The development of Portland's mass transit policy is presented within the larger context of urban transportation policy and planning in general and is compared with the experiences of other cities throughout the country. This study concludes the primary crises that defined urban transportation policy in Portland can be divided into two types. Those that existed during the period of private ownership arose from the conflicting demands of the various actors in the transportation policy process. There were also those crises that arose just prior to and during the transition to public ownership: in addition to the traditional conflicts that had been present--labor, ridership, the city--there were new elements of conflict between the central city and the growing suburbs. This study also concludes that the decline of transit began in 1919 and that the roots of this decline lie in the structure of the industry, its place in the local political economy, and in its inherently antagonistic relationship with the city. While the use of the automobile, suburbanization, and highway development were all significant factors in accelerating transit's decline, they alone do not explain transit's decline. Finally, this study concludes that in the Portland case, it was a combination of several factors that worked together to facilitate the implementation of public ownership and operation of transit in Portland, including growing concern about the weakening economic strength of the central city and the availability of new sources of implementation funding.

This thesis traces the emergence of the American policewomen's movement through the career of Portland, Oregon's Lola Greene Baldwin, the first such officer hired by a municipality. It recounts the conditions which marked Baldwin's transition from a volunteer moral purity worker to a professional urban vice detective. The thesis connects Baldwin and her new profession to the Progressive era's social hygiene impulse. It considers how government absorption of the social hygiene agenda influenced the enforcement attitudes and methods of the early policewoman. Further, this work looks at the way Baldwin functioned within the bureaucracies and political structures of her environment. Baldwin's biographical history was obtained from her answers on a federal civil service application. The detective's original police department logs were a key element in researching her activities. Correspondence from the Portland city archives between the policewoman and five mayors and numerous police chiefs enhanced the information from her daily entries, as did a thorough perusal of contemporary newspaper items. Progressive-era city ordinances, reports of the Portland Vice Commission, and various memoranda of city council and local social hygiene committees also proved valuable. Miscellaneous personal documents and newspaper stories covering Baldwin's federal policing service during World War I were bolstered by articles from Social Hygiene. Baldwin professionalized women's police work by convincing Portland to pay for vice prevention and investigation formerly sponsored by private charities. She developed professional standards and procedures such as detailed case files, periodic statistical reports, and a specialized parole system for female delinquents. The female vice officer freely offered her ideas to other cities and helped form a national association of policewomen in 1912. Baldwin adopted social hygiene ideas through authoring laws which segregated females from sources of immorality in amusement and employment environments. The policewoman also championed detention homes for sexually precocious young women and special facilities for venereal cases. She fully accepted, moreover, social hygiene doctrine that prostitution was a medical as well as moral threat mandating complete abolition. When city authorities lagged in pursuing prostitution abatement, Baldwin helped establish a vice commission which forced appropriate action. National recognition of the female detective's vice policing won her appointment as a World War I federal military training facility protective agent. This work involved the detention of thousands of West Coast women and girls on mere suspicion of immorality. Baldwin returned to her police job in Portland after her federal task ended in late 1920. Used to the complete social control afforded by martial law, however, the policewoman became discouraged by postwar moral laxity in the Rose City, and retired in early 1922. The American urban policewomen's movement was engendered as a government effort to maintain traditional female purity in the modernizing environment of the Progressive era. Baldwin personified the transition from religious-based notions which relied on moral suasion to methods of modern professional social control which codified traditional standards and made them relevant to prevailing cultural and social conditions. The policewoman used the agenda and momentum of the social hygiene movement to empower herself and her new profession. Baldwin took advantage of growing acceptance of women as necessary partners in the management of a "parental" state. She embodied elements of "social feminism" because she believed that females were inherently different and needed state protection. Her insistence on professional equality with male cohorts, however, contradicted this pattern, as did her support of woman suffrage. Although Baldwin never reconciled to the vast cultural changes of her time, she left a proud legacy of professionalism to her daughters in modern law enforcement.

The question of what constitutes a culture has often been answered in one phrase: shared knowledge. Recent developments in both the theory and mathematics of examining this shared cultural knowledge allow researchers to produce mathematical models of informants' knowledge and perceptions of the culture they belong to. Many studies in cognitive anthropology have utilized these theoretical and mathematical tools: the present research sought to integrate a research design (based on the theory and mathematics mentioned above) with a relatively new cultural domain: the culture of sports. Three main question pertaining to cultural knowledge were addressed in this research: 1) Did an informant's behavioral embeddedness in sports correspond to their cognitive embeddedness? 2) Did informants' behavioral embeddedness (as a qroup) affect their perceptions of the sports culture they belonqed to? 3) Did informants' coqnitive embeddedness (as a qroup) affect their perceptions of the sports culture they belonged to? Behavioral embeddedness was measured using an instrument that contained 96 bioqraphical variables primarily designed to investigate an informant's participation in sports. Cognitive embeddedness was measured using an instrument based on consensus theory. Subjects' perceptions (called "world view" in this study) of sports were based on their judgements of similarities and differences among 10 sports. These judgements were evoked by triadic analysis. Both consensus theory and triadic analysis followed the framework laid out in Romney and Weller's systematic Data Analysis. Sixty-six informants completed a self-administered survey containing the three parts mentioned above. Because of the nature of the sample used, this study was treated as an ethnography. It was hypothesized that a) behavioral and cognitive embeddedness were correlated and, b) more culturally embedded individuals would have more "sophisticated" perceptions of sports culture. The first hypothesis was not supported: only weak correlations were found between cognitive embeddedness and variables measuring behavioral embeddedness. For the second hypothesis, the exact opposite was found: the more culturally embedded groups of informants had less "sophisticated" perceptions of the sports culture they belonged to.

The St. Johns neighborhood of North Portland is known for its strong regional identity, working class character, and diversity. Portland as a whole has experienced a major socioeconomic shift in the last ten years, and these changes are hitting St. Johns particularly hard. My research seeks to identify the place meanings that underpin sense of place, place attachment, and processes of attachment formation, among residents of the neighborhood. My research questions are: What are the objects of attachment? Why (the place meanings that underpin attachment)? And how (through what processes are attachments formed)? In what ways are the "why" and "how" intertwined? What are the commonalities across different variables, and how do those gesture at a holistic St. Johns essence, or sense of place? My primary method was Resident-Employed Photography, supported by participant observation and archival research. This 'photo voice' method entailed giving single-use cameras to 43 place-attached St. Johns residents and asking them to photograph and write about twelve things that explain their connection. The results offer a rich, multifaceted understanding of place meanings and processes of attachment in St. Johns, and insight into what individual facets are most intrinsic to sense of place. The intention of this research is to inform planning efforts, contribute to community dialogues about the future of St. Johns, empower residents to become civically engaged, and articulate a sense of place that can be leveraged by the community in spatial struggles.

Across the United States one would be hard pressed to find an urban center that has been unaffected by the phenomenon known as gentrification. From substantial economic growth to the displacement of long-term residents, the benefits and criticisms of the process of gentrification are wide ranging and extend over a thorough body of literature. Commonly associated with increasing levels of education and higher resident incomes, gentrification should be a boon to struggling public schools that are continually plagued by generational poverty. Unfortunately, the continued widening of the education gap and increasing racial segregation in our public schools suggest that any benefits of gentrification are not translating to equity in our public schools. By looking at the city of Portland, this paper attempts to quantitatively explore the complicated relationship among gentrifying neighborhoods, school performance on the 3rd grade standardized Math and Reading tests, and racial demographics of the students. This paper will follow the methods established by Keels et al. in their work on gentrification and school achievement in Chicago. By using 2000 Census and the 2015 ACS data and spatial analysis and mapping in GIS, gentrifying school neighborhoods in Portland will be identified and analysis of student test performance and racial demographics will be conducted to determine if any relationship exists. By exploring how these schools have changed both academically and racially we can expand educational and urban theory around the process of gentrification.