<p>The purpose of this dissertation is to discover the VMT impact of each level of proximity in order to help government identify key locations for housing development, and thereby lower VMT and reduce dependence on foreign oil. By discovering the VMT impact of each level of proximity, this dissertation provides a) the first known means of calculating the proximity-based VMT benefit of subject locations by individual proximity level, and b) the new finding that it is <i>likely</i> that high VMT benefit can be achieved at moderate proximity levels acceptable to many households, enabling representative governments to be politically successful while promoting housing in locations that will lower the average VMT of the population. </p><p> After discussing the impetus for the work, this dissertation presents a theory of the determinants of VMT, searches the literature for appropriate techniques for empirical analysis of the proximity-VMT relationship, and presents results of the empirical research to be expected based on the presented theory and literature. </p><p> Empirical efforts are used to discover VMT impact by proximity level using three differing measures of proximity: density, distance-threshold-based total opportunities, and centrality. In the first effort, national data is used to discover VMT impact by proximity level, for both population and employment density. In order to determine the role played by alternative modes in the VMT-density curves of the first effort, the second effort uses national data to discover the impact of each level of density on usage of alternative modes. In the third and final effort, data from Hampton Roads, Virginia, are used to discover the VMT impact of each level of opportunity and centrality. </p><p> Governments can apply the discovered VMT impact of each level of proximity&mdash;via a described "VMT Benefit Technique"&mdash;to accurately determine the VMT benefit of a given location, and use the VMT benefits of a set of candidate areas to select key locations for development. </p><p> In addition, the discovered VMT impact of each level of proximity informs the key hypothesis of this dissertation that there exists a sweet spot on the VMT-proximity curve that has high VMT benefit and a proximity level acceptable to many households. Although the hypothesis tests indicate that it is <i> not certain</i> that the sweet spot exists, the mean coefficients of the models indicate that it is <i>likely</i> that the sweet spot exists, i.e. that there are high-VMT-benefit proximity levels acceptable to many households. The overall implication of this is that representative governments in the U.S. who promote housing development at these moderate levels of proximity will not only lower average VMT in the short term, but they will not be punished politically for doing so, and therefore may be successful in thereby lowering average VMT in the long term. </p><p> In summary, the dissertation provides encouragement to governments hoping to lower average VMT and an accurate method of calculating VMT for choosing SGAs with which to actually lower average VMT. It is hoped that this combination will help U.S. governments become independent of foreign oil. </p>

<p> Following the Civil War, the American government greatly expanded the opportunities available for private businessmen and investors in an effort to rapidly colonize the West. This expansion of private commerce led to the second industrial revolution in which railroads and the corporation became the symbols and tools of a rapidly modernizing nation. It was also during this period that the responsibility of food distribution was released from municipal accountability and institutions like public markets began to fade from the American urbanscape. While the proliferation of private grocers greatly aided many metropolises' rapid growth, they did little to secure a sustainable and desirable form of food distribution. During the decades before and after the turn of the century, public market campaigns began to develop in response to the widespread abandonment of municipal food distribution. </p><p> Like many western cities, Portland, Oregon matured during the second half of the nineteenth century and lacked the historical and social precedent for the construction of a public market. Between 1851 and 1914, residents of Portland and its agricultural hinterland fought for the construction of a municipally-owned public market rallying against the perceived harmful and growing influences of middlemen. As a result of their efforts, the Carroll Public Market was founded on the curbsides of Yamhill Street in downtown Portland. While success encouraged multiple expansions and an increasingly supportive consumer base, a growing commitment to modernist planning among city officials and the spread of automobile ownership determined the market to be incompatible with the commercial future of Portland.</p><p> In an effort to acknowledge and capitalize on the Carroll Public Market's community, a group of investors, incorporated as the Portland Market Company, worked with city officials between 1926 and 1934 to create the largest public market in the United States, the Portland Public Market. As the first building of the newly constructed waterfront development, many believed the massive institution would reinvigorate nearby businesses and ultimately influence the potential of the downtown business district. The Portland Public Market was decidedly distinct from the market along Yamhill and the promoters cast it as such. By utilizing the most modern technologies and promises of convenience there was little that the two organizations shared in common. In the end, the potential of the waterfront market was never fulfilled and amidst legal scandals, an ongoing struggle to meet operating costs, and the success of a rebellious Farmers Cooperative, it shut down after nine years.</p><p> This thesis discusses these two public markets during a period of changing consumer interests and the rise of modernist planning in Portland, Oregon. Ultimately, the Carroll Public Market was torn down for reasons beyond its own control despite the comfortable profit it enjoyed each year. Many city officials refused to support the institution as they increasingly supported the values of modernism and urban planning. The Portland Public Market fit perfectly with many city planners' and private investors' intents for the future. This essay seeks to offer a unique glimpse of how commercial communities form and how commercial environments evolve through the politics of food distribution, consumerism, and producer-to-consumer relationships.</p>

<p> From the time of the New Deal legislation in the 1930s, the Federal government has provided some form of housing relief for people with low income. Today, the primary demand side subsidy program is the Housing Choice Voucher Program (HCVP), which subsidizes rents for low-income people and households to live in places where market-rate rents are beyond their economic means. During the last two decades many Americans cities have been transitioning and affordable housing is becoming scarce even in formerly low-income neighborhoods. In these transitioning neighborhoods current rents are prohibitive for low-income residents. However, with a subsidy through HCVP, this population can remain in its original neighborhood. Landlords are assured full market value rents, while renting to low-income tenants. The residents of the Anacostia neighborhood in Washington, D.C. are predominately low-income and African-American. Using Anacostia as a case study, this paper shows how HCVP has increased in volume and, in the face of diminishing affordable housing, recipients of this subsidy are concentrating in this low rent neighborhood rather than dispersing throughout Washington DC. This is a mixed methods study using data gathered from the Washington D.C. Housing Authority, home sales, home rental prices, census, and interviews with participants in HCVP. The findings of this study reveal that HCVP has been successful in improving the lives and residences of low-income people but that vouchers are geographically concentrated to the lowest income neighborhoods of Washington D.C.</p>

<p> The grouping of public buildings into civic centers and cultural centers became an obsession of American city planners at the turn of the twentieth century. Following European and ancient models, and inspired by the World&rsquo;s Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893 and the McMillan Commission plan for the National Mall in Washington, D.C. in 1901, architects sought to create impressive horizontal ensembles of monumental buildings in urban open spaces such as downtown plazas and quasi-suburban parks in direct opposition to the vertical thrust of commercial skyscrapers. Hitherto viewed largely through the narrow stylistic prism of the City Beautiful vs. the city practical movements, the monumental center (as Jane Jacobs termed it) continued to persist beyond the passing of neoclassicism and the rise of high modernism, thriving as an indispensable motif of futurist aspiration in the era of comprehensive and regional planning, as municipalities sought to counteract the decentralizing pull of the automobile, freeway, air travel and suburban sprawl in postwar America. The administrative civic center and arts and educational cultural center (bolstered by that icon of late urban modernity, the medical center) in turn spawned a new hybrid, the center for the performing arts, exemplified by Lincoln Center and the National Cultural Center (the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts), as cities sought to integrate convention, sports, and live performance venues into inner-city urban renewal projects. Through the key case studies of Pittsburgh, Cleveland, and Detroit, one-time juggernauts of heavy industry and twenty-first century regions of rust-belt collapse, this study examines the emergence of the ideology of grouping public buildings in urban planning as well as the nineteenth century philology of the keywords civic center and cultural center, terms once actively employed in discourses as diverse as Swiss geography, American anthropology, Social Christianity, the schoolhouse social center movement, and cultural Zionism. It also positions these developments in relation to modern anxieties about the center and its loss, charted by such thinkers as Hans Sedlmayr, Jacques Derrida, and Henri Lefevbre, and considers the contested utopian aspirations of the monumental center as New Jerusalem, Celestial City, and Shining City on a Hill. </p>

<p> This study defines and explores the concept of community learning as a driver of economic and social change. Community learning refers to the creation of new knowledge and skills as a result of people interacting with each other to affect change within a locality. Jointly-created knowledge and skills build the efficacy of individuals as well as the capacity of a group to further its purpose. The question that shaped this study was: How do communities educate themselves for change? A theoretical framework is developed based on social constructivist learning theory, organizational and collaborative learning, and community development. This study applies Morse's (2006a) six postulates of community learning to the creation of Chattanooga Venture, a non-profit organization in Chattanooga, Tennessee, in 1984. Three primary sources&mdash;personal interviews, organizational documents, and newspaper accounts&mdash;ground the study in the lived experience. By applying Morse's postulates to the origin of Chattanooga Venture, the study examines both the process and structure of community learning and has implications for both theory and practice. The significance of this study is to determine if a theoretical understanding of community learning can be applied to creating stronger and better communities, increasing the knowledge-base both individually and collectively, and generating social and economic productivity.</p>

<p> This study utilized geographic information systems (GIS) software to identify and map vacant parcels of land where the establishment of urban market gardens and small-scale farms would most likely be viable, and then estimated potential crop yields and gross sales based on available land resources. Of the 100,618 parcels (62,098 acres) within the study area, 14 percent (4,603 parcels, 8,612 acres) were water-metered, vacant, and met the study's minimum suitability requirements. Based on average yields for fourteen regionally appropriate crops and local produce prices for organic goods in 2012, gross yields and sales were calculated. The findings suggest that urban growers in the Reno-Sparks-Washoe County study area could generate between $88,000 and $272,000 per acre, a range based on conventional and biointensive crop management methods, respectively. If 10 percent (861 acres) of all suitable vacant lands were cultivated, an estimated $76 million to $234 million could be generated through sales of an estimated yield of 29 to 86 million pounds of produce. </p><p> These figures were based on the assumptions that land would be at least 60 percent cultivated; that season extension infrastructure such as row covers, polyethylene-film covered hoop-house structures, or traditional greenhouses would be utilized to ensure three full growing seasons if necessary; and that 60 percent of all produce would be sold directly to consumers at organic retail prices. Costs of labor, establishment, and production were not considered due to extreme variability of site requirements and growing methods. The results highlight the importance of urban agriculture to our community's economy and food security, and its needs for greater public awareness and political and programmatic support.</p>

The piazza is failing as a typology of public space in Florence, Italy due to sprawl, tourism, and the profuse use of the car. However, the city of Florence keeps building new piazzas to act as a public space inside the Centro Storico and in sprawling Florence only to find them empty and unused. Instead of creating new piazzas, the city should be looking towards the successful types of public space which include the parks outside of the historical center. What if needed infrastructure is used to fund public space? Currently Florence dumps all of its untreated wastewater into the Arno and consequently pays 1/2 billion euros annually in fines to the European Union. In addition, the Arno floods catastrophically with the last major flood occurring in 1966 causing over 10 billion euros in damage to date. While the city image of Florence is very different than the realities of Florence, even tourists can not escape the consequences of the sewage filled Arno which floods. Building a wastewater treatment plant within the city limits and turning it into a contemporary public park would fulfill the Florentines' needs for communal/public space while also cleaning the water.

Mathematical models of urban spatial structure in cities with decentralized employment involve the interaction between a minimum of three markets: land, labor and capital. I study the interaction between the land and the labor markets carefully. Standard theory assumes that when firms decentralize, firms located away from the Central Business District (CBD) offer lower wages to their workers. The continuous downward adjustment in wages as firms move further from the CBD is characterized as the wage gradient. By this approach, following firm decentralization, the adjustment in wages is sufficient to leave everyone indifferent between the monocentric city and the latter case. Consequently, no one relocates and the city is left essentially unchanged. I refute this argument on the grounds that it does not hold in a model with a full labor market. First, I consider the wage gradient approach, where labor demand is infinitely elastic. Next, I look at the case where labor demand becomes vertical. I consider several special cases, and find that when proportionally more employment moves further out, everyone in the city is better off. Finally, I include a labor market where firm movements take place due to movement of capital, a complimentary factor of production. I show that the wage gradient posited by standard urban theory breaks down. Instead, as firms decentralize in a city with fixed population, an upward sloping utility gradient appears as firms move further out. Finally, I consider a case where there are a fixed number of high skilled and low skilled workers in the city with a full labor market. I study where they live, given the proximity and strength of the employment subcenter. When the CBD and the subcenter locate close to each other, the two groups stay segregated, all low skilled workers living close to the center and all high skilled workers occupying a low density suburban area. As more jobs move further out, this pattern changes, and low skilled residential areas and high skilled living areas intermingle. In all, I find five possible patterns of residential location.

During the Victorian era, Galveston Island, Texas, was a cosmopolitan port-city, the second wealthiest city in the nation based on per capita income. In 1900, its good fortune was dramatically reversed when a hurricane struck the Island, killing more than 6,000 people and leveling much of the city. Although Galveston never regained its prominence as a shipping and financial center, it did gain notoriety of a different sort--as a haven for prostitution, rum-running, and gambling. Vestiges of this mottled past are visible today, as the rich and poor live cheek by jowl, their respective Victorian mansions and shotgun houses abutting each other at more than the occasional turn. A resort island for much of its existence, Galveston has an old and indigenous discourse of the self (Islanders) and the other (Mainlanders, tourists, and non-native residents). And like many tourist towns and settings, it also has an internal discourse about itself as the cultural other. This discourse is about the islandness that constitutes Galveston's "authentic" cultural otherness, as distinct from the touristic islandness, by which it commodifies and markets itself to outsiders. In the mid 1980s, the Island experienced an identity crisis grounded in the political economy of tourism and ushered in by a period of self-representation that parlayed a denatured historical past into cultural and economic capital. Galveston Island, in the late 20th century, was a city in the throes of historic preservation. As a form of cultural and historical production, preservation requires the privileging of certain periods and images of the past, and the suppression, if not outright erasure of others. The Galveston Historical Foundation, has been remarkably successful in this regard. For nearly a decade its hegemony remained virtually uncontested. But in the mid 80s, a series of political referendums designed to reintroduce gambling to the Island (this time by legal means), pitted the Victorian era-past against an explicitly resort-island past and exposed the symbolic connections between the patronage of preservation by the Island's dynastic families, and their opposition to gambling as a threat to the preservation of their ancestral milieu.

The Melting Shed presents the role of the architect as a traveler in the world today. This thesis documents a voyage taken to investigate the work of an artistic vanguard and focuses on the place where its art has been housed for the public. The journey is an exploration of the artistic and cultural life of two cities: Cuenca, Spain and Houston, Texas. The process involves research in both the old and the new worlds, while discoveries remind us of the rewards of searching in far away places. On the way, the architect considers establishing a forum for artistic expression in Houston. The project examines the city and illustrates how the site was selected as a place to shelter the arts. This thesis delivers a manifesto and suggests a design for the architect's proposal of a Facility for Urban Culture in Houston.