The 1984 Louisiana World Exposition in New Orleans was an important historical and cultural event. Unfortunately, the principal private and public sector parties involved had conflicting expectations as to its anticipated results A number of external and internal factors limited full achievement of all goals and there was a considerable financial deficit. Early financial difficulties and other problems caused a negative public relations image of the Fair during its 184 day run, and management was not successful in promoting it. Attendance was far short of that expected. A recession, political problems, demographics and certain strategic decisions based on faulty original data also contributed to the shortfall To what level it can be said to be successful can only be determined in a relative way to how it met its stated and implied goals of being a great show, drawing twelve million visitors, being self liquidating, being an economic development catalyst, and leaving something behind of value. However, there are certain residual tangible and intangible benefits which the area realized by hosting the Fair / acase@tulane.edu

The 'Washington Consensus' over Neoliberal reform has fallen significantly short of a consensus, at least among some Latin American nations maintaining vestiges of state-led development strategies. Instead, this study shows how Venezuela is fashioning a 'hybrid' strategy, incorporating elements of statist theories of regional development with free market principles of economic reform such as privatization and decentralization. It examines the extent neoliberal principles have been adopted, assesses the social impacts of different approaches to development, and uncovers social and political forces complicating a shift from state to market-led development Three dimensions of the impacts of retreating states and a strengthening market are analyzed: regional planning, firm performance, and political participation. I conducted in-depth interviews, archival research, and content analysis where the Corporacion Venezolana de Guayana (CVG) built a planned city and Latin America's largest state-owned industrial complex. Legacies of state intervention in Ciudad Guayana were a context for examining how the State, firms, and civil society are negotiating industrial restructuring, increased global competition and political decentralization. My own face-to-face household survey, focus groups, participant observation, and annual survey data reveal impacts of these processes and provide evidence of and reasons for resistance to change My results challenge key assumptions about both statist and market-based development models, and in doing so indicate that neoliberalism's hegemony is subject to reexamination. First, despite origins in competing ideologies, both approaches advocate exploiting comparative advantages in natural resources. Second, contrary to empirical evidence from other resource-based development projects, residents' standard of living was very adequate, indicating long-term returns on public investment associated with state-led capitalism. Third, regardless of global universality and uniformity of neoliberalism, locally implemented policies stopped short of structural reform. Fourth, global economic restructuring has wrought enormous local change independent of neoliberal reform. Industries struggle with global oversupply of commodities, debt, and technological shortcomings; unemployment is increasing; wages are stagnant; and the service sector is growing. Finally, while local actors agree that they must look beyond public enterprise for a development strategy, the centralization associated with state-led development makes it difficult for local government, led by 'La Causa R', to foster participatory democracy / acase@tulane.edu

Previous evaluation and research studies focused on planning have indicated that the incorporation of natural hazards into comprehensive plans results in a reduction in property loss following a disaster event (R. J. Burby et al., 1999, 2000; A. C. Nelson & S. P. French, 2002; R. B. Olshansky, 2001). To date, minimal research has been conducted on the efficacy of stand-alone mitigation plans to reduce disaster loss. With passage of the Disaster Mitigation Act of 2000 and its emphasis on mitigation planning, analysis of its efficacy in reducing disaster expenditures is important. The dearth of related research increases the relevancy of this study This current study sought to determine whether mitigation planning improves community disaster resiliency through the reduction of disaster recovery costs. The purpose of this research was to investigate whether vulnerable populations and property are protected from loss due to natural disasters by continued investment in mitigation planning under the present legislative framework. This research examines the Local Mitigation Strategies implemented within Florida and over 25 federally declared events from 1994 through 2004. The Local Mitigation Strategy served as the pilot program for the planning requirement introduced in the Disaster Mitigation Act of 2000. A multivariate model was applied to determine whether disaster expenditures or per capita expenditure from the natural disasters under study could have been reduced had a mitigation plan been in place. It was found that having a plan did not reduce either type of expenditure. Based upon these findings, changes are strongly recommended in the manner in which mitigation planning is conducted under the current framework to reduce the loss of life and property from natural disaster events / acase@tulane.edu

During the 1990s, Bogota, the capital of the Republic of Colombia passed through one of its most intense transformations due to new government policies in urban relations. Taking these changes as a point of departure, this dissertation attempts to demonstrate the implications that symbolic expressions (novels, essays, films, etc.) have in such transformations, and especially to show how the urban imaginary influences the different uses of the city itself. Thus, the dissertation explores novels, essays, mass media, advertising, film, among other expressions, in order to see how they portray the city, and especially how they position themselves vis-a-vis new urban government initiatives (support, resistance, etc.) The first chapter recounts how the city was seen as a space of chaos and how it was no longer possible to understand the urban. The chapter further explores the first years of the 1990s, where we find texts (novels, essays, and films) perplexed with the growing chaos of the city, its hyper-growth, and the cognitive difficulties it presents as an object of study. The second chapter focuses on a diversity of texts (the mass media, government publicity campaigns, the press, etc.) and explores the communicative actions that were produced by the government and by the media who have the power of informing the people. This chapter makes the argument (which is the overall argument of the dissertation) that to govern is a communicative act, and that it is precisely there, in the act of communication, where memory is or is not constructed in a democratic way The third chapter reviews different novels and films that have Bogota as their setting and subject, showing the different ways that art resists the official gaze of the city government. These are texts that clearly show the poverty, crime, violence, and illegality rampant in the city. Throughout the dissertation, I question the different theoretical tendencies that are used to explain urban and cultural phenomena that take place in a city like Bogota. Furthermore, I propose it should be through a combination of different disciplines and diverse theories that it is possible to explain the new phenomenon that is to inhabit a twenty-first century city such as Bogota / acase@tulane.edu

This dissertation examines the growth of a modern tourism industry in New Orleans, Louisiana, in the half century after World War II. It sheds light on the ways in which tourism shaped local culture, race and class relations, and public policy-making in a city that was struggling to reverse its slippage from the first order of American cities. Topical chapters explore how, in a time of urban decline, tourism assumed greater importance in concert with several developments: the rise of historic preservation, the resurgence of traditional jazz, and the expansion of the city's Carnival celebration. The study also considers how struggles to end racial discrimination in public accommodations and to stem prostitution, gambling, and other forms of vice and disorder both drew strength from the city's need to attract tourists and facilitated the further expansion of the hospitality industry. Finally, it traces the growing municipal and state partnership with private developers and tourism promoters to develop tourist attractions and venues, market the city's colorful heritage, and fill the calendar with conventions, festival, and other special events Much of this dissertation centers on the French Quarter, or Vieux Carre, the site of the French and Spanish colonial city in the eighteenth century. It argues that different groups in the city---including white social elites, business leaders, municipal officials, and preservationists---tried to use the French Quarter as a vehicle for tourism or as a preserve for an imagined romantic past that reflected a very selective memory. Conversely, many African Americans, whose cultural heritage and labor had proved essential to the city's rise as a tourist destination, viewed the French Quarter with much less affection. For transients, street performers, and nonconformists, the Vieux Carre was a place where they might drink freely, indulge in sexual activities, earn money by entertaining tourists, or live unorthodox lifestyles relatively free from harassment---far different from the upper-class notions of a genteel past. As tourism became more and more central to New Orleans' economy, city leaders and preservation-minded French Quarter residents clashed with those who did not use the urban district in ways they found acceptable / acase@tulane.edu

This research draws upon the writings of Michel Foucault and a range of governmentality texts to problematise those planning techniques and practices promulgated in an attempt to produce particular ideals of community. To accomplish this I have focused predominantly on the discourses pertaining to the Golden Grove Development. The histories I re-construct from these discourses demonstrate how ideals of community have been constituted and how they act as technologies of government. The goals of these governmental technologies, I argue, were the normalisation of particular suburban subjectivities, with the intent to maximise economic gains and minimise financial, temporal, spatial and social risks. / PhD Doctorate

This thesis investigates factors which influence the physical form of the urban environment at the micro-scale. Three aspects of form are considered. These are configuration, separation, and consistency. A method of assessing the form of a property from a public place with respect to these aspects is outlined. The technique breaks each aspect into a scale of form types as a tool for measuring the formal characteristics of the environment. These form types are used to describe an urban environment. A comparison of this description with the physical attributes of the area identifies four factors which may have affected the patterns and distributions of the forms observed in the description. These are land use, land ownership patterns, time, and regulatory controls. Detailed studies of these factors in five particular areas reveals that relationships between each of the factors and the incidence of the various form types exist. Correspondences which suggest that the factor probably has an influence on the forms identified are evident in varying degrees depending on the factor considered.

Grassroots studies of the implementation of the federal antipoverty initiatives of the 1960s and 1970s are showing that the War on Poverty did not operate in a vacuum; rather, it was profoundly shaped by a multifarious group of local actors that included public officials, local elites, grassroots antipoverty activists, program administrators, federal volunteers, civil rights activists, and poor people themselves. In Houston, grassroots activists created a local context in which to implement the War on Poverty that was much more diverse in its intellectual and political influences than the rather narrow confines of New Deal-Great Society liberalism. The moderate liberalism that motivated the architects of the federal War on Poverty certainly helped galvanize local antipoverty activists in Houston, but even more prominent in their antipoverty philosophy were Prophetic Christianity, radical civil rights activism, and the vision of participatory democracy and community organizing espoused by members of the New Left and iconoclastic figures like Saul Alinsky. This local context created a favorable environment for these activists to use the War on Poverty to advance an agenda of social change by empowering the poor and helping then engage in confrontations with the city's elite. By the same token, the diversity of ideas that fueled the implementation of the War on Poverty in Houston---and especially the small victories that grassroots activists were able to achieve in their quest to empower the city's poor---provoked a swift and powerful backlash from local public officials and conservative defenders of the status quo. In Houston, therefore, local political conditions and contests, even more than federal politics, determined how the War on Poverty was fought, and the interaction between the federal antipoverty program and a broad range of local ideas gave the War on Poverty a distinctive flavor in Houston that both created opportunities for grassroots activists to bring about social change and set limits on what those activists could accomplish.

<p>An ecosystem is a community of organisms interacting with its environment, and landscapes are spatially interactive ecosystems. Earth's burgeoning human population demands ever more from finite ecosystems; but if managed well, landscapes can sustain their provision of resources and services and adapt to fulfill the changing human appetite. Management relies on sound information, and managing landscape change requires reliable spatio-temporal databases of ecologically relevant information. Remote sensing technologies fill this niche, providing increasingly large and diverse datasets, but the algorithms to extract information from the data must be developed. I developed and compared three remotely sensed measurements of forest canopy height to one another and to in situ field measurements. Both the precision and the accuracy (as well as the cost) of the measurements sorted along an axis of spatial scale, with Light Detection and Ranging (lidar) measurements proving most reliable at fine scales but prohibitively expensive over large areas and various radar technologies more appropriate for larger areas, especially when calibrated to the more accurate and precise lidar measurements. I also adapted traditional, single-time landcover classification algorithms to extract dense time series of categorical landcover maps from archival multi-spectral satellite images. These measurements greatly expand the potential spatio-temporal scope of landscape ecology and management, facilitating a shift away from data-imposed reliance on "space-for-time substitution" and loosely connected case studies toward robust, statistical analysis based on consistent information.</p> / Dissertation

Thesis (M. Arch.)--University of Hong Kong, 2000. / Includes special study report entitled: Regional design approach. Includes bibliographical references.