This thesis explores how to conduct a regional foodshed assessment and further provides guidance to local and regional planners on the use of foodshed assessments. A foodshed is the geographic origin of a food supply. Before the 1800s, foodsheds were predominantly local — within the city or neighboring countryside. Today most urban areas are supported by a global foodshed. While the global foodshed can present many benefits, it also creates tremendous externalities. In an attempt to address these concerns, promotion of alternative local foodsheds has re-emerged. A foodshed assessment serves as a planning tool for land use planners, as well as for local food advocates, offering an understanding of land use implications that is not often carefully considered. By determining the food needs of a region’s population, the land base needed to support that population can then be identified. In this way, planners can have a stronger basis for promoting working farmland preservation measures and strengthening the local foodshed. This thesis compares the approaches of five previous foodshed assessments and presents a model for conducting an assessment on a regional level. This model is then applied to the Pioneer Valley of Western Massachusetts with the goal of determining how much the agricultural production in the Pioneer Valley fulfills the food consumption needs of the region’s population. The assessment also compares the amount of current working farmlands to open lands available for farming, and the extent of farmland necessary to meet regional food demand for various diet types.

Shifts in economics, demographics, and lifestyle in America have lead to changes in this country's urban landscape. Rural and urban populations have migrated toward the suburbs and concentrated metro areas, leaving holes in the urban fabric of small and midsized cities. Often these empty spaces become drivers of blight, crime, and discouragement in the community. The goal of the Grow Pods Project is to transform the negative of vacant urban lots into an opportunity for improving health, building community, and encouraging positive growth. As a tool for integrating the food system directly into the urban context, this project addresses the need for innovative solutions to the complex issues of city land use. Grow Pods aim to help communities redirect a trajectory of decline toward a future that is focused on the health and wellbeing of the urban environment and the people who live in it. Transformation and transportability are intrinsic features of the design, in acknowledgement of the necessity for any component of a contemporary city in flux to be dynamic enough to reinvent itself within its evolving context. The Grow Pod project is focused on the South End Neighborhood of Springfield, MA, a city whose population and industrial base has decreased since much of its infrastructure was designed. Located in the fertile Connecticut River Valley, it is also in a region with a rich agricultural history.

The intent of this thesis is to challenge our society’s existing options for the care and processing of the deceased, and to design a space and a ritual which are both deeply meaningful and ecologically beneficial. The community for whom this architecture is designed currently lacks the religious or cultural rituals which would otherwise guide them through the process of laying of their loved ones to rest. For this community, both traditional burial and cremation are devoid of meaning and culturally irrelevant ways of dealing with the deceased, in addition to being unnecessarily wasteful processes. Likewise, the community for which I am designing is decidedly urban, and made up of people for whom the city is the chosen site for living. This city dweller loves the bustling, complicated, concrete and steel metropolis reality. I posit they would find a deep comfort in becoming part of the city after dying. However, it is my position that a deep connection to the cycles of nature is critical in order for the dead to rest peacefully, and for the living to properly grieve. Therefore, I propose that the space I am designing – and its processes within - will be deeply rooted in the cycles of nature, for it is only by truly comprehending our part in these cycles that we can grieve and heal.

Projects to expand the passenger rail network in the United States will connect major metropolitan areas over long distances, travelling through smaller communities along the way. Transit-oriented development (TOD) is a concept for planning around stations to support transit and allow the development of dense, mixed use, walkable places. TOD literature focuses largely on developing around transit in metropolitan areas. Guidance for small towns and cities in rural areas is lacking. This thesis compares best planning practices from TOD literature to the planning practices of small cities located in rural areas of New England where new passenger rail service or a new station has been developed in the last fifteen years. The research focuses on planning efforts in the area within a half mile of the station. Two indicators, property values and ridership, were also used to determine if the service has impacted the area surrounding the station. The goal of the research is to determine how planning for rural stations differs from planning for TOD in metropolitan areas. Findings show that many of the best planning practices from the literature were applied in the small cities, though there were a few important differences. The station was included as part of broader development plans, rather than acting as a central focus of the plan. Additionally, it was found that stations should incorporate multiple uses to create activity throughout the day since train service is less frequent than in an urban setting.

Community Land Trusts (CLTs) are an affordable housing model based in the principles of community control of land and housing, as well as the permanent affordability of home ownership. Because of their membership-based governance structure and limited-equity formula, they are uniquely positioned to target reinvestment in communities of color and low-income communities without perpetuating cycles of displacement. Though focused on home ownership, many CLTs have adapted the model to include rental housing. This addition has the potential to expand affordability and opportunities for community governance to lower-income renters; however, it also challenges CLTs as organizations with little experience developing or managing rental housing. CLTs interested in providing rental units also find limited sources of research guidance on the topic. This thesis intends to evaluate the reasons CLTs do or do not provide rental housing, the obstacles to providing rental housing, the strategies they use to overcome those obstacles, and the resources available to them. To achieve these objectives it assesses interviews with staff at 22 CLTs around the U.S. The research finds that CLTs begin providing rental units to meet the housing needs of low-income people who do not qualify for mortgages, and when the resources available to them supports this strategy. It also reveals that CLTs face significant challenges taking on large rental projects early in their rental careers, but may succeed with smaller-scale rental development and management. The findings suggest that CLTs require much more technical assistance in developing and managing rental properties. The modification of the CLT model to include renters also necessitates some re-thinking of how to provide the full benefits of the model to these new tenants, as well as how to best market the organizations to municipal officials. Lastly, this research aims to encourage planners to reevaluate housing policies biased toward home ownership, especially given the instability of the housing market and the increased demand for rental units. CLTs’ success with rental housing should also prompt these public officials to challenge the typical stereotypes of renters and understand the stability, flexibility, and sustainability that CLTs can bring to affordable rental housing.

The concept of my thesis is to employ architectural intervention in residual urban space as a catalyst for transformation. The goal is design of a building and environment that could be used for any combination of purposes, be used freely by all members of the community, be designed so that the art and architecture is interactive, and could be transformed by the users of the space. The project makes use of a residual urban space that would otherwise remain largely inaccessible. The project explores how the space could be designed to give a sense of ownership of it to the community, and how it could be designed to reunify areas of the city that have been severed by urban renewal. The site I have chosen is the Franklin Arterial in Portland, Maine, a four-lane divided surface highway surrounded by parking lots vacant lots, industrial sites and housing projects. Design interventions include a centrally located public market building, which would have a variety of uses throughout any given time period, a bicycle pedestrian path which reconnects the surrounding neighborhoods, and designated sites for art and performance throughout the area.

Landscape design media comprise those graphic and spatial models used to generate imagined landscapes and to represent finished designs. But many of these traditional devices are insufficient for their purposes and/or inappropriately used, limiting conceptualization, understanding, and communication. This thesis critiques the uses of traditional representational media and proposes alternatives, relying on insights from architectural and landscape criticism, environmental psychology, cognitive science, and art history. Collage is one proposed new medium tested here for representing landscape to communicate design intent to the non-expert. Expert and non-expert comparative understanding of collage, orthographic drawing, and plan was assessed by questionnaire. Experimental results of this pilot study suggest that collage is appropriate for use by professional landscape architects to communicate type of place, user, activity and experiential aspects of design to non-experts, in conjunction with labeled orthographic drawings that show spatial information, structures, and activity locations. Collage and orthographic illustrations are best understood when viewed together, either as two separate illustrations or as a hybrid form. Further studies are needed to test the efficacy of collage for communicating user and activity aspects of design to non-experts across culture, age, and gender. Studies of paired illustrations (collage + architectural drawing) and hybrid variations are needed. In addition, studies are needed to test the efficacy of collage for communicating other aspects of contemporary landscape design, such as temporality, dynamism, and process, as well as acoustic, tactile, cognitive, and intuitive qualities of landscape.

Most scientific studies concerning energy conservation benefits of trees have been completed in cooling dominated climates or have involved model-based engineering studies. An infestation of the Asian Longhorned Beetle (ALB) (anoplophora glabripennis) has initiated an extensive tree removal program in Worcester, Massachusetts. A June 1, 2011 tornado in Springfield, Massachusetts has damaged a randomized sample of the urban canopy cover in Springfield. These events provide natural, controlled experiments to quantify the energy use impact of trees in real-world settings. Large-scale tree removal and natural disasters completely transform the landscape. Due to the reduction in shade, near-ground temperature increase is substantial. With the trees gone, the increased velocity of cold winter winds is noticeable for neighborhood residents. Tree removal due to ALB infestation in two residential neighborhoods in Worcester, Massachusetts in the winter of 2008-2009 resulted in a 37% increase (t = -9.09, p<0.001) in baseline-corrected, weather-normalized electrical consumption from the 2008 to 2009 cooling seasons. In Springfield, Massachusetts we find no difference in baseline-corrected, weather-normalized natural gas consumption for the heating season for individual homes after the June 1, 2011 tornado. The results of this research will aid in the development and implementation of energy conserving treeplanting and retention programs and policies pursuant to the Clean Energy and Climate Change Plan of 2010 in Massachusetts.

Separation, removal, and relocation are the initial steps in the “clean-up” of a contaminated site. While crucial to safeguarding the public health of adjacent communities and the surrounding environment, conventional remediation is subtractive from the community leaving many psychological wounds untreated. Architecture has the greatest potential to address the social concerns which contribute to the complexities of redeveloping a contaminated site. Focusing on the 52 acre former General Electric Brownfield site in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, I have explored through design alternative approaches for the redevelopment of contaminated sites. My design research focuses on the ways in which architecture can be used as a tool to desensitize the legacy of post-industrial contaminated sites within our communities and create spaces of sustainable coexistence between for our greater economic, environmental, and communal interests.

This thesis acts as one of the first studies that analyzes the safety effects of Edge Lane Roads (ELR) for all road users. This is important since ELRs can be a solution to many issues, such as alleviating congestion, increasing multimodality along roadways, and reducing maintenance costs. ELRs in both North America and Australia were observed. Starting with the North American ELRs, the following study designs were employed to estimate the safety of ELRs: (a) yoked comparison where each ELR installation was matched with at least two comparable 2-lane roads to serve as comparison sites and (b) an Empirical Bayes (EB) before/after analysis for ELR sites where requisite data on AADT and other relevant characteristics were available. Crash data was collected and compiled into four different groups: ELR before implementation, ELR after implementation, comparison site before ELR implementation, and comparison site after ELR comparison. The yoked comparison showed 9 of the 13 sites that had lower crash counts compared to their respective comparison sites. The EB analysis showed all 11 ELRs that were observed demonstrated a reduction in crashes. Moving to the Australian ELRs, the following study designs were employed: (c) analysis of general crash counts/trends, and (d) reverse EB analysis. The analysis of general crash counts and trends showed that each of the Australian ELRs exhibited very low amounts of crashes for 5 years, which further shows how safe these facilities are. Moving forward to the reverse EB analysis, 5 of the 8 ELR sites demonstrated a reduction in crashes. Overall, the results were generally favorable and indicated that ELRs provided a safer experience for cyclists, drivers, and pedestrians. More analysis is recommended as more data becomes available on these ELRs. Examples of this include using pedestrian and bicycle data to better understand the safety effects VRUs experience on North American facilities or gathering enough crash data to conduct 3-year reverse EB analyses for ELRs that were expanded to 2-lane roads. Hence, a recommendation can be made to implement a few experimental ELRs in rural locations throughout the State of California to help it meet its SB-1 objectives.