Sustainable Built Environments Senior Capstone Project / Green infrastructure is defined as a planned and managed natural system which can provide several categories of benefits. Man-made, gray solutions are no longer considered to be a viable solution when designing with resiliency in cities. Gray solutions have replaced naturally occurring vegetation with impervious surfaces. During severe rainfall events, these impervious surfaces have led cities to become more susceptible to flooding as infiltration and retention capacities have been significantly reduced. This study will analyze an area located within a highly urbanized city center and will begin to interpret the performance and impacts that may come after implementing green infrastructure practices. Based on the simulated outcome provided by the National Storm water Calculator, the results will determine if added green infrastructure features can reduce urban flooding.

<p> Disadvantaged communities in California and across the US encounter unique barriers to attracting competitive funding for affordable housing, economic development, sustainability initiatives and other needs. This paper examines an effort underway in California to overcome these barriers by providing subsidized technical assistance to disadvantaged communities that apply for certain cap and trade-funded grant programs. Specifically, we evaluate the effectiveness of California&rsquo;s technical assistance (TA) pilot run by the California Strategic Growth Council (SGC) for the Affordable Housing &amp; Sustainable Communities (AHSC) Grant Program. We find that applicants who received comprehensive technical assistance, such as the services provided by the SGC TA pilot, enjoyed a strong competitive advantage over those who do not receive assistance. We also find evidence that projects aimed at serving disadvantaged communities see greater benefits from technical assistance than projects in more affluent communities.</p><p>

<p> A growing number of Community Artists are doing work with potential relevance to the field of historic preservation. They have seen a need for action in low-income communities and communities of color that are losing their historic, physical, and social character through dilapidation, redevelopment, and displacement. These artists have found nontraditional ways to bolster communities while preserving neighborhood buildings, histories, and social structures. This thesis analyzes three community art case studies as a means to evaluate changes proposed to our current preservation system by leaders in historic preservation concerned with issues of equity and social justice. This study finds that these projects offer many useful examples for preservationists interested in better serving underrepresented communities through the field of historic preservation.</p><p>

<p> Since China's shift to market socialism, many marginalized by this process work as informal street vendors where they reappropriate public space in order to survive&mdash;a practice at odds with urban authorities' modernizing agenda. In relation to these competing logics concerning public space's use value versus its exchange value, this dissertation examines the practices, experiences, and agency of informal street vendors working in Sanjingwuwei, an ordinary, yet rapidly gentrifying, neighborhood of Nanchang, capital and largest city of southeastern China's Jiangxi Province. After describing the growth of an informal economy in modern China and providing a history of street vending, I describe the everyday practices of vendors and their reappropriation of public space in Nanchang and the Sanjingwuwei neighborhood. I then provide the socio-demographic details of Sanjingwuwei&rsquo;s vendors and use their voices to demonstrate how city image protection, a burgeoning informal sector, and the globalization of urban space bring challenges to their already precarious work in the streets. The dissertation concludes by linking the practices and agency of Nanchang&rsquo;s vendors into a theoretical discussion concerning the agency of informal street workers. Despite daily attempts by the local state to remove them, this study shows how Nanchang's street vendors, continue to actively engaging in alternative forms of urban space-making through reappropriating of public space. Therefore, this dissertation shows how vendors challenge the city as a system by downscaling, slowing down, decommodifying, and ultimately, deglobalizing urban space to neighborhood-level through their reappropriation of public space.</p><p>

<p> I analyze Lviv outskirt settlement Sokilnyky in Ukraine in order to find out which social structures, emerged or reconstituted after the collapse of the Soviet Union, are expressed in cultural landscape and how. After the collapse of the Soviet Union and redirection of Ukrainian economy to the neoliberal way of economy and the emergence of the distinctive post-socialist form of capitalism (Hirt 2012), largest cities&rsquo; environs became places of drastic change in demography, housing, infrastructure, land-use and landscape. Former predominantly agricultural areas became desirable places to live for the new rich Ukrainians. In addition suburbs were commercialized with the emergence of segregated commercial units including big box shopping malls. Currently post-socialist suburbs are mixed income with different social classes coexisting in one area face to face, however the segregation of affluent people is evident in new residential areas where fortress houses have emerged. At the same time Lviv suburbs still retain their rural face with supplemental family farming practiced mainly by long-term residents. After the strict planning regulations during the Soviet period, nowadays the lack of planning and architectural regulations together with drastic privatization of former agrarian land created eclectic landscapes being also the landscapes of privilege and inequality. </p><p>

<p> Issues of food accessibility and food insecurity receive high attention in the United States, due to evidence of disparities in the location and level of accessibility to nutritious food sources amongst neighborhoods of different economic classifications identified in several studies. However, most studies focus on grocery stores or convenience stores without considering other options available for food insecure residents. This research examined the different economic classes of neighborhoods in the Triple Cities of Broome County, New York and their proximity to grocery stores, food pantries and convenience stores, to establish the level of accessibility to food sources for residents of these different neighborhoods using ESRI ArcGIS for spatial analysis and Chi-Square for statistical analysis. The Findings reveal a positive relationship between the location and density of grocery stores, convenience stores and food pantries to low-income populations. Moreover, high-income neighborhoods are more disadvantaged in terms of physical access to food stores by distance. However, there exists an over-concentration of convenience stores in low-income neighborhoods compared to grocery stores and can have a negative impact on their diet choices and expenses on food.</p><p>

<p> The competition for resources between increasingly commodified pets (especially dogs) and human needs has often been qualitatively studied as an aspect of gentrification. This research is a quantitative, GIS-based case study that tests the hypothesis that there are spatially correlated effects on the urban environment where populations owning highly commodified pets cluster. The research began by identifying and mapping populations favorable for possessing commodified pets in the City of Chicago and continued with mapping the distributions of pet-centric and other specific businesses and amenities. The study examined the relationships between the spatial distributions of probable commodified pet owners, various businesses, and amenities. The results indicate commodified pet ownership does affect the urban landscape and may be indicative of a diversion of resources from established public facilities and amenities to those that are dependent on pet ownership. This is a serious issue to examine, especially in times of tighter municipal budgets for publicly funded facilities.</p>

Situated within the interpretive and critical traditions, this study aims to contribute to one of the continuing primary themes in urban preservation: how to interpret and preserve the intangible values of built environments. A comprehensive analysis of dominant theories of urban preservation forms the conceptual framework within which this dissertation takes place. It starts by locating the intellectual context of preservation in North America, and examines its basic premises and core issues. It identifies three limits to the traditional approach to preservation planning. The complexity and fragility of history, its narrative quality and its particularities, its emotional content and economic values, all connect urban preservation with public history. Therefore, in the spirit of communicative democracy and “a shared authority”, the study incorporates collective memory as an essential construct in urban landscapes, and suggests a culturally sensitive narrative approach (CSNA). The study employs an in-depth case study. The setting is Kensington Market in Toronto, Canada. It examines retrospectively the urban renewal planning of Kensington Market in the 1960s, identifies the pivotal events that prompted the change of urban renewal policies, and demonstrates, through the interpretive policy analysis, that sometimes urban renewal plans that fail to be implemented can become success stories in how to preserve urban neighborhoods as a kind of public history. To probe deeper into the sources of conflict between the professionals and the public, the study further explores the mutual relationship between collective memory and urban landscapes. It takes a selective look at some significant sites of memory, and connects them into a narrative path. Through oral history interviewing, field observation, and material cultural analysis, this part of the analysis constitutes an empirical study of CSNA. A proposition is derived from this critical case study. The study concludes with seven steps of CSNA, a guide for urban landscape preservation and planning.

Why do some communities thrive after closure of a major employment center such as a military base, while others suffer for many years with long-term unemployment, decaying infrastructure, or other indicators of a weak economy? Through a mixed-methods approach, this paper examines a wide variety of community characteristics from past base closures, builds a model of the most relevant indicators of success or failure, and then offers redevelopment lessons to communities facing base redevelopment. This research incorporates a multivariate statistical analysis including panel regression and then a historical study of the five major BRAC closures in New England. While strong pre-existing economic and social conditions are indicative of successful recovery in many situations, there is no universal set of indicators that can predict success. Nonetheless, there are actions that communities can take to help navigate a military base redevelopment—these include establishing a strong leadership system, aggressively seeking federal and state funding, and orchestrating comprehensive planning that synchronizes market research with available infrastructure and opportunity.

This dissertation investigates the economic consequences of urban sprawl for US minorities. Each essay focuses on a key empirical debate related to that relationship. The first essay establishes a set of attributes and empirical measures of sprawl based upon a comprehensive review of the literature. I define sprawl as a multi-faceted pattern of three land-use attributes: low density, deconcentration, and decentralization. I then resolve several methodological inconsistencies in the measurement of sprawl. Extensive analysis of spatial and economic data finds that metropolitan areas do not commonly exhibit high-sprawl (or low-sprawl) features across multiple measures. Instead, they often exhibit unique combinations of low-sprawl and high-sprawl attributes. The second essay examines the effect of sprawl on minority housing consumption gaps since the housing bust. I make two contributions to the literature. First, I reveal a facet of the relationship between sprawl and the Black-White housing gap not examined by previous econometric studies: Sprawl only contributes to reducing that gap once a metropolitan area reaches a critical threshold level of sprawl, typically at high levels of sprawl. Below a threshold, sprawl facilitates an expansion of the Black-White housing gap. Second, I compare results for Blacks, Asians, and Hispanics using recent data. For Blacks, the benefits from sprawl occur above an even higher threshold, as compared to preceding studies using 1990’s data. For Asians, sprawl yields significant gains in housing consumption relative to Whites. As such, arguments that anti-sprawl policies reduce minority gains in housing should be treated with considerable skepticism in the post-Great Recession economy. The third essay explores the relationship between sprawl and racial and ethnic segregation. This econometric study advances the understanding of that relationship in two ways. First, I examine the effect of countervailing patterns of multiple land-use attributes, i.e. unique combinations of low-sprawl and high-sprawl attributes, on all five of the dimensions of segregation. Second, I compare outcomes for Blacks, Hispanics, and Asians. The study analyzes the contribution and transmission of countervailing spatial patterns of land use to increasing (or decreasing) segregation. These complex effects bring new precision and insights to the analysis of racial and ethnic inequality in an age of rapid demographic change.