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The Pecan Street Project (PSP) is a public-private initiative that seeks to establish the City of Austin and its electric utility, Austin Energy (AE), as leaders in developing the electric utility system of the future and clean energy economy. The four main components of the project are to: 1) develop a local, public-private consortium dedicated to research and development of clean energy technologies and distributed power generation; 2) open the city’s electric grid to act as a lab to test emerging clean energy technologies; 3) develop a new business model to ensure AE’s continued profitability; and 4) show the world how the new business and systems model can work. This report provides a case study of PSP and describes an analytical approach for evaluating projects, programs, and policies proposed by PSP working groups to develop a cleaner, more efficient electric system. This report includes a history of the project, discusses opportunities and challenges identified by PSP, and evaluates the potential economic, environmental, system, and other impacts of different project ideas through a technical analysis. This report concludes with a series of recommendations to PSP and identifies policy implications for the City of Austin, AE, other policymakers, and other electric utilities. / text

Depuis ses débuts, l’industrie hollywoodienne utilise des stéréotypes dépréciatifs des Latinos pour construire une série de personnages menaçants qui cristallisent les peurs de la société américaine. Cette recherche se concentre sur le festival de cinéma latino Cine Las Americas (Austin, Texas) et questionne les stratégies explicites et sous-jacentes mises en œuvre pour déconstruire ces stéréotypes. Dans un premier temps, il s’agit de faire émerger les phases qui ont permis à Cine Las Americas de s’institutionnaliser entre 1998 et 2017. En se concentrant sur une année type (2012), la recherche met également en lumière la synergie avec Austin, ville créative « excentrique » (weird) de façon à montrer en quoi elle est un terrain fertile pour le festival. Elle place également Cine las Americas dans le contexte historique des festivals de films latinos pour en comprendre l’émergence au tournant du millénaire et les spécificités. Dans un deuxième temps, après avoir fait un état des lieux des stéréotypes latinos véhiculés par Hollywood et des stratégies cognitives utilisées pour les construire, le contenu des films des quinze premiers festivals (1998-2012) est analysé dans le but de mettre en évidence les contre-stéréotypes correspondants, notamment à travers l’image du migrant, figure centrale d’un groupe de films sur la frontière. L’analyse fait émerger les thèmes fédérateurs, les contre-récits et questionne l’héritage Chicano de Cine Las Americas. Dans un dernier temps, la thèse s’intéresse à la place de Cine Las Americas dans les réseaux transnationaux et locaux de ses débuts à 2017. Il s’agit de déterminer comment les films « des Amériques » sont utilisés pour articuler la mission anti-stéréotype et faire émerger la figure collective des Indigènes, démontrant ainsi comment Cine Las Americas est devenu un « événement configurateur de champ » (Field-Configuring Event). Cette stratégie confirme le rôle moteur d’Austin et permet de voir les organisateurs comme des diplomates culturels. / From the beginning, Hollywood has used disparaging stereotypes about Latinos to create a series of threatening characters that give shape to the fears of the American society. This research focuses on the Latino film festival Cine Las Americas (Austin, Texas) and questions the explicit and underlying strategies used to deconstruct such stereotypes. First, the study analyzes the different phases that have allowed Cine Las Americas to become an institution between 1998 and 2017. The research also highlights the synergy with the city of Austin, « weird » Creative City, to show how it represents a fertile ground for the festival. It also situates Cine Las Americas in the historical context of Latino film festivals in order to understand their emergence at the turn of the millenium and their specificities.Second, after going over the Hollywood stereotypes about Latinos, the content of the movies from the first fifteen festivals (1998-2012) is analyzed to shed light on the corresponding counter-stereotypes, especially through the image of the migrant, the central figure of the movies about the border. The analysis sheds light on the unifying themes and the counter-narratives and questions Cine Las Americas’s Chicano heritage. Last, the research seeks to consider Cine Las Americas’s position in international and local networks from the beginning to 2017. It seeks to determine how the movies from « the Americas » are used to implement the anti-stereotype mission and to bring forth the collective figure of the Indigenous people, thus demonstrating how Cine Las Americas has become a Field-Configuring Event (FCE). This strategy confirms Austin’s driving force and portrays the organizors as cultural diplomats.

Le champ de l’aménagement urbain structure fortement la vie politique locale de la capitale du Texas. Les acteurs s’affrontent autour des enjeux d’aménagement, allant du simple cas de zonage à l’élaboration complexe du plan d’urbanisme. La crispation des relations actorielles dans ce domaine s’effectue sur fond de croissance démographique et économique rapide qui aiguise les enjeux d’aménagement. Alors que l’attractivité d’Austin est érigée en modèle exemplaire du succès de la théorie de la classe créative, l’objectif de ce travail est de révéler le rôle des différents types de modèle dans la structuration et l’évolution de la culture des acteurs de l’aménagement austinite. La première partie précise les objets de recherche et développe une méthodologie adaptée. L’étude de la culture de l’aménagement urbain s’appuie sur les analyses des professionnels de l’urbanisme et les travaux d’analyse comparative des cultures de l’urbanisme en les adaptant à un champ actoriel ouvert à tous les acteurs impliqués, porteurs d’une stratégie spatiale. Les différents types de modèles actifs dans la vaste communauté discursive et comparative de l’urbanisme à l’échelle mondiale sont définis avant d’être envisagés à la lumière des policy mobility studies.La deuxième partie retrace l’histoire de l’urbanisation d’Austin au miroir des modèles théoriques utilisés pour en étudier le développement, tout en pointant les modèles urbanistiques dominants à chaque époque. La construction des modèles contemporains est analysée dans leur relation dialectique avec le cas d’Austin afin de souligner les mécanismes de la modélisation scientifique et l’influence réciproque entre ces modèles théoriques et les acteurs de l’aménagement urbain.La troisième partie analyse le système actoriel de l’aménagement d’Austin, sa gouvernance et la conception de l’urbanisme des divers groupes d’acteurs impliqués. Elle montre qu’au-delà des communautés épistémiques, de véritables communautés culturelles se forment autour d’objectifs politiques afin de surmonter les enjeux contemporains.La dernière partie approfondit l’analyse des jeux d’acteurs et des modèles urbanistiques dominants à travers l’outil de planification. Elle souligne les mécanismes de l’évolution culturelle dans le champ de l’aménagement et révèle les stratégies des acteurs pour promouvoir de nouveaux modèles urbanistiques.La profondeur des fractures révélées au sein du champ actoriel explique les difficultés à faire évoluer le système aménagiste qui reste crispé et litigieux. Le développement d’une culture commune de l’aménagement permettrait de retisser progressivement un lien de confiance et remplacer la défiance qui bloque pour le moment les processus d’adaptation aux nouvelles réalités urbaines d’une grande ville en émergence. / The urban planning field strongly structures the Texas capital’s local political life. The actors confront each others on planning issues, ranging from the simple zoning case to the more complex elaboration of a comprehensive plan. The tense relationships between the actors in this domain are taking place against a backdrop of rapid demographic and economic growth, which sharpens urban development issues. While Austin's attractiveness is set as an exemplary model of the success of creative class theory, the goal of this work is to reveal the role of the various types of models in the structuring and evolution of Austin’s planning culture.The first section specifies the research objects and develops an appropriate methodology. The study of the urban planning culture is based on the analysis of urban planning professionals and on the comparative analysis of urban planning cultures, adapting them to a larger variety of actors to take into account all the people involved through a spatial strategy. The different types of active models in the global discursive and comparative urban planning community are first defined, then considered in the light of the policy mobility studies.The second section traces the history of Austin's urbanization through the lens of the theoretical models used to study its development, while pointing out the prevailing urban models at each period. The construction of contemporary models is analyzed through their dialectical relationship with the case of Austin in order to emphasize the mechanisms of scientific modeling and the reciprocal influence between these theoretical models and the urban planning actors.The third section analyzes Austin’s planning system, its governance and the conception of the urban planning held by the various groups of actors involved. It shows that beyond epistemic communities, real cultural communities are formed around policies imagined to overcome contemporary planning issues.The last section deepens the analysis of the actors’ interplay and of preveiling urban models thanks to a planning tool: the comprehensive plan. It highlights the mechanisms of cultural evolution in the field of planning and reveals the actors’ strategies to promote new urban models.The depth of the fractures revealed within the planning field explains the difficulties for its system to evolve. Its processes therefore remain very tense and litigious. The development of a common culture of planning could gradually restore a bond of trust and replace the mistrust that, for the moment, stalls the process of adaptation to the new urban realities of an emerging big large city.

This dissertation investigates the figure of “the Texan” during the 1970s across local, regional, and national contexts to unpack how the “national” discourse of Texanness by turns furthered and foreclosed visions of a more inclusive American polity in the late twentieth century. The project began in oral history work surrounding the cultural politics of Austin’s progressive country music scene in the decade, but quickly expanded to encompass the larger transformations roiling the state and the nation in the 1970s. As civil rights and feminist movements redefined hegemonic notions of the representative Texan, icons of Anglo-Texan masculinity—the cowboy, the oilman, the wheeler-dealer—came in for a dizzying round of celebration and critique, satire and ritual performance. Such Seventies performances of “the Texan” as took place in Austin’s “cosmic cowboy” subculture provided an imaginative space to refigure Anglo-Texan identity in ways that responded to and internalized the decade’s identity politics. From the death of Lyndon Johnson to Willie Nelson’s picnics, from the United Farm Workers’ marches on Austin to the spectacle of Texas Chic on the streets of New York City, Texas mattered in these years not simply as a place, but as a repository of longstanding American myths and symbols at a historical moment in which that mythology was being deeply contested. This dissertation maps the messy ground of the 1970s in Texas along several paths. It begins some years prior with the Centennial Exposition of 1936 and the regionalism of J. Frank Dobie, Walter Prescott Webb, and Roy Bedichek before proceeding to the challenges to their vision of “the Texan” on the part of the African American civil rights, Chicano, and women’s movements. The dissertation’s central chapters then address the melding of countercultural forms and the state’s traditional Anglo-Texan iconography and music in spaces like Austin’s Armadillo World Headquarters. Popular music, art, film, journalism, and literature evoke this attempted revisioning of Anglo-Texan masculinity in dialogue with the decade’s identity politics. / text

Since the Tax Reform Act of 1986, Low-Income Housing Tax Credit (LIHTC) has been a major source of affordable housing provision for low to middle-income families. Meanwhile, growing concern about potential decrease of property value in neighborhoods has been the main obstacle for most of the affordable housing projects. As a result, LIHTC projects are facing backlash from neighborhoods near the potential affordable housing projects – NIMBYism (Not In My Back Yard). However, during decades, it has been always controversial whether LIHTC is actually affecting neighborhood property value in negative way. This study tests the hypothesis that the LIHTC projects affect negatively on neighborhood single-family home property value in Austin, Texas. Single-family homes within 2000-feet radius from the selected LIHTC projects were analyzed based on the Travis County Appraisal District annual appraisal values between 1993 and 2008. / text

The circumstance of mass incarceration in the U.S. has reached the point of social crisis. When the statistics on imprisonment are demographically disaggregated, they point to the overrepresentation of imprisoned men and women of color. Paying special attention to Black men and women, critical race, prison advocacy, and Black feminist research has been vital in theorizing the structural and ideological implications of this racial inequity. The insight that the U.S. prison system constitutes a prison industrial complex arose from such scholarship. More recently, transnational feminism has offered insight into the specific experience and socio-historical contextualization of raced women within a transnational prison industrial complex. Based on transnational and Black feminist precepts, this thesis will argue the need to reframe the discursive position of imprisoned Black women in liberatory discourse. Using the work of Homi K. Bhabha, I contend that Black women’s discursive positions should be understood as “culturally undecidable.” Dominant paradigms of mainstream feminism have assigned Black women the task of fulfilling the ideal of “true womanhood.” Black feminist scholars have argued that this model erases and marginalizes Black women’s resistance. I suggest the imposition of this ideal rhetorically fixes Black women as victims, pathologizes them, and ultimately pathologizes the Black community. In contrast, renaming Black women’s discursive position as “culturally undecidable” creates the possibility to decenter the transnational networks that underpin the transnational prison industrial complex. To proffer this argument, I will analyze performative resistances and reifications of criminalization within narratives of imprisoned Black women and suggest performance practices to encourage Black women’s sense of agency. / text

The following report details research and analysis in order to assess the background market and market-based feasibility of the development of efficiency apartment units in the central Austin Area. It explores the potential and opportunities of reducing the size of apartments and promoting efficiency apartment unit development as a strategy to improve housing affordability for the Generation Y (Gen Y) population while taking advantage of urban redevelopment investments near Austin’s main TODs. The body of this study will discuss: (1) Generation Y and its impact on Austin’s housing market; (2) concepts and facts related to housing affordability; (3) strategies used by the city of Austin to promote infill development and existing transit oriented development sites; and (4) an overview of key housing development strategies and the real estate development process, including market analysis and absorption forecast under current housing market conditions. The study evaluates the implications of a significant demand for less expensive and smaller alternative housing products for a growing population group near downtown Austin. This report may contributes to the policy discussion about different approaches to housing affordability and offers an assessment guide for new housing development opportunities for a diverse range of city residents. / text

This study compares certain factors of Austin College financial aid recipients to the same factors in their classmates who received no financial assistance. First, this study attempts to determine whether there are significant differences in selected variables between these two groups. Second, the study seeks to identify the causes for students' withdrawing from the College. Subjects were randomly selected from two groups: (l) 100 subjects receiving financial assistance; and (2) 100 subjects not receiving such assistance. The sources of data for this study were students'. records located in the Educational Advising Center, the Records Office, and the. Counseling Center.