As cities worldwide plan for increasing urbanization levels, new challenges in mobility will arise. Any approach taken to address these new issues will need to consider how to move more people with declining resources, thus the need for a sustainable solution arises. This thesis examines the growing trend of cities creating public bicycle systems as a means to add sustainability to a transportation system and identifies what are the criteria and indicators of a sustainable public bicycle. The criteria and indicators are used to examine data collection techniques of three Public Bicycle Systems in the United States: Capital Bikeshare in Washington, D.C., Nice Ride in Minneapolis, Minnesota and Denver B-Cycle in Denver, Colorado.

Land use grain is a commonly-used measure of the mixture of land uses in the urban environment in transportation planning and public health, but there is no standard measurement practice in place. This thesis examines the meaning and common measurements of land use grain in these subfields. The entropy-based equation, the jobs-to-housing ratio, and the Herfindahl-Hirschman Index (HHI) are among the most common measures of land use grain, but results from these metrics differ depending upon how researchers choose a sample area and upon how land use categories are defined. All three metrics are performed, in a single context with varying assumptions, using the neighborhoods of Roxbury and Dorchester in Boston, MA. The entropy-based equation was deemed the most appropriate measure in a general context, with the HHI and the jobs-to-housing ratio potentially appropriate in specific contexts.

This research examines the feasibility of a gasoline and diesel consumer subsidy phase-out in Venezuela from a transportation planning perspective. It surveys the literature and discusses case studies from Iran, Brazil, and Bolivia in order to identify the lessons that Venezuela can learn from these countries’ successes and mistakes. It examines how strengthening and investing in the public transportation system can be used as a means to gain public support for the reform. I discuss the current political, social, and economic conditions that make a fossil-fuel subsidy reform difficult, and offer suggestions from a transportation planner’s perspective on how the transition can be made as smoothly as possible. Finally, I explore the opportunities that present themselves to transportation planners in shaping the country’s future approach toward transportation.

Beginning with the development of Seaside (Walton County, FL), Kentlands (Gaithersburg, MD), and Laguna West (Elk Grove, CA), New Urbanist developments have set aside parcels for civic structures, many of which now house congregations. Using interviews with developers, planners, and church officials, this thesis examines the rationale behind including congregations within New Urbanist developments in four southeastern states (Alabama, Georgia, North Carolina, and South Carolina). The expectations of New Urbanist developers largely mirror those found within key New Urbanist texts: congregational structures help create a legible landscape through typological architecture and conspicuous siting while providing space for public gathering. The thesis ultimately argues that New Urbanism requires a more robust sociological model, one which captures the influence of institutions on forms of social interaction. Moreover, such a model might provide insight into the ways in which developers and congregations might collaborate to fulfill the social goals of New Urbanism.

Housing requisition (Fangwu Zhengshou) is defined as the power to take residents’ property for public use by the state. Between 1995 and 2010, one million residential units were relocated from the inner city of Shanghai to the outskirts of the city or suburban counties. Historically, residents have been excluded stakeholders in large-scale urban renewal in post-reform China. Starting in 2011, Shanghai requires residents to vote on property takings for inner-city renewal. In March 2013, residents voted down the Block 59 project in the North Bund area in Shanghai, which marks the first housing requisition project for inner-city redevelopment rejected by residents in Shanghai. This research illustrates how citizen participation frames or structures the relocation decision-making and whether participation matters. This dissertation investigates four lines of inquiry: 1) How are housing requisition regulations and negotiations shaped at the district level in Shanghai? 2) What roles do the state and local authorities play, and how is this associated with urban redevelopment regimes under neoliberal governance? 3) Do the more “participatory” approaches to housing requisition for urban redevelopment address power relations and conflicts among local groups in different districts? If so, how? 4) What strategies do residents use to negotiate inner-city redevelopment? I utilize qualitative methods to recognize the complexities of citizen participation in urban renewal in Shanghai, and to develop an understanding of the dynamics of citizen participation and governance structures. The 2011 regulations provide a more transparent, open and interactive process for community residents directly affected by housing requisition projects. However, the term “public interest” is ambiguously defined under the 2011 regulations. Findings suggest that state-led participation in housing requisition is a tool for the government authorities to facilitate economic growth through requisition and strengthen the legitimacy for requisition among the relocated residents. The shift of compensation from counting the number of people in a household to considering the size and value of the apartment illustrates the shift from a social welfare approach to a market approach. The participation schemes promote fairness in a certain way that people who hold out for more compensation lose the power.

Researched during the summer of 2006 in a collaborative effort between Carnegie Mellon University's Urban Lab and East Liberty Development, Inc. this thesis seeks to develop a model for evaluating the impact of progressive urban design strategies in an existing community by measuring the costs and potential returns of public investment in progressive urban infrastructure. Using the case study of East Liberty as a laboratory, this study identifies clear baseline assumptions for the costs of urban infrastructure, as well as estimated public returns based on private investment leveraged and new residential and commercial tax revenue streams. Aimed at providing urban designers a facilitation tool in arguing for public investment in progressive urban infrastructure that reconnects fragmented com m unities, this study suggests that clear financial and com m unity returns are "hidden" in urban infrastructure investment.

This dissertation charts the contested political and cultural meaning of urbanization in the emerging plantation societies of Virginia and Maryland. Scholars have long asserted that Chesapeake planters' desire for lucre led them to patent huge tracts of land, disperse across the landscape, and completely dismiss urban development. However, through 17 pieces of legislation, colonists, governors, and London administrators actually encouraged towns in the Chesapeake through the seventeenth century. Despite the environmental and agricultural constraints of tidewater tobacco, both colonies wrestled with a perceived need for towns, which consistently appeared to represent the best means to engineer the region's political economy and local social order. Shifting demographics, a changing labour system, religious conflict, and increasing imperial pressure for control created an atmosphere in which the promise of urbanization could be a powerful tool for various Atlantic actors seeking to shape the emerging plantation system to their purposes. They shared a desire to urbanize the region, but quarrelled because they had contradictory definitions of precisely what a town was, how it should function, and how it should be governed. These divergent visions sprang from and contributed to a contemporaneous European contest between ancient boroughs and modern cities, civic humanism and the emerging nation-state. Towns in the Chesapeake only became widespread in the mid-eighteenth century, once the broader questions of political order in England's boroughs and its plantation empire had been resolved.;Piecing together a range of sources, this dissertation emphasizes the political, economic, and cultural context of the region's many urban plans---and especially the subtle differences in context between Virginia and Maryland---in order to demonstrate how and why town building remained a vital weapon in broader constitutional and commercial disputes. its transatlantic source base connects the Chesapeake's planners and proposals with the contests in English boroughs and Whitehall; spatial, ceremonial, sensory, and cultural analyses uncover the overlooked significance of urban foundations that remained only paper plats or collections of warehouses. The project highlights how proto-urban spaces fit within, or challenged, the emergence of a plantation landscape on the physical, cultural, and political levels.;Part 1 explores urban plans in seventeenth-century Virginia, their connections to English commercial and political rivalries during the Civil War, their role in provoking Bacon's Rebellion, and finally their part in a 1680s transatlantic contest over corporate government. Part 2 offers a parallel story of town-founding efforts in Maryland, exploring how Lord Baltimore's proprietary authority distinguished the complexion of urban development there. Part 3 addresses the entire Chesapeake region after 1689 (once both colonies had fallen under royal control), tracing Governor Francis Nicholson's efforts to reshape the definition of urbanity in the empire by founding Annapolis and Williamsburg and demonstrating how they pushed the concept of the imperial city to the centre of Atlantic political discourse. The fault lines of this debate had become so entrenched by the 1710s that it was abandoned entirely, and during the eighteenth century both colonies developed new kinds of plantation cities, freed from the bitter Atlantic disputes of the previous century.

Public spaces are noted by historians, philosophers, planners, etc as being the lifeblood of civic centers, spaces that bring people in community together for a myriad of reasons. Recalling the ancient Agricola’s of ancient Greece to the modern version of malls and pedestrian plazas, these spaces are where social interactions occur, ideas are spread, and are open for all people to enjoy. Beautifying these spaces with public art and well-thought out design encourage the use of these spaces and work to empower those who use them. While the mode in which public art populates public spaces has changed, the notion that they exist to benefit a public good, act as a civilizer, create character and a distinct environment endures. The idea of public art is unique and is noted for doing something that neither a public space without art nor a museum with art can do: it can capture the eye and mind of individuals passing through public spaces. Making people pay attention to the civic environment around them, creating a sense of “civic vitality” in cities, towns and communities. Public art prompts vital questions about our environment and ourselves, encouraging a broad range of learning opportunities. Public installations of art celebrate culture and the environment, providing connections to history and the natural world. It makes space interesting and different from another. Public artwork is celebrated and condemned for its ability to challenge, delight, educate, and illuminate. Establishing written policies and programs for the arts solidify their place in communities, enacting a set of codes and a process for which artistic endeavors are woven into the complex urban landscape. The role public art plays in communities is unique in the marrying of two very different sectors of civic life: art and aesthetics with the political planning process. This study examines how political decisions impact the installation process for public artwork in cities. How do written policies and programs support opportunities for installations, ways to empower the community and brighten the streetscape, and where are there gaps in knowledge and information that make the process more convoluted and difficult to navigate? Through studying the public art installation process in the City of San Luis Obispo from the perspective of the administrators working with the public art programs and policies and comparing the process with the ways in which the community is empowered by public art a number of recommendations are made to increase transparency and encourage artistic opportunities in the town with an already robust Public Art Program.

During the second half of the twentieth century, scholars and journalists documented the failures of the public housing program in the United States with a range of studies focusing on the Midwest and East. Problems such as displacement, criminal activity, high vacancy rates, racial segregation, and the isolation of tenants informed critiques of federally-subsidized housing for low-income families. These aspects contributed to the national image of "the projects" as high-rise ghettos, populated primarily by African Americans, and located in run-down areas. Public housing with its position at the crossroads of national, state, and local politics and policies as well as tenants' varied experiences, however, defy simple categorization as an unmitigated failure.;This study expands the history of public housing to the West and in doing so complicates the image of where public housing is located, what it looks like, and who lives there. Examining public housing in San Francisco, a multi-racial, multi-ethnic, politically liberal city, reveals the important role regional, local and spatial politics play in project design, location, and population. The three projects examined here, Ping Yuen in Chinatown, North Beach Place in North Beach, and Valencia Gardens in the Mission District, are located in thriving urban areas near public transportation, shops, and hospitals. Nevertheless, tenants over the years experienced a range of difficulties including mismanagement and racial segregation by the San Francisco Housing Authority, rising crime rates, in-fighting, and at Valencia Gardens and North Beach, the scorn of district neighbors. Despite these challenges, many tenants came together to form communities. Coming across racial and ethnic lines, tenants relied on formal and informal networks to make their rental apartments into "homes." Demonstrating part of the hidden history of public housing, tenants at Ping Yuen, North Beach Place, and Valencia Gardens became politicized by living in the projects and challenged the state to improve their living environments. These case studies highlight public housing's contribution to the affordable housing stock and tenants' roles in making the projects livable spaces.

This study focused on using a mapping tool, Space Syntax, to analyze the connectivity of the Cache County road network and its use to plan for bicycles. Space Syntax is being compared to another method that is already used by city planners called Bicycle Level of Service, or BLOS. The two analyses used data from Cache County and, after they were modeled and evaluated, a statistical analysis was done to see how similar one is to the other. The analyses were done at both a regional and a local scale. At both scales the analyses were not similar. Data was added to the Space Syntax analysis at both scales to see if it would influence making it more similar to BLOS. Adding the data had no effect in making them similar. It was determined that Space Syntax and BLOS are not similar and more research would need to be done to attempt to make them similar. They both have advantages and disadvantages to them when being used for planning for bicycles. One is not necessarily better than the other, as they are two different methods that could be used.