Thesis: M.C.P., Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Department of Urban Studies and Planning, 2014. / Cataloged from PDF version of thesis. / Includes bibliographical references (pages 120-130). / Human reliance on fossil fuels has led to a wide range of adverse environmental and health effects. As our understanding of these impacts has grown, so has the search for other, more sustainable sources of energy. One such source is solar power, and the federal and state governments in the United States have created various policies and financial incentives to encourage adoption of solar energy technologies. While solar energy offers tremendous potential benefits, siting utility-scale ground-mounted photovoltaic arrays can give rise to strong public reaction. With this in mind, this thesis explores the controversy, or lack thereof, surrounding the siting of utility-scale solar energy facilities in New York by examining two case studies - the Skidmore College Denton Road solar array and the Cornell University Snyder Road solar array. While these two solar energy facilities share many commonalities, there is one key difference - the Skidmore College array created a much greater level of controversy than the Cornell University array. Analysis of this divergence indicates that choice of site is a crucial determinant of the extent of controversy. While local impacts are an important concern, this thesis demonstrates that the reasons for controversy go well beyond those impacts. Issues related to information, equity, and trust were other key sources of controversy. In addition to analyzing the sources of controversy, this thesis also offers some recommendations that may be helpful for entities involved in the development of solar power facilities. It is hoped that these recommendations will help to eliminate or mitigate future solar power siting controversies. / by Casey R. Stein. / M.C.P.

Thesis (M.C.P.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Urban Studies and Planning, 1988. / Includes bibliographical references. / by Ann Claire Greiner. / M.C.P.

Thesis: M.C.P., Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Department of Urban Studies and Planning, 2017. / This electronic version was submitted by the student author. The certified thesis is available in the Institute Archives and Special Collections. / Cataloged from student-submitted PDF version of thesis. / Includes bibliographical references (pages 71-75). / Until recently, prisons were considered an economic development strategy particularly in rural communities struggling with the loss of manufacturing jobs. However, many studies have shown that prisons often have weak linkages to the host community, and sometimes have negligible or even negative impacts on rural economies. A combination of factors including changing sentencing laws, inadequate conditions in older facilities, fiscal conservatism, and increasing reliance on community based alternatives to incarceration are now leading to prison closures all around the country. In this changing context, this thesis explores: (i) What are the real and perceived impacts of prison closures on local economies in small rural counties?; and (ii) Where communities are redeveloping old prisons to boost their economies, how are local needs, politics, and project constraints (related to design and finance) shaping the transformation of these sites? By focusing on two cases where former prisons are being reused for community and economic development, this thesis explores how rural communities might transition to new ways of employing people and generating wealth after a local prison closes. / by Insiyah Mohammad Bergeron. / M.C.P.

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Dept. of Urban Studies and Planning. Thesis. 1974. B.S. / Bibliography: leaves 108-109. / B.S.

Thesis (M.C.P.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Urban Studies and Planning, 2011. / Cataloged from PDF version of thesis. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 63-65). / This thesis explores potential employment opportunities in energy efficiency construction and aquaculture for Vietnamese American fisherfolk significantly impacted by the BP oil spill in Louisiana. First, the thesis explains the history of the Vietnamese American community in Louisiana and the affects of Hurricane Katrina as well as the BP oil spill on the community. This is done in order to build the case for the need to look for alternative employment for dislocated Vietnamese American fisherfolk. Second, it assesses the skills and job suitability for Vietnamese American dislocated fisherfolk. It then explores the potential growth of the energy efficiency construction and aquaculture industries in Louisiana. Finally, the thesis concludes with recommendations for how Vietnamese American fisherfolk can enter these industries and how Mary Queen of Vietnam Community Development Corporation can further explore future employment opportunities for dislocated Vietnamese American fisherfolk. / by Mai T. Dang. / M.C.P.

Thesis: M.C.P., Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Department of Urban Studies and Planning, 2018. / Cataloged from PDF version of thesis. / Includes bibliographical references (pages 53-55). / Although we are now well into the twenty first century, the possibility of achieving equitable, universal access to water and sanitation is still out of reach for most cities. According to a progress report by the WHO/UNICEF Joint Monitoring Program, in 2015, 844 million people lacked even the most basic access to safe drinking water (WHO/UNICEF, 2017). The case for sanitation is even more dire, as about 2.3 billion people have no access to the most basic sanitation service (WHO/UNICEF, 2017). Moreover, an estimated 1.5 million children under the age of five die each year as a result of water and sanitation related diseases. This harsh reality is consistently reflected in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, where much like many other cities in the global south, water shutoffs are a norm and access to safe sanitation services is unfortunately minimal. Caught between the influences of the normative recognition of water and sanitation as a right and a national development agenda that sees Addis Ababa as the driver for economic progress, the city's utility is struggling to provide adequate access to its inhabitants. This thesis uses the Addis Ababa Water and Sewerage Authority's recent, ambitious plan to transition Addis on to the country's first sewage grid as a sight for investigating how these influences play out on the ground and understand how residents are being serviced or excluded from accessing safe sanitation services. Drawing on multiple interviews, close readings of policy documents, and physical analysis of the distribution of services, I conclude that both normative and growth-centric approaches fail to reach their goals of achieving equitable, universal access to safe sanitation services for the city's residents. This is in large part because these approaches are not adequately responding to the realities of Addis Ababa, which is as much a city of informality and poverty as it is the capital of Africa's fastest growing economy. / by Fitsum Anley Gelaye. / M.C.P.

Thesis (M.C.P.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Urban Studies and Planning, 1999. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 63-67). / This thesis describes a state owned municipal water supply service company, the Haiphong Water Supply Company (HPWSCo), that improved its service delivery and successfully transformed itself into a profit making utility with metered consumers willing to pay for improved service. The thesis examines how HPWSCo tackled the typical problems of a developing country's municipal water supply company and succeeded in the eyes of the consumers, the local and national governments, and the wider development community. The thesis describes how and under what conditions HPWSCo has changed itself from a poorly performing utility to a successful one. It explores the characteristics of the local level service delivery 'ward model' that underpin HPWSCo's success, including: the structure of the ward water supply sub offices; the local procedures for responding to consumer need; and the management of local employees in a way that motivates exemplary performance. The thesis examines how HPWSCo used existing resources and scaled-out improvements ward by ward, learning lessons for subsequent ward enhancements. By focusing on what HPWSCo did the thesis attempts to illustrate the reform strategy of a government agency (state owned enterprise) previously riddled with problems and poor performance that became much more effective and efficient. / by Joyce E. Coffee. / M.C.P.

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Dept. of Urban Studies and Planning. Thesis. 1972. B.S. / Lacking leaf 97. / Bibliography: leaves 106-107. / B.S.

Thesis: Ph. D. in Urban and Environmental Planning, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Department of Urban Studies and Planning, 2015. / Cataloged from PDF version of thesis. / Includes bibliographical references (pages 281-311). / From the eastern seaboard of the United States to coastal cities in Southeast Asia, severe weather events and long-term climate impacts challenge how we live and work. As the debates over cities, planning, and climate change intensify, governments are proposing increasingly ambitious plans to respond to climate impacts. These involve extensive reconfigurations of built and "natural" environments, and massive economic resources. They promise "ecological security" and the perpetuation of capitalist growth. Yet they often involve intractable social questions, including decisions about how and what to protect on sites that are home to already marginalized urban residents. Scholarship on urban adaptation planning has tended to reinforce divisions between social and spatial, drawing a line between designed and engineered solutions and sociopolitical measures. It often assumes urban politics to be contained and cohesive. And it has relied on static conceptualizations of the city as a bounded territory, neglecting interconnections across networks and broader processes of globalization, urbanization, and geopolitics. This dissertation, on the urban spatial politics of climate change adaption, is posed as a conceptual and methodological counterpoint to the dominant discourse. Exploring what I call a political ecology of design, I investigate sites and strategies in three cities, New York, Jakarta, and Rotterdam. Looking, on one level, at city and national initiatives, including Rebuild By Design in New York, the "Great Garuda" sea wall plan in Jakarta, and Rotterdam Climate Proof, my dissertation also searches out alternate narratives, the "counterplans" - including community resiliency in Brooklyn and Manhattan, and grassroots design activism in the informal "kampungs" of Jakarta - and new global/urban networks - the multiscalar, multilevel connections through which urban concepts travel, transform, and embed. I focus on the contested visions, the interrelationships of local and global, and the role of design in urban adaptation. I ask, in the face of climate change and uneven social and spatial urban development, how are contesting visions ofthe future produced and how do they attain power? I ground my research in theories of sociospatial power relationships - the social production of space (Lefebvre 1991), urbanization and uneven development (Harvey 1985; Smith 1984), spatial justice (Soja 2010), and the geographies of policy mobility (Peck 2011; Roy and Ong 2011). I also look to theories of the interrelationships between social, ecological, and technological processes in and through cities (Bulkeley et al. 2011; Hodson and Marvin 2010). I develop a method of urban relational analysis to study disparate yet highly interconnected sites. On one level, this is a mixed methods study of multiple design strategies across different cities, combining semi-structured interviews with field and participant observation, and spatial and visual methods. On another, I build on frameworks for a more reflexive approach to case selection and analysis (Burawoy 2003; McMichael 2000) and a relational reading of sites - each understood through the others (Amin 2004; Massey 2011; Roy 2009). In Ananya Roy's words, "to view all cities from this particular place on the map." I find that, 1) in this new landscape of climate policy mobilities, urban adaptation projects, globally constituted, are reformatted by and to local urban sociospatial systems, 2) climate change motivates relationships, but plan objectives often transcend climate-specific goals, and 3) the production of alternative visions - "counterplans" - opens terrains of contestation, enabling modes of organizing and resistance to hegemonic systems. These findings emphasize the agency of marginalized urban communities, the sociopolitical role of design, and the embeddedness of climate change responses within multiple scales and levels of global urban development. They imply that planners committed to just socio-environmental outcomes engage across the range of urban scales and networks, and learn from critical social and political imaginaries and practices. I end with speculations on an insurgent, networked, urban ecological design practice. / by Kian Goh. / Ph. D. in Urban and Environmental Planning

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Urban Studies and Planning, 2004. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 269-284). / The current consensus in housing policy recognizes the importance of learning from rather than about informal settlements. To serve this end, this dissertation presents a novel methodology for investigating land and housing markets. The methodology consists of investigating time-evolving relationships between attributes of the social agents who intervene on a market (e.g. social standing, religious affiliation, gender), rules-institutions systems (formal and informal institutions), and the macro political-economic context (e.g. price of land, demographic growth). The method was applied to a case study that tracked three groups of actors: developers, public agents, and homeowners, over a fifty-year period (1950-2000) in Hayy el Sellom, a neighborhood located in the southern suburbs of Beirut, Lebanon. The case study relied on in-depth interviews of developers, public agents, and residents, a structured survey of homeowners, research of public archives (e.g. construction and urban regulations, building permits, lot subdivisions), and time series analysis of aerial photographs. The case study demonstrated that the proposed method can unpack the category of the "informal market" by revealing a web of co-existing formal (market and public institutions) and informal (e.g. social, geographic, political associations) institutions whose interplay determined market characteristics (e.g. openness, flexibility, security) and resulted in unequal opportunities for housing and capital accumulation by residents and developers, respectively. Second, the case study unraveled dialectical actor-institution relationships in which one's ability to intervene in the housing market depended on one's ability to tap existing institutions that sustain exchanges and build new ones. Third, the / (cont.) study documented the heavy involvement of public agencies or agents in the development of informal regulations and the organization of illegal processes of housing production. Fourth, the case study documented the interconnectedness of housing markets segments, showing how so- called informal markets are directly influenced by city-wide parameters (e.g. price of land, political stability, housing demand) and partially rely on formal market institutions such as banks and contracts. Finally, it was found that greater involvement of formal market institutions did not improve market conditions (e.g. transaction security) or opportunities for capital accumulation. / by Mona Fawaz. / Ph.D.