Master of Regional and Community Planning / Department of Landscape Architecture/Regional and Community Planning / Larry L. Lawhon / This report addresses the questions of whether the Birch Street Development in Brea, CA is a successful example of Smart Growth, and whether it is something that can be replicated in other cities. It is important to find the answers to both of these questions because Smart Growth may hold the key to solving the problem of sprawl, and the Birch Street Development could potentially serve as a Smart Growth implementation guide for cities everywhere.

Providing secure and reliable water supply service to major urban areas has become a considerable challenge in recent years on a global basis. Rapid population growth, urbanization and development needs put enormous pressure on water resource managers to satisfy the ever-growing demand. Climate change, in addition to the inherent variability in hydrological cycles, adds another layer of deep uncertainty to forecast surface water availability. Many major cities have observed declining reservoir storages during unprecedented droughts. The once-reliable reservoir storage systems can no longer serve its purpose. During extended period of water shortages, urban residents and businesses suffered from mandatory water restrictions, causing large economic and social welfare losses. Facing these challenges, water utilities and governments make large investments in supply augmentation infrastructure, which have long-term consequences that can shape development for decades. However, the increasing complexity of uncertainty suggests that the ability to predict the future is limited; hence, there is a need to shift from the conventional “predict-then-act” planning paradigm. This thesis presents an alternative framework to urban water investment planning, using a portfolio approach. A generalized risk-based framework for urban water supply-demand planning is proposed, and it is applied to Melbourne, Australia, to demonstrate its utility and usefulness. First of all, water shortage risk is clearly defined in two terms–frequency and severity of water shortages–of a defined planning horizon. Supply-side uncertainty is quantified based on probability distributions of precipitation and runoff to reservoirs. Demand-side uncertainty is modeled by scenarios with different combinations of population growth rate and per capita water usage. Next, the thesis presents an investment decision-making tool to identify cost-effective supply-demand portfolios that minimize water shortage severity while achieving a target level of reliable service. In addition to find the optimal portfolio composition, the model presents sequences of investments, indicating timing of implementation of each chosen measure. Using mixed integer programming, the decision-making tool yields Pareto efficient frontiers for different demand scenarios. The Pareto frontier exhibits trade-offs between cost of a water supply-demand strategy and water shortage risks facing a society in the long run. The trade-offs provide analytical insights on risk attitude towards water supply services, namely (i) what is the acceptable level of water shortage risk for a society, and (ii) how much are customers willing to pay to avoid such a risk. The results indicate that a portfolio which diversity risk of individual supply augmentation and conservation measures is robust when confronting a wide range of plausible climate and demand growth scenarios. Finally, recognizing important roles played by society and government in water-related investment decision-making process, the thesis discusses institutional barriers in adopting and implementing the proposed risk-based framework in practice. This thesis presents an alternative framework to quantitatively integrate risk in urban water resources management. Under this framework, the portfolio approach is an analytical tool for decision-makers to prioritize investments in supply augmentation infrastructure and implementation of demand management programs. It is the hope of the author that this work provides new insights and necessary tools to water sector professionals in urban water investment planning. The use of risk-based framework and portfolio approach is not limited to any specific city and could find many applications in urban areas where water scarcity and climate risk are pressing issues. / Engineering and Applied Sciences - Engineering Sciences

If capitalist cities are dense, hierarchical, and exploitative, how might socialist space be differently organized to maximize productivity, equitability, and collectivity? That question—central to early Soviet planning specialists—is the basis of this dissertation, which investigates the origins and evolution of the socialist spatial project from land nationalization to the end of the first Five-Year Plan (1917-1932). This dissertation asserts that socialist urban practices and forms emerged not by ideological edict from above, but through on-the-ground experimentation by practitioners in collaboration with local administrators—by praxis, by doing. Existing scholarship on early Soviet architecture and planning relies on paper projects of the Moscow avant-garde—radical, exciting, and yet largely unbuilt. This dissertation, based on new empirical research, uncovers the untold origins of socialist urban practice through the brick and mortar, steel and concrete projects that defined Soviet urban praxis in the 1920s and 30s. Through interweaved stories of three so-called “socialist settlements” in Baku, (Azerbaijan), Magnitogorsk (Russia), and Kharkiv (Ukraine) this study explores how Soviet physical planners and their clients addressed unprecedented socioeconomic requirements. Provisions like affordable housing near the workplace, robust municipal transportation and evenly distributed social services emerged from these experiments to affect far-flung sites in the Soviet sphere for decades to follow. Material gathered from now accessible archives—including architectural briefs, bureaucratic memos, drawings and photographs—finally permits deep inquiry into these significant years and projects. It draws the Soviet case into dialogue with scholarship on industry, urbanization, and social modernization in Europe and the United States, and highlights the contributions of Soviet designers to devise viable alternatives to the capitalist city. / Architecture, Landscape Architecture and Urban Planning

Who decides which neighborhoods receive affordable housing, community gardens, or job centers? How do these organizations and agencies get a seat at the decision-making table? And what can urban redevelopment politics tell us about larger links between governance and inequality in American cities? This dissertation, based on four years of ethnographic fieldwork in Boston, addresses these questions and significantly advances our understanding of urban governance and neighborhood inequality. First, I argue that influence over community development plans depends on organizational legitimacy, not unequal access to resources. Second, I illustrate a consequential realignment of political representation, showing how private community-based organizations (CBOs)—not elected politicians—represent poor neighborhoods in community development decision-making. Finally, I reveal how subtle cultural processes—not overt elite domination—undermine resident power in public participatory processes. By focusing on the day-to-day grind of governance, this dissertation reveals overlooked actors and new political processes. It is a unique urban ethnography that takes readers off of the street corner and into the conference rooms of government agencies and private development organizations—a move forcing social scientists to rethink dynamics of power, political representation, and inequality in poor neighborhoods. / Sociology

Much has been made of the proliferation of fictions in the contemporary city, coming together under the hegemony of globalization to obliterate the particularities of place. The pervasiveness of media in daily life gives the impression of inescapability, and it appears impossible to conceive of the city in “traditional” physical terms. Among the nations of the so-called First World, Japan, the center of which is unquestionably the metropolis of Tokyo, has been at the fore of the social, economic and technological changes that revel in these fictions. This dissertation is a critique of the culture of Tokyo of the last several decades. Following from the assumption that the city and mass media are inseparable, it examines the representations of urban places in television towards understanding how they function as part of urban development. It is thus an attempt at a history of urban culture incorporating both “concrete” and “virtual” forms of spatial practice, towards a unified understanding of the processes that create the contemporary city, with a particular focus on the role of corporations. Two specific places in Tokyo that underwent large-scale development have had an exceptional presence in Japanese television: Odaiba and Akihabara. Limited to two types of television, what are known in Japan as “trendy dramas” and anime (animated cartoons), this dissertation examines the roles television programming had in creating or recreating the “placeness” of these two parts of Tokyo. It is separated into two parts for each location. Chapters one and three examine the historical background of each place alongside the media context that applies in each case, and chapters two and four demonstrate how television was used to advertise a particular image of each place. / Architecture, Landscape Architecture and Urban Planning

The number of residential small-scale solar electric, or photovoltaic (PV) systems installed in Massachusetts has increased over the past five years. However, expanded deployment of residential solar PV may be hindered by lack of awareness of expected electricity generation of solar PV systems, and corresponding financial return. Policymakers are also interested in using limited state resources to support the installation of well-producing solar PV systems that will help meet state greenhouse gas reduction goals. Operational residential solar PV systems may provide a key to understanding electricity production that can inform prospective system owners and policymakers. This research utilizes monthly electricity production data for 5,400 residential solar PV systems in Massachusetts that were installed between 2010 and 2013. The analysis first focuses on understanding the aggregate dataset and distribution of systems, then explores the impact of fifteen different variables on residential solar PV system electricity production. These variables include shading, rebate eligibility, equipment type, ownership model, date in service year, system cost, selected installer, PTS reporting method, and others. When controlling for system size, production over all systems was normally distributed. Through a multiple regression analysis, percent shading, roof inclination and azimuth, rebate eligibility and county were variables that had the greatest impact on system production, with shading being key among them, while other variables showed a more nuanced impact. Ultimately, the full regression resulted in an r2 value of 34.2, leaving a majority of the system production variability unexplained. The data also provide insight into the impact of state policy measures surrounding system siting, validation of production data, and forecasting as part of the production based SREC incentive. Ultimately, quantifying the impact of the variables on electricity production patterns can be an effective tool to provide guidance for both prospective system owners and policymakers.

Kampala is Uganda's capital city and is one the fastest growing cities in the world. Over 60% of the city's urban population live and work informally. In 2002, the Ugandan Minister of Lands, Housing and Urban Development attended the World Urban Forum in Kenya, where he met with the international president of Slum/Shack Dwellers International (SDI), Jockin Arputham. The Minister requested the support of SDI to mobilise the residents of Kampala for settlement upgrading. Following this invitation, the SDI president, with Federation members from South Africa and India, visited Kampala. This visit resulted in the signing of an agreement to enable community residents and the state to jointly improve the living conditions of people in informal settlements in Kampala. This marked the beginning of a new form of state-society relations, called co-production. These relations have grown, evolved and progressively matured over the years. This evolutionary case study asks how co-production engagements in the City of Kampala provide empirical support for an enhanced theoretical framework in planning which contributes to ideas of state-society engagement in the cities of the global South. Drawing on poststructuralist theory and cases of co-production, a conceptual framework provides the theoretical basis to examine how service delivery and city planning under co-production are shaped by power and rationalities that occur at the interface between state and society. This study draws on key proponents of the case study method. Primary data and information were collected, using semi-structured interviews. Document analysis and observations were used to supplement the interview processes and data. The findings were analysed and then used to engage with the theoretical materials in order to write back to theory and then generate theoretical prepositions on planning theory and co-production as an interventive planning framework. Key findings show that communities and civic groups used tools of enumerations, exchange visits and savings to assert their claims and demands, as well as to advance and secure their survival assets and systems. The study reveals complex multifaceted and dynamic power struggles and matrixes within and between structures of the state in the implementation of various co-production initiatives and relations. The state displays and relies on incoherent legal and policy positions, acts informally and operates between old and new ways of engaging with communities. The study further reveals tension points, reversals and the 'holding back' of state power during encounters of state, networked and multiple community power bases that have strong and influential claims to urban space, materialities such as land, trading spaces, informal livelihood systems, place and belonging. The narratives show that community is segmented and conflicted, with individuals and civic groups straddling the divide between state and societal spaces. The combination of organised community resistance and collaboration led to 'quiet encroachment' to shift state positions on development regulations and to disrupt and refine states' schemes of community intervention to become open and more inclusive. The conflicting rationalities and deep differences between state agents and communities extend beyond the binary of state and 'community'. The narratives reveal the fragmented nature of the state - formal and informal - and the divisions within and between society and civic groups characterised by the politics of control of space and territoriality, differentiation and belonging. The case study engages with theory to provide an important caution against the limitations of assuming that planning can adopt consensualist processes in the cities of the South. It suggests that co-production offers a more productive and realistic way of approaching state-society engagement in planning, but is also fraught with difficulties that are also present in the wider context within which engagement occurs. Therefore, this thesis also argues that planning in the South should be seen as both a collaborative and conflicted process. In addition, it postulates that there is nothing peaceful about urban life, and that power and conflict are ubiquitous elements that both produce and are a product of the interface between state and society.

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