Thesis (M.A.)--McGill University, 1997. / Mode of access: World Wide Web. Includes bibliographical references.

abstract: The increasing isolation and segregation of children in American cities and suburbs is of special significance. This has meant a loss of freedom for children to explore their neighborhood and city as they get older, their exclusion from varied contacts with diverse adults in a variety of settings, and their consequent inability to learn from personal experience and observation, so essential to social and emotional development. The purpose of this study is to measure the differences in child-friendliness between neighborhoods with different income levels by developing an indicator framework that can be used by planning departments and other local authorities based on available data. The research also focus on what other factor (besides income) influences child-friendliness in a city at the neighborhood level. If a relationship does exist, how big is the difference in terms of child-friendliness between low-income and high-income neighborhoods, and what indicators play the most important role in creating the difference? Neighborhoods in the city of Glendale, Arizona serve as case studies to aid in refining the assessment method, and show the potential for how cities can become more child-friendly. The neighborhoods were selected based on income, same size and different location. / Dissertation/Thesis / M.U.E.P. Urban and Environmental Planning 2011

abstract: The aims of the study are to investigate the relationship between density and social equity. Social equity is an important social goal with regard to urban development, especially smart growth and sustainable development; however, a definition of the concept of social equity from an urban planning perspective was still lacking. In response to these deficiencies, the study used quantitative and qualitative methods and synthesized multiple social and spatial perspectives to provide guidance for density and social equity planning, community design, and public policy. This study used data for the area of King County, Washington to explore the empirical relationship between density and social equity at the neighborhood level. In examining access to several facilities, this study found that distances to parks and grocery stores were shorter than those to other facilities, such as the library, hospital, police station, and fire station. In terms of the relationship between density and accessibility, the results show that higher density is associated with better accessibility in neighborhoods. Density is also positively associated with both income diversity and affordable housing for low-income families. In terms of the relationship between density and crime, density is positively associated with violent crime, while density is negatively associated with property crime. The findings of this study can aid in the development and evaluation of urban policy and density planning aimed at promoting social benefits in urban space. Therefore, this study is useful to a range of stakeholders, including urban planners, policy makers, residents, and social science researchers across different disciplines. / Dissertation/Thesis / Ph.D. Geography 2014

Within the global South, the public realm is often characterised as a territory of intense accessibility and spatial claims, equally enabling and constricting citizens to shape and reshape an inclusive place within the informal city. The contemporary African city has been central to the discourse around the rapidity of urban development and influx, producing a global narrative of the inability of a frail postcolonial metropolis to support this growth. What is emerging, however, is the resulting improvisation of the city’s inhabitants to reimagine their contrasting, everyday environments for the city’s negotiation and daily navigation. Often, the global discourse omits the finer, more nuanced informality of life that the African city’s marginalised users employ in the everyday to innovatively sustain their livelihood. Central to this imagination, is the Designer’s role to spatially represent all citizens within the urban arena; achieving this through the People’s City design approach. This participatory, incremental approach produces innovation outside the preconceived idea of a design product; rather, pursuing the process over the product. If more than half the city is marginal, the role facing practice should be framing solutions from the perspective and design of citizen/community majority. As Hamdi observes, the integrity of developing an inclusive approach in design, is through the collective voice and experience from within the community context itself; “practice, then, is about making the ordinary special and the special more widely accessible - expanding the boundaries of understanding and possibility with vision and common sense... It is about getting it right for now and at the same time being tactical and strategic about later” (Hamdi, 2004). Manenberg, Cape Town, provides insight into the negotiation of community spaces; where form-making operates outside of the regular and explores how previous areas of exclusion contribute to an emergence of a more flexible and adaptable city. Rather than the static public realm, Manenberg demonstrates “a temporal articulation and occupation of space which not only creates a richer sensibility of spatial occupation, but also suggests how spatial limits are expanded to include formally unimagined uses in dense urban conditions” (Mehrotra, 2010). These unimagined, informal spatial nuances become the co-construction of choice and improvisation that composes daily life. This collaboration and co-constructing of place formed the catalyst from which the research project pursues the process over the product, and was the key in developing an action research methodology to partnering and co-design with community members. The overarching thread that this research project attempts to explore in its approach, is: how can designers intervene in a manner which creatively alters the persistent dominance of exclusion in the public realm? And, in doing so, can the community be invited into the process? Throughout this iterative design, three principles emerged: People, power and place; through these the design process could be interrogated across multiple scales, with participants establishing outcomes, diagnosing spatial negotiations and dreaming proposed interventions. The co-design process in the research project required active engagement, where the participants explored values, issues, threats and opportunities relating to the principles through a series of three process stages: Diagnosis, Dreaming and Designing. The intention was to allow the question of what the community wanted to emerge from within the groups. This process framework provides an opportunity for the group members to revisit their visioning iteratively during each process stage, testing and negotiating decisions of how interventions can be achieved. It allows the participants a space to comprehend urban solutions and explore alternatives, responding to on-the-ground issues from local and nuanced experience. Answering questions communities are not asking: this subtitle becomes a commentary, or perhaps a statement, on how previous areas of exclusion, the marginalised and the informal city, often do not have a voice in the conversation of how their spaces are conceived and designed for them, without them. The research project concludes with strategies of intervention, with outcomes and solutions generated from the process of co-design. These strategies were then transposed into incremental interventions, testing the greatest impact to alter the accessibility of the public realm. The greatest tool to emerge from the community-led approach was the identification of potential partnerships which strengthened the dynamics in negotiating the public realm; illustrating that if communities are offered a seat at the table, the designs become all the richer, participating in the emergence of a more flexible, incremental and adaptable city.

Electricity disruptions are a common feature of cities of the global south. However, not much is known of how households cope, and strategize around these electricity disruptions. In this thesis, I focus on middle-class households in Lilongwe, who are connected to the formal electricity grid but experience frequent power cuts. I examine this space of disrupted electricity, paying attention to household's experiences. I explore the varied ways in which households cope with and navigate around disruptions, by piecing together an array of technologies and infrastructures. Drawing on in-depth interviews and observation, I argue that households build assemblages of infrastructures, bringing into their energy sources a mix of older technologies, as well as new ones, to ensure an uninterrupted flow of energy even during an electricity disruption. Households find alternative ways to link to power, by reorganising themselves, their energy choices and food choices. In this piecing together, households themselves constitute a critical infrastructure that makes the alternative technologies work. It takes their agency, knowledge, and creativity to piece the multiple technologies together, bridge them, and make them work. In short, I demonstrate that in the event of a power disruption, households do not sit back and wait passively for electricity to come back on. They plan and strategize, making do using any resources within their capacities. A form of infrastructural citizenship, making do around electricity disruptions has the potential to reconfigure citizenship.

Analysis of access to water in the global South tends to disproportionately focus on the presence of water infrastructure such as the piped network to estimate the proportion of population that have access to water. While interest in access to water has advanced considerably, less research has focused on practices, strategies and experiences of everyday water access. This study engages with this issue in two neighborhoods, Kpanvo and Katariga, in Tamale, Ghana, exploring the ways in which residents negotiate to access water services in practice. Through participant observations and in-depth interviews, the study sets out to address three specific objectives, namely to understand how households experience and describe water access; to explore the various strategies and infrastructures households mobilise to gain and maintain access to water; and to examine the factors that mediate households’ water access. Water infrastructure in the study neighbourhoods includes pipes, but critically also other sources of water (dams, boreholes and wells) and storage infrastructure (underground reservoirs, poly tanks, plastic drums, metal drums, earthen ware pots, aluminium pots and jerry cans) where residents store water for use during periods of interruptions of supplies. Also given that water is not always readily available in the private homes of residents, vehicles such as tanker trucks, bicycles, motorbikes and motorised tricycles are used to haul water from various sources, making them part of water infrastructure that make water flow in and to the neighbourhoods. Similarly, humans themselves, particularly women and girls, are a part of the infrastructure that make water flow as they carry water from both improved and unimproved sources to meet households water needs. Findings from the study demonstrate that continuous access to water, even if a household is directly connected to a piped water system, is impossible due to practices of water rationing, contrary to a normative assumption of universal and reliable water service provisioning associated with networked water supply. Household access to water is constructed through multiple strategies and infrastructures, mediated as much by access to financial resources as by networks of social relationships. Affluent households are able to acquire household connections, and some, a priori rejected connections to the pipe network due to erratic supply, in favour of the more expensive options of installation of mechanised boreholes and buying water from tanker operators. In contrast, poor households leveraged networks of social relationships to enter into tap sharing arrangements with neighbours on agreed conditions of payment of monthly service bills or gifts of water from owners of private water sources. Building on Anand (2011) and Peloso and Morinville (2014) this thesis therefore concludes that the way in which access to water needs to be understood is not simply in terms of access to pipes - as critical as they are - but also in terms of the strategies and negotiations that structure and are embedded in practices through which access to water is gained, maintained and potentially controlled at the household and neighbourhood level. Analysing access to water in this way makes visible the various ways that humans shape water infrastructure and water access.

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