City planning

As cities respond to accelerating climate impacts, scholars have identified climate gentrification as a phenomenon exerting displacement pressures on low-income communities, including ethnic enclaves. While climate gentrification pathways literature primarily addresses economic causes and effects, an opportunity exists to better understand policy contributions and social impacts surrounding resilience and displacement.
For this dissertation project, I expanded the concept of climate gentrification pathways to examine connections between displacement, resilience strategies, and urban planning. Using an interpretive approach, I explored how an ethnic enclave experienced and responded to displacement pressures, especially regarding social impacts related to (climate) gentrification. In addition, this project compared resilience and planning policies and strategies discourse with community discourse related to climate gentrification.

Suburban sprawl, automobile dependency and the current parking requirements have led to an ineffective and inefficient use of land which presents added cost to land owners and residents. The current standards often have limit quantitative reasoning and often exceed the peak demand for parking. The current requirements may seem as a necessary evil to address transportation and consumer habits, but in actuality it is only further facilitating the dependency on the automobile. Modifications to the current standards such as the amount of parking required and the required size of parking spaces will help decrease the amount of land and cost related to parking facilities. Other alternative modes of transportation also need to be invested in to make these options more convenient. The continued support of the automobile through parking regulations will accentuate the effects of urban sprawl and in the end, this is not environmentally or financially feasible.

This thesis looks at how political decisions influence the design and outcome of planning processes and how these decisions influence the urban landscape. This study looks at one specific planning process and compares the results of two different planning workshops to show how differences in representation and information dissemination can lead to different outcomes. The first workshop had broad representation and was educated by planning experts, while the second consisted of only local community representatives and was not influenced by planning professionals. Although similar, each workshop had different visions and different priorities. This shows that participatory processes have to be carefully constructed to empower communities. It also shows that decisions made in the way planning processes are structured can lead to differences in the landscape.

Satellite derived vegetative data of urban areas is normally classified into several classes of trees, fields, grass and bare soil using unsupervised and supervised classification methods. Normalized Difference Vegetation Indexes (NDVI) have traditionally been applied to agricultural satellite images to assess the health and maturity of commercial crops. When a NDVI is used to examine urban vegetation, many discrete data values are generated which can be differentiated into meaningful vegetation classes.

This thesis examines the importance of a CDC in the revitalization efforts for the neighborhood. The thesis also examines various elements in the political, social, and economic climate, that can have an affect on the successful establishment of the community development corporation (CDC) as the agent for revitalization in the neighborhood. CDC presidents, neighborhood residents, presidents from private lending institutions, and government officials from various levels were interviewed in an attempt to gauge the climate in which CDCs in Palm Beach County operate in. This analysis was used to predict the likelihood that the CDC will successfully be established as the agent for neighborhood revitalization in three neighborhoods in Palm Beach County.

Views on general urban, commercial, and light industrial growth are analyzed to determine the effect of substantive differences. While consistency across issues is often assumed, public opinion theory and recent findings on environmental concern suggest otherwise. Also, "utility-maximizing" actors (Coleman, 1986) may be influenced by the tax and employment benefits of economic growth. As suggested, growth views varied across issues and intercorrelations were only moderate. Strongest support was for attracting light industry. Bivariate and regression analyses of the effects of sociodemographic and community evaluation variables indicated that while no predictor was significantly related to all three growth issues, the strongest were city's performance controlling growth, age, and homeownership. Best predicted were views toward general growth, while views on attracting industry were least explained. An index of growth views resulted in generally weaker relationships although one variable, sex, became significant.

The world currently has more people living in cities than in rural areas. In the United States this is no exception, and as a result government policy is focusing on the supply of 'green' jobs that help repair and expand its infrastructure in an attempt to help curb non-renewable resource use. The expansion of public transportation throughout the country is one facet of the multi-pronged US government policy. In the tri-county area of South Florida (Palm Beach County, Broward County, and Miami-Dade County) a research study known as the South Florida East Coast Corridor Transit Analysis (SFECCTA) entered Phase 2 in January 2009. This study looks at incorporating the FEC freight corridor which transverses the downtown areas of 47 cities into a major North- South commuter system. This system would also supplement the existing commuter Tri- Rail corridor. The proposed methodology in this manuscript attempts to address the issue of providing an adaptable, efficient and convenient public transportation in a low to medium density environment where the automobile is the preferred mode of travel. Emphasis is placed on connecting existing origin and destination locations in and around the greater West Palm Beach metropolitan area in Palm Beach County, FL. The goal of the methodology is to establish potential routes that will connect high amounts of residence to places of social interaction, consumption, employment, and the proposed SFECCTA regional transportation system with Light Rail Transit as the end goal. As a result the proposed corridors focus on creating dedicated and shared right of ways that already exist via the road network. The discussion and conclusion provide methodology successes, improvements, and economic development recommendations.

Urban green space plays a vital role in the stability of the environment. Green spaces are increasingly becoming an integral part of the efforts to promote sustainability because of the different areas of benefits they provide. Sustainable city ranking systems were used to identify the most sustainable urban extents within the US. Landsat TM 4-5 imagery and textural classification are used as techniques in identifying, classifying and analyzing urban green spaces within nineteen urban extents. Patch analyst was used to analyze the location, structure and fragmentation green spaces within each urban extent. The aim is to determine to what degree urban green spaces can be considered to be an integral part of the sustainability of sustainable urban extents across the US and ascertain whether or not more sustainable urban extents do have more urban green spaces. The results of the study have shown that urban extents that are ranked highly v on sustainable ranking systems do not necessarily have to have large proportion of green spaces. Results have also shown that urban extents that are ranked high on sustainable rankings will not necessarily be affected by increase in population or decrease in urban green space. Finally human modified green spaces have simple geometric shapes compared to natural unaltered green spaces that have more complex geometric shapes.

In light of the growing traffic demand and the futility of the conventional solutions, many states have been considering alternative intersection designs. Researchers have demonstrated the benefits of several unconventional intersection designs and their implementation at different sites throughout the United States and abroad have delivered significant improvement in traffic compared to the conventional intersections. A signalized and un-signalized roundabout, a Continuous Flow Intersection, and a Parallel Flow Intersection have been evaluated and compared in this research as viable alternatives to the traditional single intersection. Using micro-simulation platforms, AIMSUN 6.0 and VISSIM 5.10, models of each intersection are evaluated for low, medium, and high entrance volumes. The analysis revealed that the Roundabout performs better at low entering volumes while the Continuous flow yields better results at high volumes.