Browsing by Author "Zhang, Chen"

Now showing 1 - 4 of 4
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    City of Rosemount Parks and Recreation Public Engagement Plan
    (Resilient Communities Project (RCP), University of Minnesota, 2015) Zhang, Chen; Williams, Bernard; Smith, Antonio; Kotzian, Alyssa; Flood, Bonnie; Jo Busian, Laura
    This project was completed as part of a year-long partnership between the City of Rosemount and the University of Minnesota’s Resilient Communities Project (http://www.rcp.umn.edu). As the City of Rosemount Parks and Recreation Department prepared to update its master plan, the Department was interested in identifying new opportunities for community input. The goal of this project was to increase public engagement in the Department’s planning and decision-making processes. In collaboration with city project lead Dan Schultz, Parks and Recreation Director for the City of Rosemount, a team of students in PA 5145: Civic Participation in Public Affairs created a detailed plan for engaging residents in decisions regarding new investments in Rosemount’s parks and recreation system, including sample communications to residents, an Engagement Planning Worksheet, and a Community Engagement Assessment Tool to help staff manage the engagement process. A final report from the project is available.
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    The Danger and Power of Being In-Between: Rural-Urban Inbetweener Identity in Contemporary China
    (2019-07) Zhang, Chen
    In 2015, United Nation Habitat estimated that 1.5 million people globally were moving from the countryside to the city every week. They are often regarded as living in a seemingly “transient” or “liminal” status. Their ambiguous status of identity and place has long been taken for granted as temporary, exceptional, unstable, undesirable, vulnerable, or dangerous in both state-dominant political discourse and critical urbanists’ scholarly examinations. However, my research finds that a community of Chinese rural-to-urban migrants challenge this assertion and pursue a right to permanently inhabit this seemingly undesirable status between rural and urban. They identify themselves as rural-urban “inbetweeners,” build “in-between” informal settlements on the rural-urban periphery and mobilize themselves to sustain an inbetweener identity as a permanent and positive identity. Inbetweeners’ pursuit of the right to permanently inhabit a seemingly transient, ambiguous, and marginal status poses a puzzling question: Why do migrants pursue an in-between social status which has been widely viewed as dangerous and disadvantageous? To solve this puzzle, my dissertation explores two research questions: 1) Why do migrants decide to become inbetweeners? 2) What do migrants do with this inbetweener identity in their everyday life practices and collective resistance? Drawing on data from my in-depth interviews with two inbetweener communities and my observations of their anti-formalization and anti-eviction movements in two Chinese cities — Chengdu and Beijing — from 2016 to 2018, this dissertation reveals a nested set of logics behind migrants’ decision to construct, preserve, and deploy an inbetweener identity. I found that migrants’ decision to identify themselves as inbetweeners was born from their resistance to be identified by the dominant discourse as an inferior group — the floating population (in Chinese, liudong renkou). To replace this floating people identity, migrants created this inbetweener identity. By identifying themselves as inbetweeners, migrants don’t say a simple “no” to their social and spatial status between rural and urban; instead, they find potential in this seemingly disadvantageous rural-urban in-between status. Inbetweeners deploy their identity to achieve material benefits, escape the gaze of state power, and create an alternative social belonging beyond a rural-urban category. This inbetweener identity signals both danger and opportunities for migrants in their everyday life. These findings enrich scholarship on critical urban theory, modernist and postmodern planning theory, and interpretative methods in urban studies. First, these findings challenge critical urbanists’ etic assertion about migrants’ general desire to move from a “liminal” status between rural and urban to a more stable and permanent urban status. Instead, I found that a rural-urban in-between status signals both danger and power from migrants’ emic perspective. It can be simultaneously exclusive and empowering. By constructing and deploying this inbetweener identity, migrants are able to strategically and flexibly respond to and resist the multifaceted repercussions produced by a rapid urbanization process. Second, this dissertation criticizes a modernist planning mode that overly relies on a series of spatial and non-spatial oppositions, including rural/urban, inclusion/exclusion, and past/future, to index and explain social differences. Drawing from the danger and power experienced by rural-to-urban migrants who live and straddle between rural and urban societies, I argue that planners should treat a rapidly urbanizing society as a contradictory whirlpool in which marginalization, exclusion, and exploitation paradoxically coexist with material opportunities, liberating potentials, and new modes of social belonging. Third, this study demonstrates another way in which interpretative method is a promising approach for investigating previously neglected dimensions of urbanization in people’s everyday life practices and their meaning-making processes.
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    Exploring the Walking Tolerance of Transitway Users
    (Minnesota Department of Transportation, 2017-09) Cao, Jason; Lampe, Joseph; Zhang, Chen
    To park or to develop is always a key question for transit station area planning. Planners are interested in a hybrid option: siting park-and- ride (P&R) facilities at the periphery of development around transitway stations. However, the literature offers little evidence on how far a P&R lot can be located from transitways while maximizing ridership and revenue. Using a stated preference survey of 568 P&R users in the Twin Cities, this study conducted several experiments to illustrate their walking tolerance and identify built environment attributes that influence the walking distance. Walking distance is much more important than intersection safety, pedestrian infrastructure, and building appearance in affecting P&R users’ choice. The average walking distance is three city blocks when the minimum walking distance is set as two blocks in the experiments. Intersection safety, pedestrian infrastructure, and building appearance help mitigate the disutility of walking distance. If all three characteristics are adequate, it seems that P&R users are willing to walk 1.8 blocks farther than their existing facilities. A further analysis shows that the effects of these four dimensions vary by transit type. The analysis of stated importance illustrates that when determining how far P&R users are willing to walk, they value snow clearance, street lighting, and intersection safety the most. In general, the quality of sidewalk network connecting transit stops and P&R facilities is the most important, followed by safety and security attributes associated with the walking environment. However, the aesthetic quality seems to be the least important for P&R users.
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    The gaps in satisfaction with transit services among BRT, metro, and bus riders: Evidence from Guangzhou
    (Journal of Transport and Land Use, 2016) Cao, Jason; Cao, Xiaoshu; Zhang, Chen; Huang, Xiaoyan
    This paper explores transit riders’ satisfaction with bus rapid transit (BRT) and compares BRT with conventional bus and metro services using revealed preference data from Guangzhou, China. A trivariate ordered probit model is developed to examine the effects of various service attributes on riders’ overall satisfactions with the three types of transit. We find that the top-three influential attributes for satisfaction with BRT are ease of use, safety while riding, and comfort while waiting. Moreover, transit riders are most satisfied with metro, followed by BRT and conventional bus. The top-five attributes that contribute to the difference in the overall satisfaction between BRT and metro are ease of use, comfort while riding, convenience of service, travel time, and comfort while waiting. Based on the findings, we propose specific strategies that can be used to enhance BRT quality of service.