Browsing by Subject "Sustainable development"

Now showing 1 - 4 of 4
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    The aerotropolis: Urban sustainability perspectives from the regional city
    (Journal of Transport and Land Use, 2017) Banai, Reza
    The aerotropolis—a metropolitan region with cities that capitalize on proximity to a globally networked economy’s airport—is regarded as the twenty-first century’s new urban-development paradigm. Similarly, the regional city—a polycentric metropolitan region with linked mixed-use centers, multi-modal corridors, multi-functional districts, and natural preserves—is regarded as an urban form of the future with global and local advantage. In this paper, the building blocks of the regional city, which are increasingly regarded as principles of a durable urbanism, inform a multi-criteria framework toward a sustainability assessment of the aerotropolis-built form. The implications for the redevelopment of a North American city as an aerotropolis are noted. The paper concludes with an expansive discussion of the sustainable urban form of the future.
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    Comparing The Impacts Of Community-Based Tourism Development On Local Livelihoods And Empowerment
    (2023) Legatzke, Hannah
    For decades, policymakers, scholars, and development practitioners have promoted community-based tourism (CBT) for sustainable development in socioeconomically marginalized rural communities. However, the mixed results of these initiatives warrant further study into the mechanisms through which community-management of tourism leads to local livelihood opportunities and community empowerment. This dissertation responds to this need through a comparative case study of CBT management models in the Maya Biosphere Reserve, Guatemala. Different trajectories of community tourism involvement in the three gateway towns to the most visited parks in the reserve make it possible to study the role of community-tourism management compared to tourism development in strictly protected areas and in the private sector, in the local livelihood and empowerment outcomes of tourism. During approximately 10 cumulative months of ethnographic field research in the Maya Biosphere Reserve, I applied the Sustainable Livelihoods Framework (SLF) and Community Empowerment Framework to compare the impacts of tourism and its role in residents’ livelihood activities. Through semi-structured interviews, focus groups, content analysis, participant observation, and 134 livelihood surveys with household heads across the three towns, I find that community-based management of tourism supports a wider distribution of local tourism income-earning opportunities and overall greater local empowerment than conventional growth-oriented, private sector led tourism development in strictly protected areas, in part through emphasis on training opportunities and recognition of the compatibility and tradeoffs between tourism and residents’ other livelihood activities. Nonetheless, difficulties achieving social unity and differential individual barriers to tourism participation make ensuring equitable tourism community-tourism development an ongoing challenge. Tourism becomes part of integrated household livelihood portfolios, rather than supporting households alone or replacing small-scale agricultural activities. Overall, this dissertation contributes to understandings of the role of CBT in sustainable development as well as a methodology for more closely analyzing and comparing the livelihood outcomes of tourism development.
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    Framework for Measuring Sustainable Regional Development for the Twin Cities Region
    (Center for Transportation Studies, 2010-01) Kirk, Kaydee; Tableporter, Jody; Senn, Andrew; Day, Jennifer; Cao, Jason; Fan, Yingling; Schively Slotterback, Carissa; Goetz, Edward; McGinnis, Laurie
    Patterns of growth and development impact our environmental, social, economic, and cultural quality of life. In order to take steps toward sustainable development that will have a positive impact on these effects, this project, sponsored by the McKnight Foundation, identified a framework for an indicator system to measure sustainable regional development in the Twin Cities metropolitan region. The proposed framework includes a set of sustainability principles, indicators, measures, and accompanying data sources. It is anticipated that the McKnight Foundation will use this sustainability framework for internal organizational purposes with the possibility of the system being considered by other local geographies in the future. This framework could also serve as a tool to compare sustainability between the Twin Cities seven-county region and other comparable regions. The report provides a summary of the research, presents a final recommended set of performance measures for the indicators, makes recommendations for the selection of tier 1 and tier 2 indicators, and recommends a plan for next steps.
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    Impact of land use on bicycle usage: A big data-based spatial approach to inform transport planning
    (Journal of Transport and Land Use, 2020) Zhao, Yi; Lin, Qiaowen; Ke, Shangan; Yu, Yanghang
    Bicycling is an alternative of urban transport mode, which is significantly influenced by land use. This paper makes an effort to quantify the magnitude and direction of the impact. We first develop a theoretical framework to establish links between land use and bicycle usage. Then, trip data is crawled from Mobike, one of the largest newly emerging, free-floating bike sharing operators in Shenzhen (China), for a total of more than 7.8 million records over 191 consecutive days. And bicycling frequency, travel duration, and riding distance are obtained to be proxies of bicycle usage. Land-use characteristics regarding bicycling are comprehensively indicated by a set of standardized variables including three dimensions, land-use type, land-use mix, land-use connections, and 12 concrete indices. Panel spatial model is applied to quantify the associations at the district level with socioeconomics controlled. Results show that the percentage of green land has a remarkable impact on bicycle usage outcomes and land-use mix is positively associated with bicycling frequency. Density of intersections contributes to longer trip duration. Bicycle lane is a positive facilitator on workdays, while the number of stations is positively related to bicycle usage, especially frequency and distance. These findings provide insight into land use-transport interaction and could be of value to policymakers, planers and practitioners for transport planning while incorporating bicycling-friendly principles.