Browsing by Subject "Urban Planning"

Now showing 1 - 4 of 4
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    Assessing The Influence Of The Neighborhood Environment On Evaluative And Emotional Subjective Well-Being
    (2020-03) Das, Kirti
    Comprehending and promoting well-being has been regarded as a key goal in academic research and policy making given its significant role in creating and maintain healthy, productive societies. As urban planners focus on designing and maintaining living environments, they have the potential to enhance the well-being of residents and provide opportunities for all to flourish. It is therefore critical for planners to understand how the built environment influences well-being. Despite the theoretical importance in linking planning to subjective well-being (SWB), the attention to SWB in planning is relatively recent. There remain significant gaps in the planning literature including inadequate research on the emotional aspects of SWB and omission of key SWB determinants in analysis due to a lack of interdisciplinary perspectives. In this dissertation, we hope to fill these gaps in the planning literature, add to the understanding of how attributes of the neighborhood influence the evaluative and emotional dimensions of SWB, and explore analysis methods best suited to study the neighborhood-SWB relationship. To this end, two detailed literature reviews were conducted to identify an extensive list of SWB determinants to include in the analysis. Original data were collected via a survey conducted in the Minneapolis-St Paul Twin Cities area from October 17, 2016 to October 25, 2017. The data collection effort was part of the Sustainable Healthy Cities project funded by the National Science Foundation. We find that evaluative and emotional SWB have varied determinants, both at the personal and neighborhood level. We also find evidence to support that relationships between neighborhood attributes and evaluative and emotional SWB can be asymmetric. Specifically, there is a typology of neighborhood attributes in terms of how they impact SWB when these attributes perform poorly/absent, at all levels of performance, and only at a high performance. The typology is also sensitive to modeling techniques as well as data coding schemes. Across all models used the nature of the relationships between neighborhood attributes and SWB is found to vary based on the SWB measure used. Given the sensitivity of findings to SWB measures used, analysis modeling and coding, directions for future research are discussed.
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    Beyond Accessibility and Behavioral Outcomes: Re-conceptualizing Equity in Transportation through the Capabilities Approach
    (2020-09) Wang, Jueyu
    In the past decades, transportation equity has attracted increasing attention from transportation researchers and policymakers. Nonetheless, there is a lack of theoretical understanding of transportation equity. The dissertation engages the Capability Approach of Sen and Nussbaum as a theory of justice and well-being to conceptualize transportation equity as the process of the production of the equality of mobility capabilities, the substantial freedom people have to travel. Specifically, I propose an equity evaluative framework of five evaluation domains, including 1) Access to basic resources, services, and activities sites; 2) The freedom of physical movement around places; 3) Opportunities for active travel (walking and bicycling); 4) Opportunities to conduct safe and psychologically satisfied trips; 5) Access to political engagement activities. The dissertation also applies the CA framework to two different empirical contexts. One assesses the inequalities of mobility outcomes and capabilities of traveling within low-car ownership households. The results reveal that low-car ownership people of different socio-economic groups achieve different mobility outcomes under the different levels of mobility capabilities. The analysis suggests the joint evaluation of mobility capability and outcomes in informing transportation inequity and disadvantage. The second examines the inequalities of travel mood among different socio-demographic groups and how mobility capabilities, measured as modal options and access destination opportunities, interact with travel mood. The results reveal the significant impacts of mobility capabilities on travel mood and the moderation effects of mobility capabilities on the relationship between mode and mood. The findings highlight the importance of explicit consideration of mobility capabilities– in policy debates and planning initiatives. The concluding chapter contextualizes these findings within the transportation literature and proposes several take-away for policy and future research directions.
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    There Goes the Neighborhood? The Impact of Subsidized Multi-Family Housing on Urban Neighborhoods.
    (Center for Urban and Regional Affairs, University of Minnesota., 1996) Goetz, Edward G; Lam, Hin Kin; Heitlinger, Anne
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    Walking Corporate Suburbia: A Photographic and Sonic Record
    (2021-04-19) Bauch, Nicholas; nbbauch@protonmail.ch; Bauch, Nicholas
    [Written by Nicholas Bauch, 2021] This is a collection of digital photographs, audio recordings, maps, and creative writing. They were all made by artist Nicholas Bauch during multi-day walks that he did in the Minneapolis-St. Paul metro area between 2018 and 2020. The nodes of the walks are Fortune-500 corporate headquarters based in the Twin Cities (as listed in 2019). Bauch navigated from one headquarter to the next using only a compass while walking. His main camera was a GoPro 4, which he wore for most of the walks attached to either his head or chest. This camera was programmed to take one JPG picture every two seconds for the duration of the walks, which ranged between 4 and 7 miles each. Without the use of other wayfinding technologies, the resultant routes are not always the most direct, creating documentation of an embodied trek among some of the world’s most influential repositories and wranglers of capital, and—more importantly—the urban and suburban space in which these centers are situated. Any large scale economic system—capitalism, in this case—has a built form that emerges to accommodate the (dys)functions of that economy. The photographs produced on these walks seek to expose that built form, implicitly positing that the organization of suburban spaces is intimately tied to the needs, as it were, of the global corporations. These include things like high-speed roads, protected residential areas, and recreational opportunities like water bodies and parks. One can also read in this built form spaces of oppression and poverty, such as unmaintained housing and sidewalks, shuttered storefronts, and many instances of economic liminality, that is, places for people who are involved in the economic system without much choice, but are not its beneficiaries. One of the great consequences of capitalism is its tendency to direct wealth and resources into smaller and smaller numbers of people as time progresses. This can be read in the urban form, and this collection provides visual evidence for this movement towards unequal wealth distribution as it existed in these years. The photos, therefore, record the urban form of a mid-sized, Midwestern, United States metropolis in the late 20-teens. Urbanists, geographers, and planners, among others in the future may benefit in particular from seeing how the myriad details of suburban and urban spaces were conceived, constructed, and inhabited. Bauch’s 70,000-plus scenes document the everyday spaces of life and work, spanning the four seasons of Minnesota’s extremely variable continental climate. The headquarters between which Bauch walks are the main decision, management, finance, and research centers for large-revenue companies that impact the lives of millions of people across the local region, the nation, and the world. While many lives—bodies, even, as in the case of health insurance and food manufacturing—are materially shaped by these entities, most people could not say where they are located within the city and its surrounds. Examples of these companies, along with their annual revenues in 2019, are UnitedHealth Group ($242 billion), 3M ($32 billion), Ecolab ($15 billion), CHS ($32 billion), C.H. Robinson ($15 billion), Cargill (privately held, $115 billion), Best Buy ($43 billion), United Natural Foods Inc ($21 billion), Target ($75 billion), and General Mills ($18 billion). This is not a celebration of corporate life or of the normalization of wealth accumulation, nor does it condone the historically (and currently) racist social systems that make continuously accelerating commercial growth possible at a global scale. On the contrary, it is an attempt to point attention--much as Pop Art might have--toward the realities of economic geography, in an attempt to know them and sow the seeds of rebuilding them in ways that benefit all people. From the artist: My identity as a middle-aged, white, English-speaking, employed, housed, U.S.-passport-holding male positions me to blend-in, as it were, when I walk through areas that do not experience high volumes of foot traffic from “outsiders.” That is, even with a strapped-on camera, I look enough like a local to not arouse visits from the police, or suspicion from other entities that enforce social and economic boundaries. Being ignored is a privilege that only proves the existence of the racist structure in the first place; I suspect that someone pushing a grocery cart, or someone with a camera strapped to a turban, would not move as unencumbered as I have. When I walk, I often find myself trying to imagine the landscape as it might have looked before European contact with the Americas. Without assuming details about the Dakota experience, I think about lives that might have been lived in these places. With each picture, I see what now appear to be banal landscapes as deep containers that have amassed generational layers of meaning. That is, stories about real people who held all the complexities, fears, joys, and wonders of a life fully lived have happened in the places where my feet hit the ground, where motorists fling out cigarette butts and where plows heap oil- and salt-soaked snow.