2021-2022 Thesis/Dissertation Abstracts by MIT DUSP

DEPARTMENT OF URBAN STUDIES AND PLANNING

THESIS/DISSERTATION ABSTRACTS DUSP GRADUATES 2021/2022

MCPs: Eve Allen Fiorella Belli Ferro Lauren Craik Miguel Davila Uzcategui Somala Diby Neha Doshi Ehab Ebeid John Fay Alexander Gant Cesar Garcia Lopez Andrea Grimaldi Lamice Halaby Meital Hoffman Ava Hoffman Rajan Hoyle Adriana Jacobsen Rhett James Aiyah Josiah-Faeduwor Katharine Kettner

Laura Kim Allison Lee Jasmine Martin Angeles Martinez Cuba Danielle Moore Maria Lucia Morelli Christopher Moyer Mora Orensanz Jordan Owen Andrey Prigov Maria Camila Ramos Yanez Tyler Rivera Anna Schuessler Kevin Kaiwen Shi Stephanie Silva Asher Simon Christian Turner Matias Williams Prathito Wisambodhi

SM: Kloe Ng

MST/TPP: Patrick Meredith-Karam

PhDs: Isadora Araujo Cruxen Andrew Binet Johnna Brazier Colleen Chiu-Shee Eman Lasheen Rida Qadri Dorothy Tang Laura Wainer

UGs: Luis Becerra Solis Alexander Boccon-Gibod Tanner Bonner Grace Bryant Yu Jing Chen Jennifer Choi Alena Culbertson

Moctar Fall Ana Fiallo Jennifer Fox Elena Gonzalez Emily Levenson Sarah Lohmar Ariadne Rios

Husain Rizvi Amelia Seabold Natasha Stamler Max von Franque

Isadora Araujo Cruxên Dissertation Advisor: Gabriella Carolini

Disordering Capital: The Politics of Business in the Business of Water Provision This dissertation consists of three articles that together seek to deconstruct, or disorder, monolithic treatments of “private sector” participation in the delivery of urban water and sanitation services. The studies interrogate how variation in forms of business ownership and politics not only shape public-private collaboration for service delivery over time but also contribute to re-configuring the institutions that govern service provision markets in global South contexts. Drawing on historical and ethnographic research on the development of private participation in water and sanitation provision in Brazil, my work yields three central insights. First, it illuminates how shifts in business ownership away from family-owned construction business groups towards ownership by financial investors produced a “centralizing” organizational and institutional pull in the governance of private urban water and sanitation services. Once heavily embedded in local politics, private holdings reduced subsidiary autonomy, eschewed close relations with local politicians, and mobilized for regulatory centralization. This finding problematizes the tendency within scholarship on the financialization of urban development to position

financial investors as capitalizing on local forms of entrepreneurial politics, suggesting the need to consider how different investors fluidly engage with shifting market contexts. I argue that financial investors perceived centralization as an effective strategy for ensuring stable returns across consolidated operations within otherwise unstable and fragmented local political environments. Second, my work challenges the tendency to portray infrastructure investors as passive onlookers searching for institutionally-stable investment geographies. I show that private investors in Brazil’s water and sanitation sector were able to counter strong opposition and successfully lobby for a centralizing regulatory reform by constructing business power over time. This entailed learning from mistakes and adjusting mobilization strategies, revealing that infrastructure investors do not have fixed preferences, may learn and adapt, and can be key agents of institutional change. Finally, my research unsettles the assumption that profit maximization will override other service objectives. My comparative analysis of the long-term outcomes of different models of public-private collaboration shows that states can still shape service delivery priorities through the work of politically-appointed managers and state allies, what I call “political modulation.” This finding not only problematizes policy advice that prescribes political insulation as a strategy for improving service delivery, it also suggests politics can play a positive role in promoting more equitable service outcomes.

Fiorella Belli Ferro & Mora Orensanz Thesis Advisor: Lawrence Vale

Public housing, Private priorities: The invisible dynamics in low-income housing allocation in urban Peru, the case of CSP-Techo Propio

allocation process as it is being implemented, beyond the official narrative. Our findings identify which families actually become beneficiaries and the spatial consequences of this model at the neighborhood, city, and national scales. We hope our findings and conclusions can help reflect on potential improvements for this and similar programs, and ultimately contribute to discussions on the roles the public and private sectors should have in the provision of affordable housing across Latin America.

This thesis analyzes Techo Propio, Peru’s leading affordable housing program for the last 20 years. Following the neoliberal turn in housing policies, the Peruvian government reduced its role to solely subsidizing the low-income housing demand while housing production and delivery was left entirely in the hands of the real-estate industry. We specifically analyze the component Construcción en Sitio Propio (CSP), which fully subsidizes the construction of 35 m2-houses in family-owned lots. Given the limited information and studies available on this subprogram, we were keen to understand how CSP is currently being implemented and, especially, how subsidies are allocated to families and what are the city-wide implications. Through a combination of spatial analysis and indepth interviews with diverse actors in the Techo Propio ecosystem, this thesis elucidates the housing

Andrew Binet Dissertation Advisor: Mariana Arcaya

Making the City Livable: Caregiving and Health in Gentrifying Boston How does the urban environment shape everyday caregiving practices? How does care mediate the relationship between cities and health? What are the planning ingredients of urban environments that support caregivers and viable caring relations? I answer these questions by analyzing data from interviews with caregivers conducted as part of the Healthy Neighborhoods Study, a longitudinal Participatory Action Research project exploring the relationship between gentrification and community health in nine Boston-area neighborhoods. First, I find that the strategies respondents employ to fulfill caregiving goals are shaped by the availability and adequacy of specific components of the urban environment, which I argue comprise the urban infrastructure of care. However, this infrastructure may be unavailable, inaccessible, inadequate, or poorly connected. Caregivers compensate for these shortcomings by securing, connecting and maintaining the components of the urban infrastructure of care to ensure satisfactory background conditions for caregiving. By shaping the extent and nature of this “infrastructural labor,” cities influence what forms of care are possible and what the work of care demands from

caregivers. Second, comparing caregivers’ experiences at different stages of gentrification, I find significant differences in their perceptions of changes in local urban infrastructures of care, and in what the work of care entails. I argue that gentrification produces “care insecurity” for respondents: diminished confidence in the ability to provide satisfactory care in the future and to adapt to neighborhood changes that impact caregiving. Finally, I explore the hypothesis that changes in the urban infrastructure of care could produce caregiver stress, and that stress might thus be a pathway through which the relationship between caregiving and the urban environment becomes embodied by caregivers. I find that the challenges of performing infrastructural labor necessary to care can be physically, mentally and emotionally depleting for caregivers with negative consequences for their health and wellbeing. I conclude by proposing a framework for “planning for care” focused on the intertwined priorities of alleviating and equitably distributing the burden of care work, proliferating the possible forms that care can take, and maximizing people’s freedoms to give and receive care in ways that they value.

Alex Boccon-Gibod Thesis Advisor: Eric Robsky Huntley

A Better Bus Map: How Good Transit Map Design Can Strengthen the MBTA’s Bus System Greater Boston is poised to radically reimagine its bus system in the coming years. With an ongoing network redesign by the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority (MBTA) seeking to create a dense network of high frequency bus lines as well as growing political momentum for fare-free transit spearheaded by Mayor of Boston Michelle Wu, the current moment is an exciting one for the future of sustainable, equitable mobility. Improvements to the bus system have the potential to attract more riders, decrease transportation-related carbon emissions, and increase equitable access to opportunities for marginalized communities.

in its printed bus system maps available at bus shelters and online. Visually unifying the transit system is a crucial part of maximizing the benefits of these changes in service. This thesis explores bus map redesign precedents, historical MBTA maps, and transit mapping techniques to reconsider what the MBTA bus system map could be. Guided by two main principles of consistency with the MBTA’s brand and highlighting service frequency, this thesis iterates through different options to arrive at a draft proposal of a new bus map that reframes how the transit system—and broader region—can be depicted and perceived.

Despite ongoing service improvements, there has been little discussion of visual improvements to the bus system. How will riders perceive and discover a redesigned network? How can historic improvements in bus service be bolstered by systemwide visual cues? A key gap in the MBTA’s otherwise strong brand identity represented by color-named transit lines lies

Colleen Chiu-Shee Dissertation Advisors: Brent D. Ryan, Lawrence Vale, Siqi Zheng

Ecological City Design and Planning: How China Expands Urban Ecology, Institutional Learning, and Cultural Shifts through the Evolving Eco-Developments As the concept of sustainability has become a global norm, industrialized and industrializing countries have sought to innovate their strategies for urbanization and modernization in order to set standards for sustainable development. In China, a pro-environmental movement has emerged with continued experimentation of eco-environmental approaches to urbanization. Through the lens of a series of high-profile eco-developments initiated by the Chinese state, this dissertation examines the transnational influences of eco-environmental ideas on urbanization policy and practice, as well as the meanings and impacts of experimental projects that demonstrate eco-environmental principles. These projects were conceived as replicable paradigms for urbanization and concomitant modernization based on the idea of growing the city in harmony with nature. The selected cases include four nationally promoted model eco-cities and two award-winning, locally initiated developments—Zhengdong New

District and Nanhu Eco-City. A deep dive into the vicissitudes of the selected eco-developments reveals their limited eco-environmental effects and social influences constrained by the scale of these privileged developmental jurisdictions. Genuine eco-environmental considerations were undermined by growth-oriented developmental agendas of entrepreneurial local states. Eco-environmental rationality was adopted within an authoritarian regime to reinforce state legitimacy. Reflecting on these limitations, this study points to accelerant factors for pro- environmental sociopolitical transitions. The assessment and comparison of the examined eco- developments illuminates how ecological design and planning has stimulated eco-environmental ethics in local practices, which have pushed the boundaries of China’s conventional approaches to urbanization. Various ecological perspectives embodied in China’s eco-developments—whether scientific, technological, aesthetic, or philosophical—have made these projects stand out as demonstrations of a greener path to urbanization. Despite the limited achievements in these experimental projects, eco-developments are meaningful experiments that have stimulated institutional learning about eco-environmental values. Facilitated by the dissemination of ideas in China’s political and professional networks, China’s evolving eco-developments have created an ecological image of the nation’s modernity, manifested by new landscapes, new infrastructure, new rhetoric, and new social life. These projects not only reshape the built environment but also influence culture, politics, and society.

Lauren Craik Thesis Advisors: devin michelle bunten, Hamsa Balakrishnan

Congestion Pricing: Moving from Equity Analysis to Transportation Justice Urban traffic congestion poses challenges to American cities in the form of lost time, economic costs, increased accidents, air pollution, and barriers to mobility. Congestion pricing has the potential to be part of the solution yet also raises a number of concerns about whether pricing a public good can be done in an equitable manner. Past studies suggest the policy is not inherently unfair however, these studies are retroactive and focus on economic notions of welfare that are at odds with how we understand the role of equity in planning. This thesis proposes a new framework, inspired by the method of scenario planning, for proactively evaluating congestion pricing with an explicit focus on both procedural and distributive justice. This framework not only addresses past limitations with economic studies of congestion pricing, which were limited in scope and relied heavily on contested inputs, but it also seeks to address the significant barrier of political acceptance congestion pricing faces by developing policy alongside the public.

This new framework was used to examine the case of a potential congestion pricing scheme in the Boston Metropolitan Region; I found that a downtown area charge has the potential to reduce traffic by 20%, whilst still providing access via public transit. This policy was likely to primarily impact higher-income drivers and primarily benefit lower-income residents and bring in around $1 million in revenue a day. This thesis also analyzes the London Central Charging Scheme using a Synthetic Control method to supplement these findings with empirical results. I find the LCCS was slightly progressive in scale of equity impact with the top 40% (by income) of drivers accounting for approximately 60% of the charge eligible trips. However, I find that as the price continues to rise, the behavioral responses between high- and low-income drivers diverge, with high-income trips having a much higher substitution rate to non-chargeable trips.

Alena Culbertson Thesis Advisor: Justin Steil

Investigating Housing First’s Potential to Provide a Home Housing First programs, which give unhoused people housing with few accompanying restrictions, are an increasingly dominant model in homelessness services. Previous research has discussed the connections between Housing First policies and neoliberal poverty governance and the implications this has for participants. This thesis connects this scholarship on Housing First’s political dimensions with existing scholarship on the importance of attachments to place and home through a case study of one Housing First’s participant’s experiences of home. Through interviews with this participant and a staff member of the Massachusetts Housing First program through which he receives housing, I investigate the extent to which Housing First is able to facilitate participants’ feelings of being at home. I find that Housing First programs essentially function to give participants access to the private housing market, particularly when programs adopt policies that give participants high degrees of autonomy, place participants in scattered-site housing units, and allow participants to remain for multiple years. This is better for Housing First participants’ ability to feel at home than the alternatives, but displacement still occurs in the private housing market in a way

that disrupts market participants’ feelings of home. This finding points to the need for broader systemic change to address the root causes of homelessness and the ways displacement is woven into our housing system before any program can fully facilitate participants’ feelings of home.

Miguel Dávila Uzcátegui Thesis Advisor: Jeff Levine

An Engagement Toolkit to Center Unhoused Stakeholders in the Design and Programming of Open Space As the number of unhoused individuals grows throughout the United States, authorities from over 100 different cities have responded to some of the heartbreaking challenges of extreme poverty with criminalization. The most recent process of criminalization has focused on limiting the use of public facilities and rights of way by unhoused individuals as a response to concerns raised by housed community members and business owners. This is problematic given that the public input that city officials receive tends to overrepresent white property owners and underrepresent all other stakeholders of the built environment. This toolkit seeks to assist the City of Las Vegas and other local jurisdictions expand their engagement efforts regarding the design and programming of open space to include unhoused individuals and elevate their roles as stakeholders with untransferable rights to public facilities. Using the case study of the 2018 closure of the Huntridge Circle Park in Las Vegas and in collaboration with advocates of the Nevada Homeless Alliance, this toolkit compiles

history and existing survey data to help planners and other city leaders create meaningful engagement and co-develop solutions that effectively respond to the needs of all users of public space. Over half of unhoused individuals counted every year in Southern Nevada are experiencing houselessness for the first time that year, suggesting that their entry into the regional homeless system and the growth of the count itself should not be attributed to substance use or individual physical and mental health problems. Existing research has attributed the rising number of unhoused individuals in American cities to rising rents instead. This toolkit discusses houselessness within the broad context of housing insecurity in Las Vegas and the multiple systemic barriers that limit housing opportunity and choice for individuals who do not have the social and financial networks to overcome housing crises.

Somala Diby Thesis Advisor: Garnette Cadogan

Narrating the Politics of Urban Development in “New Era” Boston Since 1950, urban governance in the city of Boston has been predicated on the close collaboration between the city’s economic and political elite, anchored in the Boston Planning and Development Agency (BPDA). A common narrative in Boston is that this “growth coalition” has historically achieved much by way of downtown redevelopment, and much less by way of an equitable housing market. However, with the COVID-19 pandemic, mass mobilizations for racial justice, a progressive turn within the City Council, and the inauguration of the city’s first Black and first woman mayor, recent public discourse reflects a new optimism that the city’s most powerful institutions can be transformed to support a more equitable housing market. This media thesis uses podcasting as a tool to investigate how key actors in Boston’s urban development landscape— from city councillors and administrators, to private developers, and housing justice organizers—believe this unique political moment will shape the city’s land development practices and influence urban governance in the future. I ground this exploration in the recent passage of the Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing (AFFH) Zoning Amendment, a unique zoning tool

designed to assess and address the risk that new development projects will displace nearby residents and reinforce patterns of segregation. Through five twenty-to-thirty-minute episodes, this podcast curates five threads of collective narrative that emerged across 18 semi-structured interviews. Stories are grounded in the theoretical literature of “New Urban Politics” scholars, Boston’s extensive history of urban governance dating back to 1950, and a contemporary framing of uneven urban development in Boston as a cultural challenge as much as a political and economic one. In prioritizing narrative and storytelling over traditional research methods, I advocate for the use of podcasting as a tool for planning research and practice.

Ehab Ebeid Thesis Advisors: Jason Jackson, Jinhua Zhao

The Invisible Hand or the Handgun: Ride Hailing, Violence, and Political Settlements in the South African Urban Mobility Market Markets are thought to constitute a force that fosters peace and brings both material and non-material improvements to society. Technology and innovation are similarly believed to offer developmental promise. The spread of ride hailing platforms such as Uber to developing country contexts is conceived of as a market formalization tool that produces desirable social outcomes, reducing unemployment while creating modern and efficient transportation systems. Why, then, do we see violence as a central, persistent feature of ride hailing markets in the developing world? To understand violent conflict in urban mobility markets, I conducted semi-structured interviews with drivers, policymakers, platform executives, activists, and other industry actors in Gauteng, South Africa, the province that encompasses the cities of Johannesburg and Pretoria, and one of the earliest and largest ride hailing markets in the developing

world. Relying on theoretical frameworks from new institutional economics and critical legal studies, I show that violence plays an important role in market governance. I explain the emergence and persistence of market violence as the result of a mismatch between the distribution of power and the distribution of benefits among market actors, engendered by ride hailing’s entry. To better explain how the market is governed and contested, I propose a more precise typology of power and legitimacy, and clarify the sources of power belligerents rely upon to survive and prevail in conflicts. Finally, I use the contrasting fates of two ride hailing services, Uber Bus and Uber Go, to illustrate how groups deploy power to contest the market, and how regulatory decisions go beyond traditional market considerations. By studying a market characterized by both old and new forms of violent conflict, this thesis inserts violence into literatures on markets, which largely ignore conflict; and applies the macro-institutional political settlements framework to the meso level of a specific market. As policymakers contend with the spread of ride hailing firms, a broad and empirically based view of how they are organized, governed, and how they function in different contexts is needed, to better understand how to regulate them.

Moctar Fall Thesis Advisor: Justin Steil

The Seasoned Pot: Exploring the Multidimensionality of Food at its Crossroads with Planning and its Impacts on the Community Model Food is more than just important; it is crucial to life. It is as integral to the development and structure of a community as the roads and buildings that lie within it - yet, to many planners, it is not seen as an integral part of the planning process. At the crossroads between urban planning and the everyday experiences within communities, food offers unexplored opportunities to empower communities and to understand their heritage and cultures. Being at these crossroads has left me to wonder, how and why is food such a pivotal cultural organ in the lived environment? How can food, and the memories it creates and sustains be used as a tool to empower communities? Building on existing research and analyzing interviews conducted with two individuals working at the intersection of food and community, this thesis: 1. Articulates the importance of food and food access when making planning decisions; 2. Brings to the forefront the dangers of ignoring food when engaging with

people and communities around their lived environments; 3. Shows the importance of food within communities through the lens of two food entrepreneurs in Boston; and 4. Builds a foundation for community learning through the medium of food access, preparation, and distribution.

Alex Gant Thesis Advisor: Lawrence Susskind

Achieving Equitable Outcomes in Local Climate Mitigation and Adaptation Projects - An Assessment of the US Army Corps of Engineers PublicPrivate Partnerships (P3) Pilot Program As the negative impacts of a rapidly changing climate continue to exacerbate structural inequities across all sectors and scales, U.S. communities and citizens are increasingly at risk of physical, economic, and environmental harms. Directed federal investment in climate mitigation can reduce disproportionate burdens on atrisk populations while also providing substantial economic benefits to those individuals and communities. The US Army Corps of Engineers has been the nation’s premier flood management agency since the mid-19th century and is uniquely equipped to provide technical and financial support to such communities. In this client-based thesis, I worked with Aaron Snyder, Lead of the Corps’ Water Infrastructure Financing Program and Director of the Corps’ Public-PrivatePartnership (P3) program, to evaluate its role in

developing and stewarding resilient civil works and public infrastructure. We focused on the provision of flood protection infrastructure in response to the stressors of increasingly frequent and intense natural disasters, and sought to assess how the P3 program can be improved to alleviate disproportionate cost-burdens on at-risk communities. Illustrated through case studies of weather and water disasters in Nashville, TN; New Bern, NC; Richwood, WV; and Fargo, ND; we find that the theoretical foundations of the cost-benefit analyses currently employed at the onset of the Corps’ water resource management projects substantially limits availability and access of federal aid to communities who need it most. We conclude that the new P3 program, if directed to promote equitable outcomes from local climate mitigation and adaptation projects, would allow the Corps to more accurately assess project feasibility, prioritize projects sponsored by non-federal partners, leverage progressive local funding mechanisms. This approach ultimately reduces climate risks in vulnerable communities and also meets USACE’s mission of protecting U.S. Citizens, reducing disaster risk, and maintaining support for vital infrastructures and the communities that rely upon them.

César García López Thesis Advisors: Mariana Arcaya, Justin Steil

(Re)envisioning Land and Power: A Fight for Community Ownership + Control in Massachusetts This thesis describes a client-based project I undertook in service to the Healthy Neighborhood Study Research Consortium (HNSRC) to help them develop a toolkit for community ownership + control. The toolkit explores what it takes to carry out community-led transformation for collective spaces. The toolkit came together through a participatory action research (PAR) process that built on years of neighborhood-level work carried out by folks committed to transforming their communities. My role in helping develop the toolkit was three-fold. First, I undertook archival and case study research to understand the historic and present day conditions that produced one parcel of vacant land in Boston as a way of adding contextual information to the toolkit. Second, I facilitated Learning and Innovation for Neighborhood Change (LINC) Lab working sessions with resident researchers, members of the HNSRC and who served as my committee of advising resident researchers, to surface insights into community land issues. Third, I synthesized my academic archival

and case study research together with HNS insights to draft the toolkit itself. The result is a joint-authored, action-oriented HNS toolkit that aims to help community members better understand and navigate the process of taking community control over land.

Elena Gonzalez Thesis Advisor: Cherie Abbanat

Strengthening Civil Society: Planners and Policymakers’ Role in Expanding Civic Engagement for Healthy Local Democracy What is the responsibility of planners and policymakers in supporting local expressions of democratic behavior? In light of current news and social media technologies, an increasing sense of distress for the effects of inequality, and a mixed political climate of polarization and apathy, we are at a cross roads as a nation for determining what healthy engagement both in our social and political spheres of life requires for sustaining democracy. Not only is a healthy level of engagement critical as the backbone to our system of accountability for representatives and governance structures, but it also contributes to a lively populace living in community.

and third spaces as means of encouraging further engagement and building up networks of connection within communities. The study turns to a case of Monroe County, located in northeast Pennsylvania that includes both an analysis of the publicly available information on the region and a series of interviews with local representatives. The results feature insights into planning models and governance structures that contribute to local involvement both in political matters and the social community life with the potential to strengthen public engagement, and by proxy, democracy.

The research begins by looking at the way American democracy was designed to function, as laid out in the Federalist Papers and as described by de Tocqueville in his account of the young nation in Democracy in America. The first half concludes by highlighting the importance of an active citizenry in combating political lethargy, soft despotism, and the epidemic of loneliness. It proposes civil associations

Andrea Grimaldi Thesis Advisor: devin michelle bunten

Envisioning Lower Allston’s future: Contested spaces at the margins of Harvard University’s expansion Anyone who walks, bikes, rides a bus or a car around Lower Allston today cannot avoid noticing the extent to which the neighborhood is changing and being rebuilt. Changes in global education markets have motivated Harvard University’s expansion in the neighborhood, an expansion that caters to the research and professional interests of the global creative class. With compliance from the leadership of the City of Boston, Harvard is moving ahead with its ambitious campus expansion. Through a close analysis to master plans, maps and publicly available documentation, this thesis explores the relationship between Lower Allston’s main urban development actors— the neighbors, Harvard University and the government of Boston—and analyzes each actor’s visions for the neighborhood’s future. When every single acre of land in Boston has been covered by modern classroom spaces, innovative entrepreneurship labs, and pristine landscaping... where will the people live?

Meital Hoffman Thesis Advisor: Justin Steil

Undead Bed: Mattress Recycling in Boston The Massachusetts’s Department of Environmental Protection (MassDEP) published the 2030 Solid Waste Master Plan in October 2021. As part of this plan, MassDEP issued a waste regulation that bans the disposal of mattresses and box springs at solid waste facilities. The waste ban will take effect while the Massachusetts legislature is working on passing an EPR (Extended Producer Responsibility) bill for mattress waste. This bill would require the mattress industry to administer and manage mattress end-of-life programs across the state. In the meantime, the City of Boston is preparing to implement a municipal residential mattress recycling program to comply with the MassDEP regulation before it takes effect on November 1st, 2022. I prepared this thesis in order to inform and advise the City of Boston’s Zero Waste Team and other City stakeholders regarding the creation of a residential mattress recycling program. I interviewed many of the local mattress recycling vendors and public stakeholders and conducted research into several dimensions of mattress recycling. I described the phases of a residential mattress recycling program and the logistic and cost considerations for each phase. I estimated the annual costs of the program and environmental savings

using two vendors that have different pricing and business models. I found that a mattress recycling program may cost the City upwards of $1.2 million and could save about 1000 metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent annually. I established several recommendations for the City based on cost, environmental savings, and social equity considerations.

Rajan Hoyle Thesis Advisor: Garnette Cadogan

REMEMORY: Territorial Justice in Both Americas This thesis examines the resistance tactics used by collectives of Black/Indigenous women in the Americas to fight for housing, land, and territorial justice. I put organizers from the Black Fraternal Organization of Honduras (OFRANEH) in conversation with ancestral miners in Colombia’s Cauca region, and finally with Moms 4 Housing in West Oakland to reveal themes and opportunities for solidarity and knowledge sharing across their struggles and the diaspora. Specifically, I work to tease out the limits and possibilities of property, land, and territory as viewed by each of these collectives and what cues planning might take from these insights. My research takes a journalistic and ethnographic approach and leans on theory from the traditions of Black Feminist Geography, Decolonial Thought, as well recent literature around property rights. In this trilogy of vignettes, I ask what is it that Black women can teach planners about the failures of planning to achieve property, land, and territorial justice in Black communities in the Americas.

I advocate a recentering of resistance narratives, development of solidarity networks across and throughout the Black diaspora, and for more expansive and culturally responsive approaches to planning around property, land, and territorial justice in Black communities in the Americas and beyond.

Katharine Kettner Thesis Advisor: Delia Wendel, Yolande Daniels

Inheritance Geographies: Black Presence and the Making of London Blackness has been fundamental in the making of Western cities. This thesis takes London as a site of focus through which to explore Black spatial practices. All too often, the disciplines of architecture and planning attempt to adopt apolitical, ahistorical approaches to physical space – the reality, however, is that no such space exists. Traditional pedagogies struggle to accept built interventions which occur outside strict disciplinary boundaries. By extension, these fields devalue, trivialize, or refuse to acknowledge the influence of racialized Others in shaping the built environment. Although Black people have lived and worked in Western cities for centuries, within the dominant discourse Black people are hardly ever recognized as active agents of spatial transformation and creation. This is exacerbated by visual and discursive norms which fixate on representing space in particular ways — which are not necessarily representative of the ways in which racialized groups exist, use, and make space.

This thesis rejects the minimization of Blackness in the Western canon. It calls on the disciplines of architecture and planning to expand their pedagogical horizons and to challenge normative ways of reading and understanding the built environment. Two broad case studies, British transatlantic slavery and the Windrush migration, serve as the lens through which London is investigated and mapped. In doing so, we can complicate traditional readings of space, and better recognize the roles of Blackness in creating the city – through Black presence simultaneously physical and psychological, tangible and intangible. A celebration and exploration of the richness of Black contributions in London allow us to engage the city as an ever-evolving historical, political, and social archive. The project considers some of the ways in which Black people — those departed, those present, and those future — have transformed London, which for centuries sat at the heart of a global empire, and which today remains a site of contestation. Ultimately, the soul of the project is simple: London is what it is because of Black presence.

Eman Abdelhalim Lasheen Dissertation Advisor: Balakrishnan Rajagopal

Against the Grain: A History and Policy Analysis of Rice, Water, and the Edible Landscape in Egypt Water stress is posing enormous pressure on agriculture worldwide. With the rise of ‘more crop per drop’ approaches to agriculture, countries are crafting policies that aim to balance irrigation and food production. However, these policies are not always considerate of the larger socio-economic and ecological implications they help produce. In this dissertation, I explore the history of rice cultivation in Egypt, and its regulatory context under conditions of water stress, as a case study. Given the value of rice as a staple in the Egyptian diet, its ecological benefits, its economic importance to small farmers, and its strategic importance as a food security crop, I ask: Why is rice the immediate policy target for water rationalization? And, how can these policies be explained, in light of other allocations of water and capital for agri-food development projects currently pursued? Through a combination of qualitative and historical research methods, I trace four pivotal phases of rice cultivation history in Egypt, that coincide with shifting modes of

local, regional, and international power. I then use that historical backdrop to understand the current paradoxes of water rationalization and rice. Findings of this dissertation indicate that beyond water stress, the making of Egypt’s edible landscape is a function of shifting power dynamics and political interests across history. These interests vary from purely calorific ones, to political and economic, helping legitimize certain claims to water over others, and making ‘the edible landscape’ along the way. I argue that this edible landscape is also constantly reshaped through alternative power dynamics, represented in this case by informal collaborations between rice farmers and rice researchers, as intermediary agents interested in preserving the nation’s riziculture

Allison Hannah Lee Thesis Advisor: Marie Law Adams

From Rural Ground to Rural Grocery: Designing a local food value chain

planning in a rural context. She discusses the role of design at multiple scales, and its importance in participatory food system planning. Lastly, a case study of a Food Hub project in North Central Massachusetts is used to enact the design-planning approach and propose schematic designs.

Present-day food systems in the U.S. are fraught with challenges that have spillover effects ranging from economic hardship of agricultural communities, inequitable access to nutritional foods, asymmetrical distribution of subsidies, and harsh environmental strains. Further contributing to a problematic system is the growing division between urban and rural settings, with the former receiving the majority of attention, planning, resources, and capital investment. This thesis highlights the need to rethink the relationship between food and spatial planning. In response to more prevalent urban-focused queries that ask, “can food be produced where it is consumed,” the author of this work asks, “can food be consumed where it is produced?” to acknowledge issues around food access, nutritional health, and living wages of farmers and food producers. Through a proposed design-planning approach that integrates lived experience and data analysis, the author offers methodological strategies for food system

Angeles Martinez Cuba Thesis Advisor: Andres Sevtsuk

Measuring spatial and social interdependencies between public schools and the community: City of Cambridge Schools are public institutions, but they are also social infrastructure. They create social worlds that shape and preserve the surrounding communities. While schools and other public institutions, such as public libraries, have been found to be important structures of social infrastructure, the spatial conditions under which they assume that role has been understudied. This thesis investigates how the relationship between public schools and the surrounding neighborhood may vary depending on the spatial interdependence among their amenities. To identify spatial interdependencies, I conduct the analysis from two perspectives: the school and the neighborhood. I use georeferenced data and square footage of public schools’ amenities and recreational amenities in the neighborhood combined with community demographic information and student enrollment data at the building level for the City of Cambridge, Massachusetts. Using spatial accessibility foundations, I analyze what recreation amenities are accessible around schools beyond their own, and then I

evaluate what is accessible around homes. I then determine how schools’ amenities could contribute to recreational accessibility for residents and vice versa. Moreover, I construct measures of spatial dependency to evaluate the degree to which schools depend on neighborhood recreational amenities and vice versa. To examine social relationships beyond spatial interdependency, I conducted semi-structured interviews to understand non-spatial factors that enable or prevent school-community interaction. The results show that spatial interdependencies between schools and the neighborhood could satisfy the unmet demand via potentially shared amenities for recreational and community activities, and that spatial interaction occurs when a need for space emerges from one side or the other. The stronger the interdependency, the higher the likelihood of social interaction. The weaker the interdependency, the lower the probability of social interaction. And where there is no interdependency, a school-community relationship is less likely to be identified. The findings from the qualitative analysis affirmed the importance of bilateral relationships between the community and the schools. Beyond the spatial interdependency, I found physical, social, and administrative factors that enable or prevent school-community interaction. This research offers a methodological contribution that incorporates space into the study of school-neighborhood relationships.

Patrick Meredith-Karam Thesis Advisor: Jinhua Zhao, Anson Stewart, Hui Kong

Exogenous drivers of public transit and ride-hailing ridership: a study of policy intervention, COVID-19, and the relationship between ride-hailing and public transit in Chicago Public transit is a crucial component of the urban mobility system for many cities, but several recent shocks have threatened its continued function. Additionally, Transportation Network Companies (TNCs) have grown rapidly in recent years, expanding travel choices for some but posing a challenge to public transportation, prompting the City of Chicago to price and regulate TNC services. The backdrop of the COVID-19 pandemic has posed further shocks to both travel modes and their riders. In response to these changes, this thesis asks the question of “How have public transit and TNC riders responded to various external factors, including a direct policy intervention, a public health emergency, and emerging mobility services, and what lessons can be extracted for policymakers and transit system operators?”

Through Chicago-based case studies of the questions above, this thesis examines the impacts of these shocks to urban mobility and extracts relevant takeaways for policymakers and transit agencies. The studies find that policy interventions may not cause anticipated changes to travel behavior, and that the policy impacts may differ substantially across space. These case studies provide examples that policymakers can use to evaluate program impacts to inform future policy adjustments. Regression analysis and survey findings highlight the importance of public transit to move essential workers during the COVID-19 pandemic and identify core ridership among bus riders and minority populations. This thesis also demonstrates the role of TNC services as acting significantly in competition with public transit, but found that the relationship became less competitive during COVID-19. Chicago’s mobility landscape has undergone transformative change in recent years, and the future of the urban transportation system is uncertain as we recover from COVID-19. In the establishment of a post-pandemic normal, transit agencies and policymakers will need to continually evaluate the intended and unintended consequences of policy interventions, understand the behaviors and intentions of their riders, and assess their relationship with other modes of transportation. This thesis identifies analysis processes and provides practical examples for performing all these functions.

Danielle Moore Thesis Advisor: Janelle Knox-Hayes

One Size Does Not Fit All: Individualizing Climate Action Plans in Southern California The City of Imperial Beach, a coastal Southern California city, is under severe threat from climate change. Sea level rise, flooding, extreme heat, and environmental pollution all pose risk to the city and especially its vulnerable residents. This thesis has taken an environmental justice lens and applied it in analyzing Imperial Beach’s climate action plan. Specifically, it analyzes the city’s plan for how it will protect marginalized community members from climate change while successfully reducing the city’s emissions by 2050. It also advocates for a more tailored climate plan that acknowledges different community needs based on identity (e.g., race, class, and language). After analyzing the city’s plan alone, the thesis then zooms out to compare it to neighboring cities’ plans to understand the regional context. Multiple policy recommendations across different scales are then made for the city itself, the state of California, the U.S. federal government, and the Mexican government. These recommendations include further community engagement, stronger top-down climate goals, increasing meeting accessibility, making funding more available for Imperial Beach from California,

and more. Lastly, a roadmap to 2050 that includes these recommendations alongside emissions goals is presented for the city.

Maria Lucia Morelli Thesis Advisor: Catherine D’Ignazio

The Right to Navigate Risk in Mexico City: Possibilities for Creating Safer Spaces for Women Experiencing Fear of Sexual Harassment in their Daily Use of the City This thesis explores the effects of fear of harassment on women’s mobility choices in Mexico City by analyzing it through a Right to the City framework. Women’s fear of harassment constitutes a constant state of alert to the smaller and more subtle forms which exist in a spatial continuity as a woman travels throughout the city. It is the gestures, the catcalls, the pursuing, and the groping of women in public space which make women feel vulnerable and uncomfortable. The recurrence of these experiences is a constant reminder of the risk that is out there while moving in the city. This thesis explains how women negotiate with this risk either by constraining or modifying their mobility or by directly defying it –regardless of the negotiation method, fear plays a crucial role in their choices. To make such choices, women create mental risk maps of the spatiality of fear, where they overlay the social and physical conditions that elicit opportunity or probability of harassment.

I position my research with the goal of granting women with the Right to Navigate Risk. This concept, coined by urban theorist Carolyn Whitzman, criticizes the negative outcomes that can result from reducing the Right to the City to a Right to Safety or a Right to Mobility; examples include segregationist programs like women-only transport systems, and forced mobility evident in long, complex and unwanted trips. Analyzing results from an online survey designed to capture women’s everyday activities, their experiences of harassment and their travel choices, this thesis presents the extent to which fear of harassment hinders women’s Right to the City. I examine the strategies women employ to negotiate with risk, and then propose analytical axes needed to understand the dynamism of women’s experiences through the city in order to think about creating safer spaces so they can navigate risk.

Christopher Masahiko Moyer Thesis Advisors: Lawrence Vale, Susanne Schindler

Expanding Architectures of Sharing: Public Housing Authority-Supported MiddleIncome Limited-Equity Cooperatives Amid soaring home prices caused by rampant speculation in high-cost cities like Cambridge, middle-income households are being squeezed harder than ever. Faced with a housing market structured around binaries between renting/owning and market-rate/ affordable housing (income- and price-restricted), middle-income households are left with increasingly few options. Neither private developers nor public-sector entities currently serve their needs. Limited-equity cooperatives (LECs) move beyond these binaries. LECs provide a form of self-governed housing, incorporating elements of renting and owning, designed for permanent affordability with limited wealth building via economic sharing. But LECs also facilitate social and spatial sharing through practices (collective decision making, shared meals, and childcare help) enabled by architecture (open space, common kitchen, and play facilities). LECs can thus endow

residents with the benefits of collective control, affordability, and social support through the combination of decommodification and architectural design. By embracing the interrelated tenets of economic, social and spatial sharing, the LEC provides a living environment not possible in either market-rate or traditional affordable developments. Organized around four distinct open spaces, the project combines a rental building for hospital interns and a cooperative building for an array of household sizes and incomes. A daycare, retail spaces, and below-grade parking offer public uses. The proposal reveals the untapped opportunity of institutions and housing authorities to expand architectures of sharing through middle-income LECs.social and spatial sharing, the LEC provides a living environment not possible in either market-rate or traditional affordable developments. Organized around four distinct open spaces, the project combines a rental building for hospital interns and a cooperative building for an array of household sizes and incomes. A daycare, retail spaces, and below-grade parking offer public uses. The proposal reveals the untapped opportunity of institutions and housing authorities to expand architectures of sharing through middle-income LECs.

kloe ng Thesis Advisor: Andres Sevtsuk

Walking to transit – using big data to analyze bus and train ridership in Los Angeles Los Angeles passed one of the largest sales taxes in the country in 2016, which will give the county unprecedented financing in improving public transportation. Over the years, the city has seen various proposals to fund subways and elevated railways to undo problems rampant in car-centric cities — bad air quality, congestion, inequity, and traffic deaths. Public transit ridership has been declining despite hefty investments, and it is important to understand why transit has not picked up. Walkability is key for transit use, and in a city whose dwellers are known to be resistant to walking and taking public transportation, lies an interesting question — who currently walks to take public transit in the city? Specifically, what are the factors affecting walking to transit stops and how do these differ between train and bus ridership? Studying current pedestrian-induced ridership is crucial as walkability is key in affecting ridership.

performed the best for explaining variations in walking to bus stops, while XGBoost model performed the best for train stations, most likely due to a smaller sample size (n=96). The top 3 features explaining bus boardings were: (1) number of buses passing through stop, (2) proportion of white residents near the stop, (3) total population near the stop. For trains, (1) number of ground-floor amenities near the station, (2) traffic levels on surrounding roadways, (3) total population in the station area were the top features. The number of bus stops in the vicinity has a positive association with both bus and train ridership. The partial dependence plots show that total population and greenery has flipped relationships for bus stops and train stations. Like the linear regression model, total population is negatively associated with train ridership, which is a unique scenario that is not often replicated in other cities. Variables influencing walking to transit have been widely studied, and the results for linear regression in this study have been generally expected. Machine learning models, however, can reflect relationships that are non-linear or have a stepwise like relationship which would help planners transform into more actionable policies.

I explored 5 different models (Decision Trees, Random Forest, XGBoost, Ridge and Lasso Regression) and compared it against a linear model. Random Forest Model

Andrey Prigov Thesis Advisor: Justin Steil

Making A Neighborhood Illegal: Zoning, Nimbyism, and Housing Justice in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn As the national housing crisis pushes low-income tenants out of urban inner cores, the local land use politics of the peripheral neighborhoods that they move to have taken on great importance. Part historical narrative and part zoning analysis, this thesis follows the zoning history of one such place—Bensonhurst, a large residential neighborhood in New York City’s outer ring that finds itself caught between the land use demands of longtime homeowners and the housing needs of low-er-income immigrant tenants. While other scholars have explored neighborhood dynamics like these, few have followed them through to the zoning code. By exploring how Bensonhurst residents shaped the zoning code and how, in turn, the zoning code shaped Bensonhurst residents, the thesis provides context for the opportunities and constraints that inform the neighborhood’s trajectory today. As the thesis identifies, at the heart of the neighborhood’s debates around zoning, are the legacies of two tensions: the first between homevoters and newcomers and the second between homevoters and planners. The first reflects racial, ethnic, economic and spatial anxieties about newcomers and what they

may bring. The second expresses the means of residents to approve or deny city-led projects and set their own agenda. As this thesis posits, the making of Bensonhurst is the story of how these factors reverberated against each other. Understanding how policymakers can navigate around these tensions to build affordable housing in what already is one of the densest, most transit-oriented places in the country is a crucial first step in addressing the impact of the housing shortage on the nation’s most marginalized renters.

Jordan Owen Thesis Advisor: Kairos Shen

Data Driven Transit Oriented Development Planning: Using Montreal’s New Transit System as a Case Study The goal of transit-oriented development (TOD) is to encourage personal movement via walking or cycling to/from transit stations, increase the usage of shared means of transit, reduce highway, street, and parking congestion, and thereby instill both personal and environmental benefits. There has been a significant amount of research on the methods regional and city planners can use to identify and pursue opportunities for TOD. The primary focus of most prior research has centered on population density, walkability, land use diversity, and parking around potential transit nodes to identify which ones are best suited for TOD. Studies frequently aggregate these factors into a single TOD index.

co-create maps and indices to identify which existing stations would best serve as a new polycentric node, and where new transit lines should be placed to maximize the benefits associated with TOD. To address this gap in the prior literature and its practical applicability, this research proposes a unique methodological approach that focuses on development potential around major transit nodes and market potential. This new proposed methodology produces a spatial index with three distinct layers: the Walkability, the Potential Densification, and the Real Estate Market. Along with presenting a methodological approach, the methodology will be applied in a case study, using use the city of Montreal as an illustrative example.

However, several key considerations have been omitted in past research and applications related to TOD, such as real estate development capacity, and market potential. This thesis aims to assess TOD potential quantitatively from both a city planner and real estate developers’ perspective for an existing transit network and new networks in the planning phase. As a result, city planners and real estate developers could

Camila Ramos Thesis Advisor: Siqi Zheng

Understanding Subway Vibrancy in Live-Work-Play: A Case Study from and for Santiago, Chile I characterize the subway neighborhood’s activity in three essential categories: live, work, and play. My research examines how Metro de Santiago’s latest expansion – Line 6 – has affected the configuration of neighborhoods across the city. Using multiyear information on subway new developments, data on amenities and jobs distributed in Santiago, real estate transactions in the city, and transit data in GTFS format, the results from the Differences-in-Difference model show that new subway infrastructure positively contributes to the number of openings of new amenities – be it in a subway neighborhood or in other neighborhood that benefits from network effects. The results show that the opening of line 6 in Santiago has led to an annual increase of 14.85 amenities in treated cells when considering improvements in accessibility to population. The analysis also shows that replacing accessibility to population by accessibility to purchasing power better captures the market effect on the increase in vibrancy. In models that incorporate this variable, the results suggest that the opening of line 6 has led to an average annual increase of 31.31 amenities in treated cells.

My research’s second contribution is to provide evidence on the relevance of land use regulations in enhancing the effects of vibrancy stimulated by transit infrastructure. The results show that amenities in new and existing subway neighborhoods in Santiago increased by 403% after the opening of line 6 in cells that allow commercial building or allocate land specifically for commercial purposes. This increase in the number of amenities indirectly contributes to housing price premium by improving the attractiveness of a neighborhood, however, I also find evidence that housing prices are directly affected by changes in accessibility. The results suggest that in cells where commercial building is allowed housing prices increase by 9.86% after the opening of new subway stations and that commercial land use also contributes indirectly to housing appreciation by 40%.

Tyler Rivera Thesis Advisor: Ezra Glenn

“No One Washes a Rental Car”: Parsing Contested Narratives of Worker Ownership in the Massachusetts Cooperative Economy The COVID-19 pandemic has laid bare the structural deficiencies of a capitalist system in which shortterm profits and shareholder value are prioritized over human well-being and economic stability. With the search for a more humane and resilient economic model urgent now more than ever, a groundswell of interest in worker cooperatives — firms that are collectively owned and democratically managed by their employees — has recently emerged. For many, worker cooperatives (co-ops) represent a means to raise wages, improve working conditions, mitigate precarity, and build resilience for workers and communities. But worker co-ops have also been envisaged as vehicles for more radical economic change. Indeed, prominent scholars of worker co-ops have framed the burgeoning cooperative movement as a transformative political project striving to build alternative economic institutions to challenge and replace capitalism altogether. Compelling though this vision may be, this thesis explores what is largely missed by

such top-down characterizations of the cooperative model’s transformative potential: the perspectives of actual worker-owners. Animated by this gap in the discourse on worker ownership, this thesis addresses a critical question raised by the absence of workers’ voices: to what extent do the actors ostensibly charged with leading such a transformative movement (i.e., worker-owners) think of their businesses as viable alternatives to capitalism and themselves as harbingers of a new economic paradigm? Drawing from semi-structured interviews with ten worker-owners in worker co-ops based in Massachusetts, this research reveals how worker-owners hold complex, multifaceted understandings of worker ownership and its potential to transform our economy. I find that worker-owners embrace narratives emphasizing how worker ownership can improve the lives and livelihoods of working people within capitalism, while also positioning worker co-ops as stepping stones toward a new economy built around a fundamentally different set of productive arrangements and economic relations. Ultimately, I argue that these multivalent dispositions reflect a hybrid politics of worker ownership rooted in the real-life experiences of worker-owners caught between the intellectual vanguard of the cooperative movement and the working-class polity of which they are a part, with implications for the future of the cooperative movement.

Anna Schuessler Thesis Advisor: devin michelle bunten

The Unintended Inevitable: How Housing Fell through the Cracks in Venice Beach’s Transition to Community Planning, and What It Might Take to Build an Imagination for the Future This thesis studies the community planning that took place in Venice in the late 1960s and early 1970s, reflecting the deleterious effects of a hyper-local planning focus on both current and future residents. Using archival research methods and a liberatory memory framework, I attempted to trace the dynamics underlying and surfacing during Venice Beach’s community planning process in the late 1960s and early 1970s, a time when concerns about unregulated development and a community planning process deemed inadequate by almost all stakeholders shaped a community plan allowing little growth or change. A set of secondary sources informed my understanding of the agency community groups and leaders believed they had to influence this community planning process and track the cumulative effects of local municipalities enacting slow

growth land use policy. This analysis showed that traditional planning processes, many of which have been in use for decades, privilege the sentiments of socially and economically dominant community voices. A regional approach to housing production can address the inequities produced by this dynamic — by widening our lens to think about what happens when most neighborhoods or cities in a region reject new housing production, issues with parochial planning are exposed. Efforts to set regional goals for housing and a regulatory structure to ensure those within a region contribute to it offer path toward addressing housing shortages. However, as we widen that lens beyond the loudest voices in the room, I believe we need to be vigilant not to lose the voices of the communities that have historically been marginalized by these processes and who resist oppression and plan for the future on their own terms.

Amelia Seabold Thesis Advisor: devin michelle bunten

Bridging the Divide Between Qualitative and Quantitative Methods of Gentrification Research Through the Introduction of a Novel Mixed-method in Four U.S. Gayborhoods The findings of gentrification research depend heavily on the methods used for the study: qualitative research finds gentrification to be harmful and socially salient and quantitative research finds it to be uncommon and less salient, relative to the effects of urban poverty (Brown-Saracino 2017). This thesis aims to overcome this methodological divide by using a novel mixed-method to study gentrification. This method identifies gentrification using extant qualitative interviews of residents who were asked about community development in their neighborhood and assesses quantitative changes in the neighborhood’s income and house values during the period of change described by residents. This method is performed on four gay neighborhoods (gayborhoods) in the United States: the South End, Boston; Boystown, Chicago; Dupont Circle, Washington, D.C.; and Midtown,

Atlanta. Gayborhoods have a clarity of membership and plethora of prior research done about them that makes them ideal candidates in which to research gentrification. Further, residents were not necessarily asked about gentrification per se, but also the development of the gay community, a process that may precede, follow, or comprise gentrification itself. The main findings of this research are two-fold. First, in the four gayborhoods studied, gentrification overlapped with the time that the neighborhood was a gayborhood very closely, and many residents interviewed in qualitative research explicitly linked the creation and dissolution of gayborhoods to gentrification. Second, qualitative identification of gentrification onset corresponds to the period when average income percentile starts to increase in a gayborhood, and the identification of gentrification completion corresponds to the period when the gayborhood has a high average house value percentile regardless of whether the average income percentile is high or low. The combination of qualitative interviews and quantitative income and house value data can be applied to gentrification research on other neighborhoods to give scholars and policymakers greater insight into how people perceive gentrification and neighborhood change.

Kaiwen Shi Thesis Advisor: Delia Wendel

Resilience and Its Discontents: Risk, Temporality, and a Climate Change Crisis In the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy in 2012, significant funding and numerous initiatives have sought to prepare the United States for future storms and flooding. Resilience has emerged as one of the most important concepts in discourse about climate change and urban planning, central to decisions about investments, urban development, and budgeting. Furthermore, it has taken shape as a large industry with conferences, professionals and advisors, and indices and metrics all meant to improve the preparedness and resiliency of various entities ranging from individuals and companies to cities and regions. However, resilience is not a purely technocratic and objective metric as it is often presented. This thesis examines resilience as a political and economic project, a technology for governing risks associated with climate change. In the process of this governance, the assumptions and understandings implicit within resilience, and deeply held by those working in the field, produce uneven outcomes. Unlike other paradigms like sustainability and mitigation, resilience aims not to solve the problem of global climate change but rather to protect short-term against its

impacts. Engaging with fields like geography, science, technology and society (STS), and anthropology, I argue that resilience has a temporal element — it does not aim to solve the problem of climate change, its future is instead postponed in the attempt to preserve an endless present. This present is portrayed as a crisis and resilience is framed as the way to prevent further destabilization. Crisis however, much like Naomi Klein’s disaster capitalism complex, is enormously profitable for a number of elite stakeholders including real estate developers and insurance corporations. In opposition to a resilience project in New York City, opponents have called for true resiliency. My thesis attempts to hold resilience accountable and create space for meaningful responses, ones that center solutions and climate justice.

Asher H. Simon Thesis Advisors: Albert Saiz, Amy Glasmeier

The War on Who? An Analysis of Drug Possession Arrests in Four U.S. Cities This thesis seeks to contribute to the existing understanding of inequities in drug possession arrests, especially as related to race, while explicitly addressing the role of the distribution of illicit drug use across different groups in determining patterns of arrests for possession. By combining drug possession arrest data from four U.S. cities (Los Angeles, Chicago, New York City, and Dallas) with national survey data estimating illicit drug use and population data, I create a series of multiple linear regression models that estimate the relationship between the propensity of arrest for drug possession and age, sex, racial background, and estimated illicit drug use. I find that, even after controlling for the estimated distribution of illegal drug use, along with demographic factors, significant disparities continue to exist in all four cities studied – specifically, black men are most likely to be arrested. These results provide further evidence that differences in use by identity cannot explain relative levels of arrest, lending support to theories that attribute these disparities to either police bias or differences in social or neighborhood context. I also find evidence suggesting that specific policy changes in two cities

– Proposition 47 and 64 in Los Angeles and the end of Stop-and-Frisk in New York City – appear to have significantly reduced the magnitude of disparities in drug possession arrests. This further evidences the salience of enforcement strategy in driving disparate outcomes and implies that further changes in illicit drug enforcement policy have the potential to ameliorate existing inequities.

Natasha Stamler Thesis Advisor: David Hsu

Improving the Model of Localized Air Pollution in New York City Air pollution is a health and environmental hazard in cities around the world. In New York City, fine particulate matter (PM2.5) results in thousands of deaths each year. Air pollution is an environmental justice problem; it disproportionately impacts New York City’s most vulnerable communities. Currently there are cityand state-run air quality monitor networks in New York City. However, these networks contain too few modules to provide a localized model of air quality and their data is difficult for the public to access. Low-cost sensor networks enable the deployment of many modules throughout the city, engage the local community, and provide a high volume of accessible data. This thesis evaluates the existing city- and state-run air quality monitor networks in New York City; evaluates and optimizes a network of low-cost air pollution sensors in New York City; and provides recommendations for future air pollution sensor networks.

Dorothy Tang Dissertation Advisors: Eran Ben-Joseph, Gabriella Carolini, Timothy Oakes, Gavin Shatkin

Infrastructural Landscapes: The Technopolitics of Watershed Planning in Asia This three-essay dissertation examines the technopolitics of watershed management in shaping infrastructure and landscapes in Asia. Technopolitics describes the co-production of power and technologies and how these processes manifest in the physical and social world. Using this conceptual framework, each essay analyzes a different watershed rationale, to understand how the politics of infrastructure restructure urban processes, development, and governance. Essay 1 analyzes China’s Sponge City movement and how stormwater management produces uneven development in Guangzhou and Shenzhen. Examining the role of green infrastructure technologies in mediating central mandates and local enforcement, I found that the technological basis of runoff standards at the national level shapes implementation strategies of local governments. While a systematic watershed approach is most ecologically effective, a fragmented parcelized approach is easier to quantify, faster to implement, and conducive to private

financing. Thus, local officials turn to neoliberal urban development to meet the central government’s environmental goals instead of prioritizing ecological performance. Essay 2 studies how geopolitics and water security shaped colonial Hong Kong’s transboundary freshwater infrastructure. I illustrate how uncertainty over Hong Kong’s sovereignty during the Cold War produced competing freshwater infrastructure systems: reservoirs for water autonomy and aqueducts for integration with Mainland China. Moreover, the ecological impact of reservoir construction forced the British colonial government to temporarily include saline water in the freshwater supply, exacerbating a crisis of governance in 1967. This colonial legacy of freshwater provision continues to influence contemporary debates over self-sufficiency and integration in its environmental politics and land supply controversies. Essay 3 examines transnational infrastructure projects in the Mekong River Basin and the promise of regional infrastructure for economic development. I trace the history of transnational planning of the Mekong Project (1957-75) and the Greater Mekong Subregion Economic Corridors (1992-), to understand how planned infrastructure projects shape regional politics.

Max von Franque Thesis Advisor: David Hsu

Particulate Matter inside of Diesel and Electric Commuter Trains in the US Northeast Air pollution is an ever growing threat in many urban environments, with large health implications. Regional and long distance commuter and intercity trains are one such source. An experimental study was performed to determine the levels of particulate matter (PM) throughout the insides of different types of trains between Boston, MA and Providence, RI. PM was measured in diesel based Massachusetts Bay Transit Authority (MBTA) commuter trains, and electric based Amtrak Northeast Regional intercity trains. A spatial map of pollution at different locations within the train was generated, providing passengers with a general idea of where to sit in order to minimize exposure to PM. This study found that contrary to the existing literature, passengers on average experienced higher levels of PM inside electric Amtrak trains when compared to passengers inside diesel MBTA trains. However, with a limited sample size, more investigation is needed before a proper conclusion is made.

Laura Wainer Thesis Advisor: Lawrence Vale

The Informalization of Formal Housing Projects in the Global South: Policy Failure or Counterhegemonic City-making? Faced with the rampant expansion of informal settlements in cities, many national governments across the global South have instituted formal social housing programs. In turn, however, many State-led housing projects, aimed at curtailing informal settlements, themselves informalize. How and why does this happen? My dissertation interrogates this recurrent phenomenon in Latin America and Sub-Saharan Africa: the physical, economic, and institutional encroachment of informal practices onto formal, large-scale housing projects. The scarce literature on the topic positions the phenomenon as either a policy failure or bottom-up adaptations to unsuitable policy decisions. Drawing on the intersection between State building theory, Southern Urbanism, and Design Politics, I suggest that it is instead a series of interconnected counterhegemonic city-making efforts that attempt to undo the norms and forms imposed by the national State to guarantee the political and social stability of Southern urban

peripheries. As such, informalization operates over a complex matrix of pre-existing regulations and standards, engages in practices of territorial anchoring and economic development, and asserts de facto management status without legal-administrative capacity to address the social demands and conflicts of urban growth. I base my arguments on the in-depth study of three paradigmatic cases in Buenos Aires (Argentina), Cape Town (South Africa), and Cartagena (Colombia) to introduce the informalization of the formal as a process of counterhegemonic practices transversal --but not exogenous-- to the more formal managerial logic that entail: anchoring people and organizations to their territory, individualizing land to self-manage urban space, incrementing houses to serve the extended families’ needs, unlocking the local economy, and stabilizing tensions and social conflicts of urban management. The study cases show that informalization enhances livelihoods and provides political stability in the short term. Still, as space and infrastructure become more contested, significant new tensions emerge within the community and between the community and governments. In turn, the State has not yet found planning visions or pragmatic alternative solutions, contributing to ongoing neglect of these territories. The findings also bring out the possibilities of a techno-political re-imagination of the planning and design disciplines.

Prathito Wisambodhi Thesis Advisor: Andres Sevtsuk

Pushcarts to Platforms: Measuring Food Delivery Apps’ Effect on Street Vendors’ Location Preferences in the Global South. Case Study: Surakarta, Indonesia How does online commerce affect the offline presence of retail, food, and beverage (F&B) establishments in cities? While extensive literature exists on e-commerce’s effect on the retail industry, its impact on retailers’ location preference and in particular street vendors in the Global South has been less explored. E-commerce and food delivery apps (FDA) change search costs for customers and could therefore change the desirability of locations for retailers. Yet, most existing retail economic studies are specific to brick-andmortar establishments in the Western urban context, despite street vendors’ rapid adoption of online commerce and the Asia Pacific region’s lead in the global e-commerce growth rate even before the COVID-19 pandemic. This thesis focuses on the effect of FDA on the growth trend and location preferences of F&B street vendors in Indonesia, using the city of Surakarta as a case study. By using spatial analysis and interviews, the thesis analyzes four hypotheses about the changes in street vendors’ presence, clustering, and location

preferences based on street vendor location data collected in 2014 and 2019 on the same set of streets. The results show a negligible change in location preferences for street vendors of all kinds and a more pronounced change for F&B vendors after controlling for street vendor growth. Without growth control, FDA has a minimal effect on the change of F&B street vendors’ clustering and location preference which was also validated by the interviews. Finally, the thesis discusses data limitations and future opportunities that could inform policies on street vending and online delivery services.