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- Creators: Eakin, Hallie
Description
Sustainable urbanism offers a set of best practice planning and design prescriptions intended to reverse the negative environmental consequences of urban sprawl, which dominates new urban development in the United States. Master planned developments implementing sustainable urbanism are proliferating globally, garnering accolades within the planning community and skepticism among social scientists. Despite attention from supporters and critics alike, little is known about the actual environmental performance of sustainable urbanism. This dissertation addresses the reasons for this paucity of evidence and the capacity of sustainable urbanism to deliver the espoused environmental outcomes through alternative urban design and the conventional master planning framework for development through three manuscripts. The first manuscript considers the reasons why geography, which would appear to be a natural empirical home for research on sustainable urbanism, has yet to accumulate evidence that links design alternatives to environmental outcomes or to explain the social processes that mediate those outcomes. It argues that geography has failed to develop a coherent subfield based on nature-city interactions and suggests interdisciplinary bridging concepts to invigorate greater interaction between the urban and nature-society geographic subfields. The subsequent chapters deploy these bridging concepts to empirically examine case-studies in sustainable urbanism. The second manuscript utilizes fine scale spatial data to quantify differences in ecosystem services delivery across three urban designs in two phases of Civano, a sustainable urbanism planned development in Tucson, Arizona, and an adjacent, typical suburban development comparison community. The third manuscript considers the extent to which conventional master planning processes are fundamentally at odds with urban environmental sustainability through interviews with stakeholders involved in three planned developments: Civano (Tucson, Arizona), Mueller (Austin, Texas), and Prairie Crossing (Grayslake, Illinois). Findings from the three manuscripts reveal deep challenges in conceptualizing an empirical area of inquiry on sustainable urbanism, measuring the outcomes of urban design alternatives, and innovating planning practice within the constraints of existing institutions that facilitate conventional development. Despite these challenges, synthesizing the insights of geography and cognate fields holds promise in building an empirical body of knowledge that complements pioneering efforts of planners to innovate urban planning practice through the sustainable urbanism alternative.
ContributorsTurner, Victoria (Author) / Gober, Patricia (Thesis advisor) / Eakin, Hallie (Committee member) / Kinzig, Ann (Committee member) / Talen, Emily (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2013
Description
Anthropogenic land use has irrevocably transformed the natural systems on which humankind relies. Understanding where, why, and how social and economic processes drive globally-important land-use changes, from deforestation to urbanization, has advanced substantially. Illicit and clandestine activities--behavior that is intentionally secret because it breaks formal laws or violates informal norms--are poorly understood, however, despite the recognition of their significant role in land change. This dissertation fills this lacuna by studying illicit and clandestine activity and quantifying its influence on land-use patterns through examining informal urbanization in Mexico City and deforestation Central America. The first chapter introduces the topic, presenting a framework to examine illicit transactions in land systems. The second chapter uses data from interviews with actors involved with land development in Mexico City, demonstrating how economic and political payoffs explain the persistence of four types of informal urban expansion. The third chapter examines how electoral politics influence informal urban expansion and land titling in Mexico City using panel regression. Results show land title distribution increases just before elections, and more titles are extended to loyal voters of the dominant party in power. Urban expansion increases with electoral competition in local elections for borough chiefs and legislators. The fourth chapter tests and confirms the hypothesis that narcotrafficking has a causal effect on forest loss in Central America from 2001-2016 using two proxies of narcoactivity: drug seizures and events from media reports. The fifth chapter explores the spatial signature and pattern of informal urban development. It uses a typology of urban informality identified in chapter two to hypothesize and demonstrate distinct urban expansion patterns from satellite imagery. The sixth and final chapter summarizes the role of illicit and clandestine activity in shaping deforestation and urban expansion through illegal economies, electoral politics, and other informal transactions. Measures of illicit and clandestine activity should--and could--be incorporated into land change models to account for a wider range of relevant causes. This dissertation shines a new light on the previously hidden processes behind ever-easier to detect land-use patterns as earth observing satellites increase spatial and temporal resolution.
ContributorsTellman, Elizabeth (Author) / Turner II, Billie L (Thesis advisor) / Eakin, Hallie (Thesis advisor) / Janssen, Marco (Committee member) / Alba, Felipe de (Committee member) / Jain, Meha (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2019
Description
In Latin America food insecurity is still prevailing in those regions where extreme poverty and political instability are common. Tseltal communities are experiencing changes due to religious conversions and the incursion of external political institutions. These changes have diminished the importance of traditional reciprocal and redistributive institutions that historically have been essential for personal and community survival. This dissertation investigated the impact that variations on governance systems and presence of reciprocal and distributional exchanges have on the food security status of communities. Qualitative data collected in four communities through 117 free lists and 117 semi-structured interviews was used to elaborate six scales that correspond to the traditional and civic authority system and to inter-community and intra-community reciprocity and redistribution. I explore the relationship that the scores of four communities on those scales have on the food security status of their inhabitants based on their results on the National Health and Nutrition Survey 2012. Findings from this study suggest that in marginalized communities that many scientists would described as experiencing market failure, participation in inter-community reciprocal, intra-community reciprocal and intra-community redistribution are better predictors of food security than enrollment in food security programs. Additionally, communities that participated the most in these non-market mechanisms have stronger traditional institutions. In contrast, communities that participated more in inter-community redistribution scored higher on the civic authority scale, are enrolled in more food aid programs, but are less food secure.
ContributorsDe La Torre Pacheco, Sindy Yaneth (Author) / Janssen, Marco (Thesis advisor) / Eakin, Hallie (Committee member) / BurnSilver, Shauna (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2015