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- Creators: Arizona State University
Description
Tempe political and business leaders implemented a series of strategies, composed of interconnected economic, political, and cultural factors that contributed to the city's growth over time. Influenced by a new economic opportunities and challenges, changing ideas about redevelopment and the role of suburbs, and Tempe's own growth issues after 1960, Tempe leaders and citizens formed a distinct vision for downtown redevelopment. Modified over time, the redevelopment strategy depended on effective planning and financing, public-private collaboration, citizen participation, and a revised perception of growth. After 1980, the strategy gained momentum enabling leaders to expand their ambitions for downtown. Redevelopment manifested through riverfront redevelopment, art and culture, and historic preservation redirecting the city's growth, creating economic development, and revitalizing downtown as Tempe began flourishing as a mature supersuburb. The strategy showed considerable economic success by 2012 and the completion of the Rio Salado Project, the Tempe Center for the Arts, and the preservation of the Hayden Flour Mill made downtown an attractive and diverse urban destination.
ContributorsGerszewski, Alyssa Danielle (Author) / Vandermeer, Philip (Thesis advisor) / Dallett, Nancy (Committee member) / Thompson, Victoria (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2014
Description
Tempe experienced rapid growth in population and area from 1949 to 1975, stretching its resources thin and changing the character of the city. City boosters encouraged growth through the 1950s to safeguard Tempe’s borders against its larger neighbor, Phoenix. New residents moved to Tempe as it grew, expecting suburban amenities that the former agricultural supply town struggled to pay for and provide. After initially balking at taking responsibility for development of a park system, Tempe established a Parks and Recreation Department in 1958 and used parks as a main component in an evolving strategy for responding to rapid suburban growth. Through the 1960s and 1970s, Tempe pursued an ambitious goal of siting one park in each square mile of the city, planning for neighborhood parks to be paired with elementary schools and placed at the center of each Tempe neighborhood. The highly-publicized plan created a framework, based on the familiarity of public park spaces, that helped both long-time residents and recent transplants understand the new city form and participate in a changing community identity. As growth accelerated and subdivisions surged southward into the productive agricultural area that had driven Tempe’s economy for decades, the School-Park Policy faltered as a planning and community-building tool. Residents and city leaders struggled to reconcile the loss of agricultural land with the carefully maintained cultural narrative that connected Tempe to its frontier past, ultimately broadening the role of parks to address the needs of a changing city.
ContributorsSweeney, Jennifer (Author) / Thompson, Victoria (Thesis advisor) / Gray, Susan (Committee member) / MacFadyen, Joshua (Committee member) / Smith, Jared (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2019
Description
Although smaller and more local elections could have implications more dramatic to an individual than larger district-, state-, and nation-wide elections do, very few citizens vote in them. Moreover, citizens are limited in procuring further information on candidates, issues, and the overall election when there are fewer sources of such information across various mediums. While existing literature on political communication and voter participation does not yet extend far enough to sufficiently address the most local aspects of media effects on elections, the political science field’s dominating frameworks would suggest that an increase in news media, social media, and ground mobilization tactics would increase civic engagement and voter participation. My research, which focuses on hyperlocal elections, both supports andrefutes certain elements of that suggestion. Based on surveys of potential voters in a university’s student government election and a school board election, interviews with two student government presidential candidates, and an analysis of social media engagement, my research compares three mass media platforms and two elections to characterize the effects of media on hyperlocal elections—that certain tactics have drastically different results on different populations. My research expands the body of media and politics knowledge to include hyperlocal elections, suggesting that civic engagement on the local levels require increased further study.
ContributorsRomanov, Andrew Samuilovich (Author) / Wells, David (Thesis director) / Brodie, Mark (Committee member) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor) / School of International Letters and Cultures (Contributor) / Department of English (Contributor) / Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication (Contributor) / School of Politics and Global Studies (Contributor)
Created2015-05
Description
Historians typically view the postwar suburban metropolis from one of two vantages: from the vantage of urban capital as it flowed out of central cities into new automobile suburbs, where a new suburban culture emerged and flourished after 1945, or from the vantage of central cities, which become progressively hollowed out, leaving behind badly deteriorated inner-city services and facilities. Rarely, however, do historians view the postwar suburban metropolis from the vantage of peripheral small towns and rural countrysides. This study looks at the “metropolitan revolution” from the outside in, as the metropolis approached and then absorbed a landscape of farms and ranches centered on a small farm-service town. As a case study, it focuses on Tempe, Arizona, a town and rural countryside eight miles east of Phoenix.
During the postwar period, Tempe became part of the Phoenix metropolitan area. Agricultural production in Tempe yielded to suburban development, as a producer-oriented landscape of farms and ranches became a consumer-oriented landscape of residential subdivisions and university buildings. Intangible goods such as higher education eclipsed tangible goods such as grain, dairy, and cotton. Single-family houses supplanted farmland; shopping centers with parking lots undermined main street businesses; irrigation water became domestic water; and International-style university buildings displaced vernacular neighborhoods rooted in the early history of the settlement. In Tempe, the rural agricultural landscape gave way to a suburban landscape. But in important ways, the former shaped the latter, as the suburban metropolis inherited the underlying form and spatial relationships of farms and ranches.
During the postwar period, Tempe became part of the Phoenix metropolitan area. Agricultural production in Tempe yielded to suburban development, as a producer-oriented landscape of farms and ranches became a consumer-oriented landscape of residential subdivisions and university buildings. Intangible goods such as higher education eclipsed tangible goods such as grain, dairy, and cotton. Single-family houses supplanted farmland; shopping centers with parking lots undermined main street businesses; irrigation water became domestic water; and International-style university buildings displaced vernacular neighborhoods rooted in the early history of the settlement. In Tempe, the rural agricultural landscape gave way to a suburban landscape. But in important ways, the former shaped the latter, as the suburban metropolis inherited the underlying form and spatial relationships of farms and ranches.
ContributorsHallam, Nathan (Author) / Vandermeer, Philip (Thesis advisor) / Smith, Karen (Committee member) / Thompson, Victoria (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2016