Matching Items (19)
Description
This research project is part of a larger study of green infrastructure in urban planning and sustainability initiatives in cities across the U.S. Within the past few decades, the topic of sustainability has been at the forefront of city planners’ minds as cities grow, there is new or redevelopment, and the threat of climate change and future climate variability increases. Green infrastructure is one increasingly popular urban sustainability strategy, which is widely promoted for its ability to provide multiple benefits. This multi-functionality translates into ecosystem services and possible disservices for a local community and the city as a whole. This research project examines 120 planning documents from 19 U.S. cities to examine whether the services cities say they expect green infrastructure to provide, or the rationale, match with the criteria used to determine where green infrastructure is sited. For this project, we ask: what are the rationales that cities provide for developing green infrastructure and what are the criteria cities are using to determine where to site it? We find that certain rationales, or benefits, are claimed without corresponding and specific siting criteria to substantiate how these benefits will be achieved, while other benefits, like those related to stormwater management, are prioritized over other potentially important benefits.
ContributorsColeman, Emma Ciara (Author) / Meerow, Sara (Thesis director) / Hoover, Fushcia-Ann (Committee member) / School of Molecular Sciences (Contributor) / School of Sustainability (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2020-12
Description
Global climate change, rising average temperatures, rising water levels, irregularities in climate and river regimes, and increasing anthropogenic disturbances pose a significant risk to the ecosystems of protected areas. Given that past conditions are different from future conditions, managing protected areas faces serious challenges. New management approaches and strategies are needed to overcome these challenges. Planners and academicians have established methodologies for assessing the quality of climate change adaptation and resilience plans. However, a similar plan quality evaluation that considers climate change adaptation for National Park General Management Plans has not been conducted. This study adapted that methodology for national park management plans and applied it to analyze National Park General Management Plans across nine United States climate regions. Furthermore, this thesis aims to address this gap by asking and answering the following question: How do existing management plans for national parks meet the principles identified for effective planning for climate change? In this study, national park management plans are evaluated according to 112 criteria across seven principles, allowing for direct comparison and conclusions on strengths and weaknesses. The study revealed the strengths and weaknesses of the plans. Plans generally have similar weak points and strong points. While some aspects, such as public participation and coordination, perform relatively well, there are critical shortcomings in articulating a vision for climate adaptation, addressing uncertainty, and developing detailed strategies and monitoring mechanisms. The study will contribute to a better understanding of how protected areas can prepare for climate change impacts.
ContributorsSeki, Muhammet Ali (Author) / Meerow, Sara (Thesis advisor) / King, David (Committee member) / Larson, Kelli (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2023
Description
Traditional infrastructure design approaches were born with industrialization. During this time the relatively stable environments allowed infrastructure systems to reliably provide service with networks designed to precise parameters and organizations fixated on maximizing efficiency. Now, infrastructure systems face the challenge of operating in the Anthropocene, an era of complexity. The environments in which infrastructure systems operate are changing more rapidly than the technologies and governance systems of infrastructure. Infrastructure systems will need to be resilient to navigate stability and instability and avoid obsolescence. This dissertation addresses how infrastructure systems could be designed for the Anthropocene, assessing technologies able to operate with uncertainty, rethinking the principles of technology design, and restructuring infrastructure governance. Resilience, in engineering, has often been defined as resistance to known disturbances with a focus on infrastructure assets. Resilience, more broadly reviewed, includes resistance, adaptation, and transformation across physical and governance domains. This dissertation constructs a foundation for resilient infrastructure through an assessment of resilience paradigms in engineering, complexity and deep uncertainty (Chapter 2), ecology (Chapter 3), and organizational change and leadership (Chapter 4). The second chapter reconciles frameworks of complexity and deep uncertainty to help infrastructure managers navigate the instability infrastructure systems face, with a focus on climate change. The third chapter identifies competencies of resilience in infrastructure theory and practice and compares those competencies with ‘Life’s Principles’ in ecology, presenting opportunities for growth and innovation in infrastructure resilience and highlighting the need for satisficed (to satisfy and suffice) solutions. The fourth chapter navigates pressures of exploitation and exploration that infrastructure institutions face during periods of stability and instability, proposing leadership capabilities to enhance institutional resilience. Finally, the dissertation is concluded with a chapter synthesizing the previous chapters, providing guidance for alternative design approaches for advancing resilient infrastructure. Combined, the work challenges the basic mental models used by engineers when approaching infrastructure design and recommends new ways of doing and thinking for the accelerating and increasingly uncertain conditions of the future.
ContributorsHelmrich, Alysha Marie (Author) / Chester, Mikhail V (Thesis advisor) / Grimm, Nancy B (Committee member) / Garcia, Margaret (Committee member) / Meerow, Sara (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2021
Description
Transit agencies are struggling to regain ridership lost during the pandemic. Research shows that riding transit was among the most feared activities during the pandemic due to people’s high perceived risk of infection. Transit agencies have responded by implementing a variety of pandemic-related safety measures in stations and vehicles, but there is little literature assessing how these safety measures affect passengers’ perception of safety. This study implements surveys, interviews, and observations in Berlin, Germany to assess how passengers’ demographic characteristics and experiences with safety measures are related to their perception of safety using transit. Females and older age groups were more likely to perceive transit as riskier than males and younger age groups. The results provide little evidence to suggest that safety measures have a significant impact on passengers’ perception of safety, however. If this result is supported by future research, it suggests that transit agency investments in pandemic safety measures may not help them to regain ridership.
ContributorsKatt, Noah (Author) / Salon, Deborah (Thesis advisor) / Meerow, Sara (Committee member) / King, David (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2022
Description
Student housing at American universities have been compared to prison cells in pop culture ad nauseum, but how far does this joke actually reflect reality? Most freshmen are required to live in student housing for their first year of college, yet these spaces are most notorious for having small windows, tightly packed beds, questionable food access, thin walls, and little ability for customization. Impacting the sight, touch, taste, sound, and speech of residents, respectively, these living conditions unavoidably impact the on-campus freshman experience in an integral way and deserve more intentionality of their design. The marketed purpose of offering housing and requiring on-campus living by universities is to ensure students are able to form a community and connect to campus as soon as they arrive. Yet, to what extent does this university-held goal to retain students fail when the goals of individual students do not have conditions in which to be successful? To what extent do the goals of the university actually hold students prisoner to a poorly designed system?
ContributorsCarlson, Chloe (Author) / Redman, Charles (Thesis director) / Jerlinga, Brittany (Committee member) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor) / School of Sustainability (Contributor) / Watts College of Public Service & Community Solut (Contributor) / School of Complex Adaptive Systems (Contributor)
Created2022-05
Description
The Arizona State University (ASU) Masters of Sustainability Solutions (MSUS) program connects student teams with real-world clients to solve real-world sustainability problems as a part of the students’ Culminating Experience in the program. This report details the project assigned to our group, the Emissions Data Detectives (EDD), in partnership with our client, Gannett Fleming. This project focuses on calculating greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions from the client’s leased office spaces across the United States and Canada.
In excess, GHGs trap heat in the atmosphere, negatively affecting global air quality and human health. In addition, top companies similar to our client are already disclosing their emissions, new legislation is aiming to require such reporting, and stakeholders are trending to gravitate towards firms measuring and reducing their environmental impact. During the first semester of this project, we noticed that Gannett Fleming lacked data on specific utility usage in their leased office spaces, as not all data is shared, standardized, or robust enough for accurate emissions calculations.
After conducting a landscape analysis where group members interviewed companies facing a similar problem, the team identified best practices for addressing this issue. Such practices included using mixed methods for calculations based on data availability, leveraging organizational connections for efficient communication with landlords, creating custom communication plans, and using concise language with landlords. The team also conducted an sTOWS analysis to understand better how our research could best be applied to Gannett Fleming’s problem. From there, we developed a project plan that included an Invitation to Participate and Data Request to collect the necessary data. Next, the team outlined strategies for emissions calculations, including applying calculations from the GHG Protocol and compiling all calculations in a navigable spreadsheet.
Greenhouse gas calculations were made using a mix of asset-specific data from the Data Request forms and average data from the EPA estimates using equations from Scope 3, Category 8, or Leased Upstream Assets per the Greenhouse Gas Protocol. Emissions were categorized under Scope 3 since the client has no control over the leased offices, and the control approach was used. Final results showed that the emissions calculated for the 8 offices where asset-specific data was used combined with the 31 offices where average data was used totaled 2,390 metric tonnes of CO2e for FY2022.
In order to ensure that this project can be helpful to Gannet Fleming long-term, we came up with three main deliverables including a GHG spreadsheet including all calculations and findings, a GHG roadmap with simplified step-by-step instructions of our methodology, and a Sustainable Leasing Policy information to ensure the client’s emissions reduction goals are communicated and considered in the decision-making process for future lease agreements.
This version contains results that have been edited to ensure client confidentiality. Offices have been anonymized, and numbers used are not representative of actual emissions findings.
ContributorsGutierrez, Lukas (Author) / Carlson, Chloe (Author) / Davitt, Akilah (Author) / Cobb, James (Author)
Created2023-04-24
Description
The continued rise of temperatures and extreme heat events globally is contributing to increases in mortality and morbidity in every region of the world. Urban areas are experiencing the combined effects of anthropogenic climate change and the urban heat island effect, exacerbating the risks associated with heat for urban residents. In response, cities must make every effort to adapt, pursuing engagement in high-quality planning processes and implementing robust sets of strategies to mitigate and manage the heat. Cities are shaped by networks of plans, however, the process of systematically evaluating these plans has focused on individual plans or plan types when assessing their quality. This study combines qualitative plan quality evaluation and semi-structured interviews to assess how Vienna’s network of plans addresses heat. Two clear divides emerge when analyzing the plan network; direction-setting principles are included more often than others, and mitigation strategies are more prevalent than management strategies. These results, which are consistent across the broader plan quality evaluation literature, illuminate a clear path for Vienna to continuously improve their planning process and effectively respond to heat.
ContributorsLeyba, Bryan (Author) / Meerow, Sara (Thesis advisor) / Damyanovic, Doris (Committee member) / Hondula, David (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2023
Description
Cities are in need of radical knowledge system innovations and designs in the age of the Anthropocene. Cities are complex sites of interactions across social, ecological, and technological dimensions. Cities are also experiencing rapidly changing and intractable environmental conditions. Given uncertain and incomplete knowledge of both future environmental conditions and the outcomes of urban resilience efforts, today’s knowledge systems are unequipped to generate the knowledge and wisdom needed to act. As such, cities must modernize the knowledge infrastructure underpinning today’s complex urban systems. The principal objective of this dissertation is to make the case for, and guide, the vital knowledge system innovations that coastal cities need in order to build more resilient urban futures. Chapter 2 demonstrates the use of knowledge systems analysis as a tool to stress-test and upgrade the Federal Emergency Management Agency flood mapping knowledge system that drives flood resilience planning and decision-making in New York City. In Chapter 3, a conceptual framework is constructed for the design and analysis of knowledge co-production by integrating concepts across the co-production and urban social-ecological-technological systems literatures. In Chapter 4, the conceptual framework is used to analyze two case studies of knowledge co-production in the Miami Metropolitan Area to better inform decisions for how and when to employ co-production as a tool to achieve sustainability and resilience outcomes. In Chapter 5, six propositions are presented – derived from a synthesis of the literature and the three empirical cases – that knowledge professionals can employ to create, facilitate, and scale up knowledge system innovations: flatten knowledge hierarchies; create plural and positive visions of the future; construct knowledge co-production to achieve desired outcomes; acknowledge and anticipate the influence of power and authority; build anticipatory capacities to act under deep uncertainty; and identify and invest in knowledge innovations. While these six propositions apply to the context of coastal cities and flood resilience, most can also be useful to facilitate knowledge innovations to adapt to other complex and intractable environmental problems. Cities must move swiftly to create and catalyze knowledge system innovations given the scale of climate impacts and rapidly changing environmental conditions.
ContributorsHobbins, Robert Jonathan (Author) / Miller, Clark A. (Thesis advisor) / Meerow, Sara (Committee member) / Muñoz-Erickson, Tischa A (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2020
Description
Urban community gardens hold the potential to serve as a form of multifunctional green infrastructure to advance urban sustainability goals through the array of ecosystem services they afford. While a substantial body of literature has been produced that is dedicated to the study of these services (e.g., providing fresh produce, promoting socialization, and enhancing urban biodiversity), less attention has been paid to the strategic planning of urban community gardens, particularly in an expansive urban setting, and in the context of the co-benefit of mitigating extreme heat. The research presented in this dissertation explores the potential of community gardens as a form of multifunctional green infrastructure and how these spaces can be planned in a manner that strives to be both systematic and transparent. It focuses on methods that can (1) be employed to identify vacant or open land plots for large metropolitan areas and (2) explores multicriteria decision analysis and (3) optimization approaches that assist in the selection of “green” spaces that serve as both provisioning (a source of fresh fruits and vegetables) and regulating (heat mitigation) services, among others. This exploration involves three individual studies on each of these themes, using the Phoenix metropolitan area as its analytical backdrop. The major lessons from this piece are: (1) remotely sensed data can be effectively paired with cadastral data to identify thousands of vacant parcels for potential greening at a metropolitan scale; (2) a stakeholder-weighted multicriteria decision analysis for community garden planning can serve as an effective decision support tool, but participants' conceptualization of garden spaces resulted in social criteria being prioritized over physical-environmental factors, potentially influencing the provisioning of co-benefits; and (3) optimized urban community garden networks hold the potential to synergistically distribute co-benefits across a large metropolitan area in a manner that systematically prioritizes high-need neighborhoods. The methods examined are useful for all metropolises with a preponderance of open or vacant land seeking to advance urban sustainability goals through green infrastructure.
ContributorsSmith, Jordan Paul (Author) / Turner, Billie L (Thesis advisor) / Meerow, Sara (Committee member) / Tong, Daoqin (Committee member) / Grebitus, Carola (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2021
Description
Extreme heat is the deadliest weather and climate-related hazard in the United States, and the threat it poses to urban residents is rising. City planners increasingly recognize these risks and are taking action to mitigate them. However, the COVID-19 pandemic has disrupted many plans. Building on a previous survey which queried city planners from across the United States about how concerned they were about extreme heat, and their heat management efforts. This thesis examines how these perceptions and efforts have changed in the face of the COVID-19 pandemic. In general, it was found that public spaces which would typically have been used to shelter individuals from extreme heat conditions were closed to mitigate close-contact and to encourage social distancing. Furthermore, priorities were changed as the presence of the virus became commonplace, with plans being altered, delayed, or shelved to diverge more time and effort towards the crisis at hand. Working environments and conditions also changed, which in several cases led to technological shortcomings, resulting in further delays. Finally, most planners had attained a surface-level understanding of which socio-economic groups were most impacted by both COVID-19 and extreme heat, in congruence with the current literature written on the topic. Generally, it appears that planners feel that the impact of COVID-19 on heat planning efforts has been limited.
ContributorsNorris, Walker Yale (Author) / Meerow, Sara (Thesis director) / Keith, Ladd (Committee member) / Dean, W.P. Carey School of Business (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2021-05