Showing 1 - 4 of 4 Items

Date: 2024-03-20

Creator: Katharine Kurtz

Access: Open access

Cities need more green spaces to adapt to climate change and facilitate community resilience. However, successfully managing green spaces is challenging. City governments consistently employ top-down management practices that limit the benefits, usage, and perception of such spaces as Nature. Further, current management practices overlook socio-cultural factors important to residents. Using the existing categories of urban green spaces (UGS) and informal green spaces (IGS), this article situates the cultural practice prendersi cura as a way to conceptualize successful, bottom-up green space management. The term prendersi cura, meaning “to take care of” in Italian, emerged through interviews in Perugia, Italy, and reflects the socio-ecological value of IGS and the disconnect between residents and city-managed UGS. This study employed mixed methods, combining 10 weeks of participant observation, 13 interviews, and GIS analysis to understand the relationship between Perugians and their green spaces. Results indicate that interviewees did not describe city-supported UGS (i.e. top-down green spaces like parks or historic gardens) as Nature, even if they were areas of dense vegetation and recognized by the City of Perugia in GIS analyses. In contrast, interviewees described IGS (i.e. community gardens, vacant lots, or potted plants) that were unrecognized in city GIS visualizations as Nature, indicating a stronger attachment to green spaces when interviewees had active roles in their management or witnessed community-based management practices. This paper demonstrates the importance of managing green spaces through a socio-ecological framework that considers user perceptions and cultural values. To allow greening initiatives to reach their full potential, it is critical to embrace local values and participation in management practices.

Date: 2022-01-01

Creator: Micah Benjamin Wilson

Access: Open access

This thesis investigates three predominantly Jewish housing cooperatives that emerged in the Bronx in the late 1920s. The Amalgamated Housing Cooperative, the United Workers Cooperative Colony (the “Coops”), and the Sholem Aleichem Houses offered garment workers utopian retreats from the drudgery of Lower East Side tenements where Jewish immigrants arrived in droves between 1890-1920. With each cooperative housing a distinct faction of the Jewish Left––from socialists to communists to Yiddish nationalists––the Bronx housing cooperatives, more than experiments in communal living, were the site of a highly contested battle over competing Jewish cultural and political worldviews across the 1930s and 1940s. Transcending the era that is typically considered the movement’s “peak” in the 1910s, this thesis demonstrates that the era of the Bronx cooperatives must be central to any study of the Jewish labor movement by revealing the ways radical Jews attempted to maintain and negotiate their various worldviews against the backdrop of the threats posed by the capitalist housing market, assimilation, and sectarian struggles. I reconsider the disproportionate attention the “success story” of the Amalgamated Cooperative has received, situating its politics as but one of many responses to the contradictions embedded in the housing cooperative model. Finally, I analyze the role of nostalgia present across resident recollections of the cooperatives and situate it in the contexts of 1970s neoliberal urban reform and suburbanization, while considering the discursive power of this emotion to obscure the persistent legacy of anti-black racism entangled in the cooperative housing movement despite its progressive reputation.

Date: 2023-01-01

Creator: Patrick Rochford

Access: Open access

In the decades following World War II, mass suburbanization remade the American landscape. While suburbs accounted for 83% of the nation’s growth between 1950 and 1970, cities bled their populations and natural resources dwindled. Treating the postwar era as a critical juncture, this thesis examines the political history of twentieth-century state land use policy to illuminate how competing interests have shaped policy outcomes across the United States. Specifically, the paper seeks to explain the passage of statewide growth management and smart growth programs. After providing a history of American suburbanization, the paper considers an emergent challenge to the postwar growth paradigm as manifested through resistance to urban renewal, open space loss, and diverse anti-freeway coalitions that combined actors from each movement. Thereafter, I detail the development of statewide growth management and smart growth programs before employing a set of case studies to discern causal factors associated with the success or failure of such legislation. Testing the theory that broad-based coalitions were essential to the passage of state growth management legislation, I perform a controlled comparison of two pairs of states, Maryland and Virginia and Oregon and Washington, employing additional within-case analysis for Washington. In so doing, I find evidence that diverse coalitions—from environmentalists and housing advocates to farmers and historic preservationists—were essential to the passage of state growth management programs. I conclude by considering the implications of these findings and the relevance of state land use policy to contemporary issues such as affordable housing and climate change.

Date: 2024-01-01

Creator: Katharine Kurtz

Access: Open access

This thesis explores the gentrification of Munjoy Hill, a neighborhood on the northeast end of Portland, Maine from 1990-2024. Once the industrial hub of the city filled with factories and an industrial shipping port in the late 1800s and early 1900s, Munjoy Hill is now the most desirable neighborhood in the city with expensive, high-end condos, water views, ocean access, and hip restaurants and breweries. I argue that Munjoy Hill’s industrial past and strong connection to the local environment has made it unique, however the recent gentrification also makes Munjoy Hill a place that resembles, gentrified neighborhoods in cities around the country. This thesis studies Munjoy Hill’s change through three lenses: environment, housing, and food and drink. In the environment chapter I argue that the Hill’s natural beauty and connection to Maine’s scenic coastline primed it for gentrification once the area deindustrialized in the 1990s. In the housing chapter I explore the dramatic increase in housing prices and three ways residents are attempting to control the changes: affordable housing development, zoning, and historic designation. In my final chapter I analyze the role of new food establishments in transforming the Hill’s culture and cementing it as a neighborhood that feels, in part, like gentrified neighborhoods around the country.