Set within the interwar and post-World War II era from 1930 to 1965, this dissertation investigates the establishment of one of the most profitable Italian industries of the twentieth century, the Olivetti Company, and attempts to explain how the majority of its success resulted from a belief in the redemptive qualities of good design. The company was established by Camillo Olivetti 1868–1943) in 1908； however, its first major expansion occurred during the 1930s under the management of his son, Adriano Olivetti 1901–1960). In addition to his major contributions in the modernization of Italian industry, Adriano Olivetti was best noted for his business style which entailed gathering Italys most accomplished architects, writers, artists, and engineers to design a wide range of projects for the company—from the planning of the company town to the design of advertisements. While the history of the Olivetti industrial empire has been retold many times, this dissertation attempts to add theoretical rigor to the Olivetti historiography by deconstructing some myths, and examining the design strategies employed to promote the utopian industrial community of Ivrea and, more importantly, the company brand. By investigating the political and economic origins of such strategies, this research seeks to reframe Olivettis utopian project within the totalizing contexts of Fascism, postwar neo-capitalism, and the emergence of the mass media, ultimately illustrating the means by which design can perform as an effective and profitable medium in the exercise of economic and political power. Each chapter is an interrogation into different scales of intervention within the Olivetti project of total design. They examine the political, cultural, and economic issues of design, and encompass the typewriter, publicity, the factory, regional planning, governmentality, the showroom, and brand. Each plateau of the Olivetti study is a vehicle to explore the question: What is the position of design in relation to the entire mode of production and the creation of value?

This study investigates the first Womans Department at a Worlds Fair in the Deep South. It documents conflicts and reconciliations and the reassessments that post-bellum women made during the Worlds Industrial and Cotton Centennial Exposition in New Orleans, the regions foremost but atypical city. It traces local womens resistance to the appointment of northern abolitionist and suffragist, Julia Ward Howe, for this “New South” event of 1884–1885. It also notes their increasing receptivity to national causes that Susan B. Anthony, Frances E. Willard, and others brought to the South, sometimes for the first time. This dissertation assesses the historical forces that goaded New Orleans women, from the comfort of their familiar city, to consider radical notions that would later strengthen them in civic roles. It asserts that, although these women were skilled and capable, they had previously lacked cohesive force and public strategies. It concludes that as local women competed and interacted with women from across the country, including those from pioneering western territories, they began to embrace progressive ideas and actions that, without the Womans Department at the Exposition, might have taken years to drift southward. This is a chronological tale of the journey late-nineteenth-century women made together in New Orleans. It attempts to capture their look, sound, and language from their own writings and from journalists interpretations of their ideals, values, and emotions. In the potent forum for exchange that the Womans Department provided, participants and visitors questioned and revised false notions and stereotypes. They influenced each other and formed alliances. Although individuals spoke mainly for themselves, common themes emerged regarding education, jobs, benevolence, and even suffrage. Most women were aware that they were in a defining moment, and this study chronicles how New Orleans women seized the opportunity and created a legacy for themselves and their city. As the Exposition sought to re)assert agrarian and industrial prowess after turbulent times, a shift occurred in the trajectory of womens public and political lives in New Orleans and, perhaps, the South more broadly. By 1885, southerners were ready to insinuate their voices into the national debate on womens issues. .

The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers is a federal agency with a mission to develop water resource projects to benefit the nation. Some of its large scale projects have been built to benefit cities, but through unintended consequences have caused economic and environmental damages. For example, its control of Mississippi River flooding has protected the City of New Orleans, but contributed to land loss in coastal Louisiana, and by some accounts, made the population more susceptible to hurricane damage. The agency has now embarked on a mission to restore some of the damaged environmental areas. This dissertation evaluates whether policies and practices used by the agency to evaluate and select plans to implement is logically flawed and could produce suboptimal project selection. The primary issue is the practice of including only implementation costs in the analysis while excluding other positive and negative economic impacts. A case study is performed using the method to evaluate a traditional economic development project for which optimal project selection has already been determined using widely accepted benefit-cost practices. The results show that the Corps environmental project evaluation method would cause rejection of the most efficient plan. The loss of welfare that would result from using this technique is measured by comparing the welfare gain of the optimal project to the welfare gain of the suboptimal projects which could be selected using the flawed methodology. In addition, the dissertation evaluates whether suboptimal results could be produced using two other current Corps policies: selecting projects based on production efficiency, and the exclusion of environmental benefits from the discounting process. For the first policy, a simple counter example shows how clearly inferior choices may come from including only supply considerations in investment choices. For the second policy, it is demonstrated mathematically that refraining from discounting benefits while discounting costs causes a bias towards selection of plans that take longer to build, are delayed in their implantation, or a combination of the two.

Annual Average Daily Traffic (AADT) is used in several planning, roadway design, operational and safety analyses by transportation planners and engineers. Existing methods are very complex and do not adequately address the modeling needs. Errors and inaccuracies in a traditional four-step method get carried to later steps often resulting in incorrect estimates of travel demand. The primary focus of this research is to develop a systematic and simplified methodology to estimate link level travel on roadways. The proposed methodology involves scientific principles and statistical techniques, but bypasses the tedious four-step method. Two spatial methods, first one based on “spatial proximity” and second one based on “spatial weighting”, are proposed to estimate link level travel. While the former method investigates to identify ideal “proximal” distance to capture spatial data, the later method involves application of “spatial weights” that decrease with an increase in distance to integrate spatial data from multiple buffer bandwidths. Generalized Estimating Equations (GEE) models are developed for both the methods using Poisson and Negative Binomial distributions with and without network characteristics to facilitate transportation planning and analysis. Validation of the developed models is carried out using Chi-Square Statistic test. The goodness of fit statistics indicates that Negative Binomial models performed better than Poisson models. Models with network characteristics performed better than models without network characteristics. Model validation results indicate that link level travel can be accurately estimated using both the spatial methods.

This dissertation explores the process by which UN-Habitat, the United Nations housing and urban development agency, changed the way it worked with governments to reduce poverty in East African cities. In the 1980s the focus of its assistance was the central government. By 2005 the organization engaged cities, social movements, and private industries. While it continued to serve government, UN-Habitat worked with the State through municipal, community and private actors. The author posits that the agency changed as the governments it served decentralized, democratized, and privatized. These policies required the State to cede power to cities, social movements and industry, so the agency helped governments engage new actors. The dissertation subjects this claim to historical comparative analyses of state formation, urbanization, and UN-Habitat field operations. The author argues that the narrow economy and indirect rule left a troubling colonial legacy. Attempting redress, African States over-compensated. These actions weakened their ability to handle global crisis and negotiate structural adjustment. In the 1990s East Africa stabilized partially, yet remained dependent on cash crops and struggled with forms of political representation. In Kenya, European settlers triggered squatter rebellion prompting social engineering that produced class divisions, ethnic rivalries and heavy State control. Colonial agreements in Uganda privileged Kingdoms making for a weak nation-state. Devolution replaced dictatorship after years of unrest but recovery reinforced regional divisions and delayed pluralism. Tanzania exchanged a weak colonial economy with an ambitious but unviable socialist project. Adjustment stabilized the economy but at great social cost and without reform to the constitution or the ruling party. In the comparative history of East African cities, the author finds that urbanization resulted from and contributed to the colonial economy but not indirect rule. Heterogeneity in the city and the labor requirements of industry prevented manipulation of tribal chiefs as happened in rural districts. Rapid urbanization, narrow economic growth, and weak urban governance after independence combined to create urban spaces dominated by informality. Slums reproduced the contradictions of national politics. The results in Nairobi were dense, commercialized slums that mirrored the nations troubled ethnic history. Kampala, the seat of power for Baganda and colonial, cum-African State was a proxy for the war on Kingdoms. Sprawling, un-serviced Dar es Salaam reflected the anti-urban tenor of socialism, laisse faire city planning, yet an accommodating Swahili culture. Analysis of UN-Habitats Community Development Program, the Global Campaign for Secure Tenure and the Slum Upgrading Facility reveals the value and limits of working with the State through non-State actors. The author finds the problems the agency encountered relate directly to the history of East African nations, cities and slums. In its efforts to guide decentralization, democratization and privatization, the agency became embedded； its initiatives often serving as instruments of a reticent State. The author concludes by identifying ways to use reflexive sociology applied in this dissertation to strengthen the transformative role of the United Nations.

New Orleans’s extreme flood risk is not entirely inherent in its physical site. Rather, the city’s flood vulnerability has been manufactured over time via the efforts of its growth machine to expand the Port of New Orleans and the city’s footprint via a series of drainage and shipping canal megaprojects. These canals were created largely at the behest of elite members of the Levee and Dock Boards, who sought to capitalize on New Orleans’ strategic location during wartime—particularly World War II—in order to further their own business interests by creating an “Inner Harbor” facility out of the swampland between the Mississippi River and Lake Pontchartrain. Unable to pursue their desired “improvement” projects with local resources alone, these elites lobbied for and eventually won authorization and funding for their projects from the state and federal governments, with help from allies throughout the Mississippi Valley. As a result, the city’s outfall canals along with the Industrial Canal, the Intracoastal Waterway, and the Mississippi River-Gulf Outlet have repeatedly allowed flood waters to penetrate the city during hurricanes. While New Orleanians properly blame the Corps of Engineers for the levee and floodwall failures during Hurricane Katrina, the impact of this catastrophic storm cannot be completely understood without an acknowledgment of the role that local elites of decades past have played in continually putting economic growth ahead of public safety, a process which has created New Orleans’ near-complete dependence on structural mitigation flood control projects that are never enough to truly protect the city.

Barcelona, 1974. One year before the death of the Spanish dictator Franco, a group of intellectuals, most of them architects and with a past of political resistance, started an independent “little magazine” entitled Arquitecturas Bis. The main protagonist of Arquitecturas Bis was the architect, educator and writer Oriol Bohigas. Its editorial board included also some of the most prominent Spanish designers and educators, such as Rafael Moneo, Helio Pinon, or Manuel de Sola-Morales, as well as the philosopher Tomas Llorens, at the time in exiled in England. When the magazine ceased publication, in 1985, some of its editors had become pivotal agents of a radical process of preservation, renewal and transformation of the city of Barcelona that would culminate in the 1992 Olympic games. This dissertation argues that Arquitecturas Bis was the intellectual forum that engendered and nourished this transformation. Thus one could argue that Arquitecturas Bis went from publication to public action. Arquitecturas Bis negotiated the Catalan theoretical consensus on strategies of urban renewal and promoted the historical interest on the city that informed those strategies. It also bridged the academia and the public realm and showcased architectonic models as possible materials for the transformation of the city, delivering them to public scrutiny. The strategy of public address enacted by the magazine was instrumental in focusing attention and providing the interpretative models that enabled the successful reception of Barcelonas urban transformation. Thus, Arquitecturas Bis, both in itself and through the analyses of its reception, is a privileged object to explore the intellectual history of what may be judged as the most successful urban renewal of the last 30 years.

Development in the urban and metropolitan context continues to be a vibrant area of scholarship and debate in the social sciences. This study continues and augments this research by examining two overarching issues: first, how development at the local level is impacted by fragmented political structures and inter-municipal relations, and second, the extent to which local, non-profit organizations and state agencies whose policies involve land-use planning and environmental conservation, are addressing issues of uneven- and parochial-centered development as a by-product of political fragmentation. This study relies on the case-study method and uses the Albany-Schenectady-Troy metropolitan area in upstate New York as the analytical context. Data come from in-depth, qualitative interview- and archival sources. Structured and semi-structured in-depth interviews were conducted with local elected leaders, local planning officials, heads of government agencies, and leaders within the economic development- and nonprofit sectors. The archival data comprise an array of primary sources including newspaper articles, minutes from government and organizational meetings, and organizational and governmental pamphlets and websites. Political fragmentation and inter-municipal/regional relations align to form what I call a “regional opportunity structure” that has important consequences on the resource levels of communities, a communitys ability to capitalize on or exploit existing resources, and its capability of successfully implementing coherent and comprehensive development plans. Therefore, local growth coalitions must be studied in ways that take into account stratified regional contexts maintained, in part, by political fragmentation. A communitys growth coalition, therefore, cannot be examined in isolation from growth coalitions in neighboring communities, jurisdictions, as well as the context in which the community lies within the hierarchical region. Local organizations and state agencies have an impact on facilitating inter-municipal and regional land-use and development outcomes. The study finds that state agencies are best suited to foster regional planning and development cooperation. In comparison to non-profit organizations, public agencies carry the weight of the state as well as strategic cross-agency communication important for achieving policy implementation. Although non-profit organizations play a role, questions remain surrounding the extent to which such groups represent “shadow” or privatized government and the effect this may have on the wider public interest.

Market and nonmarket urban forest resource values can be achieved through many cost reductions e.g., improved air quality, fossil fuels for heating and cooling, stormwater runoff) and increases in tax bases for communities from improved property values. These benefits need to be measured quantitatively so decision makers can understand economic gains or losses provided by street trees. Resource inventories are often undertaken as part of the planning phase in a tree management program. It is a comprehensive assessment that requires an inventory of a communitys tree resources and it acts as a fundamental starting point for most urban and community forestry programs. Whether an inventory is an estimate or a complete count, quantitative benefits and costs for urban forestry programs cannot accurately be represented without one. This study provides a new approach to understanding a citys street tree structure using data from a Light Detection And Ranging LiDAR) sensor and other publicly available data e.g., roads, city boundaries, aerial imagery). This was accomplished through feature e.g., trees, buildings) extraction from LiDAR data to identify individual trees. Feature extraction procedures were used with basic geographic information system GIS) techniques and LiDAR Analyst to create street tree inventory maps to be used in determining a communitys benefit/cost ratio BCR) for its urban forest. Only by explaining an urban forests structure can dollar values be assigned to street trees. Research was performed with LiDAR data and a sample of ground control trees in Pass Christian, and Hattiesburg, Mississippi, located in the lower U.S. South where many communities have publicly available geospatial data warehouses e.g., MARIS in Mississippi, ATLAS in Louisiana). Results from each citys estimated street trees revealed a BCR 3.23:1 and 6.91:1 for Pass Christian and Hattiesburg, respectively. This study validated a regression model for predicting street tree occurrence in cities using LiDAR Analyst and a street sample. Results demonstrated that using LiDAR Analyst as a street tree inventory tool with publicly available LiDAR data and a sample adequately described 88% of a communitys street trees which was used to calculate both market and nonmarket resource values.

The purpose of the current study was to explore the extent to which yellow rectangular rapid-flashing beacons (RRFBs) affected motorists’ yielding, exit-lane encroachment and conflicts at fire station exits. This study explored the use of RRFBs attached to sign prompts that alerted motorists to the presence of exiling emergency vehicles. These signs were activated only during an exit event. It was hypothesized that motorists would increase their frequency of safe and legal yielding in the presence of the RRFB intervention when compared to the absence of contextually activated RRFB units. This study was conducted in a midwestern town in front of a fire station known to have poor yielding compliance in the presence of exiting emergency vehicles. The results suggest that the RRFB intervention was successful at increasing yielding compliance to exiting emergency vehicles during the daytime and nighttime hours. The data suggest that enhancing yield signs with RRFBs may be an effective intervention to increase motorist-yielding compliance to exiting emergency vehicles.