It is now well-recognized that, at local, regional, and global scales, land use changes are significantly altering land cover, perhaps at an accelerating pace. Further, the worlds scientific community is increasingly recognizing what, in retrospect, should have been obvious, that human behavior and agency is a critical driver of Land Cover and Land Use Change. In this research, using recently developed computer modeling procedures and a rich case study, I develop spatially-explicit model-based simulations of LULCC scenarios within the rubric of sustainability science for Nang Rong town, Thailand. The research draws heavily on recent work in geography and complexity theory. A series of scenarios were built to explore different development trajectories based upon empirically observed relationships. The development models incorporate a) history and spatial pattern of village settlement； b) road development and changing geographic accessibility； c) population； d) biophysical characteristics and e) social drivers. This research uses multi-temporal and spatially-explicit data, analytic results, and dynamic modeling approaches combined with to describe, explain, and explore LULCC as the consequences of different production theories for rural, small town urbanization in the South East Asian context. Two Agent Based models were built: 1) Settlement model and 2) Land-use model. The Settlement model suggests that new development will emerge along the existing road network especially along the major highway and in close proximity to the urban center. If the population doubles in 2021, the settlement process may inhibit development along some corridors creating low density sprawl. The Land-use model under the urban expansion scenario suggests that new settlements will occur in close proximity to the town center and roads； even though, the area is suitable for rice farming or located on a flood plain. The Land-use model under the cash-crop expansion scenario captures that new agriculture will occur on the flood plain and other areas suitable for rice farming. The Land-use model under the Kings Theory scenario suggests that agriculture agents occupied more disperse lands than the cash-crops scenario. In addition, the Kings Theory scenario provided more access to water surface than other scenarios and was the most sustainable development plan. These products offer a better understanding of the urban growth and LULCC at a regional scale and will potentially guide more systematic and effective resource management and policy decisions. Although this research focuses on a specific site, the methods employed are applicable to other rural regions with similar characteristics.

This study investigates the relationship between “active aging ” and “smart growth “, through comprehensively analyzing and evaluating the US Census data, 40 attributes within 8 indicators of “active aging “, and 40 attributes within 10 indicators of “smart growth “, as well as an online survey with senior citizens from the three US EPAs Active Aging Award-winning communities: City of Kirkland, Washington, City of Casper, Wyoming, and Iowa City, Iowa. The study examines how these communities achieve the goals of both “smart growth ” and “active aging “, and shows how the principles of “smart growth ” are related with the elements of “active aging “, through comparing the achievements and identifying these weaknesses in realizing both “active aging ” and “smart growth ” in the targeted three American communities, as well as investigating the satisfaction degrees of the local senior residents in terms of their community environment, respectively. The study discovers that the realization degree of “active aging ” rises along with the increase in the realization degree of “smart growth ” in all the three communities. The realization degrees of “smart growth ” of the three communities demonstrated higher than their “active aging ” counterparts at distinct levels. The findings indicate that “active aging ” and “smart growth ” can be positively associated, while the consistency degree between their realization levels can be distinct in different communities. Additionally, diverse theoretical and practical implications are discussed for future research.

If the 19th century urban center was a city of manufacturing, and the early 20th century city was one of corporate capitalism, todays downtown can best be characterized as a site of culture and consumption, from the Guggenheim Bilbao to Times Square in Manhattan. Downtown Houston is at a disadvantage in this contemporary context, for it lacks any density of cultural institutions. Sites of entertainment and culture are instead spread throughout the greater Houston metropolitan area. This dispersal creates islands of culture, but leaves downtown Houston without a cohesive cultural identity. By tweaking municipal policy and exploiting untapped sites, this thesis seeks to inflate cultural space in downtown Houston and by cultural space, I mean everything from the symphony to contemporary art to Karaoke). Inflations promote a new way to transform the city. Rather than make big change through big cultural projects, Inflations are small iterative structures where transformations occur through a set of connections: infrastructural and visual. Already in place in downtown Houston is a seven mile system of tunnels and skywalks that has led to an evacuation of the street and a fragmented downtown public. By slowly infusing forms into this downtown infrastructure a new culture map is made. Through an accumulation of Inflations these small structures become sites of consistent visible exchange: point moments of cultural activity placed in a once banal infrastructural system.

This thesis expands upon the dialogue between speed and architecture, investigating how architecture reinterprets the linear city, originally defined by the continuous fabric of the freeway and more recently reconfigured by the high speed rail line. Using the linear city as a site of exploration and high speed rail as a ground to test new typologies of architectural insertions at amplified speed, this thesis produces an extended civic space along the proposed high speed rail line connecting Tampa and Orlando. Combining a series of performance and commercial programs, this new typology will make the obscured visual experience along the extended territory of the rail line legible, through a sequencing of specific architectural intersections, exploring how monumental civic space will be made and occupied in the sprawl of the American city.

Abstract not available.

Chicagos turn-of-the-century social settlements, most notably Hull House, have long been considered the mainstay of American progressive reforms. Yet settlement houses were but one aspect of a wide-ranging set of architectural and spatial inventions that used certain kinds of familiar imagery to build public support for innovative social ambitions. This dissertation connects the major settlement house designs of Chicago architect Dwight Perkins with the parks, recreation centers, playgrounds, and public schools he designed during these same years. It also situates Perkins among the extraordinary group of Chicago reformers who were transforming philanthropy, education, public health, municipal government, and the urban environment. The portrait that emerges is one where architecture and civic space were indelibly bound up with and helped to advance transformative social changes. Chicago was the epicenter of American progressive reforms. Both theoretical and practical, these extended across a broad range of issues from education to womens rights, political participation to public health, the natural environment to municipal reforms, social psychology to the social sciences. Embracing most of these aspirations, Perkins took up familiar civic typologies and gave them a new purpose that can be described, most concisely, as democratic social centers. To some extent, they could be compared with the “social condensers” of contemporary Soviet Union, architecture intended to help generate, or at least facilitate, major social and political transformation. Yet Perkins was not an ideologue. He adjusted his own beliefs to the particular, and often rather cautious, attitudes of various clients and constituencies. By and large, the tensions focused on several related issues that were inherent difficulties in the American progressive movement: a desire for bureaucratic efficiency that leaned towards restricted budgets and standardized types； a desire to transform society that contravened an abiding faith in contingent, piecemeal change； and a desire for expansive democratic participation that ran up against a deep suspicion of the immigrant populations that were flooding into American cities, especially in Chicago where foreign-born individuals or children of immigrants made of 77% of the population in 1900. While interested in intellectual debate about education, social psychology, and political reforms, Perkins was a pragmatist. He wanted the chance to create architecture that could be tested, discovering the most feasible and effective ways to bring about widespread social progress. He applied his ideals about social democracy, education, and the environment in various contexts and in different ways, always remaining open to experimentation, collaboration, and compromise. These “flexible principles,” simultaneously consistent and elastic, gave him the fluidity to engage diffuse audiences, helping him advance his goals. This dissertation situates Perkins within the American progressive movement that centered on Chicago, more than any other city of the era. It then analyzes his designs for five civic typologies—settlement houses, parks, playgrounds, recreation centers, and public schools—as well as his vision for how these spaces were constituent parts of an innovative urban-planning model based on overlapping, yet distinct neighborhood centers. It explains the intellectual debates that informed these projects and his concerted efforts to implement improvements, even if they did not fulfill his highest ideals. Perkins spoke of his designs as “social centers” that he believed were able to facilitate democratic exchange across class and economic lines, as well as bring much needed public services to the people of Chicago. Dwight Perkins was a designer and community activist of mainly regional significance who believed, above all, in social democracy. Exploring his social politics allows me to situate his work within the dominant narratives of American progressivism and its corollaries in modern architecture. This is not to suggest that his progressive goals and aesthetic predilections were avant-garde. Perkins by and large eschewed radical forms in order to achieve other goals, though some involved architectural innovations and experiments. Democratic engagement was his primary concern, related to other principles about educational freedoms, public health, and environmentalism. These aspirations remain central to the history and future of self-consciously progressive architecture, whether in Europe or the United States.

This study addresses the landscape connectivity pattern at two different scales. The county-level analysis aims to understand how urban ecosystem structure is likely to evolve in response to the proposed development plans in Maricopa County, Arizona. To identify the spatio-temporal land pattern change, six key landscape metrics were quantified in relative to the urban development scenarios based on the certainty of the proposed urban plans with different level of urban footprints. The effects of future development plans from municipalities on landscape connectivity were then analyzed in the scaled temporal and spatial frame to identify in which urban condition the connectivity value would most likely to decrease. The results demonstrated that tremendous amount of lands will be dedicated to future urbanization, and especially urban agricultural lands will be likely to be vulnerable. The metro-level analysis focuses on a group of species that represent urban desert landscape and have different degrees of fragmentation sensitivity and habitat type requirement. It hypothesizes that the urban habitat patch connectivity is impacted upon by urban density. Two underlying propositions were set: first, lower connectivity is predominant in areas with high urbanization cover； second, landscape connectivity will be impacted largely on the interfaces between urban, suburban, and rural areas. To test this, a GIS-based connectivity modeling was employed. The resultant change in connectivity values was examined for exploring the spatial relation to predefined spatial frames, such as urban, suburban, and rural zones of which boundaries were delineated by buffering method with two criteria of human population density and urban cover proportion. The study outcomes provide a practical guidance to minimize connectivity loss and degradation by informing planners with more optimal alternatives among various policy decisions and implementation. It also gives an inspiration for ecological landscape planning in urbanized or urbanizing regions which can ultimately leads urban landscape sustainability.

This dissertation consists of three essays that look at the impact of local government policy on cities and land markets. The first essay examines the effect of differences in anti-crime policy on the spatial distribution of crime and the off-setting of the state policy by local governments. The second essay considers how differences in crime rates affect the sorting of businesses within an urban area. The third essay analyzes how housing vouchers affect the neighborhood quality of low-income households. The first essay considers two related questions: the impact of spatial variation in crime prevention policies on the migration of criminal activity into nearby locations and the tendency for higher-level government anti-crime policies to be offset by a scaling back of local crime deterrent efforts. The key source of variation used for identification is differences in the timing of adoption of state-wide Truth-in-Sentencing TIS) legislation. To estimate the effect of the policy, I compare activity in adjacent counties on opposite sides of state boundaries in the 59 urban areas that cross state lines. There are three key results. First, adoption of TIS lowers the level of criminal activity in the adopting state. Second, adoption of the stiffer sentencing policy prompts migration of criminal activity into adjacent counties in the neighboring state. Finally, after imposition of TIS by the state government, local governments reduce the level of police protection. This suggests that some of the deterrent effect of the policy is offset by a scaling back on anti-crime efforts at the local level. The second essay estimates the impact of violent crime on the location of business activity in five U.S. cities. Central to the analysis is the idea that different sectors of the economy will sort into high- and low-crime areas depending on their relative sensitivity to crime. We illustrate this by comparing retail industries to their wholesale counterparts, and high-end restaurants to low-end eateries. Because retail industries are dependent on pedestrian shoppers, they are expected to be more sensitive to violent crime. Because high-end restaurants are dependent on evening business, they are expected to be more sensitive to violent crime over the prime dinner hours. We find that retailers are more likely to locate in safer locations compared to wholesalers in the same industry. Among restaurants, an increase in violent crime during the prime dinner hours decreases the high-end share of local restaurants. These findings indicate that entrepreneurs take violent crime into account when bidding for locations within a city. The third essay examines the effect of receiving a housing voucher on the residential mobility and neighborhood attributes of low-income households. Federal housing policy has shifted towards vouchers in lieu of public housing projects, in part, to allow households to move away from high poverty areas. Prior research, however, has found little evidence that households voluntarily move away from such locations. Drawing upon an exogenous shock to the supply of vouchers and an instrumental variables strategy, we use confidential administrative records and find that voucher recipients were located in neighborhoods with a 16% lower poverty rate as compared to non-recipients. In addition, we find voucher recipients were 33 percentage points more likely than non-recipients to move across census tract boundaries each quarter. These estimates are larger in magnitude than earlier studies that did not have a plausible instrumental variable to address the endogenous receipt of a housing subsidy.

The physical environment plays a major role in facilitating peoples activity patterns in residential settings. The ways in which people conceive of their neighborhood as a space and a place for activities has theoretical implications for exploring the relationships between environmental factors and pedestrian behavior and physical activity. An elaboration of existing theories of space and place combines these two constructs into a single framework useful for describing and studying the physical environment. It is suggested that patterns of place and configurational aspects of space both encourage walking and physical activity. The empirical section of this dissertation investigates the relationships of destination, space syntax, and urban planning measures with pedestrian movement and physical activity outcomes. This work draws on data from the Healthy Environments Partnership HEP), a research initiative that focuses on the contributions of the environment to health outcomes in three Detroit neighborhoods. Data were obtained from a household survey of 919 respondents, neighborhood observations, parcel level land use records, and the US census. The physical activity outcome data comes from the survey and is directly connected to neighborhood residents, while the neighborhood observations of pedestrian movement include both residents and visitors. Multilevel and OLS regression analyses were used to test the relative predictive strength of the three types of environmental factors on two sets of outcomes: pedestrian movement ＋ sedentary behavior ) and physical activity and waist circumference ). Psychosocial perceptions were also analyzed as possible mediating factors. Findings show that the three types of measures are associated with pedestrian movement, with destination measures being the most related； fewer associations were found with waist circumference and physical activity. Perceptions of the psychosocial environment were not found to mediate the main effects. New environmental measures developed for this research offer new ways to conceptualize the built environment. The findings related to psychosocial factors, the importance of destination measures, and the theoretical distinction made between physical activity and pedestrian movement may be useful constructs in the design process. This dissertation suggests that approaches emphasizing environmental patterns rather than discrete environmental variables should be considered in future research.

In recent years, a considerable amount of money has been spent on Real-time Transit Passenger Information Systems RTPISs), which provide timely and accurate transit information to current and potential riders to enable them to make better pretrip and en-route decisions. Understanding traveler responses to real-time transit information is critical for designing such services and evaluating their effectiveness. To answer this question, an effort is made in this dissertation to systematically conceptualize a variety of behavioral and psychological responses travelers may undertake to real-time transit information and empirically examine the causal effects of real-time information on traveler behavior and psychology. This research takes ShuttleTrac, a newly implemented real-time bus arrival information system for UMDs Shuttle-UM service, as a case for empirical study. In Part 1 analysis, using panel datasets derived from three-waved online campus transportation surveys, fixed-effects OLS models and random-effects ordered probit models are estimated to sort out causal relations between ShuttleTrac information use and general/cumulative behavioral and psychological outcomes. In addition, a twostage instrumental variable model was estimated to examine the potential change in habitual mode choices due to real-time transit information use. The results show that with a few months of adjustment, travelers may increase their trip-making frequency as a result of real-time transit information use, and positive psychological outcomes are more prominent in both short and longer terms. In Part 2 analyses, using the cross-sectional dataset derived from the onboard survey, OLS models and ordered logit models were estimated to examine the tripspecific psychological effects of real-time transit information. The results show that these trip-specific psychological effects of real-time transit information do exist in expected directions and they vary among user groups and in different scenarios. A finding consistent across two parts of analyses is that accuracy of information plays a greater role in determining traveler behavior and psychology than the mere presence. This research contributes to the general discussion on traveler behavior under advanced information by 1) developing an integrative conceptual framework； and 2) providing useful insights into the issue with much empirical evidences obtained with revealed-preference data and sophisticated modeling techniques.