Recent Graduates
Dissertations
Selected Doctoral Dissertations from the Ph.D. in Urban and Regional Planning program. Interested in viewing dissertations for previous years? Search the U-M DeepBlue Repository.
2024
Institutional Hybridity for Effective and Plural Disaster Response: On How to Govern a Polycrisis
by Taru Taru
In 2020, as COVID-19 spread worldwide, communities had to formulate a rapid response to protect themselves from a poly-crisis that impacted economies, social support systems, and more. In particular, the pandemic made ever more evident the everyday precarity of populations like migrant workers that have long been marginalized. This paper maps the journey of a disaster response system – Jharkhand State Control Room (JSCR) – that emerged in Jharkhand, India, to support more than a million migrant workers who were adversely affected by the pandemic and associated lockdowns. What makes JSCR unique is its hybrid nature, where a civil society-led, state-based organization worked with indigenous groups, traditional networks, built-in trust, and insight into the worldviews of vulnerable populations they needed to reach. Using JSCR as a case study, I ask: How can hybrid institutions leverage networks, technology, and resources to plan for and address disasters? What do these hybrid arrangements tell us about how planning institutions in the Global South could transform to plan for – and with – indigenous populations effectively? Furthermore, how can these initiatives, grown in the face of a crisis, result in long-term institutional change? The dissertation is based on three years of extended engagement with the JSCR and utilizes grounded theory to contribute to the overall literature on collaborative disaster response, hybridity, and institutional change. I was embedded within JSCR in 2020 during the nationwide lockdown and the migrant crisis. Across 2020-2022, I conducted 105 semi-structured interviews, including JSCR workers, state officers, NGO leaders, and indigenous workers who collaborated to launch the JSCR, civil society workers who collaborated with JSCR, and migrants who registered with the JSCR for aid. I also conducted two surveys. One involved 544 migrants who registered for aid. The second collected forty responses from frontline JSCR workers. I also conducted in-person focus group discussions with various stakeholders in 2022. Finally, I also drew on document review, including daily reports sent to the state and the various JSCR internal reports on funding, impact, and implementation. My findings show that state-civil society- traditional systems-based hybrid organizations if allowed to function with strategic autonomy, are more likely to achieve efficient, plural governance and access a more extensive range of networks that expedite problem-solving (Battilana & Lee, 2014; Denis et al., 2015; Manara & Pani, 2023). I document how the JSCR acted as a catalyst for substantive changes in the support systems for migrants, including creating an inter-state embassy and an intra-state organizational framework for migrant registration, contractual aid, and advocacy. Further, in the tradition of learning by doing, these reflective practitioners created new processes that leverage plural networks, social media, and geolocation. These processes and additional infrastructure provide transregional informational support, rescue, and advocacy support to the migrant workers who found limited aid outside their home villages. I highlight the tactics this team of civil society workers, the state, and indigenous networks used to address the situation and collaboratively assist those in immediate precarity. Further, using the lens of practical authority (Abers & Keck, 2013) and policy sustainability (Patashnik, 2014), I examine how the JSCR is fundamentally changing embedded institutions through the new knowledge gained by advocating for new legal frameworks, policies on migrant protection, and new organizational frameworks.
Informal Settlements: The Intersection of Social Networks, Livelihoods, and the Built Environment in Johannesburg, Nairobi, and Accra
by Nana-Yaw Andoh
Major cities in sub-Saharan Africa are facing an uncomfortable truth: despite decades of investments to mitigate urban informality, they continue to experience an increase of informal settlements. Concurrently, a portion of informal settlement residents who are relocated to state-sponsored formal development continue to experience significant daily challenges. However, scholarly literature and journalistic discourse around urban informality tend to reduce its complexity to the singular theme of a need for more affordable housing. As a result, current policies focus on providing “affordable housing,” including upgrading and new development initiatives as the solution. These policy approaches ignore the fact that while informal settlements begin as a consequence of a lack of affordable housing options for the urban poor, the result of their spatial organization is often driven by the dependence of its residents on their social (political, livelihood, familial, and friendship) networks.
This research aims to answer three questions regarding social networks: (1) What is the influence of social networks and livelihood activities on the spatial organization of traditional informal settlements? (2) How does the spatial organization of informal settlements impact the livelihood activities of the residents? Furthermore, (3) How does the relocation of informal settlement residents impact social networks and livelihood activities? I use mixed methods to examine six case studies in Johannesburg, South Africa; Nairobi, Kenya; and Accra, Ghana. The three cities provide examples of long-standing informal settlements representing control groups and newly developed formal housing projects where some informal settlement residents have been recently relocated, representing a treatment group. Data collection consisted of an in-person survey conducted with residents in the control group (n=280) and treatment group (n=297). One focus group was conducted with 15 residents in each location (n=90). Finally, municipal officials were interviewed for planning decisions within the cities where the research sites are located. My findings illustrate how residents of informal settlements, composed of myriad cultures, come together to create a sense of place, which is often overlooked in upgrading and other housing policies. I outline the essential ways that social networks shape the livelihoods of residents and the built environment of informal settlements, suggesting more effective urban policies that can ease the transition of informal settlement residents into new or improved housing. I argue that acknowledging and including more culturally and place-sensitive strategies and other planning and housing policies will mitigate the proliferation of informal settlements in sub-Saharan Africa.
2023
If They’re Riding It, We’re Not Voting for It: Assessing the Role of Racial Threat on Voter Support for Regional Public Transit in Atlanta and Detroit
by Eric Bettis
Regional transit ballot measures in racially segregated metropolitan areas of the United States have historically faced fierce opposition by suburban voters. Proposed public transportation network expansions often reveal acute tensions between constituencies and their priorities, with urban residents tending to support such proposals while suburban residents do not. Furthermore, support for transit proposals tend to show differences by race, with Black, Latino, and other marginalized groups typically supporting transit at higher rates than White voters. The spatial patterns of this support suggest that race itself, and particularly increasing diversity, play a role in this disparity, and further suggests a connection between a region’s contentious racial history and suburban transit opposition. To study this relationship between diversity and transit support, this dissertation employs multiple regression and geospatial analyses of demographic and election data to support an examination of demographic composition’s role in reflecting and influencing changing levels of regional transit support. Using the Racial Threat Hypothesis to interpret past and current suburban voter opposition to transit, the project examines four suburban counties in the Atlanta and Detroit metropolitan regions as case studies. Regression analyses of precinct-level voting data and 1990, 2000, and 2010 census tract-level data find that measures of Black population density and proximity exert moderately strong influence on transit support: positive in more racially diverse census tracts, and negative in tracts and subregions with less diversity. These results are more pronounced in homogeneously White portions of segregated counties: the study shows a statistically significant decrease in transit initiative support associated with growing proportions of nearby Black populations, with Black residential density and proximity being second only to partisanship in influence. The study also finds a direct relationship between increases in Black populations and increasing support for conservative policies and candidates in homogeneously White portions of metro counties. This suggests that areas with recent, significant Black population growth exhibit voting behavior more consistent with the Racial Threat Hypothesis, while those with longer exposure to integration show more tolerance for minority-beneficial policies. This research has implications for understanding how demographic transition, racial group concentration, and proximity to communities of color can influence voter support for regional transit expansion. Furthermore, the study demonstrates that the relationship between democratic processes and the success of equity-associated policy can be tenuous in areas where diversity has historically been resisted or absent.
Integrated Planning for Climate Resilience and Food Security: An Analysis of Urban Food System Resilience Planning in U.S. Cities
by Sarah Dobie
Urban food systems face growing threats from extreme weather and climate disasters. The need to proactively build urban food system resilience is becoming more apparent as city planners and policymakers increasingly recognize that disasters can lead to an inability to carry out critical food system functions, such as providing food security. Addressing this cross-cutting challenge will require policy alignment and coordination between the climate and food sectors. Policy integration—i.e., the alignment and coordination of policy processes and outputs across policy sectors—has long been viewed as a tool to improve governance of complex policy problems. However, research on policy integration has revealed many gaps that limit its practical utility. In many instances, poorly conceived and implemented policy integration can instead lead to policy failures. The aim of my dissertation is to provide an improved understanding of how policy actors can effectively leverage policy integration to address urgent policy problems, using integrated planning for food system resilience as a lens. I performed three interrelated studies, using a three-paper model, that contribute to an improved theoretical foundation for policy integration research as well as practical guidance to help policy actors get food system resilience onto their cities’ political agendas. In the first paper, I conducted a systematic review of policy integration research to understand the current landscape of research on policy integration within an urban governance context, identifying the limitations from a planning perspective and ways future research can address these shortcomings. Specifically, I suggest three research needs: to differentiate between stages of the policy process when studying policy integration; to apply plan evaluation methods to evaluate policy integration; and to explore pathways taken to facilitate integration and weigh tradeoffs. I drew on these findings in the second paper, where I applied plan evaluation methods to evaluate the extent to which U.S. cities have developed integrated plans for food system resilience. I developed two indices—a plan quality index and plan policy focus index—to understand the quality of planning and types of policies being incorporated into plans by cities for food system resilience. I found that few cities have developed high quality plans or plans with a comprehensive focus on food system resilience policies, and the most significant predictors of overall plan scores (a combined plan quality and plan policy focus index) were the rate of food insecurity (higher food insecurity associated with higher plan scores) and plan type (sustainability and food systems plans associated with higher plan scores, and climate resilience plans associated with lower plan scores). This analysis demonstrated how plan evaluation methods could be used as a proxy to measure policy integration for the policy formulation stage of the policy process. It also provided a better understanding of actions cities should include in their plans to address food system resilience challenges. Finally, the third paper included case studies of three U.S. cities identified as national leaders for food system resilience planning based on the plan evaluation performed in the second study. Through document review and interviews, I applied policy process theories to understand how case study policy actors were able to steer the urban agenda to address food system resilience challenges, including the role that policy integration played. Baltimore, Honolulu, and Seattle have taken different pathways to planning for food system resilience, but the type of approach seems to have been less influential in furthering the topic on urban agendas than the degree of integration across the climate and food policy sectors. Based on the case studies, I developed several recommendations for future research to build on this research to advance both theory and practice, including six propositions for policy integration researchers to explore in other planning and policy contexts. Finally, I conclude with a reflection of how this research contributes to policy integration theory, as well as how the insights from this research can be applied to further planning for urban food system resilience across other cities.
Planning Resettlement: Assessing Governance Gaps in the U.S. Resettlement Program
by Alex Judelsohn
Cities, especially those that have faced population loss and austerity measures as a result of neoliberal policies, may engage in welcoming work to support refugees and immigrants as part of efforts to revitalize their cities. For this welcoming work, local and county governments may have an office or implement a plan dedicated to new Americans; they do not just provide lip service but deploy monetary resources. In theory, welcoming work bolsters the U.S. refugee resettlement program, as it inadequately supports adjustment to a new home. This research examines the welcoming work and governance gaps that refugees experience in two rust belt cities and their surrounding counties: Buffalo, located in Erie County, New York and Grand Rapids in Kent County, Michigan.
Utilizing a qualitative research approach including document review, interviews, and a focus group, I examine how urban planning impacts the refugee experience. My research findings are organized around three main sub-questions. I first examine welcome plans and comprehensive plans to understand whether and how they address the needs of refugees, if at all, employing Ager and Strang’s conceptual framework that proposes four themes of integration (2008). The analysis shows that welcome plans are more thorough in including domains of Ager and Strang’s framework, while comprehensive plans primarily cover topics such as housing, safety, and employment. Secondly, through interviews and a focus group, I examine how local and county governments engage and interact with other refugee support organizations, including local resettlement agencies and refugee-led community organizations. Findings show that it is common for support organizations to point to local resettlement agencies as key players in supporting refugees, but generally do not see the work that refugee-led community organizations do and are unclear as to how local planners are involved in resettlement. Additionally, communication and collaboration between these entities is lacking. Lastly, I examine how the official welcoming work and other public-sector supports are perceived and experienced by refugees, in comparison to the unofficial support offered by grassroots groups. The data show that while local and county governments attempt to support refugee communities through offices and plans dedicated to them, they largely miss the mark, either through their engagement processes or by cherry picking what goes in the plan. On the other hand, refugee-led community organizations, while not perfect, are more effective at serving refugee communities as their work shares some principles and modalities of insurgent planning. Research findings show that the welcoming work by local and county governments is done in a way that ostracizes refugee communities, even as they have good intentions and invest resources. Further, a lack of collaboration and leadership from refugees themselves prevents buy-in to the welcoming work. This results in perpetuation of a harmful rhetoric, with cities — especially rust belt cities in need of retaining population – seeing refugees as a way of “saving” or “revitalizing” their cities, rather than being places where refugees have the tools and support to flourish in their new homes. I outline a way forward through a collaborative approach to resettlement that can also weather changes in political views.
Food Systems Planning to Rebuild Infrastructure of the Middle:
A Case Study of Urban-Rural Public Food Procurement in Seoul, South Korea
by Seulgi Son
Increasing reliance on the global corporate food system has made food supplies more vulnerable and threatened local food economies. While private-sector, community-led and non-profit efforts to re-embed food systems are emerging in many global cities, such as food hubs and farms to school, few of these efforts to shorten and re-localize supply chains have been led by the public sector except for a few examples. My dissertation examines the roles urban and regional planners can play in re-localizing food systems, using the Urban-rural Coexistence Public Meal Program (UCPMP) in Seoul, South Korea as a case in point.UCPMP is a city-level effort to link small-size rural farmers and public institutions including schools, daycare centers, and welfare facilities in the urban area. This study will argue that public food procurement can make a meaningful contribution to scaling up short food supply chains, supporting a transition to sustainable local food systems. Methods in use include a)direct observations of project sites, b) semi-structured interviews with government officials, involved civic actors, and rural farmers, and c) a wide array of document analysis.
2022
Discursive Approaches to Gentrification Studies: Excavating the Market-Led Paradigm
by Michael Borsellino
Gentrification is a contentious topic both theoretically and politically. A subset of urbanization, gentrification displaces existing residents as wealthier residents and developers move into an area and invest in local housing, commerce, and public infrastructure. Some view gentrification as a savior for disinvested urban areas while others challenge that it is inequitable and destroys urban communities. Both sides generally understand gentrification as an economic phenomenon and acknowledge that few mechanisms exist to offset its negative externalities. This dissertation challenges both of those assumptions. In this dissertation, I examine the academic genealogy of gentrification and its contemporary understanding in public discourse. The objective of this study is to understand how our current academic interpretation of gentrification was formed and to understand how that differs from a public understanding of the process. To this end, the dissertation uses a suite of discursive methods to examine the language of gentrification used by both academics and public actors like developers, city officials, and residents. Those methods are textual analysis, actor-network theory, and discursive frame analysis applied to a case study. Adopting this suite of approaches allows for the excavating of the initial meaning of gentrification and its transformation through academic debate. These methods also allow for the interrogation of academia’s current logjam of research that may not adequately explicate the complexities of gentrification as it occurs in American cities and abroad. I show that Ruth Glass’s early observation of gentrification in London was a byproduct of unique historic preconditions and changes in technology, demographics, and administrative policies. In the 1980s and 1990s, influential scholars overlooked these spatiotemporal contextual causes as they renegotiated the cause of gentrification and, thus, its meaning. I show that a new gentrification resulted from those negotiations, one defined as a market-led process with universal application. This interpretation continues to dominate gentrification studies today. My case study centered on a rezoning application for a redevelopment project in Austin, Texas shows that this market-led paradigm fails to capture how different groups understand the causes and scale of gentrification today. Relying on the tripartite contextual framework from the second chapter, I demonstrate that gentrification is fundamentally state-mediated. Further, gentrification is not equal to the materialization of development. Future research on gentrification should take care to understand local histories and contextual causes. This, coupled with empirical analysis focused on effects, will help close the gap between theoretical significance and political significance in a way that is policy relevant. Future research should also break from the market-led paradigm that dominates gentrification studies, instead focusing on the role of the state in creating the preconditions necessary for gentrification to occur. Understanding the role of the state is key to mitigating the negative effects of gentrification.
Regions, Race, Rail and Rubber: An Analysis of How Transportation Planning Decisions Contributed to Regional Segregation, 1922 – 1973
by Robert Pfaff
Detroit’s history of systemic racial inequity has significantly contributed to the uneven development patterns of the entire metropolitan region that persist to this day. The process of central city decline, deindustrialization, and suburban migration in the post-war period compounded existing discrimination in housing and employment for Black residents, effectively trapping them in the city and preventing them from accessing suburban amenities. This dissertation evaluates the role that public transportation planning played in reinforcing racial segregation by restricting transit options to suburban areas, effectually limiting physical mobility of residents. My research demonstrates that the City of Detroit Department of Street Railways (DSR) had knowledge of suburban growth trends, sufficient budget revenues, legal jurisdiction, and the physical resources to provide service to suburban areas, but voluntarily limited suburban transit options. The failure to provide suburban service meant that the DSR could not capitalize on regional growth trends and could not recover from lost ridership numbers as Detroit depopulated through white flight and decentralization. This study analyzes key transportation planning decisions made by City of Detroit officials between 1922 and 1973 using qualitative, primary-source, archival records such as letters, meeting minutes, reports, survey documents, and maps. These sources have not been comprehensively researched or peer-reviewed to date, and my research contributes to a literature gap in the history of public transportation planning in the City of Detroit. Findings are determined using interpretive analysis to understand the role that transportation planning has played in reinforcing racial segregation between city and suburb in post-war Detroit.
Federal Incentives, State Preemptions, and Local Politics: Implementing Inclusionary Housing Policies in India and the United States
by Naganika Sanga
Cities around the world are experiencing increasing affordable housing shortages and socio-economic segregation. To encourage integrated and inclusive production of affordable housing, cities are increasingly turning to market-led housing strategies such as inclusionary housing. Inclusionary housing (IH) policy requires or incentivizes market housing developers to designate a certain percentage of units as income-restricted units. IH policies have strong supporters and opponents, given their underlying redistributive principles. IH literature has so far focused on how national governments in countries such as the U.K., the Netherlands, and American states like New Jersey and California have encouraged local IH policy adoption through legislation and dedicated funding. But what happens when federal governments cannot legislate IH policies and state governments oppose them? How do local regime politics shape IH policy design and implementation? How then do the federal, state, and local level actors and priorities come together in implementing IH policies? This dissertation responds to these questions by examining IH policies in diverse structural and sociopolitical settings that have so far been ignored in IH policy scholarship. Four papers informed by a total of 111 semi-structured interviews, extensive document analysis, site visits, archival research, and participant observation of public meetings, nuance the importance of federal and state roles in local IH policy implementation in India and the United States in different case contexts. These cases offer valuable insights into the politics of urban regimes, alternative IH mechanisms, and intergovernmental relations between multiple levels of governments, the civic sector, and developer associations. This dissertation contributes to urban politics and governance literature by demonstrating the need for studying local initiatives within multi-level governance systems.
The first paper focuses on India, where the federal government has no direct legal mandate for IH policy. The paper reviews the success of alternative tools employed by the federal government by examining Andhra Pradesh state’s response to federal IH reform initiatives. The second paper discusses how states and cities creatively leverage federal housing grants while evading federal IH intent through detailed cases of federal affordable housing projects implemented in Vijayawada city, Andhra Pradesh state. The third paper discusses the importance of the state policy environment on local planning and housing policies and offers an analytical framework to categorize the range of state-IH policy positions. It specifically discusses three states – Oregon, Texas, and Tennessee – that have a history of explicit legislative restrictions, called ‘state preemptions’ against city IH policies. The fourth paper focuses on three cities that faced state IH policy preemptions – Austin, Texas, Portland, Oregon, and Nashville, Tennessee – to investigate how state restrictions impact local IH policy and their subsequent policy choices. The concluding chapter reflects on the similarities and dissimilarities of IH policy experiences in the U.S. and India and offers ideas for exchange. The four papers collectively situate IH policies within a comparative intergovernmentalism framework and provide new dimensions to our understanding of IH policies by problematizing the related political, structural, ideological, and social issues.
2021
A Metropolitan Dilemma: Regional Planning, Governance, and Power in Detroit, 1945-1995
by Joel Batterman
Scholars of planning and policy have long argued that metropolitan or regional institutions for planning and governance are needed to address such problems as urban sprawl, central city decline, and inter-jurisdictional segregation and inequality. Yet some form of regional planning and governance is already practiced in every major U.S. metro area under the auspices of metropolitan planning organizations (MPOs), which the federal government has mandated for roughly half a century. Why have these institutions proved inadequate to remedy America’s “metropolitan dilemma” of sprawling, inequitable (sub)urbanization? Are they simply too weak? Have they lacked the political will to challenge this pattern? Or both?
I examine the question through a historical case study, based in archival research, of the Southeast Michigan Council of Governments (SEMCOG), the MPO for the seven-county area that includes metropolitan Detroit. I argue that SEMCOG should be understood in the context of the political history of twentieth-century Detroit and the trajectory of twentieth-century American liberalism. The development of SEMCOG in the wake of the New Deal and World War Two reflected broader liberal efforts to harmonize private choice and public planning, and municipal autonomy with metropolitan interdependence, in an era of federally sponsored, whites-only suburbanization. SEMCOG’s arrested development from the 1970s onward mirrored the broader unraveling of postwar American liberalism as the inherent tensions in the project became increasingly evident.
In the twenty years after World War Two, Detroit pioneered the development of regional institutions for planning and governance: a Regional Planning Commission (RPC) and a Supervisors Inter-County Committee (SICC). These institutions were initially intended not to challenge but to facilitate the prevailing patterns of outward development and the proliferation of independent suburban communities, both of which placed escalating burdens on the central city of Detroit and black Detroiters in particular.
The RPC and SICC were merged to form SEMCOG just as the political transformations wrought by suburbanization, segregation and the African American freedom movement shook the foundations of the liberal political order in which regional planning and governance had evolved. As metropolitan politics grew increasingly racialized along city-suburb lines, and the federal government retreated from regional initiatives, SEMCOG survived the 1970s only by vowing to defend local control and eschewing a role in resolving issues of racial segregation and inequality, while accommodating the prevailing pattern of sprawl and disinvestment. When SEMCOG staff questioned this course, they were forced to back down in the face of opposition from the now-dominant suburban growth regime.
For advocates of regional planning and governance, there are sobering lessons to be drawn from the history of SEMCOG. In Detroit, institutions for regional planning and governance have failed to resolve the problems of sprawl and inequality, and in some respects exacerbated them, since these institutions are embedded within a larger political system that has been dominated by suburban development interests and defenders of racial and economic segregation. Although MPOs can help to bring important metropolitan issues before policymakers, and structural reform of MPOs could increase their capacity and willingness to do so, solving the metropolitan dilemma will ultimately require the development of a new multi-racial metropolitan politics that builds grassroots power for “reparative regionalism” across city-suburb boundaries.
2020
Urban Planning and Its Feminist Histories
by Bri Gauger
Urban Planning and its Feminist Histories identifies and amplifies women’s roles in shaping the institutions, ideas, and educational practices that comprised the field of planning in North America throughout the twentieth century, with a particular focus on the United States in the 1960s through the 1990s. My narrative of the relationships between feminist activism, spatial practice, higher education, and the politics of knowledge production reveals feminism’s contradictory legacy in shaping contemporary approaches to planning practice, theory, and education. Based on forty-two interviews with planning scholars in the U.S. and Canada, my cross-generational oral history research is read in light of feminist scholarship and archival documents from planning schools and organizations, women’s interest groups, collectives, and task forces, and community-based organizations and collectives. An interdisciplinary project, this dissertation draws from and contributes to the history of social movements, planning education and practice, and related fields such as architecture, geography, urban history, and women’s and gender studies.
Beginning in the late 1960s, an emerging social and political focus in the field of planning attracted women participating in a long tradition of female-headed housing and community development activism. Bolstered by equal opportunity legislation and increased federal funding for research on women’s and urban issues, the first substantial group of women to become planning scholars began their academic careers in the 1970s. These women produced feminist knowledge about gender, race, class, and the city by forming educational collectives and lobbying groups, convening conferences, and creating publishing outlets alongside members of the nascent Women’s Studies movement. The activist and community-engaged roots of the first generation of feminist planning academics equipped them to develop new paradigms for planning theory and epistemology that centered participation and everyday experience, as well as spearheading community studio learning models in planning classrooms. At the same time, these feminist planners, architects, designers, and community development and housing advocates staked a claim in both activist and academic spaces for the important role of space, place, and the urban environment in feminist thought and practice.
In the late 1980s and early 90s, women shaped the landscape of the planning academy by moving into leadership roles and founding the Faculty Women’s Interest Group (FWIG) within the Association of Collegiate Schools of Planning (ACSP). Through FWIG and various ACSP initiatives and committees, they built a professional support network and led efforts for gender and racial diversity among planning faculty, students, and research. While this dissertation demonstrates how the first feminist scholars carved out discursive and institutional space in the planning academy, it also reveals that this is not an entirely victorious story. I also examine the theoretical and practical consequences of women’s early activism in the academy through the experiences of scholars who struggled in academia, were denied tenure, and/or were pushed out of planning to a different discipline. In contrast to the initial group, comprised mostly of white women, this pool of interviewees consists primarily of BIPOC women whose stories provide a crucial intergenerational and intersectional perspective on shifting barriers and priorities that parallel broader trends in feminist movements. I present their perspectives on how these women were largely alienated from institutional gains in the 1990s, how their scholarship was marginalized, and how they have helped each other survive and thrive.
A Learning Health Sciences Approach to Understanding Clinical Documentation in Pediatric Rehabilitation Settings
by Nikolas Koscielniak
The work presented in this dissertation provides an analysis of clinical documentation that challenges the concepts and thinking surrounding missingness of data from clinical settings and the factors that influence why data are missing. It also foregrounds the critical role of clinical documentation as infrastructure for creating learning health systems (LHS) for pediatric rehabilitation settings. Although completeness of discrete data is limited, the results presented do not reflect the quality of care or the extent of unstructured data that providers document in other locations of the electronic health record (EHR) interface. While some may view imputation and natural language processing as means to address missingness of clinical data, these practices carry biases in their interpretations and issues of validity in results. The factors that influence missingness of discrete clinical data are rooted not just in technical structures, but larger professional, system level and unobservable phenomena that shape provider practices of clinical documentation. This work has implications for how we view clinical documentation as critical infrastructure for LHS, future studies of data quality and health outcomes research, and EHR design and implementation. The overall research questions for this dissertation are: 1) To what extent can data networks be leveraged to build classifiers of patient functional performance and physical disability? 2) How can discrete clinical data on gross motor function be used to draw conclusions about clinical documentation practices in the EHR for cerebral palsy? 3) Why does missingness of discrete data in the EHR occur? To address these questions, a three-pronged approach is used to examine data completeness and the factors that influence missingness of discrete clinical data in an exemplar pediatric data learning network will be used. As a use-case, evaluation of EHR data completeness of gross motor function related data, populated by providers from 2015-2019 for children with cerebral palsy (CP), will be completed. Mixed methods research strategies will be used to achieve the dissertation objectives, including developing an expert-informed and standards-based phenotype model of gross motor function data as a task-based mechanism, conducting quantitative descriptive analyses of completeness of discrete data in the EHR, and performing qualitative thematic analyses to elicit and interpret the latent concepts that contribute to missingness of discrete data in the EHR. The clinical data for this dissertation are sourced from the Shriners Hospitals for Children (SHC) Health Outcomes Network (SHOnet), while qualitative data were collected through interviews and field observations of clinical providers across three care sites in the SHC system.
How Affordable are Accessible Locations? Housing and Transportation Costs and Affordability in U.S. Metropolitan Areas with Intra-Urban Rail Service
by Matan Singer
Housing affordability is a major problem for many Americans. The increase in residential rents in the past few decades, alongside stagnant and even lower incomes, is forcing households to spend a larger share of their income on housing. The high costs of housing relative to income mean that some households cannot afford non-housing goods and services like food, healthcare, and education. Within the affordability debate, lowering transportation costs by using transit is often viewed as a potential solution to affordability problems. While housing might be expensive, if transportation costs are low, the overall costs of living in a specific neighborhood might still be affordable. Hence, housing and transportation advocates call for improving public transport options that allow households to access destinations without needing a private vehicle.
In this dissertation, I examine housing and transportation costs and affordability in twenty-seven U.S. metropolitan areas with intra-urban rail systems. The objective of the study is to understand whether transit-rich neighborhoods, especially those served by rail, are affordable, with an emphasis on lower-income households. To this end, the dissertation adopts a multilevel approach to examining housing and transportation costs and affordability cross-sectionally and over time. Adopting a multilevel approach allows examining how neighborhood- and metropolitan-level factors interact with one another and affect housing and transportation costs and affordability. Neighborhoods (i.e., block groups and census tracts) are classified based on their proximity to rail and their built environments to examine how costs vary between different types of neighborhoods. Finally, affordability is calculated based on metropolitan-wide income levels to assess whether housing and transportation costs are affordable to households at different income levels.
The results indicate that the majority of neighborhoods in the sampled metropolitan areas are affordable to median and moderate-income households. Moreover, transit-rich neighborhoods are found to be more affordable than auto-oriented neighborhoods, mainly thanks to lower transportation costs. Still, only small share of neighborhoods is affordable to households earning 50% or less of area median income. Even in transit-rich neighborhoods, the lower transportation costs typically do not translate into more affordable locations for very low-income households. This is because many households still rely on the private vehicle even in the most transit-rich neighborhoods.
Housing in transit-oriented development is expensive, in part, due to the high levels of transit job accessibility these neighborhoods offer. However, housing costs in these neighborhoods are also high because of low long-run elasticities of housing supply. Despite an increase in the demand for compact walkable neighborhoods in recent decades, land-use regulations and local opposition direct denser development to rail-station areas. As a result, a higher supply of housing in transit-oriented development is associated with higher housing costs regionwide due to induced demand for these neighborhoods. At the same time, increasing the supply of housing in alternative pedestrian-friendly and transit-rich neighborhoods has a moderating effect on housing costs in transit-oriented development as it allows separating the demand for walkable urban form from the demand for transit accessibility. Hence, rather than focusing on developing more housing only in transit-oriented development, efforts should focus on expanding the housing options in a diversity of neighborhood types both near and away from rail stations.
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