|
11.188: Urban Planning and Social Science
Laboratory |
| Name | Title | Abstract | |
| 1 | Braxton Bridgers | “Cancer Alley: Mapping Vulnerabilities of Populations Within Louisiana's Infamous Chemical Corridor” | In
Louisiana, there is an industrial corridor which spans 85 miles,
from New Orleans to Baton Rouge. Infamously referred to as
Cancer Alley, this industrial corridor has become a cause for
concern amongst environmental and social justice activists, in
large part due to reported cases of illnesses (such as cancer)
that are disportionate to other areas across the U.S. This study
seeks to both map the profile of communities residing within the
industrial corridor and examine the vulnerabilities of these
populations by visualizing socioeconomic data from the U.S.
Census Bureau’s American Community Survey (ACS): median
household income, unemployment rates, poverty levels,
educational attainment and ethnicity. These indicators will be
joined to U.S. census block group shapefiles in order to
establish descriptive statistics. Additionally, the toxicity of
the 100 plus industrial and chemical facilities within Cancer
Alley will be identified and visualized utilizing Environmental
Protection Agency (EPA) Risk Screening Environmental Indicator
(RSEI) data, in order to highlight communities that are
especially vulnerable due to their proximity to highly toxic
facilities. A “danger zone” buffer will be established for
facilities according to EPA health and environmental buffer
standards. |
| 2 |
Katie Fisher |
Take a Hike: Comparing Access to Hiking Trails in Boston and Seattle |
Many residents of cities enjoy the easy access to infrastructure and other amenities, but still might want to spend time hiking during their free time. For this project, I will look at access to hiking trails from urban areas. More specifically, how many hiking trails can be accessed from different cities? This project will evaluate access in terms of car and by public transportation. I will compare access to hiking trails from Boston and Seattle using a website called The Hiking Project which hosts a crowdsourced database of trails. I will then measure two different factors of accessibility. I will do a street network analysis to determine how long it takes to drive to those trails from the center of Boston or Seattle. I will then use commuter rail, T and bus stop shapefile to determine how many hiking trails are accessible by public transportation, for those without a car. The dataset also contains information on trail length and difficulty, allowing additional analysis of type types of trails accessible from each city. |
| 3 | Hadley Piper | The Legacies of Louisville’s First Master Plan: 1930 Zoning,
2010 outcomes
|
In 1917 the supreme court heard Buchanan vs Warley, in which a
black man sued to live in a house he owned, an act which was
outlawed by Louisville’s Racial zoning ordinance. The supreme
court found Louisville’s racial zoning ordinance unconstitutional,
outlawing overtly race-based zoning in America. The 1930
Louisville Comprehensive plan and zoning regulations sought to
replace racial zoning with a new, legal method of implementing
segregation:, identifying areas populated or likely to be
populated by black resident, and designating these areas as
industrial, with the intention of replacing “slum housing” in
these areas with institutional state-managed housing, while
protecting white neighborhoods with restrictive single family
designations, preventing the migration of lower income, black, and
ethnic residents from “degrading” these neighborhoods. Nearly 90
years later, many of the same development pattern from 1930
persist, but the city has also changed drastically, with its
limits expanding to contain nearly 3x the land area contained in
1930. This project highlights development and demographic trends
and compares them to the original 1930 zoning scheme. Vacant
property, foreclosures, land use, contemporary zoning, racial
makeup, income, housing tenure are all compared to the original
zoning scheme, with the intent to demonstrate both the lasting
impact of Louisville’s first master plan, as well as unforeseen
trends and growth the occured throughout the 20th century. |
| 4 | Meital Hoffman | From Arrests to Sentences: Cannabis Possession in Chicago |
The Illinois legislature is expected to vote on a bill legalizing recreational marijuana in the coming months, potentially making cannabis possession legal. For now, however, thousands of Chicago residents are arrested for cannabis possession and tens are sent to jail each year. Using Chicago PD arrest data from the Chicago Open Data Portal and ACS demographic measures, I will explore where most marijuana possession arrests are occuring in the city and how they compare to racial and economic factors. I am also using data from the Cook County Open Data portal to analyze sentencing for cannabis possession. I am focussing on 2018 to ensure that my conclusions are relevant and up-to-date with current cannabis legislation. My results will highlight communities that are unjustly targeted in arrests and sentencing. Along with choropleth maps, I will include necessary graphs and tables to highlight my findings. From initial exploration it is clear that mostly black men are sentenced for marijuana possession and sentence severity varies greatly depending on the judge. While legalization is a step forward in ending the unjust “War on Drugs” started in the 1970s, reflection and reparations are crucial to understanding the longstanding effects of biased policing and sentencing. |
| 5 | James Li | A Tool for Evaluating Street-Scale Walkability Using R and Google Maps |
The experience of being a pedestrian can be frustrating and difficult when street systems are not designed with pedestrians in mind – for example, when crossing the road legally requires detouring some distance to get to the nearest crosswalk. Existing “walkability” metrics such as the Walk Score (https://www.walkscore.com/) tend to measure “walkability” in terms of access to amenities such as restaurants and schools. In this project, I examine “walkability” at a more fundamental and granular level: For a given point, how much unnecessary distance is needed to walk to nearby points? This project focuses on the development of an R script that uses the igraph library and OpenAddresses data to build a graph of addresses across the city with each address connected to its neighbors. The script queries the Google Maps Directions API for walking distance data, and then calculates a metric of walkability by comparing the actual walking distances to the straight-line distances for each address. The resulting map highlights regions of better or worse pedestrian convenience and may be useful as a tool for building a more complete understanding of walkability. |
| Name |
Title |
Abstract |
|
| 1 | Sean Robins | Transit-Oriented Commercial Development Opportunties |
|
| 2 | Jennifer Fox | Renewable Energy Saturation Based on Estimated Potentials | The
question my project seeks to satisfy surrounding distinguishing
an optimal method for measuring the saturation of installed
renewable energy infrastructure based on different calculated
potentials. Searching through available online data sets, I
decided to focus on two main comparisons: the first cartographic
display, US Turbine Density & Wind Potential, and the
second, State Renewable Energy & PV Potential. The first map
uses data from three sources: the United States Wind Turbine
Database 2018, ArcGIS Hub Countries WGS84, and Global Wind
Atlas’s (GWA) Mean Wind Power Densities at 50m Elevation. The
purpose of the map is to contrast the number of major installed
wind turbines around the United States (in units per hectare)
normalized against spatial area with calculated potential for
energy production. GWA calculated the potential as a mean wind
power density measured at 50 meter elevation. I first exported a
polygon of the US using Select by Attribute from the downloaded
world country dataset. As GWA provides this potential as a .tif
file covering all of North America, I clipped the raster using
ArcToolbox(Data Management > Raster > Raster Processing
> Clip) against the new US polygon. Next, I worked on
illustrating where the majority of installed turbines exist
using circular point density analysis, classifying by quantiles
and layering at the highest level with 50% transparency to
produce the final map. The second map uses four data sources:
National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL), Direct Normal
Irradiation (DNI) 10-km Resolution 1998-2012, ArcGIS Hub USA
States 2018 WGS84, US Department of Energy, State Energy Data
System 2016, and the U.S. Energy Information Administration’s
(EIA) State Energy Data System’s (SEDA) production estimates,
renew_prod_2009.csv . This map’s purpose is to contrast national
potential for photovoltaic output with calculated renewable
energy production scaled based on annual state ranking. NREL
calculates potential based on annual solar resources averaged
over surface cells approximately 10 kilometers in size. I chose
to juxtapose this average with state rankings to examine
saturation of renewable energy production based off of potential
and current relative energy practices. To do this, I intersected
the US photovoltaic potential file (which extended into offshore
zones surrounding the mainland lower 48) with USA States 2018. I
then joined the CSV with the renewable energy production state
rankings to the ArcGIS polygon on a basis of state name. To
classify by state ranking, I used Graduated Symbols for the
Symbology valued by solar_prod , with zero normalization and
five quantile classification. Moving forward for both maps, I
intend to draw conclusions by approximating values from the
rasters, normalizing wind turbine and renewable energy
production estimates against calculated potentials to place
value on the clean energy saturation these areas display
relative to other American regions. For the second map, I also
seek to find a method to approximate solar penetration while
taking into account the percent of renewable energy produced by
photovoltaics per state, relative to other non-conventional
resources. |
| 3 | Lydia Gramstad |
Exploring Revitalization of Neighborhoods in Birmingham, Alabama |
Like many US cities, Birmingham, Alabama experienced a “white flight” to the suburbs in the 1960s and has been struggling to achieve an occupied and thriving downtown area since then. In recent years, two neighborhoods have attracted attention for their apparent neighborhood revitalization. Historically, Avondale has been a working-class neighborhood near an industrial area, and Norwood was built as a community for more affluent residents. The neighborhoods abut each other, with Norwood to the northeast of Birmingham’s central business district and Avondale to the east of it. Both were formed in the early 1900s and many existing structures date back to that time. Scores of residences in both neighborhoods have stood abandoned and dilapidated for years. Visiting the neighborhoods provides significant physical evidence of revitalization as many historic residences have been or are currently being renovated or restored. However, a visit cannot provide comprehensive understanding of the economic and social factors at play. While improvements to structures are naturally celebrated, the mere presence of improvements gives minimal indication of the nature of changes occurring in an area, particularly regarding demographics of residents.
Through a comparison of 2000, 2010, and 2017
census data and thematic mapping of census tracts and block
groups for Avondale and Norwood and Birmingham as a whole, these
areas can be studied more analytically and quantitatively,
potentially producing a practical and functional report for the
area. While innumerable factors could be analyzed, relevant
economic statistics include changes in vacancy, rent, housing
value, and income, and relevant social statistics include
changes in residency, racial makeup, median age, and poverty.
These statistics contextualize the two neighborhoods in
comparison to Birmingham over the past two decades, revealing
similarities and disparities between each of them. In some ways,
Avondale and Norwood have developed similarly to the rest of the
city. However, for many factors, they have developed in notably
different ways, some of which may be considered as favorable and
others as unfavorable, depending on perspective. Overall, the
data indicates that there have been changes to the neighborhoods
as a reduction in black residents corresponded to an influx of
white residents and an increase in housing costs. What remains
is a predication of economic and social trends for the area’s
future and a tangible understanding of the significance of these
statistics. |
| 4 | Alexander Boccon-Gibod | Analyzing Historic Rights-of-Way (ROW) in metro Boston |
|
| 5 | Mendel Keller | Socio-Economic Trends in Brooklyn Neighborhoods | |
| 6 | Hadrian Merced | Evaluating Montreal's proposed Pink Line in the context of public transit accessibility | The
mayor of Montreal has a plan to construct a new Pink Line for
the Montreal Metro before 2025. This project serves as a
starting point for an external analysis of the potential
usefulness of this proposed line. I will be looking at current
estimated travel times to Downtown Montreal, the city's central
business district, from various locations on the island,
including from locations within 50 meters of every proposed Pink
Line station. My first hypothesis is that an area a certain
distance from downtown close to a metro station will have a
shorter travel time than another area the same distance to
downtown but further from a metro station. I will be using
Google's Directions API to collect this data. Time permitting,
other venues for analysis include verifying Projet Montréal's
claim that commute times from Montréal-Nord will be cut down by
60% and looking at socioeconomic information along the proposed
line to see who will benefit from this construction project |
| 7 | Avital Vainberg | Race, Class, and School Performance in Brooklyn | This project explores the inequity in the public high school system in Brooklyn, NY based on race and socioeconomic status. Growing up in Brooklyn, I saw discrepancies in education quality across the many different communities around me. Therefore, I chose to use spatial analyses to find a correlation between race, socioeconomic status, and school performance. More specifically, the project tries to answer the question: Is public high school performance lower in areas with a high percentage of racial minorities, low-income households, and low adult educational attainment? To do so, I begin by creating three thematic maps to display the demographic data for block groups in Brooklyn, NY. The maps are on the block group level, using the U.S. Census Bureau’s geographic data for Kings County from 2017. The demographic data for each block group is from the 2017 American Community Survey five-year estimates. The first map shows the number of racial minority (non-white) residents, normalized by the total block group population. The second map shows the median-household income. The third map separates the block groups into three categories of adult education attainment: high school graduate or less, some college or bachelor’s degree, master’s degree or higher. In the next stage, I create a map of public high schools using NYC’s school point locations. The map will show each school’s performance using NYS Department of Education data for 2017-2018 average regents scores (displayed using a size gradient) and graduation rates (displayed using a color gradient). To show the correlations between the school performance and demographic maps, I will create a collection of correlation matrices, graphs, and overlay maps of school districts, block groups, and schools. I hope to shine a light on the inequities across the NYC public high school system, and start a conversation about the structural racism and classism that influence school budgets and resources. |
| 8 | Jackie Lin | San Francisco Demographic Data Indicate Online Popularity of Businesses | I aim to find how changing demographics affect the popularity and perception of businesses in an area. Prior research has shown that a large portion of users of online opinion platforms such as Yelp, Trip Advisor, and Google Places belong to certain demographics. For example almost 48.9% of yelp reviewers have an income of 100k+. Through observing demographic data on the census tract level, potential bias effects against certain business, which manifest in a difference ratings and reviews, may emerge more strongly for some tracts rather than others. I use San Francisco a case study because it has become the go-to example of changing demographics (gentrification and trend toward high-wage workers); extrapolating hypothetically, yelp review biases will be concentrated and magnified in this small area, affording enough variation across tracts to draw some conclusions. |
| 9 | Julia Curbera | Spatiotemporal patterns in home prices, housing code violations and renovation permits in Brooklyn | New York City’s Department of Housing, Preservation and Development is piloting a program that requires anyone applying for renovation or demolition permits for buildings with records of tenant harassment to confirm that tenants have been harassed in the process of renovation by completing a Certificate of No Harassment (CONH). This policy responds to a trend observed by policy makers and tenant advocates, where landlords react to increasing land values by attempting to displace lower-income tenants through neglecting their properties, and later renovating these units to charge higher rents. This study tests the spatial and temporal cycle of potential tenant harassment that the CONH pilot responds to by analyzing housing code violations and renovation permits between 2010 and 2018 in two Brooklyn neighborhoods which had similar housing stock, percentage of renters, median rents and incomes in 2010, but experienced above and below borough-average increases in home prices over the 8-year period. Neighborhood-wide trends in median home prices, housing code violations, and renovation building permits over the 8-year period are plotted and analyzed to reveal temporal lags between increases in the three variables that may confirm the sequential relationship articulated by the CONH program. Results from the temporal analysis later inform an investigation of how violations and renovation permits spatially cluster throughout each neighborhood over time. |
| 10 | Ufuoma Ovienmhada | Coastal Ecosystem Dynamics along Lake Nokoue, Benin |
Last modified: May 12, 2019 by
Rida Qadrildelgado
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