Dissertations / Theses on the topic 'New York (City) Mayor'

The purpose of this heuristic study was to explore and describe conservatory-trained violin performance major students' perceptions of their lived experience in violin learning from childhood to the music schools in New York City. The seven participants were undergraduate, graduate-level violin major students selected from the three major music schools in New York City. The primary data was collected via face-to-face audiotaped interviews, which became the narrative data.

The first question addressed students' perceptions of one-to-one violin instruction regarding expectations and values. The findings suggested that (1) autonomous thinking, boosted confidence, and transcultural learning were invaluable gains from instruction; (2) a reciprocal relationship existed between the amount of new ideas gained and one's performance outcome in lessons, which connoted students' recognition of self-responsibility in determining the quality of lessons; and (3) an ideal teacher encourages independent thinking, provides honest feedback, and respects students' individuality.

The second question asked students' perceptions toward power relationship and degree of autonomy in decision-making. The findings suggested that (1) interpretive demands seemed to cause a stronger impact to student-autonomy when compared to repertoire and technique-related demands; and (2) students adopted different reactive patterns and conflict management strategies to deal with conflicts and power struggle in the violin studio.

The third question explored students' perceptions toward the helpfulness of other courses to violin performance. The findings suggested that while all students were adept at independent learning, some students reported music theory/history courses were helpful in empowering interpretive/performance autonomy.

The last question investigated students' perceptions toward the interrelationships among self, music, violin performance, and culture. The findings suggested that (1) students' self-concept of ability in violin playing might be correlated with degree of autonomy and self-perceived technical competency; (2) the meaning of violin performance was to attain self-fulfillment in two domains: personal and social; and (3) performance autonomy might be circumscribed by socio-cultural expectation and economic condition.

This study implies that students' continued participation in violin learning might be influenced by economic concern, competitive environment, and self-concept of ability in violin playing. Violin teachers may need to help students maintain a sound professional development.

This diploma thesis describes the origin and development of dance in New York, its culture and the possibilities of dancing in one of the most artistic cities of the United States. The aim of my study was to find out what forms of dance appeared in the New York environment and how they influenced the development of dance in this area. The diploma thesis deals with historical events and personalities who participated in the development of dance art. The content of the thesis includes the current dance scene and the possibilities of studying dance in New York. The fact that there is no comprehensive study in the Czech Republic on this issue has become a stimulus for the creation this thesis.

The main goal of the diploma thesis is to describe and evaluate the form of city logistics and transportation services in New York City and to define related basic problems. The theoratical part focuses on the general background of distribution processes, logistics technologies based on transport and city logistics in general. Then in the practical part there is commented the status and trends in personal, freight transport, distribution and storage of goods in New York region, the largest problems of transportation services in aglomeration and strategies of their solution. The conclusion contains the summary and recommendations.

Thesis (M.S.)--West Virginia University, 2008.
Title from document title page. Document formatted into pages; contains vii, 49 p. : ill. (some col.), col. maps. Includes abstract. Includes bibliographical references (p. 37-45).

Thesis (M. Arch.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Architecture, 2004.
Page 94 blank.
Includes bibliographical references (p. 91).
At the beginning of the 20th century most Americans died at home from diseases whose onset was quick and aggressive. The average life expectancy was only 50 years. Antibiotics first appeared in the 1940's and when the baby boomers were born medicine entered an unprecedented age of transformation, one where illness could be prevented, treated and cured. Unfortunately, along with this progress have also come slower and often more painful deaths. The most common causes of death today are degenerative diseases such as cancer and heart disease. Thus, it appears that the ability to treat disease has altered medical philosophy from a platform of maintaining health to one of preventing death at almost any cost. It is into this environment that the concept of hospice care has emerged as an alternative way of thinking about death and dying, a reaction to the existing biomedical model of care. Hospice has put a humane focus on dying by creating a setting where pain is managed allowing the patient to move onto the hard work of dying, the psychological and spiritual dimension of the process. While the philosophical concept of hospice developed in the United States during the 1970's the questions surrounding the appropriate hospice environment have not yet been answered successfully This thesis attempts to give form to the notion of hospice. It attempts to create a place where dying exists within the natural processes of life and is celebrated and sanctified as such.
by Tracy Lee Taylor.
M.Arch.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Architecture, 1988.
Includes bibliographical references.
The "skyscraper problem" challenged the thought and practice of civic designers and architects prior to World War I. It referred to the incompatibility of City Beautiful principles with economically propelled land development, and to the contradiction between the notion of architecture as an art and the skyscraper's programmatic and technical requirements. Civic designers in New York had difficulty accommodating the skyscraper in their large-scale plans. They also found that it intruded on their vision for the business street, hindered their attempts to plan City Hall Park as New York's civic center, and created a chaotic skyline. Bruce Price, Louis Sullivan, Thomas Hastings, Cyrus L.W. Eidlitz, and other architects suggested alternative proposals for subjecting the skyscraper to the constraints of design . Prior to the design of the Woolworth Building, however, architectural critics did not unanimously endorse any single approach. Frank Woolworth chose a site for his proposed headquarters at the intersection of City Hall Park, New York's civic center, with lower Broadway, the spine of its business district . Woolworth commissioned Cass Gilbert to design the Woolworth Building in 1910. Gilbert shared the City Beautiful vision of McKim, Mead & White and Daniel Burnham. He also accepted the skyscraper's pragmatic requirements. Woolworth intended his headquarters to function as a speculative office building, but also to look like a civic institution. The imagery of a civic institution would represent the capitol of his commercial "empire" as well as display his civic-mindedness, wealth, and cosmopolitanism. The Woolworth Building's siting at New York's civic center, its composition, its arcade, and its sculptural and mural decoration identified it with the prevailing concept of the civic building. The soaring vertical piers of its exterior recalled Gilbert's earlier design for the West Street Building, which was influenced by the functionalist ideas of Louis Sullivan. The Woolworth Building convinced critics that a suitable architectural expression could be found for the skyscraper. Zoning reformers regarded it as a benign skyscraper. Contemporary observers attuned to City Beautiful aesthetic principles thought that the Woolworth Building strengthened the order and image of New York's civic center and enhanced the view of the city from afar.
by Gail Fenske.
Ph.D.

Thesis (M.Arch.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Architecture, 2004.
Includes bibliographical references (p. 64-67).
Today, cemeteries are forgotten places. Once centers of cities and the societies they served, they have been pushed to the outskirts and turned into places of pure storage, devoid of memory. This thesis takes on the additional program of the Potter's Field: a burial place for the poor and unclaimed. Currently in New York the potter's field is located on Hart Island in the Bronx. This thesis proposes replacing that cemetery. Located at Riverside Park, this thesis proposes that the cemetery can be re-inserted into the public realm. Issues such as privacy, scale, individuality, and memory are confronted. By siting the cemetery in a park, connections are made between the active world of the living, and the world of the dead and mourning. This is accomplished mainly within the architecture of the section. What results is a hybrid space that is both inside and outside the realm of the park and the city.
by Rori Christian Espina Dajao.
M.Arch.

The project is an inter-disciplinary intervention into a field that may be largely called New York Studies or, more explicitly, the uses of urban, human and cultural geography for a cultural-materialist history of New York between the fiscal crisis years of the mid-1970s through to the Market Crash of October 1987. My concern is to offer a critique of urban regime transformation in New York, the kind of private-public coalitions taking shape in response to the advent and consolidation of the FIRE (finance, insurance and real estate) industries and their socio-spatial implications, through the lenses of cultural production. I am interested in the ways in which representation - the literary, the cinematic (more sparsely and tangentially), the documented and the archival in an analytically productive conjunction - encodes and arbitrates the changes in the production of urban space in New York City. Thus, the project underlines the heightened significance of literary economies for understanding the experiential structures of urban transformation in 1970s and 1980s New York. Driven by the belief that written culture, just like visual art, may prefigure and telescope urban change, a handful of New York writers dared to tread (both literally and symbolically) where the sociologist, the urban geographer or the documenter does so by professional default, and thus engaged head-on with the hard city of socio-economic networks. This kind of ‘urbanisation of [literary] consciousness’ calls for refreshed modes of enquiry, proposed in Chapter 1, at which point fetishist and aestheticist constructions of the city in the postmodernist key become inadequate, insufficient and politically ineffectual interpretative strategies. The following three-fold case study analysis of counterculture and the underground economy, of homesteading and ‘low rent’ fiction, of the finance industry, publishing and ‘financial writing’ may offer radical opportunities for revisiting both the space of representation and the represented space of urban decline and growth through a geocultural reading for the unevenness of urban space.

Thesis (M.C.P.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Urban Studies and Planning, 2003.
Vita.
Includes bibliographical references (p. 103-107).
This thesis aims to lay a foundation for a more informed discourse on including inclusionary zoning as a mechanism for creating affordable housing in New York City. To this end, it provides a brief history of inclusionary zoning, and explores the general legal, economic, social, and political arguments for and against this policy tool. It examines the New York City housing crisis, and the issues of gentrification and displacement that are confronting the city. Interview responses of stakeholders, and the varied positions articulated in policy briefs and public hearing testimonies regarding the renewed inclusionary zoning debate in New York City, are presented. A case study of the rezoning proposal by the Department of City Planning for the neighborhood of Park Slope, Brooklyn and the inclusionary zoning debate that accompanied it, is used to frame the positions for and against inclusionary zoning. It also highlights the ideological and political pressure surrounding the public hearing process and the policy decisions that were ultimately reached in this New York City case. Recommendations are given for elements that should be included in a new inclusionary zoning program in New York City, as are suggestions for future research and policymaking strategies. This thesis postulates that inclusionary zoning is a viable policy tool for incenting the development of affordable housing in New York City and maintains that the housing landscape of New York City in 2003 is ripe for a new inclusionary zoning program. It argues that a strong housing market, especially in certain gentrifying neighborhoods, combined with a continued crisis regarding the affordability and availability of housing, sets the stage for a new inclusionary zoning program. Furthermore, it contends that not only do the rezoning and upzoning proposals by New York City's Department of City Planning (DCP) provide an environment of increased development capacity in several of the city's neighborhoods conducive to the application of inclusionary zoning density bonuses, but that these proposals also exacerbate the trends of gentrification and displacement. This thesis proposes that by leveraging the financial capacity and development efficiency of for-profit developers, New York City can ensure a low-cost, high quality housing product for working families. Further, it suggests that the application of a new inclusionary zoning program will allow developers the benefit of increased density, and when combined with other financial and tax-based incentives, can achieve an even higher profit margin than with as-of-right development.
by Gretchen Ann Maneval.
M.C.P.

Homelessness has been a problem in New York City (NYC) for decades. Part of the problem is children who grew up in the shelter system and then returned as adults, a phenomenon known as 2nd-generation homelessness. Literature indicates that no researchers have interviewed second-generation homeless adults about their experiences. The purpose of this study was to explore the experience of 2nd-generation homelessness from the perspective of homeless adults returning to the shelter system. The sample included 1 second-generation homeless adult and 10 case managers at Tier II homeless shelters. Interviews were conducted and data were analyzed using hand coding to uncover themes amongst the interviews. The themes found were: lack of information and resources, generational homelessness is passed down, people should learn from their parents' mistakes, comfort in the homeless shelter system, money, parental abuse and neglect, the role of the case manager, taking advantage of the shelter system, and mental health. The other topics that were discussed on multiple occasions but did not fit into larger categories are: education, drugs and alcohol, lack of family assistance, and activities of daily living. Findings from this study inform social change by indicating a clear need for input from homeless families and case managers when developing interventions to address second-generation homelessness. Future policymakers should include staff and clients when developing ways to address homelessness in New York City. The views and opinions expressed in this manuscript reflect the personal views of the researcher and interviewees; they do not represent the views of NYC Department of Homeless Services or its providers.

This thesis documents and analyses African churches in New York City, devoting particular attention to the experiences, beliefs and practices of the Church of the Lord (Aladura), the Presbyterian Church of Ghana, and the Redeemed Christian Church of God International Chapel, Brooklyn. Based largely on ethnographic fieldwork, this work engages multiple disciplines including globalisation theory, theology, and global city studies. Section One is devoted to “Formations”, which in three chapters assessed the work of pastors in building congregations, provides an overview of the three focus churches, and offers a broad survey of African Christianity in New York in relationship to the global city. Section Two, “Encounters”, analyses in three chapters the use of prayer, the Bible, and mission at the point of contact between faith and the city. Section Three, “Directions”, explores in two chapters the trajectories of the three churches through the mobility of spiritual geographies and the second generation of membership. The Conclusion suggests a vision of “Catholicity” for how the West can respond to the presence of African Christianity. I contend that New York’s African Christianity is an embodied faith that is growing because of its location in global urban networks, its social importance for everyday life, and its theological meaning to persons in a new setting.

Thesis (M. Arch.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Architecture, 2005.
Includes bibliographical references (p. 58-59).
This thesis poses a challenge to normal modes of experiencing and representing the spaces of tourism: that is to say, it proposes new ways of touring space. Although this project was initially conceived as a critique of tourism from a social and political standpoint, the project increasingly turned towards the abstract, as it became more evident that the only way to alter the established paradigms of touring space was to approach these both (tourism and the reception of space) through their two lowest common denominators: namely, the act of walking and the act of seeing. Only if these two acts were somehow re-envisioned could tourism itself be potentially freed up from the well-known "traps" through which it alters, demeans, or destroys the very object of its attraction. This project posits the production of tourism as a sort of curatorship enacted collectively by urban planners, architects, local businesses, local governments, and those who market tourism through books, guides, and maps. Accepting that tourism is necessarily a curated experience to some degree, I began to explore the possibility of devices that altered the accepted ways of walking and seeing the city so that they confounded our very notions of what it means to tour space. These devices take the form of video camera attachments that serve as "portable museums" reframing one's experience of the city though this recorded analog that creates new views, relationships, and erasures of the city's structure.
by Virginia Nolan.
M.Arch.

The strict divisions of city spaces created by physical urban planning disintegrated under transformations of capitalism and its accompanying crises of overaccumulation, social urban planning was elaborated to more effectively control the capitalist city and to reintegrate the increasingly blighted areas of the once popular amusements into the economy.
This disciplined reintegration, unsuccessfully attempted in New York City's Times Square since the late 1920s. is finally being realized by the redevelopment forces that began shaping the city's spatial practices in the wake of the fiscal crisis of 1975. The development projects undertaken in midtown Manhattan following the recovery from the fiscal crisis are transforming the renowned Times Square theater district into a strikingly different urban environment. The new politics of redevelopment under the regime of flexible accumulation are almost exclusively oriented towards economic development that is equated with speculative property investments, rebuilding Times Square to promote the global city's finance monopoly. Denying the existence of the public realm and celebrating free market laissez-faire policy, the 42nd Street Development Project, under the guise of removing blight, is eliminating the undesirable and underprivileged from the new image of the Bright Lights District. Times Square as a center of the local popular culture of Broadway theaters, cinemas, restaurants, billboard spectaculars, and public celebrations, has been lost as a public space. In the redevelopment projects now imaging the Crossroads of the World, the lost city of the past is recreated through the commodification of its collective memory, fashioning a Disneyfied spectacle for the global urban center. (Abstract shortened by UMI.)

Thesis (M.C.P.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Urban Studies and Planning, 2010.
Cataloged from PDF version of thesis.
Includes bibliographical references (p. 48-51).
In April 2007, New York City's Mayor Bloomberg released PlaNYC, a broad ranging set of planning initiatives for the city. A centerpiece of the plan was a congestion-pricing proposal for the downtown core in Manhattan. The proposal had the backing of key political figures, federal funding, and broad popular support, yet in failed to clear the state assembly without even getting a vote. The failure of Bloomberg's proposal is instructive not only to New York and other cities considering congestion pricing, but also to proponents of a broad range of sustainability initiatives. This thesis argues that specific aspects of the mayor's proposal created easily identifiable opponents unified on geographic lines, specifically in the outer boroughs of New York City. Further, the planning process failed to appease enough of these opponents or build a winning coalition to enact the policy. New York City is a challenging institutional environment, and in this setting, coalition building becomes even more important.
by Patrick Lynch.
M.C.P.

Thesis: S.M. in Real Estate Development, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Program in Real Estate Development in conjunction with the Center for Real Estate, 2018.
Cataloged from PDF version of thesis.
Includes bibliographical references (pages 71-72).
New York City is projected to add nearly one million residents by the year 2040. At a time when housing supply and affordability are a significant factor for global competitiveness, the city has implemented a variety of regulations and incentives to encourage new development. Current Mayor Bill de Blasio's housing strategy includes an initiative to rezone several neighborhoods to accommodate higher density, encouraging the private real estate development industry to build more units while requiring that a portion of those units be made permanently affordable. While rezoning actions are often studied years later in order to provide enough time to measure their success, the city's plan calls for as many as 15 neighborhoods to be rezoned within 10 years. A real-time analysis of an individual neighborhood rezoning proposal, approved during the time of this thesis, provides the ability to evaluate research questions related to how rezoning is being carried out now and how participants may alter their strategies going forward. The neighborhood of East Harlem, the third area in the city to undergo this rezoning process, is thus used as a case study for how rezoning is carried out, compromised and ultimately approved. The analysis reveals that the total amount of new residential development made possible through rezoning is limited compared to a "no action" scenario. Thus, the most significant impacts of rezoning are not to dramatically increase the number of new residential units to be built, but rather to require that a portion of those new units are made affordable through the introduction of the city's mandatory inclusionary housing program. Additionally, the rezoning process resulted in significant city commitments to public investments in the neighborhood. Yet, these commitments are not guaranteed within a specific timeframe and are almost entirely the responsibility of the public sector to implement. While the ability of rezoning to produce a significant number of new residential units is limited, rezoning will continue to serve as a primary means for the city to attempt to house its growing population.
by Midori Wong.
S.M. in Real Estate Development

Thesis advisor: Richard Tresch
My thesis topic is an analysis of the effects that a congestion tax in mid-town Manhattan would have on drivers who normally drive there. A congestion charge was proposed in 2008 in an attempt to lessen traffic in Manhattan below 80th street, but it was struck down in the New York State Assembly. My thesis will look into the data the Assembly used to make its decision to reject the charge. I will then use this and other data to calculate my own elasticity and find hypothetical effects of a congestion tax in the area on drivers. Then I will formulate my own proposal on whether the charge would be seen as a progressive or regressive tax
Thesis (BA) — Boston College, 2014
Submitted to: Boston College. College of Arts and Sciences
Discipline: Economics Honors Program
Discipline: Economics

Beaucoup a été dit sur les étudiants noirs en situation d'échec scolaire mais on sait peu des étudiants noirs en situation de réussite à l'université, ou du moins, on sait peu sur les diverses causes de leur réussite. Comment arrivent-ils à ce niveau d'excellence? En réalité, les témoignages de Noirs new-yorkais montrent que l'environnement familial est déterminant. L'aspect financier mais aussi les programmes mis en place dans les universités sont d'autres éléments à ne pas négliger. L'éducation et l'affluence ont propulsé les Noirs dans la société blanche sans toutefois en faire partie intégrante. Les Noirs enregistrent davantage de succès universitaires mais dans quels domaines réussissent-ils? Sur le plan de la mobilité géographique, les Noirs de New York arrivent-ils à quitter le ghetto ou leur est-il difficile d'en sortir? L'image proposée par les médias américains est loin de la réalité et n'offre qu'une vision stéréotypée des Noirs. Certes des améliorations sont constatées mais les Noirs américains dont il est question dans la presse ne sont pas forcément représentatifs dans la mesure où ils incarnent une forme de réussite, celle de Hollywood et du monde du spectacle. Cette réussite là est légitime, mais elle n'est pas des plus accessibles à la majorité des étudiants noirs
Although we know much about the failure of Blacks at school, there is a significant lacunae concerning success at university and the reasons underlying this phenomenon. Many black students obtain excellent results and go on to receive diplomas at selective universities and colleges. How do they reach this level of excellence? In reality, the testimonies of black New-Yorkers show that parental and social environments have much impact on the future of black students. This is not to say, however, that either financial factors or the different programs available should be overlooked. Education and prosperity have provided Blacks with new opportunities, but it is still not possible to speak in terms of full integration. Blacks may well be more successful at university, but in which fields? Does their academic achievement occur within fields where they do not represent a threat for their white counterparts? Concerning their mobility, can Blacks in New York easily leave the ghetto to settle in other parts of the town? This study explores the image of Blacks within the press and illustrates how they continue to be objectified in relation to stereotypes that recycle terminology and images reminiscent of an earlier epoch in American history. It also argues that while black celebrities represent a reassuring group, the success they embody is neither the most representative nor the most accessible form of success for the majority of black students

The purpose of this multiple case study was to explore strategies small physical commodities firm owners need to establish a distribution channel within the commodities market to enhance profits. The general business problem was that importing physical commodities from emerging markets was not profitable. The specific business problem was some small physical wholesale commodities firm managers lacked strategies to establish distribution channels for imported commodities. The information presented in this study is important to suppliers, manufacturers, distributors, and retailers of organic cacao products to identify strategies to enhance their distribution channels. Disruptive innovation and the theory of constraints grounded the conceptual framework to relate ideas presented in this study. The central research question guiding the study concerned strategies small physical wholesale commodities firm owners used to establish distribution channels within the commodities market. Participants included 6 small business owners who gave recorded responses during in-depth, face-to-face interviews. The 6 interview recordings were transcribed, then coded and interpreted. Data analysis revealed 6 themes, which included price point strategy, B2B relationships, differentiation, strategic locations, sufficient operating capital, and customer relationships. Enhancing profits in the distribution channels of small organic cacao companies requires a holistic approach in the New York City area. The social implications of this study may draw attention to organic cacao, which is a healthy alternative to confectionery chocolate. Strategies introduced to enhance profits may increase economic growth in the local communities in the New York Tri-State area.

Walden University College of Social and Behavioral Sciences This is to certify that the doctoral dissertation by Nathasha Brooks-Harris has been found to be complete and satisfactory in all respects, and that any and all revisions required by the review committee have been made. Review Committee Dr. Mark Gordon, Committee Chairperson, Public Policy and Administration Faculty Dr. Michael Knight, Committee Member, Public Policy and Administration Faculty Dr. Michael Brewer, University Reviewer, Public Policy and Administration Faculty Chief Academic Officer Eric Riedel, Ph.D. Walden University 2017 There is a digital divide between Baby Boomers and Millennials in the way they communicate and use technology in the New York City public sector workplace. The purpose of this empirical phenomenological study was to explore the phenomenon of generational communications between Baby Boomers and Millennials in the New York City workplace and to understand their lived experiences of how they communicate and use technology in their job. The conceptual framework consisted of two theories: Cameron & Quinn's competing values framework and Prensky's digital natives/digital immigrants. A total of 21 New York City workers (10 Baby Boomers and 11 Millennials) from various agencies participated in semi structured interviews and answered the DISC Classic Profile, an instrument that showed their communication styles. The data were analyzed using the Stevick-Colazzi method and Dedoose data analysis procedure to find groups of meaning and themes. Research found benefits and challenges of technology that impacted communications; how organizational culture impacted technology use and communications; fears about using and learning technology; differences in relationships affecting Baby Boomers and Millennials; and differences in communication styles affecting management and subordinates. Recommendations for future research include conducting a similar qualitative study on Generation X and a quantitative study on Baby Boomers and Millennials. The findings of this study will contribute to positive social change through the implementation of reverse mentoring, knowledge management and transfer, succession planning, and human resource management.

This thesis has been an exploration of a nostalgically inspired architectural idea. The resulting struggle was to bring rational clarity to the concepts associated with nostalgia in an effort to intelligently transform its essence into an expression of architecture relevant to the spirit of this culture and time.
Master of Architecture

Thesis (M.C.P.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Urban Studies and Planning, 1985.
MICROFICHE COPY AVAILABLE IN ARCHIVES AND ROTCH.
Bibliography: leaves 152-157.
by Elizabeth Ann Strom.
M.C.P.

Thesis (M.C.P.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Urban Studies and Planning, 2012.
Cataloged from PDF version of thesis.
Includes bibliographical references (p. 105-108).
Since 1961 the City of New York has allowed buildings to receive added floor area in exchange for privately owned public spaces. These spaces, typically in the form of small outdoor plazas, are spatially clustered in the densest areas of Manhattan and serve as a valuable public amenity for the residents and employees in these areas. Many of the 500+ spaces built before the last major overhaul of the design regulations in 2007 inhibit public use through poor design and management, and new zoning regulations dictate the design and operational standards that make new and redesigned plazas functional and usable. The recent resurgence of the public realm in New York City has brought attention to the quality of public space design and the activities that can take place in the public and private public spaces of the City. As the rate at which the City constructs new public parks slows and developers continue to provide new and redesigned privately owned public spaces, there exists the potential for new and innovative forms of public space given the variability of the designers. As zoning continues to govern these spaces, the administrative review process is increasingly discretionary and creates many levels of uncertainty for the developer and designer. This thesis examines the regulations and administrative processes for new and redesigned plazas to recommend a level of regulation that is clear, flexible, and sustainable over time. The thesis also examines the elements of the public space projects of the past decade to recommend additional provisions in the zoning regulations to align the design of privately owned public spaces with the emerging ideals of public space design being demonstrated in parks, plazas, and waterfronts around the world. The recommendations presented explore policies for the appropriate level of design review oversight, for including the most appropriate urban elements prevalent in emerging public space trends, and for encouraging higher quality design in plazas.
by Richard Anthony Suarez.
M.C.P.

A Mexican State of Mind: New York City and the New Borderlands of Culture examines the cultural productions of Mexican migrants in New York City within the context of a system of racial capitalism that marginalizes Mexican migrants via an exploitative labor market, criminalizing immigration policy, and racialized systems of surveillance. I begin by juxtaposing three images: "Visible Border," from filmmaker Alex Rivera's The Borders Trilogy; the Brookes Ship, which still powerfully recalls the business of transatlantic slave trade and has been significant for visual artists working from the 1960s to the present; and "la Bestia" ("The Beast"), a freight train running the length of Mexico and frequently used by immigrants on their travels. Although Mexican migrants rarely cross the border in containers, shipping container consumerism is what has allowed for the re- commodification of brown bodies, post-slavery. As such it is not ironic that the original purpose of the Beast was to move standardized containers across the US-Mexico border, yet ended up as a tragic symbol of migrant desperation. Here, as in The Borders Trilogy, I find a through line to understanding the connection between traditional border crossing and historical Mexican settlement in the southwest and Chicago, and the development of Mexican migration to New York City in a post-NAFTA, post-9/11 world.

Inspired by a dialogue of the landmark works of Paul Gilroy and Gloria Anzaldüa, I develop an analytic framework which bridges Mexican diasporic experiences in New York City and the black diaspora, not as a comparison but in recognition that colonialism, interracial and interethnic contact through trade, migration, and slavery are connected via capitalist economies and technological developments that today manifest at least in part via the container. This spatial move is important, not just because Mexican migration is largely understudied in a New York--East Coast context, but because the Black Atlantic also emphasizes the long history and significance of New York as a capital of the slave trade. As the unearthing of the African burial ground in lower Manhattan in 1991 demonstrates, the financial center of New York is literally built on the bodies of black labor. Since the 1990s, it has been built on the backs of Mexican migrant labor.

As a result of these interventions, I find a rich and ever evolving movement toward creative responses to the containments of labor, illegality, and racial and anti-immigrant prejudice. In five chapters, I present a rich archive of both individual and collaborative expression including arts collectives, graffiti, muralism, hip hop crews, through which the majority young male Mexican population form social networks to cope with this modern-day form of "social death." The first chapter, "Mexican Manzana: The Next Great Migration" introduces the context of Mexican migration to New York City since the 1980s, focusing on the economic changes undergone by the city because of the adoption of the shipping container from an industrial economy to one focused on finance, real estate, and service. It also discusses NYC as an immigrant destination and outlines the characteristics of Mexican migrants and the conditions that greet them in their new destination. Particularly iconic to New York City is the restaurant industry for which the Mexican presence is both vital and largely invisible. Thus. Chapter two, "Solo Queremos el Respeto: Racialization of labor and hierarchal culture in the US Restaurant Industry," uses that industry as a case study of Mexican migrant containment, to explore active forms of resistance. Chapter three, "Hermandad, Arte y Rebeldia: Art Collectives and Entrepreneurship in Mexican New York" focuses on the development of arts entrepreneurship and successful collectively owned businesses such as tattoo parlors that double as arts spaces. The next chapter, "Yo Soy Hip Hop: Transnationaiisrn and Authenticity in Mexican New York," employs lyrical analysis of Mexican hip hop to explore alternative forms of identity making. The final chapter "Dejamos una huella: Claiming Space in a New Borderlands," describes the way Mexican migrants are claiming space and performing a politics of anti-deportation via the aggressive visibility of graffiti. Consequently, in loosening the bounds of border and mexicanidad, I find new identities that take surprising shapes. And following my subjects on the long journey to and within the Atlantic Borderlands, they teach me the significance of blackness in Mexican lives as well as black scholarship in Chicano/a and migration studies. Here, there is so much more than comparison – rather it is a rich flow of ideas that no border could ever impede.

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For over a decade, homeland security leaders have urged emergency response agencies to improve their collaborative capacity. Collaboration and coordination is critical to homeland security effectiveness. The homeland security threat scenarios facing NYC, including terrorist attacks, natural disasters, and high consequence accidents, require a synergistic response from first arriving responders. To understand the foundation of collaborative relationships among the FDNY and NYPD, this thesis examines the concept of swift trust. Swift trust is a unique form of trust that occurs between groups or individuals brought together in temporary teams to accomplish specific tasks, often under time constraints. This thesis examines swift trust formation in military, business, and virtual collaborative studies. It applies the factors critical to swift trust formation in those areas to interagency incidents involving the NYPD and FDNY. Among the factors affecting the formation of swift trust between NYC first responders are initial interactions and communications, identification of roles and assigned tasks, formulation of a team identity, and organizational culture. The conclusions drawn from this research reveal organizational and procedural barriers preventing the formation of swift trust at interagency incidents. Additionally, current training is largely ineffective at developing swift trust.

Accounts of early film have more often than not tended to observe the period less in regards to the films produced and more in a way that privileges formal developments, modes of exhibition, and audiences as the primary subjects of their investigations. This thesis aims to restore a critical interest in the films themselves as complex vessles of protean cultural meaning by placing them, and the city they capture, at the epicentre of a network of images and ideas concerning modern life. This thesis employs the early films of New York as a means of evaluating the multifaceted and multifarious ways in which modernity was impacting upon the city during the period of film's cultural ascension. By surveying a large corpus of films with an oft-neglected method, this thesis finds that many of the films capture aspects of the radically transforming city in their iconography in ways which foreground modernity's considerable impact upon the city and, contingently, modern life. This thesis applies an extensive iconographical-iconological method to the early films of New York to assess the ways in which the emerging medium enshrined the architectural, technological, and social transformations that the city fostered in light of modernity. This thesis consists of three large chapters that focus firstly on modernity's impression on New York during the period mostly associated with actuality filmmaking, secondly on the city's diverse social transformations that were articulated in early fiction filmmaking, and finally on the ways in which Coney Island on film embodies many of the principle ideas discussed throughout the preceding chapters. The research carried out over the course of this thesis demonstrates the ways in which the city was positioned as a primary subject of early New York film and anticipates the ways in which the city would come to figure as a primary structuring principle for filmmaking throughout the century.

Thesis (M.C.P.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Urban Studies and Planning, 2011.
Cataloged from PDF version of thesis.
Includes bibliographical references (p. 142-148).
This thesis explores the relationship between urban planning and public art, and questions the efficacy of past and current models, whilst pushing us to develop new ones. It strives to glean the most salient issues universal to all instances of public art, and uses four case studies to illuminate such issues in practice. Tilted Arc by Richard Serra and Metronome by Jones and Ginzel adhere to a conventional model of public art - an object in a public space, commissioned by a small group of "experts," with an essentially passive role accorded to audience. The Gates and the work of artist Mierle Laderman Ukeles emphasize ephemerality, integration and participation. While vastly different from one another, the latter two also strive to engage more directly with urban planning and political processes. Tilted Arc is the watershed public artwork, and sets the stage upon which the other three case studies unfold. Within the context of New York City's neoliberal transformation, this thesis seeks to situate public art's role in the process, capping the story with The Gates in 2005. With modernist notions of public art losing relevance, this thesis argues that unrealistic expectations are still all-too-often placed on public art, using vestigial notions of the relationship between artist and audience. Simultaneously such outdated ideas undermine the potential for us as urban planners and public art producers to find new ways of working together in the service of cities that are "revitalized, cosmopolitan, just and democratic."' Instead this thesis argues that we deconstruct concepts of form, process, and audience/intention, and reconstitute new models for public art in our cities. Optimistically I argue that such thinking is already underway in cities like New York. It is fundamental that we consider how to refine and consolidate what is working for public art, and integrate such aspects into urban planning and policy from the outset. With both public art and urban planning at a crossroads, the potential exists to think and act boldly as we move forward. Professional silos need to be regularly challenged - collaboration will be the most important ingredient needed to redefine and shape the trajectory of public art in the 21st century.
by Samantha C. Earl.
M.C.P.

Thesis: M.C.P., Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Department of Urban Studies and Planning, 2017.
Cataloged from PDF version of thesis.
Includes bibliographical references (pages 68-74).
Land buyout programs may be used to significantly improve climate resilience by creating a protective ecological buffer area to protect land at high risk of flooding. This thesis assesses the success of the New York State land buyout on the East Shore of Staten Island in achieving this resilient outcome. The New York State buyout program was created after Hurricane Sandy in October 2012 in response to pressure from landowners who had been flooded in the storm. New York City declined to participate in a buyout in response to Sandy but offered to acquire storm-damaged homes in other areas where the New York State buyout was not offered. Through the New York City program, acquired properties would be resold to private entities at auction. In contrast, the New York State program, which purchased 37 acres of land within the 100-year floodplain, was legally bound to hold the properties bought through their program as open space in perpetuity. The state was able to promise former residents that their land would become a buffer for inland areas, increasing resilience along this vulnerable coastline. I analyze the success of the state program in achieving this goal by assessing participation and attrition rates within designated buyout areas, as well as reasons for attrition. I find that the lack of coordinated goals and agreed-upon tools prevented New York Rising from successfully achieving the highest measure of resilience: creating a coastal buffer area to protect residents from sea level rise and future flooding.
by Sonja K. Boet-Whitaker.
M.C.P.

Thesis (M.C.P.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Urban Studies and Planning, 2009.
Includes bibliographical references (leaves 41-43).
One-third of the municipal solid waste stream is organic material that, when processed in landfills, produces methane, a highly potent greenhouse gas. Composting is a proven strategy for organic waste management, which also creates a nutrient-rich soil amendment. This thesis begins with a review of three North American cities (Portland, Toronto, San Francisco) that have implemented successful composting programs, but rely on trucking the material to distant processing facilities. In New York City, the Department of Sanitation has not yet implemented a citywide composting program. In this thesis I explore four small-scale compost programs in New York City. I find that citizens, working outside the purview of city government, have developed their own innovative, local approaches to composting, which suggest viable alternatives to trucking. New York has a proven capacity for managing compost locally; I argue that these models should be replicated throughout the city. I conclude that to process organic waste material properly, it should be reclassified as a food product, and its management shifted to a new city agency that would launch and support local compost programs. Case studies are compost programs operating in Central Park, Battery Park City, Fort Greene community gardens, and the North Brooklyn Compost Project in McCarren Park.
by Sarah Neilson.
M.C.P.

Thesis: Ph. D. in Architecture: History and Theory of Art, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Department of Architecture, 2018.
This electronic version was submitted by the student author. The certified thesis is available in the Institute Archives and Special Collections.
Cataloged student-submitted from PDF version of thesis.
Includes bibliographical references (pages 335-362).
In the mid-1960s, the artists who would come to occupy the center of minimal art's canon were engaged with the city as a site and source of work. These artists drew on the social, material, and spatial conditions of the surrounding environment, producing sculpture that addressed the problem of the city as a problem of the body. At the same time, minimal art was deployed by civic leaders, including New York City's mayor John V. Lindsay, as an instrument to organize a public and project a new urban image in the midst of sweeping social and economic change. The work of Carl Andre, Tony Smith, Dennis Oppenheim and many of their peers, informed by Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology, promised to heighten one's consciousness of self, others, and environment. The Lindsay administration and its allies positioned sculpture as an aesthetic rupture that could ameliorate the sensorial burden and alienation of urban life. The phenomenological and spatial claims of minimal art were adopted and mobilized by the city's power brokers as they sought to assert authority over New York. This dissertation assesses the intertwined agency of artists, political leaders, corporate stakeholders, and private developers as they made proprietary claims for urban space. In the canonical formation of minimal art, the city has been marginalized as a field of meaning. The phenomenological reading has become naturalized in historiography. Rather than perpetuate this historiographical opposition, this dissertation pursues an urban history of minimal art and a social history of its phenomenology. It focuses on artists and organizers whose work constitutes a sustained engagement with the social, material, and spatial realities of New York City in the 1960s. Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology resonated with artists in 1960s New York, in part, because it overlapped with a politics of the urban body that was developing simultaneously. The city's use of minimal art was closely related to the problematic visibility of politicized bodies. As Lindsay was confronted with issues of race, gender, and class that emerged in the wake of massive social and economic transition, his administration turned to minimal art to serve as a tangible sign of order. Sculpture was deployed as a tool to orient the body and the public within the city's new spatial realities.
by Christopher M. Ketcham.
Ph. D. in Architecture: History and Theory of Art

Thesis (M.C.P.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Urban Studies and Planning, 1985.
MICROFICHE COPY AVAILABLE IN ARCHIVES AND ROTCH.
Bibliography: leaves 65-66.
by Cristina R. Nelson.
M.C.P.

Nigerian women face numerous cultural difficulties in their quest to attain leadership positions in Nigeria, a developing country. They are often overlooked in favor of men due to politics, religious beliefs, education, and bias in gender roles. When Nigerian women emigrate to a new country, the challenges are even greater. Although several United States policies impact the ability of a female immigrant to attain a leadership position 'the Equal Pay Act, Affirmative Action, and the Equal Employment Opportunity Act' little research has examined the challenges that affect their quest to attain leadership positions in the United States. This study explored the experiences of immigrant Nigerian women currently in leadership positions in New York City. Data for this study included interviews with 12 Nigerian female immigrants who responded to flyers placed throughout New York City; participants were also recruited via snowball sampling. Interview data were inductively coded, and then subjected to a modified Van Kaam method of analysis that revealed emergent themes. Many of the respondents reported the needed to change career paths because organizations in New York City did not recognize the equivalent of their careers, work experience, and education from their home country. As a result of this research, new information will be available to policymakers, which may be used to revise existing policies that directly impact immigrant women's career goals. The results may also provide new and useful information to leaders of local organizations that help female immigrants gain meaningful employment.

Sociology
Ph.D.
This research will examine graduation rates from the 1999-2000 school year until the 2012-13 school year, which will shed light on the long-term impact of neoliberal policy on inequality. I begin with a discussion of the history of school reform in NYC, starting with the Brown v. BOE verdict and finishing at the current neoliberal reform era, to understand how various reform strategies have aimed to reduce segregation and inequality. I then use a dissimilarity index to examine changes in racial segregation by performance between 2000 and 2013, using high school graduation rate quartiles to measure performance. In the last empirical chapter, I use growth curve modeling to understand the factors that are associated with changes in graduation rates. I model the impact of several factors that measure the presence of neoliberal reform and inequality on graduation. These measures include: racial and socioeconomic composition, the impact of mandatory regents, being a small school and failing on NYC school accountability report. This research finds that policies aimed at desegregation have been unaggressive and poorly implemented, and this has resulted in persistent segregation. Neoliberal policies assume that by increasing individual choices and accountability, that all students will make the choices that are in their best interest, and inequality will be reduced. This indirect strategy proves to be ineffective. White students have experienced increased access and isolation amongst the best performing schools, while Black students have become increasingly segregated in the worst performing schools. Growth curve modeling shows a consistent increase in graduation rates over this time. This increase is lessened for schools that serve above average black, Hispanic, and free-lunch eligible students. These schools have the lowest graduation rate.
Temple University--Theses

This ethnographic dissertation project is an applied philosophical project that takes an ontological and critical phenomenological approach to the enactment of carceral bodies. This dissertation set out to answer two central questions. First, how do jail intake processes enact carceral bodies (analog and digital) and what are the ontological implications? Second, how are jail intake processes reflective of the values and logics of a carceral society? The process of answering these questions offers an early attempt at empirical abolitionist science and technology studies research as it offers an intervention in the essentializing biomedical and criminological understandings of "the criminal." This is achieved by tracing the enactment pf carceral bodies across the domains of datafication, space, and time. First, with the advent of digital technologies, the science and technology of criminality continues to be informed by the desire to use metrics to identify and define criminal man. Like their precursors, however; when taken together these quantified characteristics contribute to the production of a body predisposed not to crime but to incarceration. This predisposition arises out of datafication and algorithmic characterization. The data comprising the raw material of this assignation pulls together the digitization of one's race, ethnicity, school (reflective of the school-to-prison-pipeline), address, sex, socio-economic status, disability status, mental health status, etc. Carceral algorithms, and the structures they arise out of, inform one's incarcerability. The carceral body of data and its risks are multiple and are represented in a number of ways, just as it is experienced variously. There are infinite permutations of the intake process across which categories come to stand in for human suffering, for risk, for job performance, etc. The data generated and its infrastructures are reflective of the broader political and socioeconomic context. The role of data collection, management, and analysis surrounding the intake process makes visible the politics and stakes of the carceral bodies enacted. The two primary epistemologies and attendant professions brought to bear upon the carceral body are medicine and criminology. These epistemologies rely upon quantification, categorization, and calculations of risk to generate data from which carceral knowledge is made (and in turn makes). This project characterizes the data infrastructures of the jails as socio-technical objects, practices, and architectures that are multiple and complex. It is through this lens that managerialism, algorithms, and knowledge production are characterized. Together, these facets provide insight into the making of carceral bodies of data and the logics and mechanisms of the carceral-data-industrial-complex. Second, this project addresses the spatialities that carceral bodies are generative of and situated in. The spaces of intake are suffused with values, politics, and epistemologies that play out in a number of ways. In order draw out these facets, the ontological approach was integrated with carceral geography. This approach elevates micro-scales of space and time, placing the personal and particular beside within the broader social and political contexts. This shift in scale has important implications for the study of correctional facilities as it is from this scale that the complexities, relationalities, materialities, contradictions, and multiplicities are visible. This approach relates to Foucault's carceral archipelago, which conveys the complexities of carceral spaces, surveillances, and their leakiness. Carceral geography's reading of Foucault requires an engagement across carceral societies that incorporates the body as a prime site from which to understand complex dynamics of control. Carceral geography offers a helpful approach drawing out spatialities enacted through performances and experiences, making concertina wire fences permeable and ever-mutable. The carceral body carries carceral spaces within it and beyond it that arise out of epistemes, policies, and practices that are mutually reinforcing and enmeshed. These embodied spaces include emotions and mental self-scapes alongside digitally recorded diagnoses and correctional designations. When considering how security infrastructures permeate society, well beyond correctional facility gates, this has important implications for this carceral society. The buildings and physical spaces of incarceration are read as reflective of the values and logics of the state, this brings into view the extra-penological function of incarceration, in which specific populations are disproportionately removed and disciplined/ punished by the state even before they are determined to be guilty or not guilty by a court. This hyper-incarceration of certain populations underlines the spatial logics of carceral networks that reflect the machinations of a neoliberal state that disappears those who have been Othered via carceral networks. This takes on even more problematic hues when considering the torturous conditions unsuitable for any creature, including humans. Third, despite Western constructs of linear or absolute time, the study of the carceral temporal body demonstrates the relativities, multiplicities, and disjunctures that challenge the notion of a universal clock. This dissertation tells of carceral bodies made into and across multiple time points. Bodies become metaphoric timeclocks through managerial oversight processes in which they are assigned varying times across different electronic record systems, with these different from their time of arrest and remand. In this space, the temporal jurisdictions diverge, giving rise to frictions and conflict. Further, these assigned temporalities differ greatly from the ways time is experienced across embodied states (e.g. experiencing acute withdrawal symptoms). The theoretical frameworks employed to understand carceral time are designed to address how carceral bodies come to be anticipated. In part, this is enacted through professional and bureaucratic routines that are often protracted and repetitive. These routines give rise to waiting and urgency. This empirical engagement with carceral temporalities draws out epistemic and experiential forces. Ultimately, this dissertation suggests that drawing out the ontological multiplicities of mass incarceration can countermand its fixities and generate abolitionist epistemologies. Abolition has generative potentials that coalesce with science and technology studies' investment in the otherwise. Over time carceral abolition has come to refer to a wide range of social movements, theoretical frameworks, and activism. The various approaches to abolition share a sense of urgency and resistance to gradual or eventual change, as this has historically led to the perpetuation and maintenance of racialized criminal justice systems and mass incarceration. Carceral epistemologies (e.g. penology, criminology, biomedicine, public health) are steeped in racisms and classisms, which inform broader imaginaries of crime and criminality. As political discourse has been reduced to simplistic chants and pithy soundbites, the aim of this dissertation has been to "complicate the discourse" surrounding the carceral-industrial-complex and the carceral body in particular. Understanding the carceral body through its ontological multiplicities serves as the grounds from which resistances to the status quo can be formulated. This is vitally important in light of the diffuse assemblages detailed in this project and the pervasiveness of carceral logics. In sum, this dissertation has demonstrated that carceral bodies are made and not born. It points to the difficult work still needed and the utility of ethnography in eliciting the multiplicities of practices and materialities in carceral settings. The abolitionist dreams arising from this project demand the embrace of ontological multiplicities as new logics and imaginaries unweave the criminal justice system. While it does not fall within the purview of this project to delineate a specific set of directives, it does suggest that abolitionist dis-epistemology requires logics and tactics equally as multifaceted and nuanced as the criminal justice system itself.
Doctor of Philosophy
This is an applied philosophy project based on ethnographic research in the New York City jails. It provides insight into the practices of jail intake as a way to draw out the ways in which carceral bodies come to be enacted. The project grows out of feminist science studies. The two central questions are 1) how do jail intake processes produce carceral bodies (analog and digital) and what are the implications? 2) how are jail intake processes reflective of the values and logics of a carceral society? These questions are addressed through the domains of data, space, and time, which serve as the organizing framework of this project. The focus on intake enactments draws out the multiplicities of carceral realities, which has the potential to resist essentializing conceptualizations of the criminal. In doing so, this dissertation project demonstrates the potential for abolitionist science and technology studies to disrupt the criminal justice status quo.

Although living in the city can provide many benefits, it also provides many issues as well. Housing costs are constantly increasing, both physical and mental spaces are sacrificed, and our innate connection to nature is severed. These produce profoundly damaging effects on the human psyche and cause people to migrate from the urban to the suburban and rural areas. The solution is to design more efficient urban buildings that can actively adapt to its inhabitants' programmatic needs and utilizes wood, specifically cross-laminated timber, as its main material to reconnect with nature.
Master of Architecture

This thesis is an exercise in responsibility regarding my actions as an architect. It is based upon the belief that architecture is a product conveying culture. While architecture can convey culture, it also has the potential to shape and facilitate change q in culture. Therefore, one can view the architect as more than a technician, making architecture stand and work properly, or an artist, concerned with the aesthetic/architectonic qualities of architecture, but rather as an active entity who can both convey and change cultural values through the built environment. The struggle in this thesis regarding responsibility has been to make my role more than an active entity in culture, but a consciously active entity in culture. Since I have long viewed culture as a political product and one's existence in culture as a political act, then one’s responsibility as an architect could be to make architecture as the conscious embodiment of a political ideology. For me, feminism is the political ideology, and Liberative Architecture is the conscious embodiment.
Master of Architecture