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This dissertation examines the origins of a planning controversy over the redevelopment of Coney Island, a world-famous, historic, seaside amusement district in Brooklyn, New York. In 2009, the Bloomberg Administration passed a major rezoning of the neighborhood in an effort to attract development to the area. This measure inspired opposition from individuals who felt that the proposal did not honor the neighborhood's history. My research focuses on the hegemonic rationality that shaped the City's plan and on the competing logics and desires that inspired its opposition. Wide agreement about Coney Island's heritage value and foremost attributes - its diversity, authenticity, and historicity - masked profound disagreement about the proper uses of the district and about the plans for its future. To explore this disconnect, I trace it back to an interplay between divergent sets of images and experiences of the neighborhood, as mediated by its materiality, and then show how these divergences helped shape the planning process. Viewed through this lens, qualities like diversity and authenticity become not points of agreement, but windows for examining sources of contestation. They help us explain why neighborhood physical structures dismissed by the City as obsolete and disposable were regarded by others as useful and historic. In this way, my project points planning practice beyond the question of which places matter and toward questions of how and why they matter. This focus on subjective experience facilitates a deeper understanding of people's relation to places, making possible the formulation of more responsive and equitable plans. It also allows us to envision forms of conflict resolution based not on zero-sum adversarial trade-offs, which invariably favor the powerful, but on a negotiated reconceptualization of a place and of its future.

Advisors/Committee Members: Lake, Robert W (chair).

▼ This work uses definitions of the state and state theory put forth through the 1648 Treaty of Westphalia, the 1933 Montevideo Convention and the 1963 Organization of African Union Charter to analyze and compare the statehood claims made by South Sudan and Somaliland, respectively. South Sudan, as the newest member state to the United Nations serves as the case study for internationally recognized statehood while Somaliland, which declared its independence in 1991 but has yet to be recognized by any international entity functions as an example of a territory that fulfills many of the functions of a state without achieving recognition. The study uses literature on economic dependence, resource endowments, interregional conflict, state-building and ‘failed states’ to examine each territory’s ability to achieve the four tenants of statehood put forth by the Montevideo Convention: the existence of a permanent population; the occupation of a clearly defined territory; the operation of effective governance over said people and territory; and the ability to engage in international treaties. While the prevailing theory is that international recognition declares statehood already achieved, as opposed to constituting statehood itself, the two cases prove that in practice the opposite is far closer to reality – an entity’s external relationships are the determining factor in gaining recognition and becoming a full-fledged member of the international community. Advisors/Committee Members: Schroeder, Richard (chair), Ghertner, Asher (internal member), Lake, Robert (internal member).

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This dissertation examines the ways that neighborhood stakeholders inserted space and place into the school closure debate in Philadelphia in 2013. I ask, specifically: (1) how stakeholders invoked place in protesting and making sense of school closures, (2) how they understand the significance of their location (their spatial position) in the context of this debate, and (3) how they understand the significance of school closures for their neighborhoods. The project is structured around case studies of three Philadelphia neighborhoods that each had at least one school recommended for closure. I draw on video and transcription records of public meetings held during the closure debate, as well as interviews I conducted with neighborhood stakeholders in the wake of the closure process. Political protest rooted in and leveraging place is particularly significant in the context of policy regimes that prioritize mobility through the market mechanism of individual choice. My analysis in this dissertation draws out three ways neighborhood stakeholders leveraged place in a policy debate framed by such market logic: (1) using place (i.e., spatial positionality) to critique structural inequality, (2) leveraging productions of place identity as claims to space, and (3) naming the place implications of broader systemic transformation. From a policy standpoint, this project considers the ways that the failure to acknowledge the spatial implications of the marketization of public education and the place-consequences of school closures obscures inequalities reproduced through these reforms. From a theoretical standpoint, this dissertation is a study of the political capacity of situated actors and, specifically, the role of place and place identity in contesting spatial inequality.

Advisors/Committee Members: Defilippis, James (chair), Lake, Robert W (internal member), Newman, Kathe (internal member), Lipman, Pauline (outside member).

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At the turn of the century, commercial, and residential development picked up speed and began to transform the physical, cultural, social, and economic landscape of Harlem in unprecedented ways. Today, the term gentrification is coupled with the mention of Harlem. The community is relishing in resources, services, and facilities that were once inaccessible in this section of northern Manhattan. Along with these changes, the population has increased, and Central Harlem has seen its largest share of non-black and middle and upper-class residents in recent history. But, despite the heightened levels of transformation, Central Harlem is still a predominately black working-class community that continues to encounter socio-economic challenges. This dissertation explores the dualism of this reality and focuses on the lived experiences of working-class single mothers who have lived in Harlem for at least ten years, and contrasts their perception of change with that of community leaders who have on the ground experience with community and real estate development. To gain an understanding of the larger processes at play, I also include discussion regarding change as recorded in meeting minutes for the New York City Community Board 10 Housing Committee, Land Use and Landmarks Committee and Economic Development Committee in calendar years 2013 and 2014. Through interviews with research subjects and document analysis, I answer the following questions: what does neighborhood change mean to the working-class single mother, and what role do community leaders play in bringing about neighborhood change? I organize the findings into several key topics that speak to the theories presented in the literature review—poverty concentration, social mix, the meaning of place, affordable housing, place ownership, neighborhood effects, and personal efficacy—challenging some and supporting others. Implications of this research are profound and complex, and will help scholars and planners gain a stronger foothold on the unintended consequences of development and the human response to neighborhood change.

Advisors/Committee Members: Lake, Robert W (chair), Newman, Kathe (internal member), Crowley, Jocelyn (internal member), Cahill, Caitlin (outside member).

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This dissertation investigates the ability of two service treatment systems—one focusing on a lifestyles and the other on a life-chances perspective—have in addressing barriers to self-sufficiency faced by homeless clients enrolled in the Newark (New Jersey) Department of Health and Human Services (NDHHS) Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA) homeless program. The study examines how program clients fare in regards to overcoming mental health and substance abuse (MH/SA) disorders, obtaining housing and employment, and halting criminal activity after receiving program treatment services. This research provides an overview of the prominent challenges faced by homeless individuals, and adds to the growing body of knowledge on effective service interventions to assist homeless individuals achieve independent living. This investigation was accomplished through a quantitative and qualitative analysis. The quantitative analysis examined data from the Government Performance Results Act (GPRA) on 181 clients enrolled in the NDHHS SAMHSA program between 2007 and 2011. The qualitative analysis included a direct observation of program activities and structured staff and client interviews. The results from this study found a comparative benefit of the lifestyles service interventions over the life-chances service interventions in addressing clients’ outcomes related to: 1. Anxiety disorders – reducing symptoms by more than 11 days per month 2. Housing – causing a 6 times higher odds of housing for clients receiving brief treatment service intervention. 3. Employment – for each increase in lifestyles services received, clients had a 2.362 times higher odds of being employed compared to being unemployed and not looking for work. Clients receiving the lifestyles intensive outpatient service had a 53.324 times higher odds of being employed versus to being unemployed and not looking for work. 4. Illegal drug use – decreasing use by 41 percent as services got more intense. 5. Criminal activity – decreasing activity by 47 percent as intensity of services increased. The qualitative results from this study reveal that the NDHHS SAMHSA program staff viewed clients’ inability to manage existing psychiatric and addictive disorders as the primary cause of homelessness. Accordingly, the staff regarded the treatment of MH/SA disorders as essential to helping clients achieve independent living.

Advisors/Committee Members: Jagannathan, Radha (chair), Coleman, Henry (internal member), Lake, Robert (internal member), Camasso, Michael (outside member).

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In 1992, the newborn Republic of Slovenia had to decide how to become an independent nation-state in the wake of the Yugoslav breakup. Decisions had to be made by the state to determine who was allowed to remain as residents within the borders of Slovenia and who was not. This dissertation explores the aftermath of this process and introduces a human rights abuse, The Erasing. A symptom of misjudgments and systematic failures, the Erasing produced people who had been secretly removed from the legal residency rolls, but never told. These people are known as the izbrisani or The Erased. The historical and theoretical implications of this act are explored as a new type of political space outside of the inclusion/exclusion dyad. Through analyses of social care data, governmental and non-governmental organizations, and ethnographic interviews with the izbrisani, a spatial regime emerged that has implications for subject/agency studies. Statistical analysis characterizes who became erased. Participatory Action Research is used to understand the institutional response to the Erasing, and biographical writing illuminates the personal geographies of the izbrisani. The Erasing and its consequences expose the state-level need for sovereignty, the individual need for autonomy, and the balancing forces between those needs as a set of social practices found throughout human social space.

Advisors/Committee Members: Regulska, Joanna (chair), Lake, Robert W (internal member), Leichenko, Robin (internal member), Pulsipher, Lydia (outside member).

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This dissertation examines the relationship between alternative food initiatives and urban processes through a case study of the statewide local food movement in Oklahoma and its cultural, political, and economic linkages with urban redevelopment in Oklahoma City. Building on literature in geography, urban studies, and food studies, the work deploys ethnographic, participatory, and archival field research to trace the development of the local food movement and redevelopment. The state’s local food movement has grown rapidly, with a number of firms demonstrating diverse operating models and relations of production, which seek to balance economic, ecological, and social goals in varying ways and to varying degrees. The movement has also benefited from increasing support from state agencies and other organizations, and from the redevelopment strategies of Oklahoma City, which focus on quality of life initiatives aimed at attracting large companies and the well-educated labor force they require. However, the study finds that benefits to local food enterprises generated by the growth of the city’s ‘creative class’ have been uneven, due in part to increased corporate interest in specialty food markets. At the same time, local and other specialty foods have played an important role in revalorizing the urban core, from which less affluent and racial minority residents of some areas have been displaced by gentrification, raising questions about the social significance of both redevelopment and the local food movement. While these questions remain open, the study concludes by demonstrating how current efforts to create a local food hub in Oklahoma City suggest that the potential for more just and sustainable food systems and modes of urban redevelopment remains substantial.

Advisors/Committee Members: St. Martin, Kevin (chair), Schroeder, Richard (internal member), Lake, Robert (internal member), Whatmore, Sarah (outside member).

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Investors have increasingly purchased rent regulated housing in New York City with heightened expectations for financial performance. The study positions these intensified expectations within the context of loosening housing regulations, increasing investment in real estate, and the perception that expanding reinvestment in property markets delivers ever-increasing property value and rent increases. Forensically-recreated ownership and financial histories from property and financial records for 9 cases of private equity purchases of regulated buildings, involving over 100 individual buildings and more than 10,000 apartments describe investors’ financial and property management strategies. In-depth interviews with 5 real estate finance experts and observation of professional conferences evaluated the financial modeling and placed the case studies within broader patterns of industry practice and market dynamics. In-depth interviews with 2 local government officials, 8 non-profit housing developers and 3 tenant organizers explained the implications of these investments for tenants and communities, and the political and policy response. Investors purchase rent regulated buildings and speculate on rent increases using three distinct but connected strategies. First, investors perceive rent regulated buildings in or near the core of Manhattan to be ‘undervalued’, and rely on the increasing difference between regulated rent and unregulated rent to anticipate very large rent increases. Second, investors view rent regulated buildings in non-core neighborhoods that had been operated on relatively thin profit margins and/or under-maintained as ‘mismanaged assets’, and leveraged low-income tenants’ constrained position in tight and increasingly expensive rental markets to realize increased building revenues. Finally, investors approach the failure of investment strategies as another investment opportunity in the ‘distressed debt’ of the rent regulated buildings—the defaulted mortgages on the properties. By using mortgage debt to anticipate above-average profits, investors create debt-financed pressure for increased financial performance. This practice heightens tenants’ vulnerability and threatens neighborhood stability through increasing rent, harassment, eviction, and when financial expectations are not met, foreclosure and physical deterioration of housing. These problems thwart long-established community development practice and housing policy, driving tenant activism and policy to engage legal-financial mechanisms to redefine the tenant-landlord relationship and to tie financial expectations more closely to the material reality of tenants and communities.

Advisors/Committee Members: Newman, Kathe (chair), Lake, Robert (internal member), Defilippis, James (internal member), Ashton, Philip (outside member).

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This dissertation examines the role of networks in producing community gardens. It does so by tracing the flows of knowledge, labor, and materials within individual garden sites, between gardens, and between gardens, institutions and other community groups. Given the attention it has gained for themes of sustainability, local food production, and community building, it is important to understand the network dynamics through which community gardens are started, grow, and change. To this end, my study has three research questions: Which places foster community gardens? How do internal dynamics govern community garden maintenance? Lastly, how do dynamics between community gardens affect the work of garden sites? This study centers on the case of community gardening in New Jersey, but it also uses national surveys in order to ground the case study materials in a broader context. The research methods began with a survey of 445 community gardening organizations in the U.S. and Canada, followed by discourse analysis of archival documents on community gardening in the U.S. from the 1890s to the 2010s. I then conducted 48 semi-structured interviews with people involved in community gardens in 19 municipalities. Due to my methodology of tracing network connections, five of these interviews took place in Australia to investigate a partnership with a community garden in New Jersey. I was also a participant-observer in the New Brunswick Community Garden Coalition and a member of a community garden for two years, one of which I served as the garden’s president. As part of this ethnographic work, I also conducted a participatory geographic information systems project. Together, these methods revealed a complex web of resource flows and the mechanisms through which they are configured. In theoretical terms, I rethink community gardens as cooperative enterprises. This dissertation contributes more broadly to economic geography by bridging the diverse/community economies literatures with relational economic geography (REG) theory. J.K. Gibson-Graham’s diverse/community economies approaches are used in an expanding literature, but there has been little theorization of network dynamics in such studies. By drawing on concepts from REG regarding resource flows and clustering, I advance a relational conception of community economy.

Advisors/Committee Members: St. Martin, Kevin (chair), Schroeder, Richard (internal member), Lake, Robert (internal member), Tulloch, David (internal member), Lawson, Laura (outside member).

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This dissertation examines the growth and development of contemporary Mexico City from the Mexican Revolution through the present. The twentieth century birthed two Mexican ‘monsters’, I argue, the PRI—the ‘ruling party’ that dominated Mexican politics for roughly seven decades until its ouster in 2000—and the capital, Mexico City. I pay special attention to the relationship between these two leviathans as they struggled through a century of revolutionary changes. An historical exploration of this relationship yields three interrelated conflictual trajectories, each of which receives in turn a more targeted investigation through specific cases. I explore the first of these, the city’s proliferating environmental, political, social, economic, and other crises, most of an increasingly dire character, through an examination of the history of ‘the right to the city’ in Mexico City from its earliest conceptualizations in the late 1980s though the public endorsement of the Mexico City Charter for the Right to the City in 2010. My investigation moves through the second trajectory, the troubled path of democratization and party politics in the capital city, by way of a largely ethnographic engagement with a planned redevelopment project along one of the city’s historic boulevards, Avenida Chapultepec. I follow the third trajectory, the growing tension between the city and the national state and the PRI—which appears in several distinct manifestations—through an historical reconstruction of the decades-long processes of ‘political reform’ by which the city finally achieved its political “emancipation” in January of 2016, and an 2 ethnographic exploration of the contemporary social and political context surrounding these ideas and events. Taken together, the cases here considered contribute several significant conclusions and open up several new avenues for the study of urban political geography. My approach to dialectical investigation provides a basis for innovative methodological and empirical considerations, not least in the way of political imaginaries elaborated in pursuit of radical change and the potential implications thereof. The plural and shifting meanings of revolution in Mexico City, the process of battling seemingly incontestable hegemonies, and the dangers and benefits of grassroots social and political movements forging partnerships with political parties or arms of the state all likewise hold potentially pathbreaking insights for the study of the character and pace of urban political change.

Advisors/Committee Members: Lake, Robert (chair), Ghertner, D. Asher (co-chair), Newman, Kathe (internal member), Mitchell, Don (outside member), School of Graduate Studies.

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This dissertation contains information about how decentralization and spatially delimited zones have been used to govern China’s economic transformation and in what way these experiences challenge traditional debates on states and decentralization. For over three decades, decentralization has been the most significant government restructuring activity worldwide, intended to achieve development and democracy through dissolving power to local levels. However, previous works on decentralization and federalism rely on a central assumption: the fixity of a structure with unchanged boundaries of authority. The chief goal is to create a fixed structure with power and tasks (i.e., federalism) to achieve societal benefits. Not much attention has been paid to the bargaining process that keeps the authority boundaries fluid. Agamben (2011) revealed, in The Kingdom and the Glory, that governance can only exist as the unity of divergence and convergence of power. Based on this concept of a bipolar governance machine, I develop a theoretical framework that explains how intergovernmental negotiation produces different developmental paths at the subnational level. Through a close and fine-grained case comparison of the planning process of three development zones in two regions (Binhai New Area in Tianjin, Guangzhou Development Zone, and Nansha New Area in Guangzhou), I explore two questions: How does intergovernmental negotiation function as a mechanism of governance? How are paths of development differentiated by the forms of collaborative relationships? In this study, I analyze these zones as platforms for intergovernmental contestations, instead of using the conventional approach of seeing zones as examples of successful policy implementation. The theoretical framework that developed from this study can open a new window to examine multiscalar, multilevel competitive and collaborative intergovernmental interactions. This paper contributes to converting the “China story” into richer Chinese stories and also provides examples of instruments and governance structures in Chinese planning today. It also provides wider theoretical and practical relevance to spatially delimited economic zones in other countries and contains questions that challenge the theoretical understanding of the role of planning in international development.

Advisors/Committee Members: Lake, Robert W (chair), Van Horn, Carl (internal member), Kaufman, Robert R (internal member), Salzman, Hal (internal member), Wei, Yehua Dennis (outside member).

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Over the coming decades, it is likely that many places around the United States and around the world will be transformed by new efforts to produce unconventional fossil fuels. Before this development is fully underway, it is important to better evaluate how these technologies are grounded in the character of particular regions. This study sets out to gain a foothold into the ways that new unconventional energy projects and particular places are co-shaping one another. I argue that this objective can be realized by engaging and deepening dialogue between research on socio-technical transitions and research on the community experience and regional economic geographies of resource and industrial development. The overarching research questions here are: How are niche projects and regime dynamics shaped by local context. In turn how are local conditions shaped by energy projects? How do they co-evolve as socio-technical projects? I examine these questions through a case study of shale gas development in northeastern Pennsylvania, which is a new place of energy development that is only recently gaining research attention. A main objective of this dissertation is to address the need to better understand transitions by investigating interactions between shale energy technologies and northeastern Pennsylvania as a region and place. The dissertation first analyzes the history and geographic patterning of the shale mode of producing energy, highlighting the way major shale operators deploy business models and technologies that one local development official characterized as "itinerant factories." This term underscores the pace and scale of an extraction campaign, the impulse to standardize development across places, and its migratory volatility. Over five years, northeastern Pennsylvania experienced this migratory volatility as a drilling boom followed by a significant downturn in activity. The second part of this dissertation analyzes data collected through two rounds of interviews with local participants in northeastern Pennsylvania. Evidence assembled from interviews documents social perspectives on the shale gas regime, place transformation, economic development, and the challenges of governance. The research supports the proposition that making sense of energy transitions locally can be improved by linking research on socio-technical transitions with research on the community experience of energy development.

Advisors/Committee Members: Leichenko, Robin M (chair), Lake, Robert W (internal member), Rudel, Thomas K (internal member), Birkenholtz, Trevor L (outside member).

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This dissertation examines gender- and immigrant nativity-based inequalities in educational and occupational attainment, earnings and wages. It uses an intersectional theoretical framework. The first chapter asks whether mothers have lower wages than women without children, and whether any disparities vary by mothers’ nativities. The second chapter asks how second-generation immigrants’ educational and occupational attainment and earnings compare to their parents’ generation, and to a group of their nonimmigrant peers. Findings are that both first-generation immigrant and nonimmigrant mothers experience wage gaps. Corrections for additional characteristics that might differ between mothers and nonmothers reduce the sizes of gaps. Corrections for characteristics linked to decisions to immigrate increase gaps for a group of recent immigrants. Within most second-generation pan ethnic Latino and Asian groups and country of origin groups from Mexico, Cuba, the Dominican Republic, the Philippines, China and India, women’s outcome attainment levels exceed those of their mothers by more than men’s outcome attainment levels do compared to their fathers. However, gender earnings gaps persist, with men having higher earnings than women across pan ethnic groups. Additionally, despite some assimilation across generations, many disparities remain between second-generation immigrants and nonimmigrants.

Advisors/Committee Members: Rodgers, William M. (chair), Lake, Robert W. (internal member), Turshen, Meredeth (internal member), Pearce, Diana M. (outside member), School of Graduate Studies.

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Economic democracy is a framework for the cooperative configuration of society, from daily interpersonal relational practice to institutional governance, to a reconstructed set of state-market relationships and political economy. As such an overarching framework, economic democracy has many movement mothers. It is politically pluralistic and even ambiguous. This dissertation examines the work of the Bronx Cooperative Development Initiative, founded by community organizers in the Bronx in response to ongoing frustration with the process and results of planning, housing, and economic development theory and practice in the Bronx dating back decades. Rather than pursuing a strategy of cooperative enterprise development, the group is pursuing a strategy of creating a community enterprise network. This focuses on the incubation of institutional infrastructure to shift the Bronx political and economically towards economic democracy. These projects envision capacities of community-led planning and policy development, high-road small business development, advanced manufacturing and digital fabrication, education and training, as well as civic action coordination and a fund for capitalizing, investing in, and sustaining the network of institutions in the borough. Through semi-structured interviews, document analysis and participant observation, this dissertation seeks to understand how this group of people understand and define economic in this case, and secondly, how does this group of people propose to operationalize that vision of economic democracy in the Bronx? Through a multi-year embedded research process, the dissertation sketches out several core themes for how economic democracy is being developed here as a framework for shared or collective ownership of economic assets and their democratic management. This working definition arises from, challenges, and is applicable but not confined to, urban community organizing and economic development practice. It both intersects with and parallels from global anti-capitalist development frameworks and movements. Core themes arise in regard to challenging assumptions and practices of community organizing, anchor institution procurement initiatives, cooperative enterprise development, scale and scalability, and the construction of durable urban governing regimes. In the final instance, rather than a cooperative enterprise development network, BCDI’s work is seen as attempting to construct an “equity regime” for economic democracy, drawing on the lessons and failures of the progressive cities movement. This dissertation contributes to literatures of equity planning, community organizing, economic democracy, the challenges of and obstacles to constructing durable political and economic power for people of color in the United States, community-labor coalitions and alliances, and freedom struggle in the United States.

Advisors/Committee Members: Defilippis, James (chair), Lake, Robert (internal member), Newman, Kathe (internal member), Gordon-Nembhard, Jessica (outside member), School of Graduate Studies.

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Borderland communities unequally and disproportionately suffer at the altar of geopolitics. Rather than the periphery, borderlands are the epicenter of territorial conflict and contests over sovereignty. This is evident in the Republic of Georgia after the 2008 Russo-Georgian war, where the Federal Security Service (FSB) of the Russian Federation began incrementally and unilaterally demarcating sections of the boundary line to the disputed and unrecognized territory of South Ossetia. This dissertation uses a feminist geopolitics approach to critically examine the violent geography of this borderization process. In addition to performing de facto sovereignty, borderization is theorized as a biopolitical tool of leverage. Qualitative mixed methods and multi-sited ethnographic fieldwork in a series of “conflict-affected villages” adjacent to the South Ossetian Administrative Boundary Line reveal how the uncertainties of the elastic border impacts the in/security of rural populations, whose pasturelands, homes, and social worlds are now bifurcated by the hardening of this dividing line. Two in-depth empirical chapters illustrate the embodied and emotional experiences of border violence. The first chapter shows how borderization transforms borderland villages into a "neitherland," which is a type of zone of abandonment. Through an emphasis on gendered mobilities, the second chapter demonstrates how ambiguously demarcated sections of the boundary imperil men vis-à-vis women, putting them at risk of arbitrary detention by the Russian-backed security regime. Attention to the issue of restricted freedom of movement and how men confront the border regime exposes an emerging form of traumatic masculinity, reinforcing an understanding of border violence as a gendered phenomenon.

Advisors/Committee Members: Schroeder, Richard (chair), Lake, Robert (internal member), Ghertner, D. Asher (internal member), Regulska, Joanna (outside member), School of Graduate Studies.

▼ Set against a background of enduring austerity and an accelerating housing crisis, local authorities in London have started assuming a greater role in the land development process. Since 2012, a growing number of local authorities have established council-owned private companies to provide homes at a wide range of price points. The problem is that in the absence of subsides, few of the homes are at the lowest, social rents. Local authorities’ revived role in housing production has in turn raised a series of questions about recent transformations in urban governance under neoliberalism and about the role of real estate therein. Drawing on a historical and relational approach to urban political economy, this study documents the revived role of local government in housing production through an in-depth analysis of four local authorities in London, each illustrating the different drivers and motivations underpinning the use of housing companies in the capital. I investigate why, how, and to what end local authorities in London have started building and acquiring homes through local housing companies, and with what effects. In the process, I explore how the relations of risk and power associated with the ownership, financing and development of public land are re-organized along the blurry line between the state and the market. The findings of this research are based on 24 in-depth interviews with key actors conducted between 2017 and 2019 and on the study of publicly available policy documents. I find that housing companies have emerged out of a complex interaction of forces including deep cuts to local government, the defunding of social housing, the restructuring of the welfare system, the post-crisis boom in house and land prices, the deepening housing affordability crisis, and local authorities’ access to historically low interest rates on their borrowing from the Treasury. At the local level, the extent to which local authorities commodify their property is contingent on several factors including their fiscal capacities, their access to land, the conditions of their local housing markets, their relationship to the development industry, and their political orientations. Some councils like Newham have monetized their land assets to generate a revenue stream for municipal purposes. Others like Croydon and Ealing are building homes for market sale or rent to cross-subsidize homes for households on their waiting lists for social housing. Enfield and Croydon have also acquired homes from the open market to let them to homeless residents. Local authorities revived role as housing producers and land developers both supports and diverges from emerging theorizations of urban governance after the crisis. The marketization and commercialization of state-led housing provision have indeed heightened local authorities’ potential exposure to market risks, such as an increase in interest rates or a downturn in rental markets. However, contrary to prevailing conceptualizations of the role of private finance capital in urban… Advisors/Committee Members: Newman, Kathe (chair), Lake, Robert (internal member), Defilippis, James (internal member), Christophers, Brett (outside member), Ashton, Philip (outside member), School of Graduate Studies.

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The National School Lunch Program (NSLP) serves nearly 30 million students per day, many of whom regularly enjoy a healthy lunch at school. However, students often do not eat the parts of the meal considered the healthiest, and there are millions more children who do not take advantage of the program at all. If students leave the cafeteria hungry or do not eat healthy foods, the program has not fully fulfilled its ambition to “safeguard the health and well-being of the Nation’s children” (National School Lunch Act 1946). Building on the public administration concepts of street-level bureaucracy and co-production, this dissertation investigates the role of program providers and clients to better understand implementation of the NSLP and its ensuing outcomes. I use information from interviews with 45 staff members and 96 students across six school districts to suggest the factors that staff and students think contribute to students’ likelihood to take a school lunch and to eat healthy foods. I find that what staff provide and how they encourage students to participate and eat may not fully align with what students see as valuable in the program or what will actually influence their behaviors. These findings suggest that school food service practitioners, advocates, and policymakers should consider a range of factors not always highlighted in research or discourse about school meals, but which can help explain why students do or do not eat at school and thus whether the goals of the NSLP are achieved. These findings also show that to better understand implementation of public programs, especially those requiring certain behaviors from clients, it is important to examine the activities and beliefs of both the program providers and recipients.

Advisors/Committee Members: Newman, Kathe (chair), Lake, Robert (internal member), Cuite, Cara (internal member), Poppendieck, Janet (outside member), School of Graduate Studies.

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This dissertation investigates the growing integration between global capital markets and municipal finance. In the United States, financial activities make up an increasingly large proportion of overall economic activity, an expansion which is often referred to as financialization. One of the primary ways that financial markets have grown is through the transformation of various income streams into new financial instruments. In recent decades, financialization has drawn land, local governments and the built environment into relationships with capital markets in unprecedented ways. I examine a key and under-explored moment in the financialization of urban governance: the first experiments in municipally-sponsored property tax lien securitization beginning in the 1990s. Most cities that engaged in this form of financial engineering quickly abandoned it, with the notable exception of New York City, which has continued its tax lien securitization program for almost two decades. My study considers the experiences of these cities, how and why they undertook securitization, and the results of their efforts. Examining qualitative and quantitative data including ratings agency documents, private placement memoranda for tax lien backed securities, and the New York City Department of Finance annual lien sale lists, I contend that municipalities' varying experiences with this practice can reveal important insights about what this form of financial engineering offers to local governments. Analyzing tax lien securitization transactions, I show how financial intermediaries relied on the accounting and legal idiosyncrasies of asset-backed securitization to adapt the technique for municipal sponsorship. However, given high transactional costs, tax lien securitization failed to provide viable policy and financing solutions for most local governments. This study suggests that the practice endured in New York City in part because it served to reconfigure the local government's capacities and institutions in ways that met its particular needs for centralized administrative control and regulatory arbitrage.

Advisors/Committee Members: Newman, Kathe (chair), Lake, Robert W. (internal member), Defilippis, James (internal member), Gilmore, Ruth Wilson (outside member).

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In this dissertation, I examine processes of the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) to develop international soft law on biofuels and synthetic biology. I ask how decision-making happens in the unique context of this treaty and on these issues, specifically looking to the role of knowledge politics. To do this, I first establish the cultures and legal structures that have developed within the CBD’s permanent bodies, identifying characteristics that have drawn criticism but that also have the potential to establish the CBD as a productive forum for examining emerging and uncertain technosciences. I then turn to the treaty’s engagement with biofuels and synthetic biology under its “New and Emerging Issues” mechanism. I identify three main ways knowledge politics have been expressed: setting the issue’s scope; establishing appropriate sources and types of knowledge for decision-making; and the meaning and implications of scientific uncertainties. I trace how the political, scientific, and administrative bodies of the treaty have grappled with each of these aspects, in the process providing a forum for consideration of the treaty’s scope, its legal epistemology, and its approach to decision-making in a post-predictive paradigm. Research methods include textual analysis, semi-structured interviews, participant observation of CBD negotiating events, and observant participation of treaty processes through an internship and consultancy with the CBD Secretariat on synthetic biology. This dissertation speaks to scholarship on global environmental governance and the governance of emerging technologies, expanding the concept of the co-production of law and science to include soft international law and a broad range of scientific uncertainties.

Advisors/Committee Members: Schroeder, Richard A (chair), St. Martin, Kevin (internal member), Lake, Robert W. (internal member), Campbell, Lisa M. (outside member).

▼ Childcare collectives have been organizing around the country in most major cities for the past several years. Their most immediate goal is to provide childcare for local social justice organizations. They are volunteer-based collectives organizing at the local level; however, many are part of a national group, the Intergalactic Conspiracy of Childcare Collectives (ICCC). Through participant-observation of an ICCC annual meeting and interviews with childcare collective members and childcare collective stakeholders, this thesis seeks to understand how and why childcare collectives organize. The research indicates that by performing carework at political meetings, events, and protests, childcare collectives build more inclusive and sustainable social movements. This thesis explores how the practices, policies, and principals of childcare collectives turn carework from an exploited and devalued labor, into a form of political organizing that confronts and challenges patriarchy, neoliberalism, and capitalism. Advisors/Committee Members: Stinard-Kiel, Sarah, 1985- (author), Newman, Kathe (chair), Lake, Robert (internal member), Defilippis, James (internal member).

▼ During the 1970s, under the banner of environmentalism and the purview of the newly-created New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection, the State of New Jersey implemented a municipal solid waste disposal policy that called for a garbage incinerator in each of its 21 counties and the Hackensack Meadowlands District. The efforts to site the garbage incinerators led to a forceful social movement to oppose them. In the aftermath of this policy, five garbage incinerators were finally established, one of them in the Ironbound neighborhood of Newark. This facility receives the garbage not only from all of Essex County, but also from other jurisdictions such as New York City, with the environmental and quality of life impacts being borne by Ironbound’s residents. In this community, conditions of environmental injustice exist, whereby the community receives the garbage from its comparatively more affluent and whiter neighbors. Using the Ironbound neighborhood of Newark and Essex County as a case study area, this dissertation examines how conditions of environmental injustice in the Ironbound are produced and perpetuated by the collective enactment of our governmental approaches to the problem of increasing garbage production in New Jersey since the 1870s. The garbage flow control policy New Jersey implemented in the 1970s is a focus point in this analysis, but this dissertation contextualizes the incinerator location strategy within the history and geography of garbage governmental management in the state. This research is informed by the scholarly literatures in environmental justice studies, governmentality, and social science studies that examine the intersection of garbage and society. Environmental injustice conditions are generally attributed in the literature to fundamental power struggles among corporate entities and social groups waged along race and class differences, with State institutions mediating these social conflicts and brokering their outcome. Using insights from the governmentality literature, this dissertation explores another explanatory framework for environmental injustice that focuses on how our collective and mundane day-to-day enactment of garbage governmental policy fundamentally produces and perpetuates conditions of environmental injustice. In this discussion, the social science literature on garbage provides key insights on garbage as a social material subject to myriad forms of governmental interventions that attempt to shape our social relations, and into the governmental rationalities, processes, and practices that have been selected by governmental authorities and that have become embodied by us, the population, in our day-to-day lives. Fundamentally, this dissertation argues that our collective governmental approach to garbage supports the power structures and infrastructures we normally point to as culprits of environmental injustice. This dissertation uses a mixed methods approach that combines both qualitative and quantitative research methods, with the qualitative research… Advisors/Committee Members: Lake, Robert W (chair), Schroeder, Richard (internal member), Wiggins, Lyna (internal member), Ettlinger, Nancy (outside member).

▼ This thesis is a methodological evaluation of thequestion–or problem –of citizenship that explores this concept’s limits,the consequences of citizenship’s overextension,and the potential of analternative question of action for political inquiry. Through thisprocess, the thesis intervenes within citizenship studies’dominant theoretical concerns with the everyday and the constitutive other, asserting that they both maintain the citizen as the defining term of the political. It argues that this conceptualization of politics is produced by the question of citizenship, and is expressed in its assumptions of separation that reduce political action to citizenship.In contrast, aquestion of action provides an alternative engagement with politics by limiting the concept of citizenship itself to avoid defining the political and action through this term.The conclusion briefly explores posing a question of action and enumerates some potential research avenues for its actualization. Advisors/Committee Members: Loewen, Kyle, 1987- (author), Defilippis, James (chair), Lake, Robert (internal member), Newman, Kathe (internal member).

▼ Despite federal, state and municipal policies implemented since the early 20th century to reduce the prevalence of lead poisoning there are still many people living in the United States who are at-risk of being exposed to lead. In an effort to reduce lead poisoning risk further in the United States this thesis examines how various lead poisoning experts in Mercer County, New Jersey define and perceive the “lead-poisoning risk-subject.” By means of analyzing how lead poisoning experts perceive the risk of lead poisoning this research works towards understanding and deconstructing the underlying assumptions pervading within experts’ discourses surrounding who lead effects, where it is most prevalent, and what the most effective solutions are in reducing the sources of lead exposure. This research adds to the current lead poisoning literature by means of pointing out the limitations of using risk factors to define lead poisoning risk and offering a new framework through which lead poisoning risk may be more productively measured. Furthermore, this research argues that in order for there to be a permanent reduction of the sources of lead exposure the “lead problem” needs to be re-politicized and constructed as a problem which effects a variety of people living across geographical, racial and class boundaries. By means of making lead poisoning into a problem the public can “see” we may be able to truly make lead poisoning a thing of the past. Advisors/Committee Members: Sutton, Rachel L. (author), Lake, Robert (chair), Newman, Kathe (internal member), Leichenko, Robin (internal member).

▼ Cultural Muslim women in Europe continue to feature prominently in public debates on immigration, assimilation and changing societies. France in particular has gained international attention for its public discourses and resulting legal measures that target Muslim women. The 2004 law prohibiting girls from wearing a hijab in public schools stands out as one example of how Muslim women are used to symbolize what is not acceptable in French society. Geographers have used various approaches to question how and why Muslim women are treated as an exception. In this dissertation, I build upon their work by developing the concept of cultural insecurity as a departure point to analyze how Muslim women are engaging with and contesting representations that characterize them as a threat to Frenchness. Cultural insecurity is first defined as the fear of losing unifying cultural traits due to the presence of another cultural group that is depicted as threatening due to its difference and perceived inability to adapt to other cultures. I argue that a large group of non-Muslim French public actors use discourses of cultural insecurity to generate discussions and debates on how the presence of Muslim women endangers French culture. Muslim women are the focus because of the highly visible nature of veiling practices, magnified by the nature of gender relations and feminism in France. These women are represented as submissive, provoking agents, radicalized and too religious for comfort. The production of cultural insecurity relies upon the circulation of narratives that represent Muslim women as having a single threatening identity, and this emphasis on threat results in mistreatment and discrimination of Muslim women. To understand how Muslim women engage with and contest these negative representations, I coded and analyzed data from two sites: the neighborhoods of the Parisian suburb Boulogne-Billancourt and the website Oumma.com. Through observations of the neighborhood landscapes, I found evidence not only of cultural insecurities through signs and symbols but also of a dialogue between defenders of Muslims and those participating in cultural insecurity discourses. Material, offline spaces allow Muslim women to produce counter narratives that are positive through performance art, casual interactions as well as social and civic engagement. Women reported experiencing discrimination and holding insecurities of their own which are byproducts of cultural insecurities felt by non-Muslim French. The analysis of the data collected on Oumma.com reveals that online spaces provide opportunities and support the engagement and contestation of circulating narratives in ways that would otherwise not be possible in material, offline spaces. Websites and social media allow Muslim women to cross geographical barriers, facilitating the forming of social bonds, connections and the sharing of information. This act of sharing is particularly important in the context of potential discrimination, verbal abuse and physical assault linked to… Advisors/Committee Members: Ramsamy, Edward (chair), Lake, Robert (internal member), Holcomb, Bria (internal member), Rodriguez, Robyn (outside member), School of Graduate Studies.

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Starting with the knowledge of overt patriarchal structures and gender norms that affect when, where, and why women in urban India travel in public, this dissertation is an inquiry into how different groups of working women literally navigate gender and class positions while using various transportation modes. The geographies of Bengaluru and Delhi were chosen for the significant physical and social transformations that reflect realities of globalization, conflicting political ideologies, internal migration, and rapid urbanization. These changes are embedded within slick metro systems, the millions of new car owners, company provided transportation for employees of multinationals, and failing public bus systems. They are transcribed onto the bodies of urban women in which a tension between mobility in a literal sense and immobility with respect to gender norms and socio-economic hierarchies constantly plays out. The project investigates the daily mobility practices of four populations of working women: women in Bengaluru’s IT sector, young, unmarried women staying in Delhi’s working women’s hostels, women working in Delhi’s retail sector, and women bus conductors in Bengaluru. A mixed methods approach of surveying, interviewing, and participant observation is utilized in order to understand what modes these women use for commuting in the city and why these modes are chosen. The primary aim is to locate the influence gender and class has on these commuting decisions. Rooted in Right to the City activism, social exclusion research, and feminist epistemologies, this project is motivated by the reality that transportation decisions for women are inherently gendered, especially in respect to concern for personal security. At the same time, transportation mobility cannot be reduced to gender alone. Urban women do not constitute a cohesive user category and policies that improve the mobility of one group can exacerbate socio-economic inequalities of others. To illustrate this, a comparative analysis is used. However, by focusing on qualitative evidence, the project locates individual agency within these women, the various ways in which women navigate through and around physical and social structures that restrict women’s mobility. To conclude, this dissertation argues that the act of commuting in the city is one salient and important way in which a renegotiation of gender norms and class positions can be achieved.

Advisors/Committee Members: Noland, Robert (chair), Lake, Robert (internal member), Turshen, Meredeth (internal member), Balakrishnan, Radhika (outside member), School of Graduate Studies.

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Disparities in breast cancer mortality are explored through a complex set of political and economic circumstances. The forms of social injustices derived from inequitable income distribution and through systematically diminishing resources for social programs are central to this research. Quantitative research methods are used to determine if political, economic and demographic factors are associated with breast cancer mortality. Using data from the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality's: Monitoring the Health Care Safety Net Dataset for States and Counties, the results demonstrate that communities that have hospitals with a major teaching status have an effect on breast cancer mortality. The results also showed that race had a minimal effect on the breast cancer death rate in the presence of political and economic factors. However, these results do not explicitly confirm that breast cancer mortality can be explained from a political and economic perspective or that race determines causality. A qualitative analysis is performed and serves to supplement the quantitative findings. A case study analysis of four states with high and low income inequality examines if investing in critical resources for a breast cancer screening program could offset mortality. The results did not substantiate that investing in targeted recruitment of selected groups, outreach activities or funding resources results in lower mortality. This research broadens existing scientific perspectives that address the impact of race, culture and poverty on mortality. The social construction of race and disease impacts program delivery and funding on current breast cancer prevention programs. Such programs devise behavioral models as a preventative measure. Programs that integrate political and economic factors could be a crucial determinant to improving breast cancer outcomes.

Advisors/Committee Members: Taylor-Jones, Monica (author), Cantor, Joel (chair), Jagannathan, Radha (internal member), Lake, Robert (internal member), Wailoo, Keith (outside member).