An Integrated Model of Community Technology: An Asset-based Approach to Community-based Computer Learning Programs

This research investigates how city-sponsored community technology centers (CTCs) in a dense urban area operate and sustain their services. In this research, a working CTC is interpreted as both being able to continually provide computer access and training to underserved populations, as well as being sustainable, both institutionally and financially. This research also attempts to build a linkage between the community technology movement and the rich body of knowledge regarding asset-based community development.

Based on three major bodies of literature: (1) the digital divide, (2) CTC practice, and (3) asset-based community development, this research establishes a three-layered CTC operation model, which identifies 15 key factors relating to CTC operation and sustainability. The current research, by testing the applicability of this theoretical model, further characterizes these locally-led and community-based CTC initiatives in greater depth. The key concepts and methodologies emerging from the theoretical model together build the empirical framework for the current research, which in turn guides the qualitative analysis of the study. The primary research tools include: (1) semi-structured interviews, (2) surveys, and (3) document reviews and secondary sources.

The research findings emerge from examining five CTC projects in the City of Seattle. These findings confirm that the five study cases help empower individual learners by providing a supportive learning environment and offering useful and practical learning materials. The findings also show that the five programs maintain their functioning and service capacities by building a strong foundation and securing three critical operating resources: (1) technological, (2) facility, and (3) personnel resources. The evidence also shows that these programs nurture community partnerships with other organizations and institutions as a means to leverage key operating resources from within the communities, which they serve. The research findings prove that the five programs take an asset-based approach to identifying resources already existing within their communities. They focus internally on community needs and relate their services to issues facing community members. They also employ relationship-driven strategies to maintain and strengthen partnerships with community members and other concerned parties, including issuing newsletters or other publications to keep members informed and fostering personal relationships among volunteers and support groups.

The empirical findings identify two additional factors and lead to a revision of the theoretical model. This re-conceptualization of the CTC practice helps clarify the actual working relations among all CTC operating factors identified in the theoretical model. The current research also offers policy recommendations for both public and non-profit sectors, which suggest more tangible forms of assistance from both city agencies and community-based organizations.

The Production of Bare Life and Spaces of Possibilities for Alleviating Homelessness in Seattle, Washington

My research is a multi-sited ethnographic analysis of the disconnections and contradictions between: (1) the spatial practices and meanings of home among adult homeless individuals and (2) the conceptions of housing and meanings of public space among policymakers, providers, advocates and law enforcement. Lefebvre's social production of space triad is my primary theoretical framework; I also leverage Agamben's concept of bare life to more precisely reveal the political consequences of these disconnections and contradictions on the lives of homeless individuals. From an initial sample of 80 homeless individuals I interviewed, I analyze narratives from ten individuals whose spatial practices prioritize four meanings of home (safety, stability, senses of self-worth and self-sufficiency, and sense of belonging) which they are not able to create in current housing and shelter options. Supportive housing is the dominant housing model among policymakers involved in Seattle's ten-year planning effort to end homelessness, where the goal is to rapidly move people off of the streets into housing. Within government definitions of homeless individuals and concepts of housing are specific meanings of public space as unsuitable for human habitation. Ignored are culturally contingent meanings of home that do not meet government defined housing models. Law enforcement officers create regulated public spaces while recognizing the futility of forcing homeless people to move as a strategy to address homelessness; instead, these ordinances serve to maintain specific meanings of public space where homeless people are not tolerated. One result is the binary categorization of homeless people as either compliant consumers of services and supportive housing, or as deviant criminals illegally occupying public spaces. Providers and advocates not associated with the ten-year plan have greater conceptual diversity related to housing and re-frame it in terms of social and economic justice agendas; their work addresses the failures of housing programs and could potentially be effective in resisting the production of bare life for homeless individuals. I advocate for the production of more diverse and humane housing options based on a robust pluralism of home, and provide nine recommendations to minimize the disconnections and contradictions.

Building Political Engagement in Multi-ethnic Communities: Toward a Multicultural Empowerment Praxis for Planning

White Center, WA is home to multiple ethnic groups from across the globe. Public outreach around the neighborhood's annexation process has experienced classic problems faced in neighborhoods and cities across the U.S., a lack of inclusion of residents of low-income, and people of color. Transformative planning theory specifically addresses inequality and power imbalance between social groups. However, the theory provides little direction within a multi-ethnic context, and little understanding of how and why transformative planning actually happens (Clarke 2005; Beard 2003). I propose that empowerment theory, developed within the fields of social work and community psychology, provides a useful conceptual framework and strategies to empower marginalized groups in multi-ethnic communities. In this dissertation I apply empowerment theory to a multi-ethnic coalition called the Trusted Advocates and its work towards community empowerment especially within the neighborhood's annexation process. Empowerment theory holds that people and communities need critical consciousness, or understanding of how their individual and collective problems stem from lack of power in order to act to solve their problems. Through analysis of data from two years of ethnographic research, including participant observation in the neighborhood and 40 semi-structured interviews, I articulate a multicultural empowerment praxis with the aim of helping planning scholarship, education and practice to more effectively facilitate empowerment of groups that lack power particularly where racial or ethnic differences exist.

Discarded Needles and the Urban Environment: A Spatial Analysis of Attractors, Deterrents and Disposal Options

Needles discarded in open spaces by injection drug users (IDUs) represent an important sign of social disorder that degrades community quality-of-life and provokes intolerance of much-needed health services, such as needle exchange programs (NEP). Discarded needles (discards) also represent a rare means of studying the environmental behavior of IDUs, as typically a needle is discarded at or near the site of injection.

Here harm reduction and risk environment theory provide a framework for two distinct analyses of an exceptional set of discard data, which includes the geocoded locations of over 7,000 needles collected monthly over a five-year period for a 2.5km 2 (one square-mile) area encompassing the most active drug-use neighborhood in Montréal, Canada.

The first analysis was an assessment of a safe disposal program. It used Quasi-Poisson regression to compare discard rates before and after the installation of needle drop-boxes, adjusting for known time-dependent covariates. Drop-boxes were associated with large reductions in discards; the association was inversely proportional to distance: reductions ranged from 59% [95% CI: 30-76%] for areas within a 200m (656ft) walking distance around drop-boxes to 96% [95% CI: 91-98%] for 25m (82ft) walking areas.

The second analysis, which required innovative GIS-based environmental measurement techniques, was more exploratory in nature. It followed a spatial case--control approach to test a conceptual model of the ecology of discarding, operationalized through 35 measures of the physical and social environment, of which 18 were significant. The strongest apparent attractor of discards was proximity to a single point-of-sale; the strongest apparent deterrent was visual exposure. Measures of drug and drug-funding acquisition were most frequently associated with discards. Measures of social control were surprisingly poor predictors of discards.

The dissertation's findings provide evidence that (a) IDUs are socially conscious, if highly constrained, individuals who will make significant efforts to reduce their harm to others when provided with the means to do so; and (b) their spatial behavior is adaptive, partially predictable, and influenced measurably by environmental settings. Taken as a whole, these findings suggest that physical interventions--whether service provision or urban design--are promising tools for reducing discards and managing public injection.

Modeling of Micro-Spatial Employment Location Patterns and its Application to the Puget Sound Region: Count and Choice Approaches

This dissertation studies employment location patterns in the Puget Sound Region of Washington State at a micro level of geography and attempts to suggest analytical methods that can be used when such micro levels of geography are used, answer some unanswered empirical questions, and thus develop a planning-oriented modeling capacity to inform local economic development policies.

Finally, the dissertation undertakes a proof-of-concept application to a planning analysis, simulating the predicted number of new small-and-medium sized retail establishments that would be created by up-zoning commercial or residential densities in Urban Centers in King County, and demonstrates that models developed in this study have a range of possible planning applicability such as suggesting ways to promote economic development in targeted urban centers.

Toward a More Complex Understanding of Urban Stream Function: Assessing Post-Development Recovery Period and Channel Morphology and the Relationship between Urban Built Form, Land Cover Pattern, and Hydrologic Flow Regime

Past research has clearly identified the differences between undeveloped stream ecosystems and those located in an urbanized watershed by relating stream health to the amount of development. These findings largely categorize urban streams has highly degraded. Missing from these findings is an assessment of the factors that contribute to the more subtle differences between urban streams. This type of assessment requires inclusion of additional variables and more complex means of measuring the urban context. My research sought to include time in the assessment of urban stream channel morphology and to assess the relationship between urban built form, land cover pattern, and hydrologic flow regime. By evaluating channel morphology on a temporal scale and relating hydrologic flow regime to urban form and land cover pattern, I ask two questions: (1) Does urban stream channel morphology relate to the length of time it has to adjust to urban development? (2) Does hydrologic flow regime relate to urban built form and land cover pattern?

The length of the adjustment period was based on the year when 80 percent of the current built structures in a watershed were completed. Streams were surveyed for geomorphic channel unit sequence and length, pebble size, bank heights, and channel widths. To answer the second question, urban built form (block size, road density, dwelling unit density, floor area ratio, lot coverage, and parcel size) and land cover pattern (aggregation index, patch density, percent area, and interspersion and juxtaposition index) were assessed for relationship to the flashiness of the urban flow regime.

The results confirm past findings that imperviousness is the most dominant predictor of channel morphology and flow regime. However in the case of pebble size, bank heights, and the ratio of wetted to bankfull width, the adjustment period length was found to partially counteract the effects of imperviousness. This indicates that urban streams do adjust or partially recover from urban impacts if given enough time. Flashiness of the urban flow regime responded to increased road density, floor area ratio, lot coverage, and dwelling unit density. The interspersion and juxtaposition index for grass and high urban aggregation index were associated with both TQmean and median percent change in mean daily flow. These findings have relevance to planning in two ways: (1) grass is identified as a critical indicator of urban impacts in addition to impervious surfaces; and (2) measures of urban form are demonstrated to be effective indicators of hydrologic impact, which positions these impacts in direct relation to measures more commonly used in planning.