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College of Design

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search.filters.applied.f.advisor: Stone, Brian × End date: 2024 × Start date: 2010 ×

Publication Search Results

Now showing 1 - 10 of 15
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Shared Use Path Design for User Safety and Experience

2024-05 , Lake, Connor

The following analysis attempts to explore the following research question: What surface design most effectively reduces user conflict, increases functional active mobility, and encourages user safety on shared use paths? The research question will be answered by 1) exploring different design methods for creating shared use paths that contribute to the goals state in the question via a literature review; 2) attempting to define the culture that surrounds these spaces and a brief investigation of how this culture might be changed/improved; and 3) offering a design solution to spaces experiencing user conflict and travel experience.

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Engaging Communities for Climate Resilience Planning

2024-04-25 , Van Slooten, Alaina

The field of climate resilience planning has emerged in response to the increased heat, wildfires, storms, and myriad other complex challenges towns and cities around the world are facing as a result of the climate crisis. This paper utilizes a broad definition of climate resilience, encompassing adaptation to changing environmental conditions, improving systems' ability to respond to social and environmental threats, and addressing causes of climate change. While large-scale federal and international action is crucial, climate change impacts will continue to play out among local communities of people around the world. Climate resilience planners and other practitioners will need to work with communities to better understand the threats they are facing and design interventions that provide local benefits. Because of the urgency and complexity of climate threats, as well as controversy surrounding interventions seen as green gentrification, engaging communities in climate resilience planning is uniquely challenging. This paper will examine community engagement practices in climate resilience planning, with an eye towards how they impact the implementation success of the final plan. The research question is, "what community engagement practices lead to climate resilience plans that achieve implementation steps?" First, the paper will review literature to outline the evolution of community engagement approaches and define climate resilience planning. Then, the two concepts are brought together to explore models of community engagement in climate-related planning, emerging challenges, and current guidance on best practices. Following the literature review, the paper will offer four case studies of climate resilience plans with strong community engagement. The case studies will delve into the “how” of community engagement processes with attention to equity and justice: who was engaged, at what stages in the process, and using what practices. To the extent possible using interviews and research, the case studies will connect community engagement to plan implementation: how was the plan received and progress made towards its actions and goals. Finally, this paper will identify common threads and challenges between the examples to develop actionable recommendations for climate resilience practitioners seeking to work among and in partnership with communities.

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Re-Think the Streets: An Evaluation of Green Street Practices as a Method to Achieve Combined Sewer Separation

2022-04-19 , Krieger, Jenna Elizbeth

Older cities across the United States have been grappling with how to mitigate stormwater for decades. The ongoing trend of land development coupled with the heightened frequency and intensity of storm events has necessitated costly infrastructure improvements that are short-sighted and fail to address the underlying cause of increased runoff. Green stormwater infrastructure (GSI) has recently emerged as a popular stormwater mitigation tool that mimics and restores the natural environment while providing the same functional benefits as conventional systems. The purpose of this research is to evaluate the effectiveness of GSI in roadside applications (i.e., “Green Streets”) to reduce combined sewer dependency and provide an alternative solution to sewer separation. Typically, roadways reach the end of their design life after 40 years, at which point, they are fully reconstructed. Reconstruction provides an opportunity to re-imagine the right-of-way (ROW) and shift away from conventional drainage design. The Green Street Toolkit presented in this research provides a planning and design framework that can be utilized prior to reconstruction to integrate green infrastructure into the ROW, which has the potential to eliminate stormwater runoff from the combined sewer system along the reconstructed segment. The Toolkit is applied under three design storm scenarios to evaluate the feasibility of a green street approach for varying storm intensities. Although green streets may not eliminate combined sewer dependency in every case, this work shows their potential in removing a substantial amount of stormwater runoff from the combined sewer system while providing secondary benefits not offered by conventional infrastructure.

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A methodological assessment of extreme heat mortality modeling and heat vulnerability mapping in Atlanta, Detroit, and Phoenix

2019-11-12 , Mallen, Evan Sheppard

Extreme temperatures pose an increasingly high risk to human health and are projected to worsen in a warming climate with increased intensity, duration and frequency of heat waves, further amplified by the urban heat island, in the coming decades. To mitigate heat exposure and protect sensitive populations, urban planners are increasingly using decision support tools like heat vulnerability indices (HVIs) to identify high priority areas for intervention and investment. However, HVIs often capture only proxy heat exposure indicators at the land surface level, not air temperatures that humans experience, and are highly subjective in their construction methodology. This gap can be filled using regional climate models like the Weather Research & Forecasting (WRF) model to simulate air temperatures comprehensively over a city, coupled with a heat exposure-response function to objectively estimate mortality attributable to heat. But this method is often beyond the capabilities of local planning departments due to limitations in funding or technical expertise to run the model. Careful consideration of decision support tool selection will be an important factor in determining the future resilience of urban populations in a changing climate. Through a comparative analysis, this study investigates the relationship and utility of HVIs and spatial statistical attribution models with a focus on 1) the extent to which HVI methods can replicate spatial prioritization from a WRF-driven mortality model; 2) the relative significance of place-based vulnerabilities used in the HVI; and 3) the potential to reliably replicate a WRF-driven mortality model using publicly available datasets. This information can help urban planners and public health officials improve their emergency response plans and communication strategies for heat mitigation by specifically targeting short and long-term responses where there is greatest need. These techniques equip planners with a useful and accessible tool to protect vulnerable populations effectively and efficiently with minimal public funds and could advance the policies we use to adapt to a changing climate.

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Georgia Low-Income Housing Tax Credit Program: An Analysis of Neighborhood Benefits in Fulton County, Georgia

2024-04-30 , Robnik, Hannah

The analysis attempts to quantify the benefits of affordable housing, specifically those created using federal and state LIHTC funds, to demonstrate the success of LIHTC not just in providing affordable housing for Georgians, but in increasing affordable housing resident’s quality of life and ultimately making Georgia a more livable place for all who call it home regardless of income.

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The Castleberry Hill Equitable Action Plan Framework: A Working Framework for Small Action Plans in Atlanta through Community-led Urban Design and Urban Systems Methodologies

2024-04 , Lloyd, Jack Raymond

This project and collection of work is the beginnings of a Small Area Plan for the Atlanta Downtown neighborhood of Castleberry Hill, intended to aid its planning efforts with regards to environmental resilience planning, equitable economic development, and strategy in preparation for the 2026 World Cup.

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Measuring climate resilience in the built environment around the Atlanta BeltLine

2020-07-27 , Tucker, William McKendree Daniel

There is a need to reorient the discourse around urban sustainability and, increasingly, urban resilience away from a reliance on intuition and appearance toward more rigorous evaluation of performance – particularly at the scale of interacting systems rather than individual sites. Large-scale, “sustainable redevelopment” projects are appropriate testing grounds for this kind of quantitative evaluation. This thesis looks at the Atlanta BeltLine, a 22-mile loop of repurposed rail corridor encircling the urban core of Atlanta, as a case study for measuring progress toward urban climate resilience objectives at the district scale. Specifically, it considers Subarea 5 of the BeltLine Planning Area between 2009 and 2017 in order to compare conditions before and after construction of the project’s first flagship trail and a 17-acre park. Findings suggest that the study area experienced a small net loss of tree canopy coverage (-3.3%) and small net gain in impervious surfaces (+2.4%) despite the addition of BeltLine green infrastructure. At the same time, using a methodology based on the LEED for Neighborhood Development (LEED-ND) certification system, the author estimated that just over a quarter of the study area’s “green growth” land supply – those parcels endowed with locational characteristics conducive to more resource-efficient development patterns – had been redeveloped by 2017. The findings underscore the importance of policies that explicitly seek to protect and enhance tree canopy in neighborhoods where green infrastructure is expected to spur redevelopment. It also raises questions about reconciling potential conflicts between strategies to pursue urban climate resilience through compact “green urbanism” on one hand and “green” land cover on the other.

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Municipal Food Scrap Composting Programs: What Can Atlanta Learn from Programs Around the Country?

2024-04-25 , Chen, Alicia

In 2022, the United States Department of Agriculture recognized the utility of composting programs and launched Composting and Food Waste Reduction cooperative agreements. Through the agreements, $10.2 million were awarded to fund pilot projects that develop and implement strategies for food waste reduction and compost plans (and increase access to compost for local agricultural producers). The City of Atlanta won one of the grants to pilot its own food waste composting program in 2022 and pilot programs have also been started in the adjacent cities of East Point and Decatur in 2023. As these services are being implemented, it is a prime time to explore and understand what policies should be included in a successful municipal food waste composting program and to discern how existing programs around the country are actually performing. This paper will aim to answer the following questions: Which municipal food scrap composting program best practices are actually being implemented around the country? Which best practices should Atlanta prioritize implementing in its own program?

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Towards an Edible Atlanta: Cultivating a Sustainable Urban Agriculture Plan

2024 , Patrick, Claire

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The application of ecosystem services in higher education planning: Very high research institutes

2020-04-28 , Rose, Jessica

The question this study aims to answer is “Are ecosystem services being utilized within campus planning frameworks to address human health and environmental performance?” and then –“If yes- is there an effective measurement plan associated with said services to measure success?” To answer this question, an extensive literature review was conducted to understand the current state of ecosystem services in planning in general, and planning in higher education. Through the review, it is established that including ecosystem services in planning requires a more intense level of valuation, beyond economics. Also, the most successful plans include stakeholder engagement during goal setting. Measuring the outcomes of plans is an emerging best practice in the planning industry. Next a plan evaluation index was developed and applied to a sample of very high research higher education planning documents. The evaluation uncovered that while certain R1 campuses are broadly including ecosystem services in their planning efforts, they have not yet mastered the implementation or measuring of these services. The ultimate goal of this effort is to connect research to practice. If the theory and existing analyses are better understood, then practical methods should be identified to apply to higher education planning; methods that will leverage environmental performance to positively impact human and broader ecological health.

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