Spatial Thinking as an Analytical Lens for Bilateral International Development: Lessons from the Harbor Reconstruction Project in Jamestown, Accrak
This thesis examines transcalar tensions that emerge from urban infrastructure development projects funded through bilateral foreign assistance mechanisms. Using a mixed-methods case study approach to gather data from a wide variety of historical and contemporary primary and secondary sources, this research centers a harbor revitalization and port reconstruction project in Jamestown, a historic fishing community in Accra, Ghana. Having coordinated plans with the Ghanaian national government, a Chinese stateowned construction firm began working on the port in 2020. In 2024, the revitalized harbor and expanded port were officially handed over to the government of Ghana in a widely attended ceremony. The spatial implications of this physical urban infrastructure project across international, national, municipal, and local levels are complex and interrelated. Therefore, this case study is especially relevant at a historical moment when the nature of bilateral engagement may be undergoing significant transformation.
This thesis argues that spatial thinking, a foundational concept in urban planning, is a necessary analytical lens to incorporate within international development practice. Despite its relevance, spatial thinking has not been meaningfully incorporated into international development policy or implementation. Therefore, this thesis seeks to bridge epistemic gaps between urban planning and international development by advancing a spatial thinking framework, adapted for use in international development contexts. In doing so, this thesis envisions a future for bilateral development assistance that delivers equitable and sustainable development outcomes across scales of engagement. This approach, rooted in spatial thinking, intends to respond to local community needs and aspirations, capacitate municipal governments, align with national priorities, and accommodate geopolitical dynamics that facilitate bilateral project implementation.
Devora Barrera Gonzalez
Thesis Advisor: Catherine D’Ignazio
“Can Planning, A Tool For Colonization, Be Decolonized?
MIT’s Funding at the Expense of Indigenous Peoples Through the Morrill Act”
This thesis questions whether planning and the activities the profession’s umbrella covers are beneficial or harmful. The project analyzes the role of planning in the colonization of Turtle Island by materializing and legitimizing the seizure of Indigenous Land through planning practices like urbanization, enclosure, the creation of Indian reservations, and tools like cartography, lawfare, and landscape architecture and design. I make an argument in this thesis about how there is no such thing as sustainable or beneficial urbanization because urbanization equals death, that planning is inherently harmful because it was born as a tool of colonization, and that there is no way to decolonize the profession, given that the profession upholds the current land system, I make an argument that the only solution to reverse and undo the harm done by planning and urbanization is to give Land Back to Indigenous Peoples. For this, building my argument, I will walk you through the narrative built to dispossess land, the concept of imaginary geography,
how planning enabled and legitimized different ways for land dispossession, and finally, the modification of land (urbanization). A chapter is dedicated to looking closer at one piece of lawfare in particular: the morrill act, revealing the history of the foundation of MIT at the expense of Indigenous Peoples, the role that universities play in the maintenance and strengthening of the systems of oppression in place. Using that information to answer the calls for decolonization of the profession, this thesis makes an argument and underscores that, given that planning is born as a tool for colonization, the profession can’t be decolonized and demands Land Back as the only solution. The thesis presents the information on two parcels that belong to the Confederate Tribes of Coos, Lower Umpqua, and Siuslaw Indians, located in the state of Oregon, that were seized and, through the morrill act, resold with the proceeds benefitting MIT, calling for the restitution of the parcels and giving Land Back.
Amanda Bendixen
Thesis Advisor: Janelle Knox-Hayes
Relationality and Reciprocity in Civic Design: Public Engagement and Offshore Wind Development in the Gulf of Maine
Offshore wind projects are inherently complex, requiring the integration of social, environmental and technical planning. Meaningful engagement with communities is critical to ensuring procedural fairness, trust and equity throughout the development process. Yet, the role of civic design in shaping these outcomes remains unexplored. This thesis investigates how relationality and reciprocity are cultivated through the civic design of public engagements for offshore wind development in the Gulf of Maine. Through qualitative analysis of public meeting transcripts – using thematic coding and memo writing in Atlas.ti – this study identifies civic design elements and recurring engagement themes.
The findings highlight relational accountability as a mechanism for building trust, transparency and procedural fairness. They also explore how civic design can support reciprocity, while revealing how structural barriers can undermine relationality. This research demonstrates the possibilities and limitations of civic design in fostering relational and reciprocal public engagements. It concludes with recommendations for incorporating civic design elements that promote sustained, reciprocal relationships and long-term community involvement in offshore wind development.
Mikel Berra Sandin
Thesis Advisor: Andres Sevtsuk
Housing In European Metropolises: Supply Dynamics and Planning Frameworks in Large Urban Areas of the EU
Europe’s housing affordability crisis presents significant territorial challenges, particularly as housing demand increasingly spills over from inner cities to surrounding municipalities at the metropolitan scale. This study addresses key policy questions regarding the coordination of housing supply and planning instruments in large urban areas of the European Union.
Focusing on 23 large Functional Urban Areas (FUAs), the research follows a three part approach: a quantitative analysis of municipal-level housing production and demographic growth between 2011 and 2021 based on Census data; an analysis of the effects of housing supply on housing prices; and an AI-powered quantitative examination of urban plans, at municipal, metropolitan, and regional scales to observe whether they establish housing supply goals. This methodology generates evidence on the spatial dynamics of housing development, by creating an EU-wide database at municipal granularity, while providing a novel
focus and analytical approach to institutional urban plans as drivers of housing supply.
Findings prove mixed alignments between housing supply and demographic growth, with Southern and coastal urban areas falling short on housing supply. In most cases, there is a pronounced metropolitan effect, where peripheral municipalities experience larger housing and population growth. When analyzing the plans, more frequent planning relates to larger housing provision. In addition, the research highlights that housing goals are usually determined at local plans, showing a mismatch between planning efforts and housing dynamics, which tend to be metropolitan or regional. Therefore, the research deepens the understanding of European housing provision and the planning of urban territories, highlighting the need for stronger housing policy mechanisms at the metropolitan level.
Smriti Bhaya
Thesis Advisor: Svafa Gronfeldt
Enhancing Impact Evaluations of Water Organizations in India: Leveraging Technology for Impact Evaluation
The thesis investigates impact evaluation practices and frameworks for water provision projects in India, motivatedv by the critical need to improve access to safe drinking water and enhance decision-making in the sector. Various stakeholders in India’s water sector, including INGOs, multilateral banks, local organizations, and startups, implement water provision projects, but their impact evaluation methods vary widely. This study conducts a comparative analysis of these methods, identifying best practices and exploring the use of technological tools, particularly spatial analysis, to address gaps in existing impact assessment practices.
The methodology involved analyzing secondary data from various stakeholders to comprehensively understand current practices and explore innovative approaches to impact assessments. An open-access spatial analysis toolkit was developed for the thesis, which local organizations can adopt. Due to limited primary data viability, simulated data based on variables typically used in impact assessments was
employed.
Findings revealed significant variations in the methods and practices across different stakeholder groups and challenges in adopting standardized metrics. The research highlighted the potential of technological tools, especially spatial analytics, in addressing data gaps and improving assessment efficiency and accuracy. The study proposes recommendations for key stakeholder groups, including INGOs, multilateral banks, local organizations, startups, government agencies, and tech companies. These recommendations range from implementing lean impact assessments and utilizing existing data to developing standardized metrics and cost-effective technological solutions.
Implementation challenges, such as resource constraints, data issues, and ethical considerations, are discussed. The study underscores the need for future research on cost-effective technological solutions and collaborative approaches to impact evaluation in India’s water sector, emphasizing the ongoing importance of improving impact assessment practices to enhance water provision efforts.
Jake Boeri
Thesis Advisor: Eric Robsky Huntley
Understanding Micromobility in New York City: An Examination of Vehicle Type Use and User Behavior in Protected Bicycle Facilities
A shift towards the use of micromobility vehicles (MMVs), specifically motorized two-wheeled vehicles in urban mobility networks, has gained significant attention over the past decade. Many have commented on a perceived increase in MMV use in New York City (NYC) in particular, a trend that appears to have accelerated in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic and in response to the expansion of high-quality bicycle facilities across the city. However, the extent to which different types of MMVs are used and related rider behavior is poorly understood, forcing policymakers, planners, elected officials, and community members to develop policies and infrastructure with inadequate information. Through direct observation of 9,629 vehicles across five locations, this thesis provides a degree of ground truth and an initial understanding of the prevalence of different MMV types used in protected bicycle facilities in NYC and related user behavior, including commercial application of these vehicles, helmet use, and passenger
presence. The findings of this study point to a surprisingly high use rate of motorized MMVs in protected bicycle facilities in NYC. Users were significantly more likely to wear a helmet when using a non-motorized vehicle than a motorized one, with helmet use varying substantially across vehicle classes. Modal split of MMV types, commercial use, and cargo vehicle use varied by both location and time of day, pointing to uneven distribution across the mobility network. There were substantial differences between the manual count from this study and automated bicycle counts generated by the New York City Department of Transportation over the same period, indicating a systemic undercounting of MMV use by the automated count system. In response to these findings, a series of recommendations are provided for how NYC and other cities with both developed and developing MMV networks can promote and guide safe, equitable, and sustainable mode shift as micromobility use expands. These proposals include policy and spatial planning improvements that should be part of a response to widespread MMV adoption, and the ongoing transformation of how protected bicycle facilities are used.
Mo Bradford
Thesis Advisor: J. Phillip Thompson
Rebuilding Civic Infrastructure for Equitable Development: Intermediary Solutions for Transforming ResourceExtractive Economies in Rural Southwest Arkansas
Southwest Arkansas, a rural and mineral-rich region, is entering a new wave of resource-driven economic activity fueled by lithium extraction. While local leaders are pushing for rapid industry development to counter long-standing socioeconomic decline, this research asks a critical question: Can these pro-industry strategies truly deliver equitable and lasting public benefits, or will they repeat historical patterns of extraction that have sidelined local communities?
This study critiques neoliberal development schemes and neoconservative, sectionalist ideologies that deprioritize equity-driven agendas and prioritize deregulation and private sector efficiency, arguing that such approaches often weaken institutional civic organizing and reduce responsiveness to public needs. As an alternative, it proposes civic infrastructure development as a strategic solution, one that strengthens the networks
of community institutions, local governments, and intermediary organizations essential for advancing equity in extractive economies.
The research further explores the role of intermediary organizations in bridging institutional and capacity gaps in Southwest Arkansas. These organizations can support under-resourced communities by providing convening power, technical assistance, and financial resources.
Through policy analysis, case studies, and field interviews, this work examines how civic infrastructure and intermediary support can work together to shift economic development toward more just and inclusive outcomes in resource extractive economies.
Julia Christina Camacho
Thesis Advisor: Garnette Cadogan
Wandr: A Digital Tool to Improve Everyday Walking Experiences
Walking is one of the most environmentally friendly and physically beneficial forms of active transportation. In addition to this, walking also has numerous mental and social benefits. However, many people face barriers to integrating walking into their everyday habits and routines due to the high activation energy needed to plan and navigate safe and fulfilling walks. As past research has found that mobile apps help make beneficial habits such as exercise and language learning more consistent, an app or digital resource could also help people walk more often. Current navigation, fitness, social media, and selfcare apps and digital tools, however, fail to address the unique needs of pedestrians.
This thesis explores how digital tools can improve everyday walking experiences by enabling better route planning, navigation, exploration, and learning. In particular, this research examines this question by designing Wandr, a mobile app that increases the ease of route planning and navigating and facilitates social exploration of urban environments. Namely, this thesis utilizes an agile development process common to
software design and product development to develop Wandr through competitive research and testing, user interviews and surveys, user personas, user journey mapping, user interface prototyping, and market analysis.
The iteration of Wandr produced in this thesis aims to serve young adults seeking to prioritize mental health and self-care and more deeply experience and engage with the world around them. In particular, Wandr aims to address the unmet needs that these users face by enabling them to reach their goals of walking and exploring more in their day-to-day routines and lives. However, in future iterations, Wandr can be expanded to serve an even larger user base. Ultimately, Wandr can help all people unlock and experience the transformative benefits of daily walking, achieve more peace and fulfillment in their lives, and contribute to a more environmentally sustainable future.
Faith Cerny
Thesis Advisors: Siqi Zheng, Albert Saiz
Accelerating Mass Timber Adoption in Greater Boston, Massachusetts: A Practical Study for Local Real Estate Developers
Today’s real estate development strategy must incorporate decarbonization to mitigate the built environment’s detrimental impact on climate change. Beyond required climate action, developments are increasingly seen as responsible for improving occupant health and wellbeing. Furthermore, industry stakeholders are tasked with efficiently delivering sustainable, high quality, and affordable housing in dense, urban areas to meet a growing demand. As the stakes intensify and demands of real estate development increase, projects face multiple barriers to implementation. This thesis explores mass timber construction as a viable solution to modern development challenges. While research content derives from multiple geographies within North America, a particular focus on the relevance and utility for Greater Boston, MA, USA is maintained. The thesis comprises five chapters. Following an introduction, the second chapter provides an overview of mass timber as an evolving building technology with an
emphasis on how and why it is gaining momentum as a viable and preferred alternative to traditional building materials. The section conversely discusses commonly cited drawbacks delaying industry acceptance. The third chapter explores mass timber adoption at multiple scales, including studies of innovative projects proving achievement of development objectives despite challenges. Guided by insights from interviews, this chapter discusses stakeholders’ current understanding of the material and motivations for its use, perceived feasibility constraints as well as believed opportunities for its incorporation and proliferation, with a focus on Greater Boston. The fourth chapter considers methods to accelerate the rate of mass timber adoption, including facilitation of local development strategy. The section builds on research and interview findings to establish key considerations when evaluating a mass timber project and to propose an analytical framework for real estate developers to holistically assess the value of incorporating the material in their projects. The concluding chapter speculates the local arc of adoption and subsequent impacts of widespread mass timber project implementation for the city and region.
Sofia B. Chiappero
Thesis Advisor: Catherine D’Ignazio
When Public Space Goes Digital: Rethinking Urban Planning with Insights from Letra Ese
Digital public spaces have become vital for organizing, belonging, and community-building, particularly for marginalized groups such as the LGBTQ+ community, who are increasingly excluded from both physical and online public spaces. Yet, the design of these digital spaces is largely shaped by profit-driven interests rather than the needs of the communities that rely on them. This thesis addresses this gap by asking: What if we treated digital spaces with the same care and intention we demand from our physical public spaces?
To explore this question, the thesis brings together frameworks from urban planning, LGBTQ+ advocacy, and digital design. It proposes a reframing of “urban planning” to include “digital urban planning,” grounded in principles of rights, care, safety, and collective memory. Through a feminist urbanist lens and systems thinking, the work challenges the separation between physical and digital cities.
Methodologically, the project moves beyond traditional research approaches, incorporating Conversational Design and the Relational User Framework to co-create knowledge with activists. The resulting contributions include both a prototype and a roadmap for a digital public space that supports and amplifies LGBTQ+ advocacy; not as a technical fix, but as a speculative and participatory framework for reimagining digital public infrastructure.
This research is grounded in a case study of Letra Ese, an activist-led LGBTQ+ organization in Mexico. The case illustrates how such groups navigate systemic neglect while leveraging technology to document violence and sustain community. Ultimately, the thesis offers a starting point for rethinking the design of digital public spaces and argues for the inclusion of digital environments within the domain of urban planning, recognizing that for many, especially marginalized communities, much of life is already lived online.
Milan Chuttani
Thesis Advisor: Karilyn Crockett
The Community Retrofit Trust: Incentivizing Deep Energy Retrofits in Massachusetts’ Triple Deckers
To meet its 2050 net-zero carbon emissions goals, Massachusetts must rapidly retrofit its aging stock of three-story multi-family homes, also known as “Triple Deckers.” However, high upfront capital costs, disparities between subsidized gas and electric energy rates, complex eligibility criteria, and misaligned incentives for landlords and renters constrain the widespread adoption of deep energy retrofits (DERs) in small multifamily homes.
Drawing on energy democracy and reparative planning theory, this thesis reframes Triple Decker retrofits as a pathway to social and spatial transformation that empowers residents through cooperative participatory processes. This project proposes a practical framework for a “Community Retrofit Trust” which uses systems of distributed energy savings, community ownership of DER assets, and cooperative governance to ensure tenants, building owners, and neighbors in environmental justice communities share benefits from DERs while maintaining rental affordability. A
proposed values-based decision-making process also helps community cooperatives adapt the Retrofit Trust’s framework to their unique social contexts.
Descriptive case studies of two community solar initiatives illustrate how cooperative approaches that build trust, bundle projects and local expertise, and expand opportunities for participation can efficiently distribute energy benefits across a community while increasing investment and lowering costs. A feasibility analysis of a Community Retrofit Trust in Boston examines the strengths, challenges, and contradictions of incentivizing Triple Decker DERs through a cooperative approach.
Zoe Cina Sklar
Thesis Advisor: Mariana Arcaya
Decarbonization at the Neighborhood Scale: Challenges, Learnings and Opportunities in an Emerging Model
Decarbonizing residential buildings in the United States is critical for reaching climate goals and has significant public health and energy justice benefits if accessible to all. To date, building electrification has been individual-level and market-driven, with some financial incentives at the state and federal level. This model is generally inaccessible to low-income homeowners and renters who are unable to afford the upfront costs of building improvements and new electric appliances. Neighborhood-scale building decarbonization has been proposed as an alternative in which new developments would be built all-electric or existing buildings would be electrified at the block or neighborhood scale. In the latter use case, neighborhood-scale building decarbonization is often tied explicitly to decommissioning gas lines. Proponents specifically posit that these projects could be funded through avoided gas line maintenance costs. Investor-owned utilities are seen by some experts in the space as key to the success of neighborhood-scale building decarbonization because of their financing
capabilities and existing role in providing heating and/or electric service to customers. In recent years, a number of state legislatures have passed legislation approving utility-funded neighborhood-scale building decarbonization and state utility commissions have promulgated regulations approving cost recovery for these projects. Utilizing desk research and informant interviews, this paper analyzes what has enabled and hindered existing utility-funded neighborhood-scale building decarbonization pilot projects in California, Massachusetts, and New York. I diagnose strong and specific climate goals, the passage of enabling legislation, an engaged state utility commission, and strong advocacy ecosystems as key factors for initiating neighborhood-scale pilot projects. Through informant interviews, I identify costs, financing, community buy-in, and planning as central themes in project implementation and the future of the model. I close by offering recommendations and outstanding research areas for planners and policymakers interested in pursuing future neighborhood-scale building decarbonization projects.
Lucy Corlett
Thesis Advisors: Mariana Arcaya, Eran BenJoseph
Beyond Safety and Surveillance: New Possibilities for Public Light After Dark
As cities refocus planning and design goals in response to evolving global standards for urban well-being, sustainability, and spatial equity, research on best practices and innovative considerations for the public realm has expanded. As a result, a new movement in research and guidance on public light has emerged. Rather than continuing to view lighting as a punitive means of enforcing surveillance and public safety, this movement advances radically inclusive, responsive design methods that use light to redress inequality in the built environment. This thesis builds on a growing body of research that establishes the powerful influence of light on human experience and perception, initiating a dialogue between different models for placebased approaches to lighting design in shared public spaces. Drawing on in-depth studies of these models, interviews with stakeholders, and existing scholarship, policy, and practice, this thesis recommends that city planners serve as the bridge between ideation and implementation in a new era of urban illumination.
Thesis Advisor: Jeff Levine
Interest Group Politics in U.S. “Social Housing” Experiments
The rising cost of housing has renewed interest in public sector-led models of mixed-income housing production. Advocates, local governments, and state lawmakers are exploring strategies to involve the public sector more directly in the residential development process by capitalizing revolving loan funds, leveraging public land, and creating new public authorities. While a universal definition for “social housing” remains elusive, most policymakers and supporters agree that social housing is permanently affordable for economically and racially diverse households and includes elements of resident self-governance. This research analyzes how key interest groups—including affordable housing developers, tenant advocates, labor unions, market-rate developers, and pro-housing coalitions—shape and respond to emerging social housing initiatives. Drawing on interviews and case studies of Seattle, Montgomery County (MD), California, New York, Atlanta, and Chattanooga between 2019 and 2025, this thesis examines how political context, institutional constraints, and coalition dynamics influence how social housing proposals are framed, negotiated, and either supported or resisted by key stakeholders. Four key themes emerge from these case studies.
First, existing affordable housing developers often interpret new mixed-income, permanently affordable proposals as competition, particularly amidst resource scarcity and institutional constraints. This constitutes a substantial roadblock for the social housing movement. Second, proponents’ theory of change, initiative branding, and their ability to participate in multi-issue bargaining notably impact how affordable housing interest groups respond. Third, private sector actors’ support appears dependent on the public sector’s willingness to partner and how proponents describe the problem they are solving. Fourth, while collaborations around social housing may trigger fault lines between YIMBYs and tenant justice groups regarding revenue neutrality and the value of new market-rate supply, social housing represents an opportunity for bridge-building and collaboration across the housing movements. As interest in these models grows, this research offers practical insights for advocates and policymakers seeking to design locally tailored, politically viable approaches to public-led, mixed-income housing production.
Simone Hope Delaney
Thesis Advisor: Karilyn Crockett
Flooding as Remembering: A Trickster’s Guide to Fugitive Ecology, Revolutionary Recall, and Speculative Worldbuilding Beyond the Plantationocene
Since the early days of conquest, Black, Indigenous, and Afro-Indigenous peoples of the Lower Mississippi River Delta have survived recurrent processes of settler colonial un-worlding by re-worlding sovereign lifeways rooted in reciprocal relationships to other colonized peoples and the environment. Un-worlding occurred to Black and Indigenous peoples through dispossession of land, capture into enslavement, and genocide. This process was intertwined with the un-worlding of the landscape’s agency, which was captured and enclosed into property by arresting waterways’ movements through constrictive engineering using coercive labor. In the Bas de Fleuve swamps (today known as the Louisiana Central Wetlands), self-emancipated fugitives that had escaped enslavement formed autonomous inner worlds in the unenclosed territories between the Mississippi River and Lake Borgne. Known as Maroons, they were led by a leader named Juan San Malò and forged interdependent networks that extended to Indigenous settlements, enslaved Africans
on plantations, and free Blacks in New Orleans. By living outside eurosettler logics of property and re-establishing reciprocity with the more-than-human web of life, they demonstrated that the liberation of captive people is bound to the liberation of captive landscapes. Their re-worlding was also reminiscent of the pan-African trickster figure: anarchistic heroes that overturn the dominant oppressive world order for more liberatory realities Today, the destruction of wetlands across Southeast Louisiana means that descendants are facing an un-worlding of the sovereign livelihoods their ancestors re-established generations before. This is due to anthropogenically induced land loss, flooding, storm surge, and saltwater intrusion influenced by extractivist industries. Through revolutionary recall, reclaiming the logics of re-worlding established by Juan San Malò’s band of Maroons offers pathways to resist the intensifying threats of climate change that represent afterlives of slavery. Common Ground Relief is one collective that has drawn from Maroon legacies to lead bottom-up disaster response, mutual aid initiatives, and citizen-led wetland restoration. Drawing from creative land reclamation projects led by Utē Petit, Monique Verdin, the Nanih Bvlbancha Builders, and the Descendants Project, a constellation of small, site-specific projects are also presented to demonstrate how revolutionary recall can become a form of speculation for broader land-based liberation in the Lower Mississippi Delta.
Cameron Dougal
Thesis Advisor: Eric Robsky Huntley
Modeling Urban Bicycle Ridership Using Bikeshare Trip
Data: A Case Study in Hamilton, Ontario
Planners and researchers rely on cyclist ridership data to make the case for planning, building, and retaining cycling infrastructure. However, researchers and practitioners often cite a lack of accessible, high-quality data as a barrier to understanding the rapidly changing landscape of cycling behavior in cities. To overcome dataset shortcomings related to resolution and representativeness, researchers create models of cyclist ridership at roadway-level resolution across urban areas. The aim of this research is to iterate on modeling methodologies proposed in the literature by building a model using a novel cyclist trip sample: bikeshare trip data.
This study employs a negative binomial generalized linear model across roadway segments in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada. The response variable is cyclist counts, based on a training set comprising 257 month-level observations from 2021 to 2024 across nine locations. The predictor variables are bikeshare trips, month, and cycling infrastructure type.
Additional spatial predictor variables were collected but ultimately excluded from the model due to variance introduced by the small number of count locations.
The presented model has a mean error of 62%, which is about twice as inaccurate as compared to other models in the literature. These other models benefit from study contexts with more count locations, enabling the use of spatial predictors. The presented model has a comparable accuracy to existing models when outliers are disregarded, with 50% of predictions having less than 24% error and 80% of predictions having less than 36% error. Prediction ranges are also presented via a novel methodology, but are likely too broad to be used for roadway-level inference. This work sets the stage for future research on cities with more robust cyclist count data.
Curtis Dufour
Thesis Advisor: Karilyn Crockett
Subaltern Spaces in the Ancient City: Cultural Identity, Spatial Memory, and Networks of Meaning in Roman Pompeii
This thesis is about subaltern spaces and identities in the Roman colony of Pompeii—an ancient city notably destroyed and preserved by the eruption of Vesuvius in 79 CE; one that has been widely studied for its preservation of a Roman urban environment that was ‘frozen in time’. The excellent preservation of the site reveals a colonial material record that has long encouraged terminal narratives of Roman acculturation, so-called Romanization, which have devalued the plurality of identities and meanings found in the dispersed spaces and imageries of the ancient city. Rejecting this unilinear narrative of colonization, this thesis instead examines the networks of meaning tied to subaltern spaces, architectures, and imageries of Pompeii under Roman colonial rule.
In doing so, this thesis adopts a middle-range approach to the study of Pompeii’s spaces—giving attention to the distinct elements of the material record while acknowledging their interrelations that form networks of meaning stretching across time,
space, and culture. These networks shaped and collated the distinctive spatial and imagistic elements constructed in the city under Roman rule—creating cohesive and legible spaces that recursively engaged with the diverse population of the city. Engaging in a ‘peopling’ of the past—that is, reimagining the lived experiences of subaltern Pompeian residents within the ancient colonial city—this thesis explores how networks of meaning led to the persistence, subsidence, and emergence of subaltern identity spaces within the ancient colonial city—spaces that were erased, appropriated, and peripheralized under Roman colonial rule.
Through a detailed analysis of the networked spaces in the city—employing methodological frameworks from urban planning, social geography, and urban ethnography—this thesis tracks the presence of the proposed networks of meaning attached to subaltern spaces within the spatial and imagistic environment of the Colonia Cornelia Veneria Pompeianorum.
Silvia Duque Añez
Thesis Advisor: Janelle Knox-Hayes
Equity and Climate Resilience in Bogotá’s Public Space Policy: A Critical Policy Review
In Bogotá, where long-standing spatial and social inequalities intersect with growing climate risks, public space policy holds the potential to either reinforce exclusion or promote resilience and justice. Decisions about parks, plazas, and green corridors are not neutral; they reflect political priorities, embedded values, and power dynamics. This thesis asks: To what extent, and in what ways, does Bogotá’s public space policy framework incorporate criteria of equity and climate resilience? Through this question, the research examines how policies define and implement these concepts, what types of interventions they promote, and what limitations may emerge.
While prior research has emphasized the importance of inclusive and adaptive public spaces, there is limited analysis of how these principles are embedded in policy instruments in Latin American cities. Addressing this gap, this thesis develops an analytical framework informed by literature on urban environmental justice and climate adaptation. This framework serves as both an evaluative tool and a resource for policymakers seeking to move beyond
vague commitments and toward actionable pathways for equity and climate resilience.
The framework is used to analyze two key policy instruments: the District Public Space Policy (Política Pública Distrital de Espacio Público 2019-2038) and the Master Plan (Plan de Ordenamiento Territorial: Bogotá Reverdece 2022-2035). The evaluation reveals that both perform well, reflecting a genuine political effort to prioritize these issues. However, the findings also show that narrow or inconsistent interpretations of equity and climate resilience can lead to unintended consequences, and that significant implementation challenges remain. By grounding its analysis in a Global South context, this thesis contributes to international conversations on urban sustainability, offering both a critical lens and a practical tool. Ultimately, this research advocates for a shift in public space governance, one that treats equity and resilience not as aspirational ideals, but as measurable, structural commitments to a more just and climate-ready urban future.
Raelene Ina Bianchi Louise Dy
Thesis Advisor: Catherine D’Ignazio
When
Girls Just Wanna Have Fun, How Do They Go? A Mixed Methods Study of Nighttime Leisure Travel in Boston
When we think of urban living and its depictions in popular culture, many shows and movies depict characters in leisure activities, such as meeting friends, going on dates or pursuing hobbies. Undeniably, leisure has many benefits for economic growth and quality of life. Despite the prominence of leisure and the night as key themes in depictions of the city, transportation planners have rarely focused on nighttime leisure and associated travel as areas of intensive study beyond the lens of safety. This thesis investigates the nighttime leisure travel patterns of residents and students in Greater Boston through statistical analysis and data sculpture. To create a baseline understanding of travel patterns, I focused on the Boston Metropolitan Area and used the most recent version of the Massachusetts Department of Transportation’s Household Travel Survey from 2011. I limited my analysis to a fixed set of leisure activities (visits to friends and/or family, indoor and outdoor recreation, and meals outside the home) during a fixed period (6PM to 3AM)
to understand associated travel behaviors (travel times, activity durations, access and egress modes, etc.). While I considered several sociodemographic attributes, I paid close attention to gender distinctions in this study to determine if this limits women’s participation in nighttime leisure. I also implemented a data sculpture method to investigate how a subset of MIT students made decisions around nighttime leisure travel. Through both methods, I found connections between participation in nighttime leisure and socioeconomic privilege, between travel and socialization, and evidence of gendered behaviors such as women favoring car ridership and walking. Walking also featured heavily in many trips and even gained prominence in exiting nighttime leisure. These findings have implications for the allocation of limited city resources to plan nighttime transportation.
Kareem H. El-Sisi
Thesis Advisor: Fabio Duarte
Miles Matter: Demographics, Distance, and Decision-Making
In this thesis, I investigate which variables have the strongest influence on an individual’s travel mode choice depending on the purpose and level of urgency (leisure, essential, emergency) of the trip. I analyze the relationship between spatiotemporal costs conditioned by demographic segmentation using data on population mobility patterns in auto-centric Los Angeles and multimodal New York City. Through a synergistic three-pronged methodology consisting of spatial (time and distance analysis complemented by a spatial interaction model), statistical (multinomial logistic regression model), and machine learning-based (graph neural networks and extreme gradient boosting) analysis, I explore the multifaceted nature of decision-making processes in different urban environments. The hidden patterns revealed by artificial intelligence show that distance is the key determinant of mode choice, depending on the urban form of the city and its adaptation to multimodality.
Sarafina Fabris-Green
Thesis Advisor: Eran Ben-Joseph
From Parking to Parcels: The Potential for Microhubs in New York City’s Parking Garages
This thesis employs a site planning and policy perspective to explore how parking garages can serve as lastmile microhubs for e-commerce package deliveries in New York City. During the COVID-19 pandemic, deliveries accelerated, prompting a proliferation of “last-mile facilities,” the destination where parcels go just prior to final delivery. This surge of activity has prompted residents to raise complaints about trucks and vans driving through their neighborhoods and blocking streets or sidewalks when unloading their goods. In response, New York City government has been forced to think more proactively about the freight supply chain and its impact on the urban environment. New York and other cities have begun experimenting with the use of microhubs. Microhubs are small spaces in which packages are unloaded from vans and trucks onto smaller, more sustainable modes such as cargo bikes and handcarts. A commonly identified but understudied location for microhubs is the parking garage. London stands out as a city with this form of hub.
This thesis employs three primary research methods— site observations, interviews, and case studies—to argue that parking garages could provide a solution to better utilize dense urban space in dense cities and improve quality of life for residents by reducing the negative impacts of existing last-mile warehouses and delivery vehicles, all while requiring minimal funding. This is shown through an analysis of existing microhub sites in London and how they relate to their urban surroundings. These findings are then applied to two distinct contexts and garage designs in New York City. Finally, the thesis offers site planning criteria that connect land use policy to the design of the facilities and the surrounding public realm through the concept of “planning at the interface.”
Yichun Fan
Dissertation Advisor: Siqi Zheng
Essays on Urban Resilience to Environmental and Health Risks
Cities today face growing environmental and health threats due to climate change. Building urban resilience requires understanding the complex interplays between environmental and social systems that account for adaptation dynamics. Using new data, computational tools, and economic analysis, this thesis explores how people and places adapt to environmental risks and the implications for urban policy and infrastructure planning.
Chapter 1 examines how the financing structure of climate resilience infrastructure impacts long-term economic dynamics. Using satellite imagery to develop new performance metrics for U.S. flood protection levees, I find that decentralized financing of infrastructure maintenance creates a feedback loop: lower housing values and property tax revenues reduce fiscal capacity for levee maintenance, which increases levee failure risk and further depresses housing values. These feedback dynamics reinforce under-maintenance and perpetuate spatial inequality.
Chapter 2 analyzes the social cost of behavioral adaptation. Leveraging 27 million fitness app exercise records and quasi-experimental designs, I find that heavy air pollution reduces outdoor exercise likelihood by 28%, with information and risk awareness as key moderators. This behavioral response results in significant health costs often overlooked in environmental health studies.
Chapter 3 explores the role of subjective traits in predicting adaptation behavior. Applying Natural Language Processing to social media posts from 500,000 users, we classify individual fear types and find that pre-pandemic fearfulness strongly predicts social distancing behavior during COVID-19. This project provides a scalable tool for measuring unobserved subjective traits to predict behaviors under risk and target interventions.
Thesis Advisor: Lawrence Susskind
The Private Sector in Public Transit: Evaluating Early US Experience in P3s
Problems in US public transit are well documented: transit providers struggle to develop new infrastructure, face high project costs and long implementation timelines, pursue designs that prioritize ease of delivery over value to the public, and struggle to sustain their operations. In response to these challenges, Public-Private Partnerships (“P3s” or “PPPs”) have been promoted as a way to deliver more infrastructure on faster timelines at lower cost and higher quality. As P3s have been increasingly considered for major transit projects, this thesis investigates their ability to deliver on promotional claims, and their ability to address key challenges in American public transportation.
First, the thesis contextualizes contemporary P3s within a history of private sector involvement in US public transit. In addition to detailing how existing infrastructure came to be, this history intends to sharpen an understanding of contemporary P3s by considering how forms of private involvement have changed over time. It proceeds to develop detailed case studies for three major infrastructure projects
that have proceeded under a P3 model: RTD’s Eagle P3 in Denver, Maryland MTA’s Purple Line in Southern Maryland, and Los Angeles Metro’s Sepulveda Transit Corridor Project. Combining historic research and contemporary case study analysis, the thesis seeks to understand the circumstances under which contemporary P3s have emerged, and to draw lessons from early experience.
American transit providers have considered P3s for a variety of reasons, but have been primarily motivated by limited administrative and financial capacity, and by a perceived ability of private firms to deliver projects on faster timelines. But P3s have achieved mixed results in accelerating project timelines, and their ability to reduce lifecycle project costs remains unclear. While P3s seek to increase private involvement in transit provision, the model places a higher burden on upfront public planning compared to conventional delivery strategies. Public infrastructure owners can design P3s to leverage private sector resources and capacity, but the model comes with tradeoffs that should be carefully weighed against likely benefits. Ultimately, P3s can address a number of acute challenges in American public transit, but are unlikely to provide a workaround to fundamental political and financial challenges that limit transit development more broadly.
Olivia Fiol
Thesis Advisors: Justin Steil, Michael Marrella
Affect in Resiliency Planning: A Conversation with Broad Channel
Planning for climate change is more relevant than ever, as the earth continues to warm, sea levels rise, and no global policy or political will is in sight. In order to plan under hostile circumstances, it is of the utmost importance that planners turn our attention to the hyper-local scale, continuing momentum in our personal and professional relationships. In this thesis, I argue that centering affective experiences of place is essential in conversations about the future of places under climate change, especially in communities and neighborhoods who may be resistant to the conversation about climate change’s impacts on their futures in the first place. This project focuses on Broad Channel, the only inhabited island community in New York City’s Jamaica Bay, which is on the front lines of sea level rise and tidal flooding in the city. I interviewed city leaders, community members, artists, planners, and activists to understand how we can move through and with affect when considering the future of this place. This can open up conversation about climate change previously inaccessible. These conversations also surfaced the need for planners to regroup and understand how their own affective
positions impact difficult conversations about climate change. I offer these insights and recommendations for future resiliency planning work, reflecting both inward and outward.
Jingkang Gao
Dissertation
Advisors: Jason Jackson, Jinhua Zhao
The Bidirectional Relationship Between Law and Algorithms in Urban Mobility
This dissertation examines three ways in which the law and algorithms interact in the process of making urban mobility smarter and more sustainable. First, I write about the impact of algorithms on the law in a paper in which I propose a process for using algorithms to make the law to maximize social welfare. I examine the idea in the law and economics literature that algorithms could be used to make the law dynamic and personalized in order to improve efficiency and equity, and I use examples from urban mobility to show that welfare maximization on the individual level may fail to account for the interactive effects among individual behavior, and thus does not necessarily result in welfare maximization in the aggregate. I argue that laws made by algorithms must be coordinated in order to maximize social welfare. The result of the application of my three-step coordination process is maintaining uniformity in the law for all individuals in some cases and differentiating the law for each individual in other cases. Second, I describe the impact of the law on algorithms by investigating whether biases against novel risks and aversion to
algorithms cause civil jurors to impose larger punitive damages on autonomous vehicle (AV) manufacturers and owners than on human-driven vehicle (HV) manufacturers and owners, and thus hinder the adoption of AV. My experiments tested two types of failures that could induce automobile accidents: mechanical failures and judgment failures. I found no evidence of novel risk bias in the mechanical failures experiment, and limited evidence of novel risk bias and algorithmic aversion in the judgment failures experiment. It is therefore unlikely that novel risk bias and algorithmic aversion will significantly enlarge punitive damages against parties responsible for AV collisions and delay AV adoption. Third, I describe an interaction in which the law and algorithms influence each other. In this paper, I explore the relationship between a) attitudes toward AV and toward technology and b) AV acceptance in terms of the intention to use AV and punitive damages against AV manufacturers. I found that the perceived usefulness of AV is not a significant predictor of punitive damages, the perceived ease of using AV is a significant predictor of punitive damages, and, contrary to my expectations, jurors with greater technology affinity and technophilia impose larger punitive damages.
Isaac Gendler
Thesis Advisors: Janelle Knox-Hayes, Susan Murcott
Critical Water, Wastewater, and Thermal Infrastructure Development for a Resilient Neighborhood in War-Affected Ukraine
The Central Ukrainian municipality of Tetiiv is experiencing an influx of migrants due to its relatively safe position amid the Russian invasion. Tetiiv, in collaboration with the Ukrainian NGO Vid Sertsya Budova, is building a new neighborhood to accommodate internally displaced people, refugees, war veterans, and local residents. The neighborhood will require water, wastewater, and thermal infrastructure that satisfies European Union requirements given Ukraine’s ambition to join the economic bloc.
This thesis performs a pre-feasibility study to help Tetiiv and Vid Sertsya Budova create an optimal configuration of water, wastewater, and thermal infrastructure for the new neighborhood. For water infrastructure, the report calculates water consumption using the BREEAM framework, quantifies storage requirements, analyzes water quality, estimates rainwater harvesting potential, and identifies optimal water
source locations within 30 km using the DRASTIC methodology combined with geospatial analysis. For wastewater infrastructure, the study estimated wastewater generation using the BREEAM framework, analyzed different wastewater treatment options, and used a decision matrix to identify the most optimal wastewater system for the site. The thermal infrastructure study developed a conceptual heating system for the new neighborhood, incorporating ground-source heat pumps in each row house and single-family home, vertical boreholes, a thermal energy network, and a wastewater heating system for the multifamily co-living units. This study provides a blueprint for Ukraine and other locations recovering from urbicidal conflict and disaster, helping them to rebuild in line with the new climate paradigm.
Bibi Khadija Ghanizada
Thesis Advisor: Brent D. Ryan
Shifting Spaces: Housing and Urban Change in Kabul
This thesis explores the evolution of Kabul’s housing landscape with a focus on the emergence of Shahraks (planned townships) after 2001. Drawing on historical research, four case studies (Aria City, Khwaja Rawash Township, Khushal Khan Mena Blocks, and Omid-eSabz Township), and interviews with residents and experts, it analyzes how Shahraks have reshaped urban development in a rapidly growing city. Inspired by Soviet-era Mikrorayons, Shahraks introduced formal infrastructure, legal recognition, modern amenities, and opportunities for new economic activity. They helped expand Kabul’s formal housing stock and created pockets of urban community identity. However, the research finds that Shahraks also deepen spatial and socioeconomic inequalities. Largely built through private investment and targeting wealthier residents and civil servants, they remain inaccessible to the majority of Kabul’s population. Many Shahraks were developed on contested or illegally grabbed land, raising concerns about tenure security and governance. Despite improved infrastructure compared to informal settlements, Shahraks often suffer from poor climate responsiveness, environmental degradation,
limited green spaces, and energy-intensive designs. Their weak integration with Kabul’s broader urban fabric further exacerbates issues of spatial fragmentation. Looking ahead, the thesis argues that Kabul must learn from both the achievements and shortcomings of Shahraks as it plans future projects like Kabul New City. Their model is not inherently unsustainable or inaccessible, but without deliberate reforms, Kabul risks reproducing a cycle where contemporary urban development becomes synonymous with exclusion,fragmentation, and missed opportunity. Key recommendations include prioritizing affordable and expandable housing models, enforcing transparent land governance, promoting climate-adaptive design, strengthening connections between housing and employment centers, and carefully structuring public-private partnerships to align private investment with public goals. As Kabul embarks on projects like Kabul New City, it must learn from the partial successes and profound shortcomings of past developments. The challenge is not simply to build new cities, but to build a more inclusive, adaptable, and sustainable urban future for all Kabulis.
Shubhi Goyal
Thesis Advisor: Gabriella Carolini
Financing Inclusive Resilience: Beyond the Economics of Infrastructure in Accra, Ghana
Global infrastructure losses from disasters now exceed an estimated US$700–845 billion annually, disproportionality affecting cities in the Global South (CDRI, 2023). Accra, as a rapidly urbanizing coastal city, faces recurring floods, coastal erosion, and rising vulnerabilities that erode development gains and entrench existing socio-economic inequalities. Climate-related disasters alone cost the city US$118 million in annual losses (CDRI, 2023), disproportionately affecting informal settlements. Infrastructure financing remains underfunded: the city needs US$37.9 billion annually to meet infrastructure needs by 2047 (GNIP, 2018), while a US$900 million gap undermines its Climate Action Plan (AMA, 2025).
Despite increased national investment and blooming global climate finance mechanisms, Accra struggles to attract and equitably deploy resources for inclusive resilience (CPI, 2023). Projects like the Greater Accra Resilient and Integrated Development (GARID) project expose systemic issues—prioritizing asset protection over community-centered design,
with inadequate participation and social co-ownership (GARID PAD, 2019).
This thesis critically examines how infrastructure financing mechanisms in Accra shape the potential to build inclusive resilience. Mapping the city’s financing landscape, it analyzes how institutional, financial, and governance arrangements influence the selection, distribution, and implementation of investments. Using GARID as a case study, the thesis applies a critical justice framework—drawing on distributive justice (who benefits and who bears the costs), procedural justice (who has voice and decision-making power), and epistemic justice (whose knowledge systems are valued in infrastructure planning) (Carolini, 2022)—to evaluate current infrastructure financing practices and explore opportunities to embed these justices in efforts to build resilience. Findings reveal that infrastructure financing decisions are dominated by centralized donor-driven and ministerial priorities, constrained by fiscal austerity, and evaluated through technocratic frameworks that marginalize community participation and local knowledge. Ultimately, the thesis argues that building inclusive resilience in climate-vulnerable cities like Accra requires transforming infrastructure financing systems to prioritize social inclusion, participatory governance, and knowledge pluralism – alongside, not subordinate to, economic efficiency.
Sophia Green
Thesis Advisor: Eric Robsky Huntley
Cycling for Two: Challenges and Safety Concerns for Caretakers
Co-Biking in Cambridge
Over the last two decades, biking in Cambridge, MA, has surged, with the number of cyclists increasing 400% between 2002 and 2019. Infrastructure investments have expanded the city’s bike network, and the number of children seen on bikes has grown by a factor of 3.5 since 2014. However, much of Cambridge’s existing bike infrastructure is not designed for co-bikers, or adults who cycle with children as passengers in bike seats, trailers, or cargo bikes. This thesis examines the experiences of caretakers who bike with children to understand what enables them to co-bike, what makes it difficult, and how the city can better support this growing population. Grounded in the Design from the Margins framework, this research draws on field observations, a targeted survey (n = 257), and interviews with seven Cambridge-area caregivers. Findings reveal that co-biking is a meaningful and joyful practice, but it remains physically and emotionally taxing due to unsafe infrastructure, high gear costs, lack of guidance, frequent harassment, and social stigma. Based on these insights, this thesis concludes with recommendations to improve network connectivity, expand equipment access, and shift public perceptions
of biking with children. Supporting co-biking isn’t just good for families—it’s essential to building a more inclusive and sustainable transportation future.
Alula Hunsen
Thesis Advisor: Karilyn Crockett
Producing a Black Oeuvre: Narratives of Black Grassroots Cultural Organizing in Boston
Amidst a bevy of nonprofits and governmental actors that support and facilitate cultural and aesthetic production in the City of Boston, a vanguard of Black artists and cultural organizers are developing structures and organizations to help local members of Boston’s Black communities steer their own cultural production. This thesis develops an understanding of actions being taken by these organizers and organizations through interviews, and builds a set of participatory action research frameworks by partnering with these organizations (specifically: Thrill, Black Cotton Club, and 5Thou), to conduct further research as to how Black Bostonians can continue to self-determine in the realms of arts and culture. Drawing from a lineage most directly traceable to the Black Arts Movement of the late 1960s, and to hip-hop cultural production in ensuing decades, these organizers are furthering Black-led, community-controlled arts, and fostering community-building. Borrowing theorist Henri Lefebvre’s conception and declaration of a right to creative expression and participation, characterized as oeuvre and as a critical aspect of a “right to the city,” I hypothesized that these actions
toward cultural self-determination could be seen as the establishment of a Black oeuvre. This assertion was expanded upon by research partners, to include a broader array of strategies and conceptual frameworks for producing Black place, community, and culture in Boston.
Thesis Advisors: Ezra Glenn, Elisabeth Reynolds
“From Vacant to Valuable: Building Community Wealth through Brownfield Redevelopment in Legacy Industrial Cities”
Recent federal investments in domestic manufacturing have renewed economic interest in legacy industrial cities across the United States. As these places attract new development, it is critical to safeguard against repeating the harms of the 20th-century exodus of industry and manufacturing jobs—when offshoring, suburbanization, and discriminatory housing policies deepened spatialized racial and economic inequalities. How can communities retain the wealth generated by new industrial investments, even if companies leave? This thesis explores how industrial brownfield redevelopment might utilize community wealth-building (CWB) strategies to advance equitable economic development. Focusing on the work of the Site Readiness for Good Jobs Fund in Cleveland, Ohio—a nonprofit preparing long-vacant industrial land for job-dense uses—it examines the potential for mission-driven organizations to use brownfield redevelopment to anchor wealth
locally and proactively resist displacement. By analyzing case studies in Buffalo, Milwaukee, Chicago, and Philadelphia, the research tackles three questions: How do mission-driven organizations deliver community benefits through industrial brownfield redevelopments? In what ways do CWB models reshape how capital flows through redevelopment projects? And, what questions and decisions must the Site Readiness Fund consider to build lasting community wealth in Cleveland? Findings suggest that industrial brownfield redevelopment, when paired with strategic partnerships, site control, and a clear vision, offers a unique opportunity to implement CWB models. These strategies can help mission-driven organizations redistribute the risks and rewards of necessary public investments in brownfields and build trust with the community, ensuring that residents surrounding these reactivated sites benefit not just from new jobs, but from ownership and long-term economic power over their futures. The thesis concludes by applying these lessons to the Site Readiness Fund, outlining potential paths forward that embed economic democracy in the redevelopment of Cleveland’s legacy industrial areas.
Brooke Jin
Thesis Advisor: J. Phillip Thompson
Toward a political economy of the power sector: green capitalism, eco-socialism, and co-operative power in decarbonized climate policy
The political economy of the power sector has been characterized by a putative transition from fossil capitalism to green capitalism in an attempt to mitigate the worst effects of anthropogenic climate change on nature and society. In recent years the rise of green industrial policy, such as the passage of the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022, has sought to stimulate domestic economic development of green-technology projects and implement protectionist trade policies with the normative intent of protecting the geopolitical hegemony of U.S. industry. Yet the objectives of such industrial policies, which function less to reduce carbon emissions than to increase resource- and carbon-intensive consumption patterns, run antithetical to putative state objectives of the decarbonization of the power grid and industrial operations, and in fact green capitalism does not exist without the continued influence of fossil capital.
In this thesis I look to Marxist theories of the state, capital, labor, and nature to illustrate the crises of capitalism that have been occurring due to the exponential increase in power demand by data centers and large technology companies. In reshaping the governance of power markets, electricity generation, and transmission and distribution infrastructure through this increase in demand, called load growth, I show the illusion of sustainability under a green-capitalist political economy that purports to advance decarbonization goals, yet which in actuality facilitates conditions for the centralization and monopolization of private capital, as well as the continued destruction of nature and exploitation of workers. However, this crisis of load growth and the issue of governance that it raises open a window for experimentation into new state systems, socialized modes of production, and labor and environmental solidarity in the creation of a new climate policy: one that prioritizes equity, welfare, ecological preservation, and a truly decarbonized society. I propose a socialization of the power sector to increase community autonomy over their energy needs and to begin to dismantle the technocratic influence of fossil-fuel and large technology companies over electricity generation and access.
Rubin Jones
Thesis Advisor: Brent D. Ryan
Ozarkitecture: Shaping the Sense of a Region
Contemporary planning often invokes a “sense of place,” yet the deeper work of placemaking remains largely unfulfilled. In its absence, cities and regions fracture into landscapes that appear whole but feel hollow. These are spaces stripped of the sensory depth and symbolic meaning that make dwelling possible. This thesis thus returns to the concept of the genius loci—the spirit of place—not as a nostalgic embellishment, but as an ethical and practical imperative. It traces the philosophical and historical foundations of place, examines how contemporary practice has diluted its meaning, and explains why a new approach is necessary. From this foundation, the project engages Kevin Lynch’s operational models and develops a reframed approach—shifting from a visual image to an embodied experience—to ground planning practice in the textures of memory, movement, and belonging. Five new concepts—anchor, patch, joint, seam, and trail—offer a vocabulary for cultivating places that hold meaning across time and transformation. This framework is applied in Northwest Arkansas, a region where rapid growth threatens to outpace the character of its communities. By strengthening sensory experience, rooted
memory, and collective authorship, this project aims to offer a different way forward through regional transit—where planning not only shapes space, but safeguards access to the ongoing, unfinished project of place itself.
Wil Jones
Thesis Advisor: Holly Harriel
Reparative Preservation through Immersive 3D Documentation: Cultural Memory, Spatial Justice, and Gullah Geechee Futures on Daufuskie Island
This thesis advances a reparative framework for cultural preservation by combining immersive documentation with co-authored digital storytelling to support Black spatial memory and community sovereignty. Grounded in fieldwork on Daufuskie Island, South Carolina—a historic Gullah Geechee community confronting dispossession and cultural enclosure—the project co-creates Daufuskie3D (https:// daufuskie3d.org/), an interactive website that presents annotated 3D scans, oral histories, ambient videos, and symbolic interface design rooted in Gullah epistemologies.
It is guided by two research questions: How can immersive documentation support reparative preservation for communities at risk of spatial erasure? And what frameworks—technical, ethical, and political—ensure digital practices reflect Black cultural
values, descendant authorship, and community control? Drawing from Black geographies, wake work, vernacular cartography, and speculative design, the thesis introduces a conceptual distinction between visualization and analysis tools to examine how different modes of spatial capture shape visibility and authority. The project finds that immersive tools, when grounded in ethical design and descendant authorship, can function not simply as representational media but as reparative infrastructure— supporting visibility, stewardship, and spatial return in communities confronting erasure.
The Daufuskie3D website serves as both platform and method. Its spatial interface draws on Gullah visual language, including Underground Railroad quilt codes and spiritual symbolism, while its non-linear navigation resists conventional heritage taxonomies. Rather than flattening culture into content, the site embraces ambiguity, withheld spatial detail, and narrative restraint as ethical design principles. Developed in partnership with Ms. Sallie Ann Robinson, a sixth-generation Gullah cultural steward, the project repositions preservation as participatory, situated, and future-facing. It offers Daufuskie3D as both a working prototype and a methodological contribution toward reparative immersive practice—centering digital preservation as a strategy of memory, sovereignty, and cultural regeneration within the Black diaspora.
Seamus Joyce-Johnson
Thesis Advisors: P. Christopher Zegras, Anson Stewart
Enabling Car-Free Living: Shared Micromobility and Public Transit Interactions in Chicago
Shared micromobility services and public transit both offer travel alternatives to the automobile in urban areas. While these services might be viewed as competitors in the urban mobility space, this thesis argues that each benefits from the other as part of a “package of options” available to the carfree or car-lite urban resident that together provide a comprehensive replacement for auto-mobility. This work centers on the Chicago mobility context. It compares bikeshare systems in Chicago, Los Angeles, Austin, Pittsburgh, and Washington, D.C., each of which have varying levels of transit integration, ridership, ownership models, and fares. It finds that transit agency ownership of bikeshare systems appears not to be a panacea and that truly integrated fares are not present even in agency-owned systems. It also finds that lower fares are present in systems with greater levels of public subsidy, regardless of the ownership model. The second part of the thesis characterizes the specific interactions between Divvy, Chicago’s main scooter- and bikeshare system, and the Chicago Transit Authority (CTA). It
tests the suitability of novel data sources, including CCTV footage and CTA farecard transactions, for inferring transfers between the two systems and finds that existing spatiotemporal inference methods do not capture the wide heterogeneity in transfer rates among rail stations. Although Divvy has stations near most CTA rail stations, there is room for improvement in the rapidity of these transfers. Using GIS and open-source routing tools, the thesis finds an average walk time of 2.1 minutes from CTA entrances to the nearest Divvy station and suggests high-priority relocations. The third part of the thesis presents preliminary results from a survey of Chicago-area residents probing their attitudes and behaviors regarding shared micromobility and public transit. The survey results showed evidence of complementary use between the two modes. The thesis concludes with a set of recommendations for the CTA regarding improvements in its integration with Divvy.
Kathleen Julca
Thesis Advisor: Gabriella Carolini
Equity Outcome Analysis of Campesino-led Water Harvest and Q’ocha Initiatives Leading Water Resilience Despite Political Dispossession of Water in the Lake
Titicaca Basin
Campesino communities across the altiplano developed and stewarded diverse q’ocha water harvest systems for several millennia and continue to during the era of climate change. The study highlights campesino experiences with climate change and water governance. Firstly, the study analyzes the equity outcomes (Carolini, 2022)of Spanish colonialism and of the modern-day Peruvian government to understand the histories and political realities of rural campesino populations. The study details the outcomes of privatization and contamination of water (i.e., untreated wastewater) and the mining industry for campesino people. The equity analysis reveals fundamental procedural and epistemic injustices in the Peruvian government which perpetuate rural campesino dispossession of water. There are, however, also powerful campesino-led water resilience efforts. The Juntas Administradores de Servicios y
Saneamiento (JASS), led by Pukachupa Secsecani residents, leverages traditional small-scale water harvest practices to deliver safe, affordable, and potable water to residents. The outcomes of Pukachupa’s campesino water governance are considered through an equity lens. JASS beneficiaries practice communal water stewardship in reciprocity with each other and the land. Reciprocity is also seen in q’ocha water harvesting, which the Earth, or Pachamama, reciprocates with downstream spring revitalization. An equity-based outcome analysis reveals q’ochas provide high-quality water and potential uses for spring revitalization. Q’ocha water harvesting, providing critical water resources in the region, is not because of climate change or the political dispossession of water sources, but rather can be seen as a commitment to reciprocity, despite these factors. The equity-based outcome analysis found that the small-scale campesino-led water governance initiatives provide equitable water resilience; for the 700 million people projected to be displaced due to water scarcity by 2030 (UN), as well as their governments, these findings are critical for addressing a problem which is both climate change-driven and explicitly political.
Samantha Kaufman
Thesis Advisor: Garnette Cadogan
Preservation Park: Planning for the Future
Preservation Park in Oakland is an anomaly. It is neither a green park nor strictly an office park, 16 historic homes, carefully renovated and maintained, are arranged around an internal way and studded with a central fountain in the Victorian style. Seeds for this park were initially planted by the city’s Landmark Preservation Advisory Board in 1976 and with fits and starts, it opened in 1991. As Interstate Highway 980 was built, the park was created as a way to save a few of the most beautiful homes under threat by the Oakland Redevelopment Authority’s urban renewal clearance and construction of the highways. Interstates 580, 880, and 980 were lashed across Oakland to bring suburban commuters over the bridge to San Francisco, cutting up a city of neighborhoods and destroying thousands of homes and small businesses. Oakland envisioned this acre and a half as a permanent site for community based organizations and non-profits to revitalize the edge of downtown and West Oakland.
Since 1991, the office space has been rented to tens of non-profits and hosted hundreds of weddings, conferences, and other public and private events. In 2004, the community development corporation, East Bay Asian Local Development Corporation purchased the park from the city and continued to manage the property as a successful office park and event space. The COVID-19 pandemic irrevocably changed how many people work, and for the first time, Preservation Park vacancies increased and have remained substantially below 100%, presenting a challenge to EBALDC and its portfolio. This thesis seeks to provide the client with a framework to assess possible redevelopment and reprogramming schemes which is sensitive to the community goals of EBALDC and requirement for the property to sustain itself. By considering, financial feasibility and partnerships, a multi-phase roadmap with a 20year time horizon is presented to EBALDC to consider. This will also provide a potential framework for more non-profit firms to pursue commercial real estate management and redevelopment as a strategy for community wealth-building and neighborhood stability.
Yvette Kleinbock
Thesis Advisor: Mariana Arcaya
Co-Governing Care in Astoria, Queens: The Role and Responsibility of the City in Supporting Community-Led Solidarity Networks
In the spring of 2020, as COVID-19 spread across New York City and the United States, an inadequate government response and an overburdened social safety net left millions facing unemployment, eviction, and food insecurity with limited institutional support. Yet alongside these systemic failures, mass acts of solidarity emerged, as unprecedented numbers of people mobilized mutual aid efforts to help their neighbors survive. While many mutual aid groups have since disbanded or experienced burnout, others have sustained the work, helping to establish alternative infrastructures of collective care. Taking Astoria, Queens as a case, this thesis examines the political lessons that have emerged in the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic, focusing on what it takes to sustain community-led solidarity networks and considering City’s role and responsibility in supporting urban infrastructures of care more broadly. To conceptualize this relationship between local community efforts and the City, I further consider the possibilities of co-governance as a framework for community care. This research utilizes a community-centered, relational, qualitative approach that draws on oral history and ethnographic traditions, including thematic analysis of key
informant interviews, document review, and participant observation. Tracing the trajectory of mutual aid and other community-led efforts in Astoria and exploring the possibilities and challenges of collaborative governance, this research imagines how planning, policy, and governance strategies in New York City can deepen collective capacity, foster resilience, and advance more just and caring urban futures.
Trevor Kodzis
Thesis Advisor: Balakrishnan Rajagopal
Between Fields and Cities: The Politics of Land Use Changes in Punjab, India
This thesis examines the urbanization of agricultural lands in the State of Punjab, looking for patterns that explain the type of development that is occurring while embedding these transformations in a larger political and economic context. The study will focus on both transportation infrastructure and the real estate developments that surround it, as a way of situating Punjab within a larger discourse on infrastructure and urbanization in the Global South. Through the case studies of three Punjabi cities: Mohali, Bathinda, and Ludhiana, this paper will employ remote sensing to analyze recent transformations from agricultural to developed land across different land use zones, revealing two primary patterns. First, highway infrastructure projects have been delayed because of land acquisition problems and a contentious political environment. Second, with the exception of Ludhiana, most of the real estate in Punjab is concentrated in the residential and commercial sector. This apparent stagnation of manufacturing growth in Punjab results from a wide range of political and economic factors including: high land prices, protest movements, emigration,
fiscal policies, geography, and competition with other states. In contrast to the rest of the state, Ludhiana has successfully attracted industrial growth, illustrating how cities that urbanized earlier follow a different path of economic development.
Justin Kollar
Dissertation Advisors: Andres Sevtsuk, Lawrence Vale
Silicon Frontier: Technostatecraft and the Geopolitical Ecology of Digital Capitalism in the Pacific Basin
Power in the twenty-first century is no longer mapped solely onto territory, but embedded in the vast, networked infrastructures that sustain digital capitalism. Semiconductors, data centers, and AI systems constitute the geopolitical terrain of our time, where corporate tech giants have absorbed functions traditionally reserved for the state—from managing logistics and public discourse to safeguarding national defense via privatized cloud networks. This fusion of state and corporate power has fused public and private interests into a technology-state nexus, with governments reconfiguring territory to accommodate infrastructure expansion and high-tech investment via special zoning laws, tax incentives, and other subsidies. The rapid scaling of AI and cloud computing has intensified this logic, accelerating land, water, and energy consumption and embedding systems of extraction into governance. What emerges is a new geopolitical terrain—one where the race for “compute” reproduces uneven development, deepens ecological
crises, and redefines sovereignty through code, chips, and circuits.
This dissertation examines how the United States has positioned itself as the geopolitical architect of global digital production, particularly through its now precarious dominance over high-tech networks. I ask: by what means do states assert control over technological frontiers, and how do these mechanisms interact with shifting geopolitical tensions and spatial transformations? Through conjunctural analysis rooted in historical materialism, this study interrogates the political work of the “frontier” as a legitimating narrative of economic and territorial expansion. Case studies in Arizona, Taiwan, and others reveal how megatechnical infrastructures comprising semiconductor fabs and data centers serve as instruments of techno-statecraft—strategic fusions of corporate, infrastructural, and state power that reconfigure regional governance and resource regimes. These infrastructures do not simply host digital goods or provide computational resources; they reconfigure systems of sovereignty, inequality, and extraction, restructuring land use and environmental policy in ways that privilege elite interests.
Nikita Kulkarni
Thesis Advisor: Gabriella Carolini
Decentralizing Power: Enabling Local Energy Resilience and Equity in Accra
Over 600 million people in Sub-Saharan Africa lack access to electricity. While Ghana is projected to achieve universal access by 2030, this national milestone obscures lived experiences of energy insecurity—particularly in urban centers like Accra. Despite a reported 91% grid connection rate, only 17% of Accra’s households consider their electricity supply reliable (Afrobarometer, 2022). Traditional, binary metrics—focused solely on grid connection—fail to capture essential social dimensions such as reliability, affordability, equity, and resilience, particularly under intensifying climate and urban pressures. My thesis investigates persistent energy insecurity in Accra, Ghana’s capital, through the lens of dumsor—a term used to describe recurring power outages that disrupt daily life and expose the fragility of the centralized electricity system. Drawing on the frameworks of splintered urbanism and the techno-politics of infrastructure failure, the thesis explores how dumsor reflects institutional fragmentation, political contestation, and inequality in the energy infrastructure space.
In response to dumsor, I examine whether decentralized energy systems, particularly solar, can offer a pathway to local energy resilience—defined here as the place-based capacity to withstand dumsor through cleaner, more affordable alternatives for sustainable and reliable power. The study combines a technical assessment of Accra’s solar potential with a critical analysis of policy frameworks, climate finance mechanisms, and political agendas. Grounded in fieldwork and interviews with stakeholders across the energy value chain—from regulators and municipal actors to utilities, solar providers, financiers, residents, and advocacy groups—my thesis identifies on-the-ground barriers to and opportunities for the energy transition.
Without targeted policy interventions, there is a risk of reinforcing a new form of energy infrastructure splintering—where only the affluent benefit. My thesis concludes that addressing energy insecurity in Accra requires strategic institutional and policy reforms to reconfigure governance, empower municipalities, and enable inclusive financing and policy at the most local level to enable solar alternatives. Energy decentralization offers a promising path forward, but the thesis underscores the ongoing role of the state as a critical enabler of an energy transition that is sustainable and just.
Aulia Kurniaputri
Thesis Advisor: Andres Sevtsuk
Prioritizing Sidewalk Accessibility Improvements for the Aging
Population and Individuals with Disabilities: A Case Study of Bandung, Indonesia
While walking is fundamental to inclusive urban mobility, major cities in Indonesia continue to face challenges in providing barrier-free pedestrian infrastructure, even for individuals without physical impairments. As the population of older adults in Indonesia continues to grow, the risk of disability within this demographic will increase, contributing to the overall number of individuals with disabilities. In Bandung City, there is a rising awareness across various sectors of society regarding the rights of older adults and individuals with disabilities to navigate sidewalks safely. These trends highlight the importance of improving inclusivity on city streets, where people travel daily to reach their essential and desired destinations.
This thesis explores an evidence-based methodology to prioritize sidewalk accessibility improvements for older adults and individuals with physical disabilities, aiming to develop a prioritization strategy that targets maximum impacts. Accessibility scores and pedestrian flow counts are calculated with the Urban Network Analysis (UNA) toolbox. Three types of user groups—non-disabled individuals, cane or crutch users, and wheelchair users—were assigned penalties for each type of barrier on a sidewalk segment, resulting in varying perceived distances. Those with physical mobility limitations perceived longer distances than those without. To identify priority locations, a system-selection ranking was applied that considered sidewalk segments with both high-frequency usage and significant discrepancies between actual and perceived lengths. The methods outlined in this thesis are scalable for use in other neighborhoods and cities, thereby supporting data-driven decision-making in pedestrian infrastructure improvements.
Yu Hang (Hannah) Leung
Thesis Advisors: Siqi Zheng, John Fernandez
Contested Values of EcoDevelopments: Integrating Biodiversity into Nusantara’s
Development and Financial Framework
Rapid expansion of urban populations has spurred the construction of new cities, contrasted with the heightened urgency to adopt climate risk mitigation and disaster resilience strategies. Along with the global need for Nature-based Solutions (NbS), new eco-developments which are planned within biodiversity hotspots should adopt resilient climate adaptation strategies for long term benefits. However, these projects are often not financially justified or positioned to sustain long investments and holding periods. This thesis examines development of Ibu Kota Nusantara (IKN) in Indonesia as an evolving eco-development case study on how biodiversity could be repositioned as a key aspect in investment frameworks. Developing new cities and eco-developments tend to rely on external investments, as internal structures are navigate the challenges of rapid growth while seeking a self-sustainable equilibrium. Based on the inherent need to build to support a growing urban population, this multidisciplinary thesis explores
three components that are needed to design an eco-development project - namely consistent way to value biodiversity in comparison to development values, proper environmental governance, and sustainable financial instruments to support the initial and operational expenditures of a project. Measurement approaches such as GBS-FI and S&P NBS are able to streamline corporation’s dependency value of biodiversity, based on valorization models developed by SEEA-EA and the United Nation’s Integrated National Financing Framework. A mixed-methods approach of qualitative case study analysis and in-depth review of existing and potential financial instruments is used to understand the demand and supply side of eco-developments. A Contingent Valuation Method of assessing buyers’ Willingness-To-Pay in addition to qualitative questionnaire on perceived values of biodiversity provides insights on local understanding and WTP of premiums in support of elevated costs of eco-developments. The intention of this research is to explore how biodiversity could be recentered as a foundational element to sustainable development of cities. More broadly, this research seeks to synthesize the interdisciplinary discussions around development, environmental policy and ecological planning, while evaluating the feasibility of innovative financial mechanisms to mobilize capital for large-scale eco-development projects.
Sungmoon Lim Thesis Advisor: Jason Jackson
Data-Driven Assessment of Digital Age Inclusion: Topic Modeling Seoul’s Digital Governance Platform to Evaluate Elderly Representation
This paper examines the intersection of population aging and digital civic government in Seoul, South Korea. As cities worldwide digitize and age simultaneously, understanding elderly citizens’ representation in digital governance platforms becomes critical for inclusive urban governance. As a leader in both aging and urban technologization, Seoul serves as an ideal case study.
Combining computational analysis of civic queries with qualitative interviews, this study investigates whether elderly residents’ concerns are adequately represented in Seoul’s e-government platform. Comparing these datasets reveals significant disparities in how elderly concerns are represented digitally: despite Seoul’s technological sophistication and digital inclusion efforts, substantial gaps remain in representing elderly citizens’ concerns in governance forums, signaling gaps that may undermine age-inclusive development. This research contributes to
theoretical understandings of digital democracy and urban aging while offering practical insights for designing more inclusive systems that address the realities of dual urban phenomena—aging and digitization—as they coalesce in cities.
Tiffany M. Lim
Thesis Advisors: Anson Stewart, John Attanucci
Predicting Ridership and Travel Time Impacts of Bus Service Changes Using Sketch Planning Methods
Bus service changes range in scale, and understanding their impacts on ridership and travel times can inform decision-making as changes are considered for the bus network. Budgetary limitations are at the heart of service change decisions, resulting in the need for analysts to assess different scenarios and accommodate quick turnarounds. This thesis provides a sketch planning framework for predicting ridership and travel time impacts of bus service changes, with a focus on direct demand models and the use of an open-source multimodal routing algorithm. The framework is designed to be streamlined with the use of data sources and capabilities, such as exporting a General Transit Feed Specification (GTFS) feed of a given bus network scenario, that agencies may have access to through existing transit planning tools.
Direct demand models are developed to estimate bus ridership at the level of approximately one-mile route-segments and time-of-day periods. This level of
analysis provides a more disaggregated evaluation of bus ridership than past direct demand models. The models are sensitive to both route and network improvements. New variables designed to capture the relationship between bus routes, including the competitive and complementary nature of routes, are introduced and incorporated in the model development process. These models are developed for the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority (WMATA). A case study analyzing two scenarios in WMATA’s Better Bus Network Redesign (BBNR) is presented, with selected route examples to illustrate how the models capture different types of service changes. These routes fall under three categories: routes with no major service changes, routes with improvements in frequency, and routes with re-routing and other improvements.
Alejandra A Martinez
Thesis Advisor: Karilyn Crockett
Envisioning Regional Futures in Southeast Los Angeles: Understanding Barriers to Implementing TransitOriented Communities along the Forthcoming Southeast Gateway Line
The first 14.5-mile phase of the Southeast Gateway Line (SEGL), a planned light rail project through Southeast Los Angeles and the Gateway Cities region, is expected to be completed by 2035. The rail line aims to improve transit access while being complemented by a regional planning framework and station area planning that seeks to promote transit-oriented communities around station areas and drive equitable community development along the corridor. However, it remains uncertain whether the frameworks and governing bodies responsible for implementing the rail project, including the Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority (LA Metro), the Gateway Cities Council of Governments (GCCOG), and cities along the corridor, will effectively align the transit investment with these land use and development goals.
Given these uncertainties, this thesis focuses on the Southeast Los Angeles (SELA) subregion, where a history of structural challenges underscores both the urgency and the complexity of realizing visions for transit-oriented communities tied to the forthcoming rail investment. Drawing on semi-structured interviews with LA Metro and GCCOG staff, along with officials and staff from cities hosting future stations, this research explores the emerging political, economic, and structural barriers to implementing transit-oriented land use around two future SEGL stations: Florence/Salt Lake Station in Huntington Park and Firestone Station in South Gate, both stations of which have multi-jurisdictional spheres of influence. This thesis also proposes a collaborative framework that encourages SELA stakeholders to engage in incremental, low-stakes planning and establish accountability mechanisms before the rail arrives, laying the foundation for sustained stewardship over the vision of transit-oriented communities and broader equitable community development goals throughout the rail’s lifespan.
Mena Mohamed
Thesis Advisor: Erica Caple James
From Silence to Sankofa: The Role of Archives in Addressing Urban Renewal’s Displacement History
In the post-World War II era, urban renewal was designed as a path towards the revitalization of American cities through public investment into the redevelopment of ‘blighted’ areas. Through eminent domain takings, urban renewal projects led to the forced relocation of residents from their homes and neighborhoods, with a disproportionate impact on Black, immigrant, and low-income communities across the country. The archives of the renewal period hold the story of this widespread displacement and are of significant value for contemporary planning practice.
Through the lens of two case studies, this thesis explores how and why urban renewal archives are being revisited today to address this displacement history through institutional and community approaches to memorialization. In Cambridge, MA, the Cambridge Redevelopment Authority (CRA) is an example of an agency drawing on its own archive to publicize its role in past forced relocation through its use of eminent
domain. In Rochester, NY, Clarissa Uprooted is a public history and community building project centered around the story of Clarissa Street, a historically Black neighborhood that was demolished for renewal in the 1960s. Through document analysis and interviews, I examine how these efforts to activate urban renewal archives and better understand the scope and impact of forced relocation provide avenues for planners and community members to remember the past, acknowledge systemic harms, and reflect on repair. Despite the different positionalities of the CRA and Clarissa Uprooted, a comparative approach also highlights how both organizations have created opportunities to unearth histories of dissent to urban renewal, more fully recognize the legacy of commercial displacement, and imagine avenues to planning, policy, and institutional change. This research demonstrates the significance of local archival initiatives that draw upon the past to better position planners and communities to face the urban challenges and inequities of the present and future.
Daniela Morales
Thesis Advisor: Mariana Arcaya
Public Health Governance at the Watershed Scale: Exploring Opportunities for Multi-sector Governance to Advance Planetary Health in Northeastern Massachusetts
Many health and environmental regulations apply only within specific political or administrative boundaries, creating a mismatch between the spatial scale of natural systems which impact health and the spatial extents of relevant regulations. For example, in Massachusetts, local boards of health govern specific public health and environmental issues through spatialized regulatory powers that carry significant weight in both local and larger geopolitical contexts. Despite the fact that watershed management influences regional public health outcomes through impacts to water quality, water quantity, and climate resilience measures, the organizations focused on watershed management do not have influence that matches the power of public health entities. This thesis explores how watershed management decisions could have similar weight to other public health governance decisions by exploring the specific speculative
case of what interest there is in, and what barriers there are to, watershed management organizations in Northeastern Massachusetts working as public health governing units, such as local boards of health. Using a mixed methods approach, combining organizational and policy analyses with semi-structured key informant interviews and surveys, I assessed the opportunities, barriers and interest for multi-sector watershed and health governance to advance planetary health in Northeastern MA. The findings showed low receptiveness towards adopting a new regional governance system due to both perceived and actualized legal, organizational and social barriers. The findings also highlighted an interest towards strengthening existing regional partnerships and building new collaborations across the fields of public health and watershed management for more effective approaches towards environmental health decision making. These results suggest a need for additional interdisciplinary training for both sectors, and the creation of new spaces and relationships for collaboration between actors involved in public health, watershed management, and related fields.
Emily Moss
Thesis Advisor: Jeff Levine
Implementing a Digital Common Application for Affordable Housing in Massachusetts
The need for affordable housing in Massachusetts is immense, with fragmented housing application processes further compounding barriers for low-income residents to access stable housing. To address these challenges, the Massachusetts Executive Office of Housing and Livable Communities (EOHLC) initiated the development of a digital common application (Common App) in 2024 to streamline tenant application and selection processes for privately owned publicly subsidized housing opportunities throughout the state. This client-based thesis offers an implementation roadmap for EOHLC to successfully operationalize the Common App within the agency.
The roadmap is structured around three topics as requested by EOHLC: (1) organizational design considerations as the Common App scales, including internal staffing models, external vendor relationship management, and budget planning; (2) long-term technical integration opportunities, including identifying relevant data systems likely to interact with the Common App and potential areas for alignment; and (3) compliance mechanisms to ensure housing
providers’ participation in the Common App, including a review of Massachusetts fair housing regulations as one possible strategy to require or incentivize providers to use the platform.
Each topic draws from a review of state policies as well as academic literature in organization studies, information systems, and public administration; stakeholder interviews; and case study research on digital affordable housing search and application platforms in Massachusetts, Detroit, San Francisco, and the Bay Area—culminating in a series of recommendations for EOHLC to effectively administer the Common App over the long term.
Sanjana Paul
Thesis Advisor: Lawrence Susskind
Community Benefits Agreements for Equitable Renewable Energy Siting:
The Importance of
Negotiation Power and Stakeholder
Engagement
As renewable energy development accelerates across the United States, conflicts over project siting have become increasingly common, often rooted not in opposition to clean energy itself, but in concerns over fairness, community inclusion, and long-term accountability. This thesis investigates how Community Benefits Agreements (CBAs) can serve as tools to address these challenges, focusing on how negotiation dynamics, mediation, and stakeholder engagement shape the equity and enforceability of CBAs in renewable energy siting.
Using a mixed-methods approach, this research draws on qualitative case studies, stakeholder interviews, policy analysis, and a limited quantitative assessment of CBA implementation outcomes. The study examines the procedural and structural conditions that influence how benefits are negotiated, formalized, and
monitored. The thesis identifies best practices for designing CBAs that move beyond performative engagement and toward genuine community empowerment by analyzing cases that include formal facilitation, amendment mechanisms, and diverse stakeholder participation.
Ultimately, this research offers a multidimensional understanding of CBAs as emergent governance instruments situated at the intersection of infrastructure planning, environmental justice, and public accountability. It concludes by proposing a model state-level regulatory framework to support equitable CBA development and embed principles of justice into the future of renewable energy siting.
Natalie Phillips
Thesis Advisor: Eric Robsky Huntley
“Whose Bronx?” Regime Politics and the Evolution of Community Power at the Kingsbridge Armory
This thesis traces the 30-year history of redevelopment activities at the Kingsbridge Armory in the Northwest Bronx, as community groups have mounted an expanding challenge to development-as-usual in New York City. Using urban regime theory as a lens, I deploy archival research and interviews to assess the tensions that emerge when regime politics collide with a building movement of community power at the Kingsbridge Armory over time. I argue that New York City’s predominant urban economic development regime is not structured to accommodate an organization that is both a grassroots leader and a developer, and that as community power continues to evolve, the regime’s traditional arrangements become increasingly untenable. I ultimately assert that the increasingly structural movement of community power at the Kingsbridge Armory requires a reimagining of the informal processes, logics, and roles that have defined New York economic development. dominance of platform/data capitalism in the U.S. and beyond.
Nrithya Renganathan
Thesis Advisor: Eric Robsky Huntley
Grid Resilient Approaches To Data Center Development: A Comparative Case Study Analysis
Over the past decade, there has been large-scale development in the technology sphere surrounding artificial intelligence (AI), blockchain, and cloud computing in general. When on the massive scale often required by big-tech corporations, high-intensity computational endeavors such as AI and blockchain-based technology take place in facilities that host computer systems called data centers [3, 4]. Keeping these data centers running requires a great deal of resources such as electricity, which has increased electricity costs for residential customers, halted decarbonization efforts, and even led to data centers inequitably being prioritized over residential homes during times of energy crisis. This thesis conducts a comparative case study analysis of the history, policy, and community reaction of data center energy use for Atlanta, Dallas, and Northern Virginia. The results of this comparison are discussed along with a compilation of potential strategies that communities and governing systems can employ to create a more resilient, equitable, and sustainable electricity grid
that can manage the energy demand of data centers.
Yuri Sakai
Thesis Advisor: Lawrence Susskind
Wildfire Risk Management for Informal Settlements in Chile
This thesis explores the critical intersection of wildfire risk and informal settlement development in Chile, focusing on the municipality of Viña del Mar. This city experienced the deadliest wildfires in the nation’s history in 2024 and holds the nation’s highest concentration of informal settlements. Despite this double vulnerability, the city has inadequately integrated wildfire resilience into its disaster risk management (DRM) framework, creating an urgent need for policy reform.
Through combined statistical and geospatial analyses, the author documents informal settlements’ expansion trajectories, especially between 2011 and 2024, and systematically assesses their wildfire exposure. Utilizing unregularized community datasets, wildfire risk classifications, and municipal planning documents, the analyses revealed that the growth of informal settlements outpaces regularization interventions. They also unveiled that all of the informal communities in the city, including their wildland-urban interface zones, face significant fire risk.
These findings further led the research to evaluate the current Chilean wildfire governance under Law 21.364 (enacted 2021) to provide comprehensive DRM across national, regional, and municipal administrative levels. Additionally, the study examines the disaster response mechanisms for the 2024 Chile Wildfires. This policy and evidence-based analyses identify inherent still reactive approaches to disasters even 4 years after the policy transition, and reveal a systematic marginalization of informal settlements.
Based on these findings, the research culminates in phase-specific actionable policy recommendations addressing the compound vulnerabilities of informal communities through: 1) enhanced shelter capacity estimation methodologies; 2) formalized private sector involvement; 3) integrated tsunami-wildfire warning systems; 4) periodic intergovernmental learning opportunities; and 5) technical support in reconstruction. Given the 2024 tragedy and Chile’s transition toward comprehensive DRM, these interventions are particularly crucial to accelerate its transition and establishment.
Maysaa Sati
Thesis Advisor: Karilyn Crockett
Navigating Identity and Place: The Role of Displacement Camps in Community Rebuilding
and Identity Preservation in Sudan
Displacement camps are often framed as zones of impermanence; spaces of waiting designed to contain crises, not cultivate futures. Yet, in Kalma Camp in South Darfur, displacement has given rise to a self-organized, complex urban environment shaped by collective labor, cultural resilience, and everyday acts of spatial and political agency. This thesis explores how communities in Kalma have remade space, redefined home, and preserved identity in the face of prolonged uncertainty. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, spatial analysis, and critical urban theory, it situates Kalma not as an exception, but as a generative urban formation—an emergent city born from the margins.
Through chapters that trace the camp’s spatial evolution, intergenerational understandings of belonging, informal governance, cultural production, and political expression, this research challenges dominant humanitarian paradigms that treat camps as temporary and peripheral. It argues that residents are
not passive recipients of aid, but planners, builders, and cultural producers who contest displacement through care, memory, and infrastructure. By threading together theoretical insights from scholars such as Malkki, Bhabha, Roy, and Simone with grounded narratives from Kalma, the study reveals how displacement can also be a site of urban possibility.
In reframing camps like Kalma as sites of urban life, not despite the crisis, but through it, this thesis calls for a fundamental shift in how urban planners, humanitarian actors, and scholars engage with protracted displacement. It invites us to see resilience as planning, care as governance, and the camp not as a space of suspension, but as a place where new urban futures are already being forged.
James Shaw
Thesis Advisor: Jim Aloisi
Evaluating Passenger Rail Service
Alternatives on the Grand Junction Railroad
The Boston metropolitan area is in critical need of improved circumferential connectivity. The rapid growth and development of districts outside of the traditional downtown has presented travel demand that is incompatible with the legacy rapid transit system.
The Grand Junction Railroad is a historically freight rail link that connects Boston’s south and northside commuter rail networks via a circumferential route through Cambridge that avoids downtown. Conveniently, this line is largely unused except for night-time MBTA and Amtrak non-revenue equipment movements, and runs adjacent to Beacon Yard, Kendall Square, and Cambridge Crossing – all dense employment and population hubs either in development or experiencing continued growth.
This thesis works to address gaps in prior literature evaluating the use of the Grand Junction Railroad (GJRR) for passenger rail service and specifically aims to provide a thorough operations analysis of potential passenger rail service. Using Rail Traffic Controller (RTC), a train dispatching software, this thesis evaluates the
compatibility of passenger rail service along the GJRR to both Lynn and North Station. Additionally, this work takes into consideration expected improvements in rail infrastructure around North Station and planned improvements in existing regional commuter rail service frequencies. The modeling conducted in this thesis demonstrates that the introduction of GJRR passenger service is operationally feasible for both a route to Lynn and North Station, but also suggests that as existing regional commuter rail service is improved, further infrastructure investments may become desirable to retain necessary levels of network resilience.
ChenAn Shen
Thesis Advisors: Jinhua Zhao, Jim Aloisi
Evaluating the Heterogeneous Impact of NYC Congestion Pricing with Aggregate Data
This thesis evaluates the equity and effectiveness of New York City’s congestion pricing program using a Bayesian Multinomial Logit (BMNL) model. As the first large-scale implementation in the U.S., NYC’s program provides a unique opportunity to assess how such policies influence travel behavior across demographic groups. Combining synthetic trip data with observed mode shares, the model estimates changes in mode choice and consumer surplus by income, age, gender, trip purpose, and origin-destination. By updating parameter estimates as new data becomes available, the BMNL framework delivers timely, uncertainty-aware insights into policy impacts. Results show that while congestion pricing improves overall welfare and reduces car use, impacts are uneven: higher-income travelers are less sensitive to charges, while lower-income drivers may face significant costs or behavior shifts. Commute trips respond less than discretionary travel. The study offers a replicable approach for evaluating congestion pricing,
emphasizing the importance of equity in policy design and implementation.
Mistaya Smith
Thesis Advisor: Andres Sevtsuk
The Path Forward: Gentrification Management Strategies in Rural Trail-Based Outdoor Recreation Economies
Rural communities in the United States face economic challenges due to a combination of factors including the decline of the extractive sector, the departure of manufacturing, the agglomeration of farmland, and the regionalization of key public services. To some policymakers, this economic decline, in combination with the nation’s rural-urban political stratification, serves as reason to further abandon rurality and promote migration to urban areas. These policies overlook the interdependence between rural and urban ecosystems and ignore rural America’s unique assets. In capitalizing on rurality’s existing natural beauty and land access, the trail-based outdoor recreation economy functions as a form of asset-based economic development in rural communities. In connecting recreators to the land, serving as the setting of social connection, and creating placebased connections across time, trails further benefit rural communities through the construction of place attachment. Investment in trails as a form of economic development, however, commodifies nature so as
to attract external interest in rural places. Externallydriven population increases and wealth influxes in rural communities can cause physical gentrification in the form of rising property values and resident displacement. This gentrification process also contains a cultural component as the commodification of nature and the demographic shift in rural places erodes place attachment between longtime residents and the land through the displacement of local placebased knowledge, changes in traditional land access, and disruption to recreational use patterns. Research suggests that those with deeper place attachments exhibit greater civic engagement, a deeper sense of community and belonging, and more care for their community and environment. Therefore, cultural gentrification can also lead to a decline in community care and a risk to rural vitality. This thesis examines five rural Northeastern towns with trail-based outdoor recreation economies to discern how each community approaches the risks of physical and cultural gentrification.
Alessandra Smith
Thesis Advisor: Karilyn Crockett
Reimagining the Role of City Owned Assets as Multifunctional Infrastructure: Serving Community Needs Through Collaboration
This thesis investigates how city governments can reconceptualize infrastructure to reshape value creation for communities, using the City of Atlanta as a case study. By examining various departments and executive offices within Atlanta’s municipal structure, the research highlights the complexities of urban governance, where value is not uniformly defined or understood even within a single city. The central question guiding this work is: How can Atlanta’s city agencies collaborate across departments to identify opportunities to create more value through cityowned assets?
Through stakeholder interviews and a mapping of publicly owned assets, this thesis explores an alternative, strategic approach to infrastructure one that supports not only urban planners but also city practitioners seeking to enhance residents’ quality of life through a value-based lens. The study also acknowledges the often overlooked, expanded value of built
assets, which remains difficult to capture through conventional metrics. In doing so, it argues for a broader, more inclusive understanding of infrastructure’s role in urban life.
This research offers a framework to view and explore infrastructure and values in a more comprehensive and holistic way compared to traditional methods. The framework centers strategy around prioritizing infrastructure planning, its relative outcomes, the spatial relationships and function of infrastructure, and the relationships that influence how people interact with infrastructure from a value-based lens.
Wonyoung
So
Dissertation Advisors:
Catherine D’Ignazio, Justin Steil
Reparative Urban Science: Challenging the Myth of Neutrality and Crafting DataDriven
Narratives
This dissertation constructs a distinctive lens on how we should see urban technology in the context of a long history of systemic racism, and how we can take a reparative approach to intervene in contemporary situations of racial inequality with technology/data as a method to address systemic racism. The current discourse of urban science often puts an emphasis on newly available (and big) data, primarily values methodologies of “hard” sciences such as physics, computer science, and mathematics, and evolves to incorporate the latest technologies and analytic methods including machine learning and artificial intelligence. However, the role of urban science and analytics that “move[s] beyond analysis” has not been extensively theorized. In particular, the relationship between urban technologies, white supremacy, and racial capitalism has not been extensively studied. Nonetheless, the impact of the applications of such “urban analysis” on people’s lives has been substantial. Building on planning scholars’ calls for reparative planning and emerging discourses of “algorithmic reparation,” this
dissertation proposes a normative framework of reparative urban science that challenges whiteness in urban science and embraces the epistemologies and methodologies of reparations.
The first paper of this dissertation introduces the overarching theory of reparative urban science, identifying three mechanisms—formalizing, context removal and legitimization, and penalization—through which urban technologies perpetuate historical inequalities under a race-neutral guise. It proposes reparative methodologies. The second and third papers demonstrate reparative urban science in action, exemplifying these methodologies. The third paper evaluates the reparative potential of housing programs using algorithmic methods, particularly comparing race-neutral versus race-conscious Special Purpose Credit Programs (SPCPs). It demonstrates that race-conscious SPCPs could significantly reduce the racial housing wealth gap than race-neutral ones, showing race-conscious policies as potential reparative tools. The concluding chapter explores theoretical and practical considerations of housing reparations through the lens of reparative justice, arguing for a deeper acknowledgment of the historical and structural harms related to land and property.
Luka Srsic
Thesis Advisor: Cherie Abbanat
Artificial Intelligence in the Urban Development Ecosystem
This thesis investigates how artificial intelligence (AI) tools can address real-world challenges in urban planning, real estate development, and architecture. While the concept of generative city design has seen rapid technical advancement in recent years, much of the innovation has remained disconnected from the day-to-day needs of professionals in these fields. Through a series of in-depth interviews with planners, developers, architects, and researchers, this study identifies specific pain points where AI could meaningfully improve workflows such as stakeholder coordination, information retrieval, real-time site analysis, and rendering. The findings show that while architects are already leveraging AI for visualization and design iteration, planners and developers are more cautious, often constrained by institutional culture, risk aversion, and legacy workflows. Key barriers to adoption include generational divides, concerns around job displacement, and the opacity of many AI systems. This research highlights a growing need for AI tools that are not only technically advanced but also intuitive, transparent, and aligned with the collaborative, relationship-driven nature of urban development work. By mapping current use cases and
identifying gaps in tool design and adoption, this thesis aims to bridge the disconnect between AI research and the practical realities of planning and development.
Jessie Tagliani
Thesis Advisor: Ezra Glenn
Evolving Concepts of the Public Interest in Comprehensive Planning
The public interest is an important, yet contested, concept in the field of planning. On the one hand, it offers a normative criterion against which planning decisions can be evaluated and is traditionally viewed as the source from which planners derive their authority. However, the precise nature of the concept is fiercely debated by both planning practitioners and theorists, with some going so far as to denounce its existence. Today, the increasingly pluralist and complex nature of communities lead to questions over the concept’s relevance and applicability. In the second half of the twentieth century, planning theoreticians began assembling a body of literature surrounding this concept, mostly in the form of typologies of the definitions that have been ascribed to the public interest. However, my review of the literature revealed that the study of the public interest as a normative criterion for planning has almost entirely taken place in the realm of planning theory. Therefore, I sought to add to the empirical scholarship concerning the public interest by analyzing it from two angles: first, instead of treating it like a fixed, ideal concept, I sought to understand how the public interest as a historical concept has changed
and evolved alongside the field of planning throughout the twentieth century. Second, I chose the field of comprehensive planning as my analytical lens due to its longevity across the history of the planning profession and its close affiliation to the concept of the public interest. Specifically, I sought to analyze how the public interest is manifested in a series of comprehensive plan documents and thereby illustrate how the concept’s operationalization has evolved over the course of the past half century of planning.
I began my analysis by drawing on over fifty years of scholarship to construct my own typology of the main definitions of the public interest. I then applied these definitions to four different models of comprehensive planning that were developed between 1962 and 2012. I also obtained a second perspective on the evolution of the concept of public interest by examining a series of comprehensive plans adopted by the City of Annapolis between 1964 and 2022. The two analyses revealed very different trajectories in the evolution of the public interest as an empirical concept. On the one hand, the four models demonstrate a fairly linear evolution in what is constituted to be the substance and process of constituting the public interest, which can be broadly classified as achieving social equity, the responsible stewardship of natural resources, and authentic citizen involvement. By contrast, the five Annapolis comprehensive plans did not neatly follow the same evolution. Instead, a recurring concern for many of the Annapolis plans is the conservation of the physical city through the control of the city’s growth, the careful maintenance of its economy, and the preservation of its urban fabric. However, the more recent plans demonstrate a stronger commitment to the social values and processes espoused by the four planning models, indicating that there is growing consensus in the field of planning today regarding an empirical understanding of the public interest.
Archer Thomas
Thesis Advisor: Albert Saiz
An Economic Reevaluation of Navi Mumbai
Navi Mumbai, a municipality in the Mumbai Metropolitan Region, is the largest satellite city project in India. Nevertheless, it has been seen within the planning discipline as underperforming its original ambitions. Drawing upon the goals enumerated in the city’s original development plan, this thesis proposes a series of quantitative metrics corresponding to said goals and then utilizes data drawn from surveys, censuses, official reports, financial statements, and remote sensing datasets to propose an updated evaluation of Navi Mumbai’s performance over the past half-century. This thesis argues that, contrary to earlier perceptions, Navi Mumbai has largely succeeded in fulfilling its ambitions, and that this can be attributed to shifting suburbanization patterns in India, the prescient decision to prioritize office-based service industries over manufacturing, and the ongoing reconfiguration of transportation and logistics networks within the Mumbai region. Reflecting on the history of urban and economic planning in India, this thesis then suggests the implications of Navi Mumbai’s apparent success for satellite city projects in India and across the Global South, focusing on questions of financing and governance.
Rodrigo A. Vasquez Posada
Thesis Advisor: Janelle Knox-Hayes
Policy Approaches to PFAS Farmland Pollution: Recommendations for Cape Cod
In this thesis, I will describe what PFAS chemicals are, where they come from and their uses, literature on their health effects, and the pathway of contamination from Wastewater Treatment Plants to Farmland through the land application of biosolids. This work will also analyze the policy approaches by the states of Maine and Michigan, and discuss the limitations of the local government of Cape Cod to address the issue. Finally, I make policy recommendations to Massachusetts and Barnstable County based on these reflections.
Cale Wagner
Thesis Advisor: David Gamble
Breaking the Loop: ClimateDriven Urbanism for America’s Climate Migration Hubs
As sea level rise and other climate impacts force millions across the U.S. to increasingly relocate in coming decades, how receiving cities accommodate this growth will significantly impact future emissions trajectories. This thesis examines the climate migration feedback loop, where climate migrants relocate to urban areas with carbon-intensive development patterns, inadvertently accelerating the climate change driving their displacement.
Through analysis of three contrasting metropolitan areas—Atlanta, Portland, and Buffalo—this research demonstrates how different development approaches could either perpetuate or disrupt this feedback loop. Using a spatial methodology based on the urban transect model, the study compares Business-as-Usual scenarios that follow current development trends with Climate-Driven Reform scenarios that redirect growth toward transit-accessible, walkable locations.
The research reveals that Climate-Driven Urbanism can meaningfully reduce both land consumption and emissions compared to conventional development
patterns. These reductions stem not from technological advancement or behavioral change, but from strategic spatial reorganization of the same migrating population, with each metropolitan area demonstrating unique implementation pathways. By connecting regional migration flows to metropolitan development scenarios and neighborhood design interventions, this thesis offers planners, designers, and communities a framework for evaluating alternative futures that transform population growth from a spatial challenge and emissions liability into a catalyst for sustainable urbanism.
Nicole Wong
Thesis Advisor: Mariana Arcaya
Ensuring Equitable Tenant Outcomes: Case Studies of Building Decarbonization Initiatives in Greater Boston, Massachusetts
U.S. cities are ramping up building decarbonization initiatives to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from buildings. However, these programs and policies generate complex challenges at the intersection of housing, climate, and environmental justice, especially for cities that face barriers to adopting strong renter protections. This thesis offers two case studies regarding tenant-related equity concerns that emerged during the implementation of building decarbonization initiatives in greater Boston, Massachusetts: Boston’s building performance standard the Building Emissions Reduction and Disclosure Ordinance (BERDO) and Everett’s energy efficiency incentive deployment program Electrify Everett. This thesis also identifies strategies that residents, community organizations, and city officials highlight as important to advance building decarbonization without generating unintended consequences for tenants. Key equity concerns include the potential impacts of building decarbonization on rental affordability, displacement, and energy burden,
whereas strategies include broad tenant protections such as rent control, renter protections attached to building decarbonization subsidies, and robust enforcement mechanisms. This research illuminates the need to build power to win essential tenant protections, focus decarbonization on housing with existing affordability protections, and advance alternative, decommodified forms of housing.
China Dispossession Watch: Making Visible the Human Costs of Forced Land Expropriation in Urbanizing China
This thesis critically examines China’s land expropriation regime through a mixed-methods approach that integrates ethnographic investigation, quantitative economic analysis, and practical interventions developed in collaboration with affected communities. Drawing on extensive fieldwork in the Yangtze Delta Region, including 50 in-depth interviews with dispossessed residents, the research documents how China’s urbanization strategy systematically captures land value through a dispossession machinery operating at the intersection of state power, market mechanisms, and contested citizenship.
The ethnographies reveal a sophisticated system of dispossession enabled by a network of actors whose complementary roles maintain procedural appearances while facilitating extralegal tactics. Quantitative analysis demonstrates systemic under-compensation and value capture that leaves dispossessed households with livelihood disruption and housing insecurity. The
research examines how affected communities navigate severe constraints through adaptive resistance strategies to overcome power asymmetries and institutional manipulation, and documents their economic, social, and health outcomes.
Moving beyond analysis to practice, the thesis introduces two pragmatic interventions developed through collaborative design with affected communities: a digital humanities platform hosting multimedia ethnographic archives and a quantitative data dashboard; and an anti-displacement handbook which operationalizes research findings into actionable guidance calibrated to the specific challenges identified by community partners. These practical outputs, established as the China Dispossession Watch social venture, reflect a theory of change focused on addressing information asymmetries while building horizontal knowledge networks and long-term movement capacity.
Ziqing (Becky) Xu
Thesis Advisor: Catherine D’Ignazio
Analyzing Risks in Voluntary Forest Carbon Offsets
Using Open Data: A Hybrid Framework Integrating Retrieval-Augmented Generation in LLMs and Geospatial Analytics
The credibility of voluntary carbon markets hinges on the quality of carbon offset projects, particularly in forestry and land-use sectors where claims of additionality and emissions reductions are often disputed. This paper introduces a novel, open-source approach to evaluating carbon offset projects by integrating open datasets, satellite-based remote sensing, and large language models (LLMs). Focusing on additionality and baseline integrity, the study examines existing challenges—including inflated baselines, inconsistent standards, leakage risks, and limited transparency—and proposes a system to automate early-stage project assessment. The platform combines AI-driven document analysis and geospatial data processing to evaluate risk factors such as additionality, leakage, and policy compliance, offering stakeholders an accessible, scalable tool to identify high-integrity carbon
credits and mitigate greenwashing. This work aims to enhance transparency, accountability, and trust in the voluntary carbon market through data-driven, user-friendly decision support.
Mabelle Zhang
Thesis Advisor: Eran Ben-Joseph
Still Working: Re-examining America’s Urban Working Waterfronts
While American urban waterfronts once served as critical sites of production, they are now disappearing, reflecting larger de-industrialization trends. This thesis argues for a critical re-examination of the continued and evolving role that waterfronts play as sites of work. It expands the definition of urban working waterfronts to mean sites of industry, production, and economic activity, thereby aligning with these sites’ historic and ongoing uses.
This thesis examines four working waterfronts in the Northeastern United States, a region with over 400 years of urban development driven by and around its waterfronts. These case studies are: Central Waterfront in Portland, ME; Waterfront District in New Bedford, MA; Waterfront at Port Morris, NY; and Waterfront at Sunset Park, NY.
Through analyzing these cases, this thesis proposes a typology of working waterfronts as an organizing structure. These typologies are the Traditional Working Waterfront, the Industrial Working Waterfront, and the Hybrid Working Waterfront, based on key
differences in uses, forms, and governance.
Ultimately, this thesis argues that the central issue is not merely protecting working waterfronts, but understanding how they are adapting to new realities. State and community-driven protections through zoning help protect existing working waterfronts. However, urban working waterfronts are not stagnant – rather, they are ever-evolving to the new economic realities through incorporating new industries, technologies, and public access into their sites.
