scholarly journals Rapid Assessment and Long-Term Monitoring of Green Stormwater Infrastructure with Citizen Scientists

2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (22) ◽  
pp. 12520
Author(s):  
Thomas Meixner ◽  
Alan R. Berkowitz ◽  
Alisen E. Downey ◽  
Jose Pillich ◽  
Reese LeVea ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
San Francisco ◽  
Green Infrastructure ◽  
Rapid Assessment ◽  
Management Approach ◽  
Urban Stormwater ◽  
Green Stormwater Infrastructure ◽  
Rain Events ◽  
American Cities

Green stormwater infrastructure (GSI) has emerged as a promising decentralized management approach to urban stormwater challenges. A lack of data about GSI performance interferes with widespread adoption of GSI. A citizen science program that benefits researchers, lay scientists, and municipalities offers a way to provide these lacking data. We have developed an open-source, transferable green infrastructure rapid assessment (GIRA) protocol for studying the performance of GSI with citizen scientists. This protocol has been tested in six North American cities (New York City, Toronto, Vancouver, Chicago, San Francisco, and Buffalo). In this research we define the performance of GSI in varying geographic, climatic, and maintenance conditions with the intent to create technological, institutional, and management solutions to urban stormwater problems. The GIRA protocol was used by citizen scientists to assess the physical properties and capabilities of bioswales, while small, affordable Green Infrastructure Sensors Boxes (GIBoxes) were used to determine longer-term function across several rain events. Our results indicate that teams of citizen scientists can be effective for collecting and archiving widespread information on the post-installation function of GSI. The effort also showed that citizen scientists had changes in understanding of urban stormwater challenges and the role that GSI can play in solving these problems. We explore the multiple benefits to knowledge, participants, and municipal partners as a result of this research.

scholarly journals A Methodology of Policy Assessment at the Municipal Level: Costa Rica´s Readiness for the Implementation of Nature-Based-Solutions for Urban Stormwater Management

2019 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 230 ◽  
Author(s):  
Veronica Alejandra Neumann ◽  
Jochen Hack
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Community Involvement ◽  
Green Infrastructure ◽  
Assessment Tool ◽  
Policy Design ◽  
Legal Framework ◽  
Environmental Benefits ◽  
Urban Stormwater ◽  
Rapid Urbanization ◽  
Municipal Level

Nature-based-solutions (NBS) pursue a combination of economic, social, and environmental benefits that can meet municipal goals on stormwater and rapid urbanization problems. However, NBS have fallen behind in reaching to the political and legal framework, and with this, to a policy mix for urban stormwater sustainability. When looking closer at NBS, it becomes evident that they are loaded with many barriers, including institutional and political ones, as well as those that exist in the urban area social context. These barriers are also deepened by the lack of policy guidelines and few demonstration projects. In this respect, this paper combines the concepts of urban experiments and the policy feedback cycle (PFC) into a singular assessment tool. It´s goal is to assess Costa Rica’s municipal readiness in the implementation of NBS within the context of policy design and implementation. Therefore, this paper focusses on the first two stages of the PFC of an existing urban experiment to extract its policy insights for the successful replication of NBS projects. This novel method aims to contribute to the ongoing debate with respect to the ability of experimentation to prompt scalability and transferability of results. Hence, the New York City Green Infrastructure plan is considered as an urban experiment that promotes sustainable policy initiatives; while the PFC can identify and (re)formulate these policies initiatives and barriers into an adaptable policy guideline. Results indicate that sustainability policies at the municipal level should incorporate incentive mechanisms policies on (i) community involvement and communication; and (ii) transdisciplinary knowledge transfer between specialists and stakeholders. Finally, this paper suggests the inter-municipal cross-institutional collaboration and the recognition of external trigger events to incentivize a sustainable urban transition.

scholarly journals Maximizing Green Infrastructure in a Philadelphia Neighborhood

2017 ◽  
Vol 2 (4) ◽  
pp. 115-132 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kate Zidar ◽  
Timothy A. Bartrand ◽  
Charles H. Loomis ◽  
Chariss A. McAfee ◽  
Juliet M. Geldi ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Green Infrastructure ◽  
Model Simulation ◽  
Private Land ◽  
Combined Sewer Overflows ◽  
Agent Based ◽  
Residential Neighborhood ◽  
Community Stakeholders ◽  
Combined Sewer ◽  
Green Stormwater Infrastructure

While the Philadelphia Water Department (PWD) is counting on Green Stormwater Infrastructure (GI) as a key component of its long-term plan for reducing combined sewer overflows, many community stakeholders are also hoping that investment in greening can help meet other ancillary goals, collectively referred to as sustainable redevelopment. This study investigates the challenges associated with implementation of GI in Point Breeze, a residential neighborhood of South Philadelphia. The project team performed a detailed study of physical, social, legal, and economic conditions in the pilot neighborhood over the course of several years, culminating in the development of an agent-based model simulation of GI implementation. The model evaluates a) whether PWD’s GI goals can be met in a timely manner, b) what kinds of assumptions regarding participation would be needed under different theoretical GI policies, and c) the extent to which GI could promote sustainable redevelopment. The model outcomes underscore the importance of private land in helping PWD achieve its GI goals in Point Breeze. Achieving a meaningful density of GI in the neighborhoods most in need of sustainable redevelopment may require new and creative strategies for GI implementation tailored for the types of land present in those particular communities.

Gentrification in the United States

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Suleiman Osman
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
20Th Century ◽  
San Francisco ◽  
The United States ◽  
Washington Dc ◽  
Controversial Issues ◽  
French Quarter ◽  
History Of ◽  
Demographic Impact ◽  
American Cities

Gentrification is one of the most controversial issues in American cities today. But it also remains one of the least understood. Few agree on how to define it or whether it is boon or curse for cities. Gentrification has changed over time and has a history dating back to the early 20th century. Historically, gentrification has had a smaller demographic impact on American cities than suburbanization or immigration. But since the late 1970s, gentrification has dramatically reshaped cities like Seattle, San Francisco, and Boston. Furthermore, districts such as the French Quarter in New Orleans, New York City’s Greenwich Village, and Georgetown in Washington DC have had an outsized influence on the political, cultural, and architectural history of cities. Gentrification thus must be examined alongside suburbanization as one of the major historical trends shaping the 20th-century American metropolis.

Immigrants in New York City: Reaping the Benefits of Continuous Immigration

Daedalus ◽  
2013 ◽  
Vol 142 (3) ◽  
pp. 92-106 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mary C. Waters ◽  
Philip Kasinitz
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
New York City ◽  
San Francisco ◽  
York City ◽  
Ethnic Conflicts ◽  
New Immigrants ◽  
Gateway Cities ◽  
European Immigrants ◽  
History Of ◽  
American Cities

Using New York City as an example, this essay examines how American cities that have a long and continuous history of absorbing immigrants develop welcoming institutions and policies for current immigrants and their children. Cities such as Chicago, San Francisco, and New York have been gateway cities for many previous waves of immigrants and continue to absorb new immigrants today. The ethnic conflicts and accommodations of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries continue to shape the context of reception of today's immigrants. In contrast to “new destinations,” which in recent years have often been centers of anti-immigrant sentiment and nativist local social policies, New York has generally adopted policies designed to include and accommodate new immigrants, as well as repurposing institutions that served earlier European immigrants and native-born African Americans and Puerto Ricans. The continuing significance of race in the city is counterbalanced in the lives of immigrants by a relative lack of nativism and an openness to incorporating immigrants.

to assimilate entirely, to leave their parents’ generation behind, to leave Europe behind—because, of course, their Europe, their Russia, their Austria, was a place of oppression, pogroms. So it’s incredibly hard to get even any information from them. But whether or not my knowledge of their decision, unconscious or conscious, to suture over all of that plays a role in my thinking about displacement, is hard to say. Later I became conscious of their difficulty, but not from them. PN: In Motion Sickness you have the narrator say, ‘It will probably be my fate not to learn other languages but to speak my own as if I were a foreigner’ (M, 51). There’s a question that the novel keeps raising about access to other languages, other codes, with a parallel sense of being alienated in one’s own. LT: I think it’s the frustration one feels being born into one’s body, and one’s body politic. I’m always amazed when people can move from one culture to another and adopt the customs of another culture. Some people can do this, some people can really transplant themselves. I don’t think I could. PN: The attention you’ve shown to cosmopolitan experience strikes me as somewhat unusual in writers of your generation. Perhaps it ties you more to a slightly earlier group—Burroughs, the Bowleses and others—for whom Europe was an indispensable reference point, not to say an escape route? LT: I was certainly interested in them, but before that I was fascinated by the period of the teens and the twenties, by the expatriate groupings in Paris, London and Zurich. Anyone fleeing. I suppose the desire was first to leave home, and then discovering that home is bigger than family, than your own tribe—that it includes the nation. That was something I contended with. PN: What do you think you gained from the metropolitan cultures of London and Amsterdam that you wouldn’t have found in your native New York—or, indeed, in other American cities like San Francisco or Chicago? LT: I think I needed, with my insecurity about writing, just to be in another place. To survive. All the otherness around me allowed me to express my difference, my Americanness. It was easier to be an American in a way and to find my own language in the midst of people who weren’t. The paradox is that you come closer to discovering what home is when you’re far away from it. And how it influences you so you can try to break from it, because at least you see it. PN: This was the period of the Vietnam war and its aftermath, of course, so there’s also the question of being an outsider politically.

2005 ◽  
pp. 50-50
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Vietnam War ◽  
Motion Sickness ◽  
San Francisco ◽  
Reference Point ◽  
Body Politic ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Escape Route ◽  
American Cities ◽  
As If

Classification of Bicycle Traffic Patterns in Five North American Cities

2013 ◽  
Vol 2339 (1) ◽  
pp. 68-79 ◽  
Author(s):  
Luis F. Miranda-Moreno ◽  
Thomas Nosal ◽  
Robert J. Schneider ◽  
Frank Proulx
Keyword(s):  
San Francisco ◽  
North American ◽  
Urban Form ◽  
The United States ◽  
Traffic Patterns ◽  
Day Of The Week ◽  
Volume Characteristics ◽  
American Cities

This study used a unique database of long-term bicycle counts from 38 locations in five North American cities and along the Route Verte in Quebec, Canada, to analyze bicycle ridership patterns. The cities in the study were Montreal, Quebec; Ottawa, Ontario; and Vancouver, British Columbia, in Canada and Portland, Oregon, and San Francisco, California, in the United States. Count data showed that the bicycle volume patterns at each location could be classified as utilitarian, mixed utilitarian, mixed recreational, and recreational. Study locations classified by these categories were found to have consistent hourly and weekly traffic patterns across cities, despite considerable differences between the cities in their weather, size, and urban form. Seasonal patterns across the four categories and in the cities also were identified. Expansion factors for each classification are presented by hour and day of the week. Monthly expansion factors are presented for each city. Finally, traffic volume characteristics are presented for comparison purposes.

Introduction: Making Places, Shaping Cities—Narrating Spatial History in Three American Cities

2018 ◽  
Vol 44 (4) ◽  
pp. 576-581
Author(s):  
Matthew Klingle
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
New York City ◽  
Spatial Analysis ◽  
San Francisco ◽  
Spatial Turn ◽  
Spatial History ◽  
Late Twentieth ◽  
American Cities ◽  
Late Twentieth Century

Powerful computing technologies and theoretical advances have empowered historians to follow the spatial turn in their work. Yet despite new technological and conceptual innovations, narrating spatial histories remains an ongoing challenge. The authors of three essays in this section apply spatial analysis in their narratives of politics, culture, and environmental change within three iconic U.S. cities—New York City, San Francisco, and Pittsburgh—from the eighteenth century to the late-twentieth century.

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