Introduction:

Urban Studies is an inherently interdisciplinary subject that draws from a range of established academic disciplines, among them global studies, environmental studies, history, sociology, anthropology, economics, political sciences, policy and planning, architecture, design, media studies, and the arts. Urban studies majors learn to address the myriad ways urbanization affects many facets of urban life, including politics, social justice, the environment, and the economy in cities both in the United States and internationally. They culminate the major course of study with a year-long senior seminar aimed at guiding students through the process of developing a research project of their choosing and prepare for life after graduation.

Below we present, in alphabetical order, short summaries of their unique and wide-ranging work.

I began community organizing work around the 2020 presidential election. Through phone banking for candidates at both national and local levels, I started noticing trends of disillusionment and disengagement among the electorate. Specifically, I observed a strong rhetoric around individualism, a sentiment echoed by several researchers concerned that Americans are becoming more individualistic and less engaged in their communities.

The purpose of my thesis is to investigate these trends and learn more about the origins of American Individualism and its effects on community organizing efforts today. My hope is to learn what organizers can do to re-engage folks in community-based organizing efforts. For that purpose, I am using the New York City Democratic Socialists of America ( NYC DSA) as a case study to examine specific tactics against individualism, disengagement, and disillusionment in New York City.

Through this research, I sought to answer the following questions: With civic engagement and community involvement low and individualism prominent in the US, how does an organization like NYC DSA push back against these trends? How does NYC DSA successfully increase community involvement and civic engagement? And what can we learn from this case study about larger scale change and engagement?

Using secondary resources and 3 longform qualitative interviews with current NYC DSA members, my research produced generative common themes around NYC DSA’s organizing and engagement strategies that can be summed up into 5 key principles:

1. NYC DSA is structured horizontally with strong democratic principles and representation which immediately entrusts new members with important work;

2. NYC DSA’s structure allows for a strong sense of community that is energizing and inclusive;

3. Small and steady wins enhance optimism and engagement;

4. DSA is not focused on just small reactive changes, but rather works to foster a radical imagination amongst members which helps people understand what they are fighting for not just what they are fighting against; and

5. These strategies foster empowerment and engagement while countering doomerism and disillusionment.

My hope is that this case study can serve as a building block for communities to expand their current organizing and engagement tactics. I hope that as we learn from each other and other successful models, we can build stronger, more powerful, more engaged communities.

When I started this project, I simply wanted to show a connection between plants in agricultural monocultures and humans increasingly living in various iterations of urban isolation. In defining agricultural monocultures as a means of maximizing profit off of plants with minimum input, I wanted to apply this notion to people habitating monotonous urban spaces, or what I would term “urban monocultures.” By examining if and how capital and industrialization created such problems, I intended to ascertain if humans are exploited in the same way plants are and if the antidote - anti-capitalist polyculture - might actually be a solution to both.

Yet through my research, I’ve realized that it’s not quite so simple. Defining monoculture in agricultural terms is relatively easy as “the growing of a single crop using the majority or whole of the land” (Watts, 2018), and there are scientifically proven problems, both environmentally and ethically, that result from simplifying an ecosystem on such a massive scale. However, a clear definition of a human or urban monoculture is much harder to develop and prove. Through this comparative process, I discovered that throughout human history there have been seemingly infinite numbers of urban monocultures. When applying the agricultural definition of monoculture to human societies, the term could be used to discuss everything from an ancient convent in which nuns were isolated together, dressed in identical uniforms, and cut off from the rest of the world, to a present day factory that churns out mass numbers of identical kitchen sinks. An urban monoculture can subsequently be defined as a group of people that have been isolated in some way based on the monetary worth or cost that group has been assigned by the capitalist system.

I have ultimately learned that monoculture, in a broad sense, is not simply a system of efficient organization that takes place mainly in agriculture, it can be applied to human societies and is something that we as humans do to everything, and plants are only one example of multitudes. Throughout history and especially in the 21st century United States, monocultures relentlessly touch every aspect of our lives. All living beings - both human and non-human - have multitudes of abilities, attributes, and gifts, but monoculture redefines them in singular fashion that can be exploited to make profit for the capitalist machine.

Abigail Dring BA ‘22, Urban Studies

Pronouns: she/her

Rubble, Post 2008

Rubble, Post 2008 is a research based, critical, and creative intervention into the practice of demolition in Cleveland, Ohio after the 2008 foreclosure crisis. The project's driving provocation is: how can a visual intervention serve to reveal and subvert the hegemonic state-sanctioned narratives that surround demolition? For context, the dominant narratives identified in my initial research were of two schools: the school of market logic and the school of urban pathologization.

My interest in this project stems from both my academic interests and my upbringing. I grew up in rural Ohio and urbanism was neither an integrated nor a foundational component of my background. Nonetheless, the realities and symptoms of class disparities were present and actively visible in the spaces I occupied. I came to the field of urbanism out of a curiosity about understanding how class functions within varying social contexts. Specifically, over the course of my studies, I have developed a desire for an understanding of the complex and often obscure systems (and [infra]structures) that inform the built environment.

Ideologically my thesis work is driven by anti-capitalist and decolonial perspectives rooted in theory that centers liberatory frameworks. Methodologically, as an urbanist and visual artist, Rubble, Post 2008 is a transdisciplinary project which allows for a weaving of knowledge (and its production) that is perhaps more capable of engaging the complexities and contradictions held within urban ecologies. As such, my thesis work and more broadly my academic work is informed by/rooted in a variety of methodological approaches.

Rubble, Post 2008 mobilizes narrative analysis as a mode of urban critique. Through reasserting the multidimensionality of demolitions’ existing conditions, my research attempts to exhume the spatial and temporal nuance that have arisen from narratives of residential demolition post-2008 (as evidenced in a short video I produced). It investigates how we can think through material conditions in ways that are both broad (structural) and specific (site-based). In this sense, Rubble, Post 2008 works towards a critical, infrastructural, and dispositional inquiry into demolitions material and immaterial realites, and puts forth an opportunity to consider “what could be”, the possibility latent in the built environment and needing only to be exhumed.

In my thesis, I examine the history of 5 Pointz within the broader context of arts and redevelopment. Originally the Neptune Water Meter Factory, 5 Pointz experienced several iterations before reaching its final form as a collaborative arts space with studios for artists. I have created an online exhibition using pictures containing artworks, artist bios, as well as a timeline cataloging the history of the building/neighborhood that seeks to educate the public on 5 Pointz. The website seeks to develop a collective memory of those working on and around 5 Pointz as a means of unearthing and possibly mending the urban palmiest in a meaningful way.

Residing at the intersection of infrastructure, public space, and landscape, 5 Pointz was a dynamic component of the urban landscape that could have offered a sense of continuity between what Long Island City was and would eventually become. Our city is not static, and it is composed of a network of interrelations. Contemporary urban policy and planning practices, on the other hand, have broken down and reduced the beautiful network of the city into fragmented realities. Although policymakers have tried to refit redeveloped urban spaces with public arts to mend the urban social fabric, they often dismiss the organic public art that has developed locally as the history of 5 Pointz demonstrates. The retrofitting of the informal to fit a formal system is a violent act, one that must be countered with tacit and dynamic, inclusive urban planning.

The act of imposing current zoning, landmarking, and fundamentally binary practices on the fluid urban realities can prove to be more harmful than beneficial. Current public art efforts embody a technocratic vision outlined by Rosalyn Deutsche, and to paraphrase; they are typically remedial efforts that don’t address the loss of people’s attachment to the city–and react by offering solutions that can only perpetuate alienation.

Rather, in my project I propose a turn away from this, and my site wishes to speak to this intention by memorializing the organic, local public art that once existed at 5 Pointz. As an artist and recovering suburbanite, I am sensitive to the violence of such abstraction and seek to highlight the detrimental costs of disrespecting the nuance of our converging realities. I wish for a future that mitigates this for all. Paired with future, more hands-on change, this is only the beginning of my work celebrating the legacy of 5 Pointz and the genuine intentions of this grass-roots arts collective which, by following their artistic instincts, managed to give back to themselves and their community!

May 27, 1964 marked the official beginning of a 52-year armed conflict between the Colombian government, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) and, eventually, the drug cartels, embodied by the infamous Pablo Escobar. Started as response to Colombia’s inept, corrupt, racist and exploitative government and intensified by the increased global demand for Cocaine since the 1970s, this bloody civil war caused tremendous violence and destruction characterized by undocumented numbers of kidnappings, assassinations, torture, rape and massive displacement, particularly among the marginalized population of African descent.

As an immigrant woman with existing family ties to Colombia and first-generation student, it matters to me to inform others about the tragic events as I’m privileged enough to study the conflict from a safe distance and removed from the distorted narratives that have been mainly fabricated by popular media. The main goal of my research therefore is to explore the media portrayals of the armed conflict centered on the two main antagonists, FARC and Pablo Escobar, and uncover the real stories of those most severely affected by the conflict. Specifically, I seek to correct some of the media misconceptions by focusing primarily on personal experiences with violence and internal displacement by interviewing an Afro-Colombian woman from a rural farm town in Caqueta to the third-largest city in Valle del Cauca. The interview is complemented by archival research and secondary sources to be able to provide a coherent narrative of the geographic impact of the armed conflict. In doing so I create awareness and give these deliberately silenced women a voice and provide a more accurate depiction of the real impact of the violent standoff between FARC, Pablo Escobar, and the Narco business even today, six years after the 2016 peace agreement that supposedly ended the violent Civil war.

The confluence of a growing global population combined with rising resource consumption has impacted the availability of critical resources for human welfare, most notably water. At the same time, the infrastructure which supposedly provides for the equitable distribution of water is aging significantly. Funding for infrastructure upgrades has steadily decreased in the United States over the past 40 years. The effects of aging water infrastructure, which are augmented by disinvestment, have created a systemic triad of challenges for equitable water utility management in post-industrial cities across the U.S.

By first examining how the lack of investment in aging water infrastructure has contributed to significant crises of water quality in post-industrial cities, this thesis investigates how continuing disinvestment in post-industrial city infrastructure shifts the costs of water quality management onto residents, who face steadily rising water utility rates as the only source of funding for critically-needed infrastructure upgrades. Low-income residents in these cities further face the challenges of falling behind on their water bills, leading to service shutoffs and property liens instated by municipal utilities on households in debt. In tracing the systemic interconnections which drive this management crisis of quality, affordability, and accessibility in water infrastructure, my research ultimately provides solutions to improve how cities can fund infrastructure upgrades while maintaining equitable water access.

Three cities emblematize how these challenges are manifested: Flint, Michigan, which experienced a lead-in-drinking-water crisis in 2014 and now faces the highest water utility rates in the country, even while the city’s lead pipes are not entirely replaced; Baltimore, Maryland, where water utility rates have been steadily rising by 9 - 10% each year in the past decade as an effect of federally-mandated infrastructure upgrades; and Newark, New Jersey, where a 2018 lead-in-drinking-water crisis had a very different outcome to Flint’s, with the city’s lead pipes being replaced within three years at no direct cost to residents. My research examines the triad of challenges for water quality, affordability, and accessibility in these cities through both a quantitative and qualitative lens. To quantitatively assess the scope of these challenges, I conducted spatial analyses of average household income with yearly utility rates per census tract in each city to map the distribution of residents living without access to affordable water. I then corroborated this analysis by interviewing activists, residents, and policy advisors in each of these case-study cities to expose the narratives of those experiencing these crises firsthand.

In my findings, I have noted a number of suggested or implemented solutions which influenced utilities management in these cities, including critical sources of funding outside of residential water utility rates, and policy reform to constrain service shutoffs on low-income households. The outcome of this research represents not only a series of recommendations for utility managers and policymakers nationwide, but ultimately points to a new form of resource management in an era of increasingly precarious environmental stability, mired by a historically polarized and disparate U.S. political economy.

My thesis is focused on urban highway removal, specifically in the city of Rochester, New York. Urban highway removal has the ability to reconnect communities and remove existing barriers that often act as tools of infrastructural segregation, creating unsafe cities and divided communities. In favor of the car and building on the Federal Highway Act of 1956, planners across the United States built highways straight through already existing residential communities, upending millions of people's lives and leaving so many American cities in a fractured state. While this may have been great news for rural and suburban Americans, it was one of the most detrimental events for inner city residents, particularly African Americans and minority groups, as the once vibrant cultural centers and places of affordable residence were effectively destroyed.

Urban highway removal can counteract such fragmentation and has several presumed benefits, most notably by providing opportunities for once destroyed neighborhoods to recover. In addition, urban highway removal has the potential to create a much more sustainable, livable, and economically thriving urban environment. To assess the potential benefits, I will be focussing on my hometown of Rochester, NY, one of the first American cities to intentionally and successfully remove urban highways by dismantling the ‘Inner Loop’, a C-shaped freeway segment that surrounded the inner financial district of Rochester.

When the Inner Loop was built, it was intended to get suburban residents in and out of the city as quickly as possible. While this was undoubtedly accomplished, Rochester’s once thriving urban center deteriorated rapidly. The inner city was cut off completely from surrounding neighborhoods and vice versa. This prompted me to ask: To what extent does urban highway removal have the potential to stitch back together the urban fabric destroyed in mid-sized American cities in the mid-20th century? When reconnecting severed neighborhoods, what can be done to protect low income local residents residential neighborhoods from being pushed out? And lastly, how can urban highway removal make cities more sustainable and ecologically viable?

I ultimately learned that the removal of the Inner Loop, Rochester has primarily had positive effects that jump-started the process of revitalizing its city center and created new economic opportunities and new neighborhood relationships without displacing existing residents or causing gentrification. By prioritizing subsidized housing for the new Inner Loop East area and green-space for the Inner Loop North, the city of Rochester has begun the incredible process of creating a new sustainable and affordable urban district. Through this process the quality of living in Rochester has increased greatly, with so many other positive overall benefits for the city including; increased population & density, new businesses, lower maintenance costs, increased mental, physical, & environmental health, more pedestrian space, lowered driving speeds (decreasing urban noise pollution), heightened sense of community, and so much more. My research provides sound evidence that more mid-sized American cities should begin the process of downtown urban highway removal.

Isabella Krebs BA ‘22, Urban Studies

Pronouns: she/her

A Vernacular Approach to Climate Resilience: Thai Stilt Housing and Urban Flooding

My senior project examines Thailand’s vernacular form of dwelling, the stilt house, as an architectural strategy to reduce harm amid the worsening climate conditions in Thailand’s capital Bangkok. Thai stilt architecture can be adapted, hybridized, and scaled to address Bangkok’s urban flooding crisis based on its environmental design (key characteristics that make the architecture sustainable to the tropical climate and resilient to extreme weather events). The stilt house has been designed and improved through generational knowledge and traditional ecological practices, and may hold lessons that can be applied to contemporary urban issues elsewhere. I sought to find these lessons in vernacular design and found that they are not purely architectural, but also have implications on our environmental behaviors, attitudes, and daily practices. In other words, adapting to more extreme weather conditions can not only be solved with architecture and infrastructure but can also rely on changing human behavior.

Due to the paper’s focus on the local context and vernacular forms that are not perfectly captured in existing literature, the paper’s analysis looks beyond secondary sources and utilizes case study analysis, which is pertinent to the investigation of Thai stilt housing. I traveled to Thailand to visit illustrative case studies of traditional Thai stilt architecture, including the Jim Thompson House, Phak Rot Fai Village, and the Suan Pakkad Palace. I documented the architecture via photography, walked around the houses, recorded observations, and asked the museum experts questions regarding the history of each house, cultural significance, and construction methods.

The final paper engages in a nuanced discussion on the key lessons from Thai vernacular architecture, the potential in hybridization and adaptation, and the implications of urban living in the face of climate change.

After living in New York City for five years, I continue to be fascinated by its modernity, unity and the capacity of its residents in such a confined space while also being appalled by its problems, particularly those associated with capitalist exploitation and inequality. Therefore, I decided to focus my senior thesis on the impact of public housing projects on the mental health of low income housing residents. My research is based on interviews with 14 residents and neighbors of the Elliott Houses in the vicinity of Hudson Yards and thus a rapidly gentrifying neighborhood in Chelsea NY. I asked my respondents about their opinions of both the housing complex and the surrounding community and most revealed that they felt like a stranger in their own neighborhood because of increasing prices and changes to the built environment.

Through my research, I have found that low-income housing located in a rapidly gentrifying neighborhood had an adverse impact on its residents by creating new, or reinforcing existing mental health problems. I do not believe that there is an easy solution to this problem, or one that is found through my project, but the blatant contrast in class differences has become rather evident suggesting that we need to create financial and material support systems coupled with more accessible and affordable mental health support that allow low-income residents to continue to be part of the community rather than being increasingly alienated from it.

For that matter, I not only wrote an extensive research paper, I also created a pamphlet for Elliot Houses residents with information about mental health and general community resources.

The purpose of my senior project is to challenge and revise the commonly understood definitions of “Urban Renewal” by revealing its classist and racist origins. Contrary to the standard portrayal of urban renewal as starting with the 1949 Housing Act, I demonstrate that the process of urban renewal actually began in 1933 with the passage of the Home Owners’ Loan Act. The Home Owners’ Loan Act and the creation of the Federal Housing Administration one year later laid the foundations for the restructuring of the United States’ metropolitan regions by the process of urban renewal. Therefore, I believe that it is crucial to include the formative years of the 1930s in the definition of urban renewal.

In redefining urban renewal as a fifty-year process that demolished, rebuilt, and reorganized American cities, I explain how urban renewal wasn’t just about a love of modernism and the automobile, but it was also a reactionary divide-and-conquer strategy that aimed to turn our cities into zones of super-segregation along the lines of race and class. It is only by understanding both how urban renewal reshaped the built environment of American cities and how it tore apart their social fabric that we can get a full picture of what happened and how we can heal from it.

I have wanted to write this paper ever since reading Robert Caro’s The Power Broker in high school. Through that book I began to understand just how deeply urban renewal has impacted the lives of almost everyone in the United States. For example, the reason my grandfather was able to buy a house in Westchester in the 1950s and begin accumulating wealth is because of the federal-level policies that were put in place during the 1930s and 40s. The racist nature in which those policies were implemented meant that Black Americans weren’t able to access that same wealth through homeownership. I hope that my historical analysis illuminates not only how American cities got to where they are today, but also what we can do to correct these grave injustices.

My senior project provides a grounded academic critique of mainstream environmentalism. This paper will examine what environmentalists (including myself) think they are doing to curb environmental destruction. It will also explore academic critiques of mainstream environmentalism– including the presence of white settler colonialism, individualization, and corporatization– and if they are justified. Furthermore, the concept of environmental justice as an alternative to mainstream environmentalism will be explored. Lastly, this paper will analyze the efforts of New York City’s local government in engaging with environmentalism with the implementation of GrowNYC, and new environmental justice projects.

The purpose of my project is to understand the current failures of public school funding allocation processes in New York State, analyze other “more equitable” systems of funding public schools in the United States, and in so doing create my own criteria for equity and its relation to public funding. It is no secret that our public education system is in a state of crisis and that the current “solutions” of supporting charter schools, private schools, and supplemental education only exacerbate existing inequalities and result in unequal educational outcomes along the lines of class and race.

Only those who are privileged enough to escape their zip code are given the tools and opportunities to succeed which begs the following questions: Are we ready, as a society, to have the greater conversations about segregation, reparations, funding algorithms, and a colonized curriculum? Are we willing to rebuild a cracked foundation and make the United States Public Schools the beacons of hope and liberation they were supposed to be? I believe that public education has the potential to own up to its past name of being “the great equalizer”.

In order to achieve a public education system that acts as a means of liberation, we must work towards creating more equitable education funding using effective algorithms to do so. Although funding sources for public schools in the United States differ by state, on average 45 percent is derived by local revenues, 45 percent is from the state, and 10 percent is federal funding. As such, our public schools rely heavily on local property taxes which are tied to actual property values and inevitably favor higher-income communities. Lower-income communities on the other hand struggle to raise the funds and in many cases end up relying on inadequate transfers from the federal government. For that reason, I believe there should be a reduced reliance on local property taxation and an increased reliance on state funding. New York State is a good example of both the prospect and limitations of public funding practices. For one, it takes into consideration the amount needed per pupil for a sound basic education, adjusts for variation in regional costs, and increases funding based on the prevalence of students with special needs, English language learners, and low-income students. In practice, however, the New York State Aid Formula or the Foundation Aid Formula falls short in that it uses outdated notions of poverty and inconsistent & unfair local share calculations. I argue that with minor changes to the formula it’s possible to consider the state taking more responsibility for equitably distributing funds and closing the gap in per pupil spending in New York, and arguably, the United States. An equitable public education system provides each and every child, regardless of race, socio-economic status, or ability, with the tools to break the generational cycles of emotional, intellectual, and financial poverty that currently plague our nation.

Tall buildings are one of the many things that New York is known for and as a kid I was fascinated by how slim and tall buildings could be, seemingly defying physics. Yet, most of these buildings are spaces of exclusive and expensive real estate, particularly private residential skyscrapers with their identifiable shiny glass facades. Some find these buildings sleek and modern, others find them an eyesore, but beyond their physique, these new super tall residential skyscrapers are indications of a fundamental shift in luxury real estate.

My thesis conceptualizes this new phenomenon as an integral part of “meta-gentrification,” the latest stage of gentrification where real estate is no longer a space to live in, but a space that exists almost solely for investment purposes. Many of the ultra expensive high rise condos in New York sit empty, despite their luxurious interiors and high rise views that would make for an amazing space to live.

The term gentrification is a widely used term to describe a multi-phase process where people with more money move into a neighborhood, displace the original residents, and invariably change the community. I am particularly interested in the “meta” gentrification stage where gentrification is no longer about wealthier people displacing a community with the intention to actually live in that space, but a space where money itself moves in as fixed investment capital.

To substantiate this claim, I started by looking at the characteristics of previous waves of gentrification in NYC such as pioneer gentrification and super gentrification and how they affected the demographic composition of neighborhoods. To juxtapose meta-gentrification in Manhattan, I examined buildings on and around 57th street in Midtown, Manhattan using secondary sources such as literature and investigative journalist practices. Such methods are warranted because of the secrecy of the meta-gentrification since the owners of these condos go to great lengths to make sure they’re identities are shielded listing such properties as shell companies, trusts, or through their lawyers’ names. This is evidence that this latest form of meta-gentrification heralds an unprecedented phase of urban development that ultimately drives up real estate prices making it more difficult for any resident - even wealthy ones- to afford housing.