Landscape Architecture Theses and Dissertations

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Browsing Landscape Architecture Theses and Dissertations by Subject "environmental justice"

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    No Walk in the Park: Urban Green Space Planning for Health Equity and Environmental Justice
    (University of Oregon, 2023-07-06) Elderbrock, Evan; Russel, Kory
    Cities are complex socio-ecological systems where social, cultural, economic, political, and environmental factors influence health outcomes. With the global population growing increasingly urbanized, understanding how urban environmental conditions affect human health has become a topic of interest among researchers across multiple disciplines. Urban green space—which includes all vegetated land cover (e.g., trees, grass, shrubs, and woodlands), as well as any land uses with publicly available recreational amenities (e.g., parks, schoolyards, university campuses, and conservation areas) located within a city’s geographic boundary—provides multiple health and health-promoting benefits. As such, disparities in park access, park quality, and green cover exposure (i.e., tree canopy and all other vegetation) are considered environmental justice and health equity issues. A wealth of recent research has found that, in general, increased access to parks has been associated with greater likelihood that residents will participate in physical activities and meet physical activity guidelines, and increased exposure to vegetated land cover has corresponded with improved psychological well-being and reduced risk of some mental illnesses. Yet, urban green spaces, and the health benefits such spaces afford, are not distributed equitably, and disparities in urban green space access and exposure based on race, ethnicity, or income represent environmental justice and health equity concerns. In this dissertation, I build upon the existing body of knowledge to 1) investigate how issues of health have shaped urban landscapes in the United States and how the policies and decisions that have shaped urban landscapes have exacerbated health inequities, 2) build upon existing research at the nexus of health and urban green space to improve understanding of relationships between urban green space access/exposure, physical activity, and mental well-being, and 3) develop a method for identifying distributional justice concerns related to urban green space access/exposure to inform urban green space planning for health equity.
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    Place-Based Social-Ecological Inquiry in Urban Green Stormwater Infrastructure Systems: A Comparison of Ecological and Social Outcomes in Three Portland Neighborhoods
    (University of Oregon, 2022-10-04) Stapleton, Elizabeth; Enright, Chris
    With the anticipated escalation in extreme weather events due to climate change, urban areas are increasingly managing stormwater through the use of green infrastructure, designed facilities which share an emphasis on the use of soil and plants to store and infiltrate stormwater. In addition to its primary hydrologic functions, green infrastructure is recognized for its multifunctionality in providing numerous bioecological and sociocultural benefits. In this context, in addition to serving as functional hydrological amenities, green infrastructure networks can be interpreted as “social-ecological systems,” systems of integrated human-environment relationships which are both adaptive and complex. There is a growing recognition in both natural science and social science disciplines that the most pressing challenges of the 21st century involve both social and biophysical elements as well as their interactions. To address the intertwined challenges of creating socially and environmentally just and ecologically resilient contemporary cities, planners, policymakers, and designers must increasingly consider the ecological and social outcomes of their decisions as a complexly integrated whole. “Place-based” modes of inquiry have emerged across disciplines out of a recognition of the critical importance of understanding unique contextual factors in both knowledge acquisition and application. This integrated understanding of physical conditions, contextual variation, and human experience have made place-based approaches an appealing mode of inquiry in the study of human-environment relationships. This dissertation uses Portland, Oregon’s network of publicly managed streetside green infrastructure facilities (Green Streets) to demonstrate how social and ecological processes co-create urban ecosystems and to explore how policy and design shape these emergent social-ecological systems. I center three neighborhood communities in both ecological and social examinations, using the concept of place to inform both social and ecological study design. In employing a place-based approach to the study of urban green infrastructure landscapes, this dissertation both advocates for the critical role of place-based methods in landscape architecture research and asserts their particular utility for exploring the complexity of human-environment relationships in interdisciplinary landscape studies.