Faculty Sponsor: Pablo Bose

Providence, Rhode Island is a city that has experienced continuous change in its urban and social fabric. In just over two centuries, the city donned multiple titles: port city, industrial powerhouse, and the ‘renaissance city.’ More recently, the city gained a new title. In 2009, Providence embarked on the ‘Creative Capital’ campaign. With this re-branding, city officials hoped to present Providence as a creative hub in an effort to attract creative individuals to live and work in the city and to promote cultural tourism. In the same year, the Department of Arts, Culture + Tourism implemented a cultural plan entitled “Creative Providence” in order to provide substantive projects and initiatives to achieve this image.  Utilizing Richard Florida’s idea of the “Creative City” as a theoretical lens, this thesis aims to provide a thorough examination of Providence’s creative transformation, with an analytical focus on the city’s unique elements of public participation and neighborhood development. I will first provide an overview of the literature of post-industrial redevelopment and the debates on ‘creative cities’ in order to situate my examination of Providence in a broader academic context. Next, I will discuss Providence’s ‘renaissance’ redevelopment occurring between 1970 and 2000 that culminated in the production of its ‘destination city’ identity. From here, I will examine in detail Providence’s creative transformation, focusing on the seeds of creativity already present in the city as well as its more intentional creative placemaking projects and branding initiatives that have occurred in the past fifteen years. Finally, I will conduct an analysis of the discourse surrounding neighborhood redevelopment and public participation in Providence’s creative zeitgeist, paying attention to three key themes: community empowerment; tourism and marketing; and perceptions of neighborhood gentrification. Here, I will implore the necessity of looking beyond official accounts of redevelopment and uncover the silences and contradictions laden in the narratives of the city’s creative revitalization.

Faculty Sponsor: Pablo Bose

This thesis will explore the actual forms, patterns and perceptions of gentrification in Burlington, Vermont from 1981 until the present day. Drawing on debates within urban geography regarding the processes and practices that make up gentrification, I will conduct empirical research with key informants and on archival material to better understand Burlington’s specific experience with gentrification. To accomplish this, I will be using mixed methods that combine critical mapping of the patterns of land use and real estate values with interviews of local stakeholders involved in urban planning. The resulting maps will serve as a resource for city residents and urban planners to better visualize over time the gentrification narratives in Burlington .

Faculty Sponsor: Ingrid Nelson

Land use has been a point of tension between rural residents, indigenous peoples, and environmentalists since the establishment of the first U.S. National Parks in 1872. Since then, the increased number of protected area designations and their unique restrictions has only increased the frequency and severity of these conflicts. The ‘No Monument’ movement in the Central Klamath River region embodies the core tensions between a variety of communities that intersect on a shared landscape. This thesis offers a qualitative analysis of the uses of different technologies (eg. gold dredging, all-terrain vehicles, and fire) in rural areas along the Klamath River. By focusing on how some technologies gain acceptance while others are rejected by those with different interests, I argue that these practices reveal the cultural assumptions that shape ongoing land use conflicts. Such conflicts stem from inconsistencies in regulating technologies that “enhance” wilderness experiences for some and technologies that “degrade” wilderness experiences for others. Drawing on ideas from rural geography, political ecology, and science, technology, and society studies (STSS), I propose the notion of a techscape, a framework for viewing a landscape as a dynamic product of the technology that co-creates it. The techscape offers an alternative method of looking at a landscape that can highlight marginalized voices and illustrate the flaws with current land use restrictions.

Faculty Sponsor: Meghan Cope

When Hurricane Maria struck Puerto Rico in September of 2017, it left destruction in its wake and unveiled the on-going state of catastrophe that Puerto Rico had been stuck in for years. In Mariana, a rural neighborhood situated in the mountains surrounding the coastal city of Humacao, Hurricane Maria made landfall on the Island’s eastern coast and the eye of the storm moved through the valley adjacent to Mariana. In the wake of the devastation, a community-based organization, the Proyecto de Apoyo Mutuo, Mariana (the Mutual Support Project or PAM), emerged as a response to the ineffective relief and recovery efforts managed by the United States government. PAM based its neighborhood recovery efforts on principles of mutual aid, education, and empowerment to address the immediate needs of the residents while also envisioning a stronger future for Mariana. During the summer of 2018, I spent two months living in Mariana and conducting ethnographic research that explored how PAM’s recovery and revitalization initiatives are designed to both combat the root sources of vulnerability experienced by Mariana residents and establish sources of sovereignty within the community. This paper develops the empirical and conceptual value of framing such post-disaster community work as dismantling vulnerability rather than “recovery” or “resilience”.