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Stormwater Management as a Tool for Urban Greening

New research supported by the UCLA Luskin Center for Innovation and the National Science Foundation demonstrates how local stormwater management efforts can contribute to wider environmental protection work. Managing stormwater is an important task for cities as runoff from heavy rain can cause flooding and pollute waterways if not managed properly. So how do water managers — such as engineers, public works employees and others who make decisions about water — choose among different stormwater options? In the new study, researchers from the Luskin Center for Innovation, UC Davis, Kent State University and Colorado State University surveyed 185 stormwater professionals from Cleveland, Ohio, and Denver, Colorado, to find out. The researchers identified two main types of water managers: “traditional technocrats” motivated by human-centric priorities, such as property value, aesthetics and recreation, and environmental “champions” who favor urban greening projects such as rain gardens, which can replenish groundwater supplies, among other benefits. This distinction can be useful to policymakers who want to advance urban greening goals through stormwater management. “Cities often use stormwater management regulations as an entry point for broader greening goals, leaving on-the-ground decisions about how that happens to professionals,” said lead researcher V. Kelly Turner, co-director of the Luskin Center for Innovation. “This indirect approach to land management is more likely to be effective if water professionals prioritize urban greening.” The study was published in the Journal of the American Water Resources Association.

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Senior Fellows Leadership Program Launches 25th Year

The Senior Fellows Leadership Program at UCLA Luskin kicked off its 25th year with a welcome breakfast that brought graduate students together with their new mentors — all leaders in the public, private and nonprofit arenas. The Oct. 21 gathering featured remarks from Ken Bernstein, principal city planner for the city of Los Angeles, and public policy student Steven King, who also participated in the Senior Fellows program last year. Bernstein, a national advocate for historic preservation, spoke of the region’s rich architectural resources, highlighted in his new book “Preserving Los Angeles: How Historic Places Can Transform America’s Cities.” Each attendee at the breakfast received a copy, and Bernstein encouraged both students and Senior Fellows to seek out unexplored corners of Los Angeles to understand that it is more than “just a bunch of bright lights and undifferentiated sprawl.” “Historical preservation has been a driving engine for change in Los Angeles, whether you are working in public policy or planning or social welfare,” Bernstein said. “There’s so much rich work that’s happening at the grassroots level, at the local level, and there are few places more interesting than Los Angeles in terms of really making a difference.” King described last year’s rewarding experience with a mentor who was willing to answer any question, discuss current legislation, provide access to meetings between policymakers and advocates, and offer advice about choosing classes and pursuing internships. He said the Senior Fellows program is helping him to “gain valuable lifelong skills to help me become a successful advocate and leader in the world.”

View photos from the event

Senior Fellows Breakfast 2021

Manville Weighs in on ‘Duplex Bill’

Associate Professor of Urban Planning Michael Manville was featured in a Los Angeles Times article about the prospects of Senate Bill 9, which would allow for multifamily homes to be built in neighborhoods currently zoned for standalone houses only. Under the “duplex bill,” owners would be able to subdivide their properties and build up to four homes on each formerly single-family lot. According to Manville, SB 9 is a key opportunity to build housing in California, if it can survive the political process intact. “[Two recent] amendments are basically a step away from the bill’s original vision,” he explained. “A bill like SB 9 was always going to produce the most housing when there weren’t restrictions on who might occupy the housing that gets built on one of these parcels.” Manville added that in the new version of SB 9, “now you’re talking about a homeowner that wants to be a developer, and that’s very different from a homeowner that’s looking to sell their parcel.”


Turner on Building Heat Resilient Communities

Assistant Professor of Urban Planning V. Kelly Turner joined the America Adapts Podcast and the Smart Community Podcast to discuss ways to build heat resilient cities and address heat inequity. According to Turner, heat governance is in its infancy. “We don’t have institutions that are responsible for regulating heat at the local, state or federal level,” she said. Turner explained that there is a difference between the acute problem of extreme heat risk and the chronic problem of the urban heat island effect. “Not all urban heat is extreme, and not all extreme heat is urban, and you can’t necessarily solve both at the same time,” she said. Turner also discussed the tradeoffs of different heat interventions such as cool pavement, which effectively combats the urban heat island effect but is “not a substitute for shade.” She recommended engaging with communities to learn how people experience heat in order to make cities better places for people to live.


Goh Explores Urban Climate Justice in New Book

A new book by Assistant Professor of Urban Planning Kian Goh explores the politics of urban climate change responses in different cities and the emergence of grassroots activism in resistance. “Form and Flow: The Spatial Politics of Urban Resilience and Climate Justice,” published today by MIT Press, traces the flow of ideas and influence in urban climate change plans in three key city centers — New York City; Jakarta, Indonesia; and Rotterdam, Netherlands. In the book, Goh analyzes major climate adaptation plans and projects such as Rebuild By Design in New York, the Giant Sea Wall masterplan in Jakarta and Rotterdam Climate Proof. Goh also discusses the rise of social movements and efforts among community organizations to reimagine their own futures in response to historical injustices and present-day challenges. Many groups of marginalized urban residents have pushed back against city plans and offered “counterplans” in protest against actions that they feel are unjust and exclusionary. Goh investigates how historically uneven development and global connections between cities have shaped the politics of climate urbanism, and her analysis provides insight on how to achieve a more just and resilient urban future. “Form and Flow” sheds light on the new wave of urban climate change interventions driven by environmental urgency, developmental pressures and global networks of expertise. Yale Professor Karen Seto called Goh’s book “a must-read for urban climate scholars and practitioners,” and Cambridge University Professor Matthew Gandy added that Goh’s “comparative global framework advances the field of political ecology in innovative directions.”


Turner on Challenges of Regulating Urban Heat

Assistant Professor of Urban Planning V. Kelly Turner joined the Talking Headways podcast to discuss different ways to regulate urban heat. The regional urban heat island effect is a climate phenomenon affecting urban areas with buildings and pavement that absorb and radiate heat, making these regions hotter than surrounding areas. However, Turner noted that thermal images that show land surface temperature can be misleading because they don’t illustrate how people are actually exposed to heat. “When I see interventions being proposed like tree-planting programs, I think we need to be careful and say, yeah, we might be providing shade that will be good for pedestrian thermal comfort — shade’s super important — but we’re not addressing the urban heat island,” Turner said. “What we’re doing is just a drop in the bucket, shifting from one climate zone to a fundamentally different arrangement of trees and buildings that would actually be cooler.” 

Listen to the Talking Headways podcast

Storper on the Pandemic’s Lasting Impact on Cities

Urban Planning Distinguished Professor Michael Storper co-authored a paper assessing COVID-19’s anticipated impact on the economic, political and social fabric of cities for the journal Urban Studies. As the world continues to adapt to the pandemic, “we remain in a period of extended social experimentation, with households, business, the professions and the public sector all in the game,” wrote Storper and co-authors Richard Florida of the University of Toronto and Andrés Rodríguez-Pose of the London School of Economics. Throughout history, major metropolitan areas have proved resilient to epidemics and other crises and catastrophes, they wrote. “Nonetheless, even if large cities are unlikely to lose their prominent role, they will be transformed and changed — in the short term and even well after mass immunity.” The authors predict that “social scarring” based on the continued fear of coronavirus infection will continue to influence residence choice, travel and commute patterns, and the economic viability of certain businesses and social gathering spaces. The future of downtowns hangs in the balance as remote work is normalized and online shopping grows even more common. “Cities might increasingly become cultural and civic places rather than shopping destinations or office hubs,” they wrote. Despite its horrific toll, the pandemic offers a window of opportunity where cities can reset, re-energize and call old practices into question, the authors conclude. “As cities rebuild and recover, …  they can pilot efforts to confront the widening chasms between classes and neighborhoods and prepare for the many threats of climate change.”


 

Goh on Community Resilience in the Face of Climate Change

Assistant Professor of Urban Planning Kian Goh spoke about the impact of climate change on cities and marginalized communities during two UCLA Arts and Architecture projects — an episode of the “10 Questions” series focusing on resilience and an interview on the podcast “Works in Progress.” Goh discussed her recent research in Jakarta, Rotterdam and New York, all of which are being forced to confront the growing threat of climate change. “Poor and marginalized populations are often pushed into more environmentally risky areas,” Goh said, and planners and designers are facing difficult questions about how to engage communities in future projects for a more just outcome. Goh described an empowering, grassroots notion of resilience “not only as a kind of individual ability to get back up when you’re pushed down, but that you have a community, you have a social network around you, who will help you if you cannot do it for yourself.”


Ritterbusch Part of International Team of Scholars Studying Child Rights and Well-Being

Assistant Professor of Social Welfare Amy Ritterbusch is part of an international team of researchers working on child rights and well-being under a grant awarded to the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine (LSHTM). The multi-country study also includes scholars and activists from Sri Lanka, New Zealand, South Africa and Uganda. “This study will advance current scholarship on two topics related to honor – honor as a factor in sustaining violence against children, and honor as a factor contributing to child well-being through children’s social relationships with family, peers and community,” LSHTM researchers said. Drawing from Ritterbusch’s methodological area of expertise, the research will use child-led participatory approaches that will place children’s voices and experiences at the center of the initiative and that will lead adult researchers toward community-driven solutions to violence in their daily lives. Ritterbusch serves as principal investigator of the Uganda country component of the project. “It continues my work on mobilizing street-level solutions to violence against children in the urban margins of Uganda, including a continuation of child-led advocacy against the multiple forms of police brutality that street-connected children and adolescents experience,” she said. Ritterbusch, a human and urban geographer, has led social-justice-oriented participatory action research initiatives with street-connected communities in Colombia and Uganda. “As part of the team of principal investigators, I will collectively lead the Uganda site of this multi-country study with the street-connected youth researchers I have been working with since 2015 in Kampala,” Ritterbusch said.

Virtual Conference Shines Light on Women’s Transit Safety Issues New UCLA report on transit safety of college students is released during InterActions LA

By Lauren Hiller

A new UCLA study found that being a woman, identifying as LGBTQI, having a long commute, or waiting in poorly lit areas significantly increased the likelihood of being sexually harassed on public transit.

In the UCLA Lewis Center for Regional Policy Studies report, “Transit Safety Among University Students,” Anastasia Loukaitou-Sideris of UCLA Luskin Urban Planning and researchers sought to better understand the characteristics of individuals and circumstances that increased their risk of harassment during their public transit journeys.

Professor Loukaitou-Sideris reported the findings during the Lewis Center’s April 3 InterActions LA conference, which brought together researchers, transit agencies and community activists around the topic of women’s safety in transportation.

The study surveyed 1,284 students from UCLA and the California State University campuses of Los Angeles and Northridge. According to the report, this population was chosen because university students are typically more transit-dependent than the general public, and because their young age may make them more vulnerable to victimization. Los Angeles was one of numerous cities studied as part of a global research project.

Much of the preexisting data on perceived safety and incidents of sexual harassment on transit in Los Angeles did not identify such characteristics as gender, sexuality and race. This study also uniquely delved into when in the course of a transit journey — walking to or from a station, waiting for the bus or train, or on the actual vehicle — sexual harassment occurred.

According to the study, 72% of respondents experienced some form of harassment on a bus, compared to 48% on rail, with women experiencing far more numerous instances than men. However, very few students (10%) reported the experience to either law enforcement or transit agencies. And more than half of women reported changing how they dressed or adjusting their travel patterns, such as riding only during daytime or waiting in well-lit areas.

Because women make up more than half of transit riders in the United States, Loukaitou-Sideris said it’s imperative to prioritize their safety.

“Their safety is an important concern that we need to tackle if we want to have more women riding transit and — for women who are already captive transit riders — riding transit more comfortably and without fear,” she said. “I think everyone deserves that in our transit systems.”

Safe Transit During COVID-19

The challenges that women and vulnerable populations face have only been magnified by the current COVID-19 crisis. Under statewide and local “safer at home” orders, it is frequently low-income women of color who are still traveling to work to provide essential services to the rest of the region, according to the other panelists at the InterActions event, including speakers from Pueblo Planning, Los Angeles Walks and Alliance for Community Transit-Los Angeles (ACT-LA).

“COVID-19 has revealed that our transit system is a lifeline,” said Mariana Huerta Jones, senior coalition and communications manager at ACT-LA, a nonprofit organization dedicated to ensuring equitable access to public transit infrastructure and funds.

During the InterActions presentation, Huerta Jones said public transit is often the only transportation option available to low-income residents working in jobs deemed essential in industries such as grocery stores, hospitals and sanitation.

Ensuring Women’s Safety

Other InterActions speakers like Monique López, founder and social justice planner at Pueblo Planning, spoke about the importance of including the voices of marginalized communities when crafting policy recommendations. And Daisy Villafuerte, advocacy and engagement manager from Los Angeles Walks, discussed grassroots efforts to improve transit experiences.

Presenting the next steps from LA Metro’s recent “Understanding How Women Travel” report, Meghna Khanna, senior director of the Countywide Planning and Development Department, and her team found that safety is still the biggest concern and barrier to riding transit for all women riders. While 60% of women felt safe traveling on Metro during the day, that number decreased to 20% at night.

Khanna and her team at LA Metro found that women frequently mentioned increased police presence as a solution that would help them feel safer on transit; however, not all transit riders agree.

“For many people of our community, more police doesn’t mean more safety. It can actually mean the opposite. It can mean racial profiling, harassment, criminalizing of poor or houseless individuals,” Huerta Jones said.

Solutions beyond policing — such as increased service frequency, improved cleanliness around stations, and the presence of non-police transit ambassadors — are just first steps in ensuring women can use transit without fear.

View a video about transit safety: