After the whirlwind five weeks of writing my thesis draft, I largely took this week off as feedback from my thesis committee members trickled in. Two of the three have provided feedback by this point and Nate Freiburger has promised to provide his feedback by tomorrow. Their recommendations for edits have been thankfully light, mainly calling attention to the need to bolster the implications section. Liz Safran advised exploring solutions to the dilemmas of planning, as well as potentially some informed speculation on how the contemporary tensions within urban planning may play out. I think my thesis points to the ways in which the affordability pressures are driven by a rather global set of urban strategies of revitalization; such pressures have induced municipalities to seek zoning changes and promote affordable housing and these presently-limited efforts may well expand.
Jim Proctor’s critique centered on adding a discussion of what’s new in this thesis—what elements of the relatively well-trodden scholarly ground of transit land value uplift and neoliberal state involvement in gentrification does my paper add to? And how does it get us to think about urbanism and gentrification in a new way? While I’ve added a section addressing the gap in the scholarly literature that this thesis fills—namely, its integration of hedonic analysis of property values with an interrogation of smart growth planning policies and politics, informed by critical perspectives from geography on gentrification and neoliberal urbanism—I need to develop what the conceptual conclusions of addressing this gap are. I don’t yet have a firm idea of how to tackle this, but I think it will focus on how pervasive and flexible neoliberalism is and the alignment of progressive urban thought with market ideologies.
Overall, I think I’ll need to do a similar process of brainstorming the conceptual subsections of the implications section and the relationship and flow between each other them; reorganizing my existing content and new ideas into this outline; and connecting these fragments. Currently, my implications are only 4 out of the total 50 pages and, while I anticipate the section being shorter than the background, owing to the lower amounts of explanation required, it could certainly use fleshing out. These sections may include:
- This is what urban success looks like(?). The different potential interpretations of a land value premium from transit, as according to the actor’s positions—as an indication of valuing the line and improving the prospects for development and as gentrification and a vehicle of displacement. This will include a brief discussion of amenities in general and the awareness of the City of this dynamic between transit/amenities and development and displacement.
- A challenge of the seamless linkage in contemporary planning of growth, sustainability, and equity. This would be the section in which I develop the conceptual conclusions of my paper.
- A discussion of possible and proposed solutions, including neoliberal ones that entrench the role of the real estate industry in the creation of urbna place (e.g. inclusionary zoning) and those that challenge it.
Most of these pieces are present in the implications, but reorganization and expansion seems necessary. Perhaps Nate will have some thoughts on this work as well.
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