Browsing by Subject "City"

Now showing 1 - 4 of 4
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    Evaluation of Durham City and County Greenhouse Gas Reduction Initiatives
    (2014-04-25) Xi, Wenyi; Gao, Gary; Anjum, Rubaina; Son, Myeongyeon
    To combat climate change, local governments and communities have undertaken various initiatives to reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. Durham City and County created a GHG Emissions Reduction Plan in 2007, with a goal of 50% GHG reduction for government operations by 2030 from the 2005 baseline. The purpose of this study is to examine various projects that the Durham local governments have undertaken since 2007, evaluate their energy savings and GHG reduction, and provide recommendations for further GHG reduction. The scope includes only projects associated with local government. Six different project types are examined: building upgrades, transportation, traffic signals, landfill methane, water and wastewater management. About 20 government officials from different departments were interviewed to collect information about projects and relevant data such as energy consumption and financial costs. Based on the data, the study analyzes the trend of energy use and GHG emissions through time and uses common metrics to measure energy intensity. Most of the GHG reduction projects were effective and are discussed in detail in the paper. The study provides recommendations for each individual project as well as general overall recommendations. The overall suggestions are to 1) set quantifiable sub-goals for different projects to complement the current total 50% reduction goal, 2) offer training to facility management teams on the importance of adopting best practices prevalent in the relevant industries, 3) install better metering technologies for more accurate data, and 4) foster more collaborations and better communication between each government department as well as between the government and the private sector. These recommendations will also help other cities conduct similar GHG reduction initiatives.
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    Four Cities: Fluothia, Awuli, Willa, and Calisandra
    (2018-04-10) Zhang, Alta Zhuyun
    This project is composed of an experimental film and an artist statement that aims to discuss the nature and perception of city based on the film. The experimental film is a combination of creative writing inspired by Italo Calvino’s book Invisible Cities (1972), cinematic language, animated presentation, and authentic soundtrack. The making of this film starts with the creation, decontextualization, and reconstruction of travel footage and hand-drawn animations. Following the visual is the composition of acoustic expression, which features the diversity of sound effect and ambient mood, as well as solo and duet narrations. The film translates the creative writing about the description of fictional cities into visual representation by a variety of cinematographic methods – such as camera movement, animation transition, and ambiance creation. Being an open-ended creative project, it seeks to provide an immersive environment for the viewer to rethink the perception of cities.
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    The City Novel After the City: Planetary Metropolis, World Literature
    (2019) Soule, Jacob Guion Wade

    Literary scholars have long identified a formal correspondence between city and novel. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the city became embedded in the narrative forms of fiction as the latter attempted to map the coordinates of the rapidly expanding and increasingly complex social formations the former produced. In our moment, the older idea of the “city” as a discrete, identifiable form of human settlement is almost universally theorized as having been displaced by what is variously called “the metropolis”, “city everywhere”, or “planetary urbanization”. Without any outside to its parameters, how can the idea of the city still have meaning? This dissertation explores how the contemporary city novel can illuminate the bewildering new spaces in which we live and the seemingly inevitable "becoming-planetary" of the urban.

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    The Philadelphia 2030 District: Measuring Transportation Emissions Now and in the Future A Quantitative and Qualitative Review
    (2018-04-20) Reinheimer, Sarah
    This MP primarily focuses on the challenges surrounding measurement of Philadelphia’s 2030 District transportation emissions. While in the past, policy makers have primarily focused on electric power generation and industry to limit the growth of GHG emissions, transportation emissions today account for 27 percent of U.S. GHG emissions (EPA, 2015). Transportation is also now the fastest-growing source of GHG emissions, and there are 1/3 more vehicles on the road than there were in 1990 (Sorrel, 2016). Transportation infrastructure lasts decades, and the decisions surrounding urban development comes not just from national, but local and city governments. This is where cities, in partnership with businesses and other stakeholders, can play a substantial role in limiting the growth of these emissions, both now and in the future. This project has three focuses: 1. A Quantitative Review. I developed a transportation GHG emissions baseline for the Philadelphia 2030 District. 2. Qualitative: I designed a survey to track transportation emissions moving forward for the District. 3. Comparative: I researched the five Districts already measuring their transportation GHG emissions.