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Confronting Experiences of Water Vulnerability and Inequities of Water Management in California’s San Joaquin Valley
California’s San Joaquin Valley is rife with water management practices that neglect the needs of primarily Latino/a/x residents of Disadvantaged Unincorporated Communities (DUCs). Hundreds of DUCs are scattered across the Valley and confront disproportionate environmental burdens such as contaminated groundwater, dry wells, and insufficient water infrastructure. Municipal and state disinvestment, industrial agriculture, dairy farming, and…
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Governing through Expectation: Territorial Configurations of Democratizing Politics in Post-revolution Tunisia
My research explores how poor urban dwellers politicize the city. I spent approximately two years in Tunisia studying a decentralization program the government set up in response to the 2011 revolution. I observed participatory planning meetings and followed the housing trajectories of poor women who built their homes in far-flung peripheries and enlisted their men…
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Ecological State: Science, Nature and the City in China’s Southwest
As the world’s most rapidly urbanizing country, China is taking measures to balance urbanization with sustainable development. Jesse’s work explores China’s urban green development at the intersection of environmental science, urban land governance, and social dislocation. Drawing on 15 months of ethnographic, archival, geo-visual, and participatory methods, his research examines the cultural politics and political…
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Deviations from Democracy: City-making in Rio’s Urban Peripheries & the Unmaking of Democratic Imaginary
My work investigates the unmaking of the procedures and imaginaries that constructed the contemporary project of democracy in Brazil. I do so by following the desvios [deviations/detours] of plans, funds, land, laws, and rights in the urban peripheries of Rio de Janeiro. These areas of the city became the site and substance of bottom-up insurgent mobilizations in…
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Spaces of Hospitality: Humanitarian Refugee Camps and Informal Practices of Integration
My research this summer primarily focused on different responses of hosting Syrian refugees in Jordan. To do this, I have conducted research with Syrians hosted among Palestinians living in an “informal” self-built camp in Amman, the capital city to Jordan. Most of the refugee populations today are not in Europe; they are in Jordan, Lebanon,…
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Toward Sustainable Mobility: Study on the BRT in Paraguay
The main objective of our research is to measure the impact of Asuncion, Paraguay’s first BRT system on travel behavior. Because we will be tracking changes in travel behavior, it is necessary to produce “baseline” knowledge of travel behavior before the completion of the project, which is now underway. From June to August of 2018,…
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From National Stormwater Regulations to Local Policies and Implementation: Perspectives From Four West Coast Urban Centers
Runoff from urban areas is a leading cause of pollution and decline in ecological health of downstream receiving waters. Mounting water quality issues and the price tags for clean ups have prompted a shift from gray stormwater infrastructure to “green stormwater infrastructure” (GSI) that provides ecological, social, and stormwater benefit. While all cities respond to…
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Remaking The San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge
On 17 October 1989 one of the largest earthquakes since 1906 struck Northern California. Damage was extensive, none more so than the partial collapse of the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge’s eastern span. What ensued over the next 25 years is the extraordinary cautionary tale to which any governing authority should pay heed.In her new book, Trapenberg…
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Subways and Urban Air Pollution
We investigate the relationship between the opening of a city’s subway network and its air quality. We find that particulate concentrations drop by about 4% in a 10km radius disk surrounding a city center during the year following a subway system opening. This reduction in particulates is larger nearer the city center, but extends over…