Doctoral Dissertation Research: Mapping and Modeling Clandestine Activities Affecting Urban Expansion

Arizona State University, Scottsdale AZ

Investigators

Abstract

This doctoral dissertation research project will analyze how, where, and to what degree clandestine activities influence urban expansion. The doctoral student will develop and test methods that can be used to identify actions associated with urban development for actions not in the common interest, such as urban expansion within environmentally sensitive areas that increases flooding, decreases water supplies, and has other adverse impacts. The project will enhance understanding of the outcomes of urban conditions that disadvantage some segments of the population, and project findings will provide new information and insights that can be used by governmental officials, non-governmental organizations, community groups, and urban residents to better understand and respond to environmental threats posed by clandestine activities. The project will facilitate meaningful interactions among academic, governmental, and community-based organizations. As a Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement award, this award also will provide support to enable a promising student to establish a strong independent research career. Clandestine activities profoundly influence urbanization worldwide, often with significant adverse environmental consequences. Such forms of urbanization have proven difficult to measure and observe, however, and processes though which they have functioned have been ignored in land-system analysis. As a result, clandestine, informal urbanization remains largely invisible in urban planning and is difficult for formal government to regulate. To conduct this project, the doctoral student will employ advanced computing and satellite imagery analyses and will conduct intensive ethnographic work to make explicit the links between detectable landscape patterns and the clandestine processes creating them. She will examine the clandestine land transactions that influence urbanization at a parcel or community level and test hypotheses to determine if such activity can be detected on a landscape scale. The student will gather and assess socio-environmental data from a range of sources, including interviews with key actors, remote sensing of urban change, digitized and geo-referenced land-use records where local government has incorporated informal urbanization into legal property registries, and ancillary data regarding voting and urban service provision. She will employ three different kinds of modeling approaches to test for the significance of clandestine variables on urbanization patterns. Although this doctoral dissertation research project will focus on development in Mexico City, the research will provide new insights and approaches for dealing with informal development related to clandestine activity in many other nations, including the United States.