Empowering Communities through Food Entrepreneurship and Creative Placemaking

The City of Clarkston is one of Atlanta’s oldest and most diverse communities. The city is currently in need of tactical placemaking strategies to create quality public spaces that can serve and unite the members of the community. This thesis seeks to identify the needs of the city using a comprehensive site analysis and apply that knowledge to determine a program that is best suited for the community. To create an impactful design, applicable placemaking procedures will be identified through literature review and case study analyses. The data collected will inform a design procedural that will yield an outcome that contributes to the environmental, economic, and social sustainability of Clarkston

PIKETTY REVISITED: THE MEANING OF CAPITAL IN THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY

Thomas Piketty had himself a moment. It did not come easily or quickly. When the academic economist first published his massive text, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, in French in 2013, summarizing over a decade of his and others’ work on capital and its unequal ownership across time and cultures, he encountered a friendly but muted reception on the continent.1 No bother: Prophets are typically without honor in their own native land. Piketty’s time came in the following year, the spring of 2014, when the English translation of his magnum opus appeared.2 Spurred on by favorable reviews from the likes of Nobel Laureate Paul Krugman (“Capital in the Twenty- First Century . . . is a bona fide phenomenon,” Krugman declared in the New York Times), the nearly seven hundred page economics book made surprising and sustained appearances on all forms of best-seller lists.3 Overnight, Piketty became the unlikeliest of oxymorons: a “Rock-Star Economist,” and a wealthy one at that.4 It might have seemed that, in the millennia-long battle to get the rich to pay their fair share of a just society’s burdens, a glimmer of hope had sprung forth. Years later, what has become of that hope? Academics have debated Piketty’s work, as academics do.5 Critics have criticized and defenders have defended Piketty’s sense of the facts of capital (it is held unequally, and inequality is getting worse); the normative ramifications of those facts (Piketty thinks they are bad); and what, if anything, to do about them (Piketty says tax the rich).6 Piketty himself has followed up with a sequel, Capital and Ideology, weighing in at over 1000 pages, roughly half again longer than Capital in the Twenty- First Century.

The Leveling Spirit: Violence and Inequality in Postwar Iraq

The Iraq War (2003–2011) constitutes by some estimates one of the deadliest and most destructive conflicts of the 21st century (Hagopian et al., 2013). In addition to the disputed figures of excess violent civilian casualties––generally ranging from 180,000 to 210,000 deaths––the war has created one of the major refugee crises of modern times, with 1 in 25 Iraqis estimated to have been displaced from their homes by the 2003 invasion (Costs of War, 2021). While much of this violence has been wrought by American and Iraqi coalition troops, violence against civilians has also been perpetuated by insurgent groups and paramilitary units like the Mahdi Army, and terrorist organizations like al-Qaeda (FSI/CISAC, 2017; Avram, 2013). This violence was potentially coterminous with a mounting degree of inequality in the country, occasioned by the radical economic reform undertaken by the occupation and the destruction of infrastructure. This study examines the potential relationship between inequality and violence against civilians in Iraq after the 2003 invasion. I hypothesized that increased inequality (possibly as a consequence of neoliberal policy-making by the Coalition Provisional Authority) resulted in greater violence owing to insurgents’ sense of relative deprivation, which counsels comparison between one’s own class or income position and those of a comparator group. No commensurable and broadly available measure of GDP in Iraq during the wartime period (2003–2014) exists, either derived from Iraqi government or international reporting. As a consequence of this deficit, the study attempts to proxy inequality in the country during this period on grounds of luxury demand, income sources and sectoral breakdown of GDP. It finds some correlation between chosen measures of luxury demand and anti-occupation violence against civilian persons for the duration of the war, as well as for some time after (2003–2014). Additional evidence is supplied by an increase in non-labour income when compared to labour income in total GDP for the same period. A 20% increase in services over the same period is observed, further strengthening the conclusions outlined in the hypothesis. Justifications for these conclusions, in addition to any implications drawable from them, are outlined in a separate portion of the study. Finally, methodological challenges are outlined and areas for further research are discussed

A Methodology to Develop a Communication Protocol for Visualizing Simulations in a Collaborative Virtual Reality Environment

In the technology field, simulations and collaborative virtual reality environments (CVREs) are not generally combined because it is complicated to develop large scale simulations within CVREs. The complexity of combining these two technologies in order to form a better form of visualization stems from the lack of a methodology to help derive these scalable simulations. Simulations require very complex calculations that the CVRE cannot perform as it is overloaded in calculations for the maintenance and stability of the environment itself. Since the simulation cannot be held within the CVRE, the solution is to move the simulation external to the CVRE and provide means for the CVRE and simulation to communicate so the scene within the CVRE can be updated. While this increases the performance of the simulation in the CVRE, another element is required to make the simulation scalable. Since the CVRE controls the interactions and the simulation controls the calculations and reactions, the basic structure of the this operations can be visualized as a state machine. By implementing the simulation as a state machine, if another element needs to be added to the simulation, it is a matter of implementing a new state and adding the transitions between the new state and all preexisting states. Implementing the simulation as a state machine leaves the CVRE responsible for the visualization of the simulation and provides means for the simulation and CVRE to communicate, which leads to the idea of a new developmental methodology for the visualization of large scale simulations in CVRE. This methodology will result in the ability to provide simulations in need of a visualization to be quickly and cost effectively implemented in a CVRE so that single users can visualize and interact. This methodology will not only impact those in need of simulations in the result of more simulation and training software, but also provide a better workforce equipped with decision-making tools and more widely available simulation and training software