A plan for evaluating the Winnipeg Core Area Agreement

Report : 121 leave

City of Montebello Tree Canopy Prioritization

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY The Loyola Marymount University Center for Urban Resilience, TreePeople, and the Gateway Cities Council of Governments partnered to conduct tree canopy prioritization in the City of Montebello. This process utilized high resolution, high accuracy tree canopy data as a foundation to engage the public in identifying their priorities for tree planting in the city. Analysis of tree canopy data showed that the City of Montebello has 13% existing tree canopy cover, which the lowest tree canopy cover in all of Los Angeles County. The analyses also found that Montebello has great opportunity to increase its tree canopy, with 48% of the land area of the city shown to be Possible Tree Canopy. The project partners held a series of planning meetings with the City of Montebello and conducted outreach to engage City staff, residents, and other stakeholders of Montebello. One event was a “Montebello community roundtable,” which took place on June 16, 2022 a via Zoom. Participants were presented with the numerous ways that their city could benefit from increased tree canopy, engaged in a discussion and interactive activities about their personal experiences and values around trees, and were invited to take a survey to choose their top ten priorities for tree planting. There were 36 respondents to the Montebello Tree Canopy Survey, with 83% of respondents indicating that they were residents of the City of Montebello, and 50% indicating that they work in the City. Respondents had the opportunity to vote to prioritize 20 specific tree benefits across seven categories. Participants identified Beautify Neighborhoods and Promote Outdoor Activities (34%) and Improve Air Quality and Reduce Noise (30%), and Increase Equity for Residents (16%) as their top priority categories for tree planting. Among the specific benefits, the highest priorities were Air Quality, Low Tree Canopy, Park Improvement, Reduced Heat, and Access to Green Space. Each of the benefits voted on by participants was associated with a spatial variable (e.g., “Heat” was associated with high-resolution surface temperature data available through NASA). Using the results from the survey, priority weightings were calculated for each spatial variable at the parcel level. These rankings were mapped to provide a visual of where participants’ combined priorities are located. The results revealed that the highest tree planting priority areas for Montebello were in the the central parts of the city. The lowest priority areas were mostly located in the northeastern part of the city. In addition to the maps, tables were produced to provide rankings for each individual parcel in the Possible Tree Canopy boundaries. This dataset includes a comprehensive listing of over 13,000 parcels in the City of Montebello, along with their priority score and percent of existing tree canopy. The survey also asked participants about their perceptions of tree planting and care in Montebello. There were 94% who agreed that planting more trees is a priority, though 61% believed there are barriers to planting and 64% recognized that there are barriers to taking care of the trees in Montebello; in particular, barriers related to City Policies & Responsibilities, Community Knowledge & Responsibility, and Infrastructure/Physical Environment. This project can help guide the City of Montebello in future urban forestry strategies. The City may look to focus their tree planting efforts in high priority locations that are on public lands, especially in conjunction with the Montebello Parks Master Plan. The City may also consider educational campaigns and incentives to reach out to specific landowners to increase tree canopy on private lands. Finally, the City may wish to develop new urban forestry policies and could consider pursuing funding programs to support a Montebello Urban Forest Management Plan.https://digitalcommons.lmu.edu/cures_reports/1009/thumbnail.jp

City of Vernon Tree Canopy Prioritization

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY The Loyola Marymount University Center for Urban Resilience, TreePeople, and the Gateway Cities Council of Governments partnered to conduct tree canopy prioritization in the City of Vernon. This process utilized high resolution, high accuracy tree canopy data as a foundation to engage the public in identifying their priorities for tree planting in the city. Analysis of tree canopy data showed that the City of Vernon has 2% existing tree canopy cover, which is the lowest tree canopy cover in all of Los Angeles County. The analyses also found that Vernon has great opportunity to increase its tree canopy, with 51% of the land area of the city shown to be Possible Tree Canopy. However, given Vernon’s unique designation as an industrial city, much of the possible area is in places with impervious surfaces, such as concrete or asphalt, that would require modification to be a good place for trees. The project partners held a series of planning meetings with the City of Vernon and conducted multiple forms of outreach to engage City, business and community participation. One event was a hybrid “Vernon community roundtable,” which took place on March 16, 2022 at Vernon City Hall and via Zoom. Participants were presented with the numerous ways that their city could benefit from increased tree canopy, engaged in a discussion and an interactive activity about their personal experiences and values around trees, and were invited to take a survey to choose their top ten priorities for tree planting. Approximately 35 people attended the community tree roundtable, and many others were reached through TreePeople’s presentations at the Green Vernon Commission and Vernon Business Breakfast, a fruit tree distribution event, and direct email outreach. A small number (12) of those reached chose to participate in the survey, with the majority (83%) of respondents indicating that they were employees of the City of Vernon. Respondents had the opportunity to vote to prioritize 16 specific tree benefits across seven categories. Participants identified “Reduce Heat,” “Beautify Neighborhoods and Promote Outdoor Activities,” and “Improve Air Quality & Reduce Noise” as their top priority categories for tree planting. Among the specific benefits, the highest priorities were Heat, Low Tree Canopy, Air Quality, Pedestrian Routes, and Schools. Each of the benefits voted on by participants was associated with a spatial variable (e.g., “Heat” was associated with high-resolution surface temperature data available through NASA). Using the results from the survey, priority weightings were calculated for each spatial variable at the parcel level. These rankings were mapped to provide a visual of where participants’ combined priorities are located. The results revealed that many of the highest tree planting priority parcels for Vernon were in the southwestern, and north and south central parts of the city, as well as east of the LA River. Many of the lowest prioirty parcels were found in the northeastern and central parts of the city. In addition to the maps, tables were produced to provide rankings for each individual parcel in the Possible Tree Canopy boundaries. This dataset includes a comprehensive listing of nearly parcels in the City of Vernon, along with their priority score and percent of possible area for increasing tree canopy. The survey also asked participants about their perceptions of tree planting and care in Vernon. All but one participant agreed that planting more trees is a priority, though 1/3 believed there are barriers to planting and taking care of the trees in Vernon. Participants named concerns about existing infrastructure and industrial operations, such as: big rig trucks, power lines, underground utilities, too much concrete, and small sidewalks. Barriers to tree care included: lack of watering, trash/pollution, and overall lack of care. This project can help guide the City of Vernon in future urban forestry strategies. The City may look to focus their tree planting efforts in high priority locations that are near to existing, new, or planned residential developments. The City may also consider educational campaigns and incentives to reach out to specific landowners to increase tree canopy on private lands. Finally, the City may wish to pursue funding programs to help replace some of the impervious surfaces with tree canopy.https://digitalcommons.lmu.edu/cures_reports/1010/thumbnail.jp

Beyond the Front Page: Measuring Third Party Dynamics in the Field

In the modern Web, service providers often rely heavily on third parties to run their services. For example, they make use of ad networks to finance their services, externally hosted libraries to develop features quickly, and analytics providers to gain insights into visitor behavior. For security and privacy, website owners need to be aware of the content they provide their users. However, in reality, they often do not know which third parties are embedded, for example, when these third parties request additional content as it is common in real-time ad auctions. In this paper, we present a large-scale measurement study to analyze the magnitude of these new challenges. To better reflect the connectedness of third parties, we measured their relations in a model we call third party trees, which reflects an approximation of the loading dependencies of all third parties embedded into a given website. Using this concept, we show that including a single third party can lead to subsequent requests from up to eight additional services. Furthermore, our findings indicate that the third parties embedded on a page load are not always deterministic, as 50% of the branches in the third party trees change between repeated visits. In addition, we found that 93% of the analyzed websites embedded third parties that are located in regions that might not be in line with the current legal framework. Our study also replicates previous work that mostly focused on landing pages of websites. We show that this method is only able to measure a lower bound as subsites show a significant increase of privacy-invasive techniques. For example, our results show an increase of used cookies by about 36% when crawling websites more deeply

Final Report

This is the Final Report of the project, ‘Advancing Coordination of the Winnipeg Homeless Sector’. Over the last year, there have been efforts in the homeless serving community to map out service gaps and needs, and to discuss HPS funding and how it aligns with community priorities. The current project advances these efforts to integrate more community knowledge, planning, and engagement into the Homelessness Partnering Strategy (HPS) funding process

Firm-level technology transfer and technology cooperation for wind energy between Europe, China and India: From North–South to South–North cooperation?

For several decades the leading wind energy nations were European, while China and India were mainly the recipients of technology transfer. This paper aims to explore the role technology transfer/cooperation from Europe played in shaping firm-level wind energy technologies in China and India and to discuss whether the recent technology cooperation between the Chinese, Indian, and European wind firms challenges the classical North–South technology cooperation paradigm. The research finds that firm-level technology transfer/cooperation shaped the leading wind energy technologies in China and to a lesser extent in India. The paper also finds that several trends towards South–North technology cooperation have been observed between China, India and Europe, such as South–North flows of capital, drivers for market access, and R&D leadership, while the origins of innovation (e.g. patents) seem to remain predominantly in the global North. The paper concludes that the technology cooperation between China, India, and Europe has become more multi-faceted and increasingly Southern-led

Building local capacity in the arts

© 2016 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis GroupThe importance of place-based funding and local policy initiatives is evident in policy literature internationally with concepts of creative cities and cultural regeneration building in prominence since the 1990s. Such literature makes the case that investment in arts and culture will bring broader social and economic benefits at a local level, but in practice investment and research has prioritised a small number of metropolitan arts venues and mega events over a larger rural or community-based infrastructure. This paper in contrast explores two case studies of cultural planning in small towns. It analyses the relationship between policy and practice in these specific community contexts and considers the role of participatory decision-making in developing a local arts infrastructure. The findings suggest that locally based initiatives can build capacity and engagement with the arts. But it further argues that this requires long-term commitment and investment, to facilitate shared decision-making between professionals and public

Developing employability in higher education music

The development of employability in higher music education concerns students, musicians, educators, administrators and funding bodies, and yet employability is both impossible to measure and poorly defined. This paper sets the context for a set of short papers that explore employability from the perspective of music. Because many of the issues they raise have relevance across the creative industries, this paper discusses research that positions them within this broader context. The paper highlights the need for both the functional (how-to) aspects of employability and those that are cognitive: development of students' cognitive dispositions and their capacity to engage as professionals. As such, the paper argues that employability requires collaborative action on three fronts: enhancement of the ways in which employment outcomes are defined and measured; initiatives that engage students in career- and life-relevant activities; and advocacy work that re-aligns stakeholder perceptions of graduate work and employability itself

Conceptualising sustainability in UK urban Regeneration: a discursive Formation

Despite the wide usage and popular appeal of the concept of sustainability in UK policy, it does not appear to have challenged the status quo in urban regeneration because policy is not leading in its conceptualisation and therefore implementation. This paper investigates how sustainability has been conceptualised in a case-based research study of the regeneration of Eastside in Birmingham, UK, through policy and other documents, and finds that conceptualisations of sustainability are fundamentally limited. The conceptualisation of sustainability operating within urban regeneration schemes should powerfully shape how they make manifest (or do not) the principles of sustainable development. Documents guide, but people implement regeneration—and the disparate conceptualisations of stakeholders demonstrate even less coherence than policy. The actions towards achieving sustainability have become a policy ‘fix’ in Eastside: a necessary feature of urban policy discourse that is limited to solutions within market-based constraints