Acoustic Design in Urban Development : analysis of urban soundscapes and acoustic ecology research in New York City

The world is urbanizing rapidly with more than half of the global population now living in cities. Improving urban environments for the well-being of the increasing number of urban citizens is becoming one of the most important challenges of the 21st century. Even though it is common that city planners have visions of a ’good urban milieu’, those visions are concerning visual aesthetics or practical matters. The qualitative perspective of sound, such as sonic diversity and acoustic ecology are neglected aspects in architectural design. Urban planners and politicians are therefore largely unaware of the importance of sounds for the intrinsic quality of a place. Whenever environmental acoustics is on the agenda, the topic is noise abatement or noise legislation – a quantitative attenuation of sounds. Some architects may involve acoustical aspects in their work but sound design or acoustic design has yet to develop to a distinct discipline and be incorporated in urban planning.My aim was to investigate to what extent the urban soundscape is likely to improve if modern architectural techniques merge with principles of acoustics. This is an important, yet unexplored, research area. My study explores and analyses the acoustical aspects in urban development and includes interviews with practitioners in the field of urban acoustics, situated in New York City. My conclusion is that to achieve a better understanding of the human living conditions in mega-cities, there is a need to include sonic components into the holistic sense of urban development.

Using structured observation and content analysis to explore the presence of older people in public fora in developing countries

There is a lack of research on the everyday lives of older people in developing countries. This exploratory study used structured observation and content analysis to examine the presence of older people in public fora, and considered the methods’ potential for understanding older people’s social integration and inclusion. Structured observation occurred of public social spaces in six cities each located in a different developing country, and in one city in the United Kingdom, together with content analysis of the presence of people in newspaper pictures and on television in the selected countries. Results indicated that across all fieldwork sites and data sources, there was a low presence of older people, with women considerably less present than men in developing countries. There was variation across fieldwork sites in older people’s presence by place and time of day, and in their accompanied status. The presence of older people in images drawn from newspapers was associated with the news/non-news nature of the source. The utility of the study’s methodological approach is considered, as is the degree to which the presence of older people in public fora might relate to social integration and inclusion in different cultural contexts.

Money and Education: How Economic Distribution Corresponds to Academic Success

Urban sprawl is a significant issue in the United States, one effect of which is the departure of the wealth from cities. This study examined the distribution of wealth in Erie County, New York, focused around Buffalo. The question is then raised, why do those with the money leave the city, and to where do they go? While this study does not attempt to explain all of the reasons, it does examine two significant issues: quality of public school education, and proximity to main highways with easy access to the city. Using ArcGIS, I was able to place the public high schools and their relative ranking over a distribution of per capita income. The results of this analysis show that the wealthiest areas are located within the best school districts. Moreover, the areas where the wealth accumulates are directly connected by major highways.

SESAME: Finding Ways Of Promoting SME Adaptation To Flood Risk

Small and medium-sized companies and other enterprises (SMEs) around the world are exposed to flood risk and many of the 4.5 million in the UK are at risk. As SMEs represent almost half of total business turnover in the UK, their protection is a vital part of the drive for greater climate change resilience. However, few have measures in place to ensure the continuity of their activities during a flood and its aftermath. The SESAME project aims to develop tools that encourage businesses to discover ways of becoming more resilient to floods and to appreciate how much better off they will be once they have adapted to the ongoing risk. By taking some of the mystery out of flooding and flood risk, it aims to make it susceptible to the same business acumen that enables the UK’s SMEs to deal with the many other challenges they face. In this paper we will report on the different aspects of the research in the project Understanding behaviour Changing behaviour Modelling impacts Economic impacts Through the above the project will advise government, local authorities and other public bodies on how to improve their responses to floods and will enable them to recommend ways to improve the guidelines provided to SMEs in flood risk areas.

Sofrimento psíquico nas organizações: um estudo exploratório junto ao corpo médico de um hospital público no município de Niterói

Essa dissertação foi escrita com o objetivo de promover a discussão sobre o sofrimento psíquico no trabalho. Tema atual, presente na vida de todos os trabalhadores, sejam quais forem suas nacionalidades, sexo, raça, faixa etária, nível de escolaridade, enfim, sujeitos possuidores de subjetividade e de desejo. Contudo, muitas vezes o sofrimento é negado pelas organizações produtivas públicas ou privadas. O sofrimento no trabalho é vivido no quotidiano das organizações como uma carga psíquica responsável por doenças físicas e psicológicas, desajustes emocionais, conflitos interpessoais dentro e fora do ambiente de trabalho, vícios, violência familiar e urbana. O polimorfismo do sofrimento aliado a sua negação pelas organizações e sindicatos confunde e envergonha o trabalhador, que passa a vivê-lo de forma individualizada e solitária. A investigação do tema teve como substrato teórico os estudos sobre psicopatologia do trabalho desenvolvidos por Christophe Dejours e seus seguidores. Além da literatura específica, buscou-se recorrer aos estudos da psicanálise e da teoria geral da administração com o objetivo de proporcionar uma ampla análise do fenômeno abordado. Finalmente, foi realizado um estudo exploratório em uma organização pública, o Hospital Getúlio Vargas Filho, com o objetivo de ilustrar o tema, abordando as questões mais significativas a ele relacionadas.

Inclusão social e atividades culturais: o Centro Cultural Banco do Brasil no Rio de Janeiro

The aim of this study is to look into the benefits provided to social inclusion by cultural activities carried out in a cultural place with great seriousness at Rio de Janeiro. To accomplish that, the author attempt to deepen into the social exclusion/inclusion in brazilian urban context, spotlighting the historic reality of the urban process of the city. Afterwards, by means of a quality research, document files from the cultural spot were consulted and looked into the view of customers, trustees and managers. For customers were applied questionnaires with open and close questions, with trustees and managers were made interviews, and also a documentary research with opinions available in mass media. This study fits into public politics, cultural and institutional marketing, for presenting examples of how cultural activities are essential tools for completely social inclusion of people in community, demonstrating that often marketing enterprises in culture area can result in benefits for society, even no being these their main purposes.

Conflito socioambiental e o papel dos conselhos gestores: a experiência de São Sebastião, São Paulo

A popularização dos conselhos de políticas públicas setoriais foi fortemente ampliada na década de 1990, decorrente principalmente das estratégias de descentralização da Constituição de 1988. Os municípios brasileiros tiveram as responsabilidades federativas ampliadas, especialmente no que tange a questão ambiental e o desenvolvimento urbano. O trabalho analisa como as correntes ambientais e de planejamento urbano se fundem no desenvolvimento da cidade a partir do estudo de caso sobre o município de São Sebastião, litoral norte de São Paulo tendo atenção especial à gênese do Conselho Municipal de Meio Ambiente e Desenvolvimento Urbano como arena de planejamento, conflito e negociação dos distintos interesses locais. Procurou-se discutir, a luz da teoria democrática, os conceitos de participação e deliberação, como alguns dos elementos essenciais ao funcionamento dos conselhos como instrumento de planejamento público e, dessa forma, apontar os limites que o objeto estudado apresenta na gestão compartilhada das políticas públicas locais.

Estado e participação pública em questões ambientais urbanas

Nessa tese relaciona-se a problemática ambiental com a problemática social tal como esta se apresenta em áreas urbanas de sociedades do Sul, particularmente no Brasil. Faz-se um esforço de não confundí-las, apontando suas especificidades e as possibilidades, que a primeira traduz, no sentido de repensar, em termos teóricos, o planejamento e a gestão das cidades. Discute-se o papel do Estado capitalista nessas sociedades, enquanto mediador de conflitos sociais resultantes de políticas públicas excludentes. Discute-se ainda o significado, limites e possibilidades da participação pública na definição e/ou implementação de tais políticas e o papel que a educação ambiental pode assumir neste sentido. Apresenta-se dois estudos de caso tratando da degradação ambiental de bacias hidrográficas localizadas na Região Metropolitana de São Paulo, nos quais a participação pública tem se dado em algum nível, contribuindo para a tomada de decisões. Num caso, esta se dá numa conjuntura política onde as decisões tecnocráticas são determinantes; em outro, está relacionada com a tentativa, por parte do Estado, de implantação de uma gestão mais democrática, que implica no diálogo deste com as organizações civis visando a realização de negociações.

Three essays on local demand for public services

Local provision of public services has the positive effect of increasing the efficiency because each locality has its idiosyncrasies that determine a particular demand for public services. This dissertation addresses different aspects of the local demand for public goods and services and their relationship with political incentives. The text is divided in three essays. The first essay aims to test the existence of yardstick competition in education spending using panel data from Brazilian municipalities. The essay estimates two-regime spatial Durbin models with time and spatial fixed effects using maximum likelihood, where the regimes represent different electoral and educational accountability institutional settings. First, it is investigated whether the lame duck incumbents tend to engage in less strategic interaction as a result of the impossibility of reelection, which lowers the incentives for them to signal their type (good or bad) to the voters by mimicking their neighbors’ expenditures. Additionally, it is evaluated whether the lack of electorate support faced by the minority governments causes the incumbents to mimic the neighbors’ spending to a greater extent to increase their odds of reelection. Next, the essay estimates the effects of the institutional change introduced by the disclosure on April 2007 of the Basic Education Development Index (known as IDEB) and its goals on the strategic interaction at the municipality level. This institutional change potentially increased the incentives for incumbents to follow the national best practices in an attempt to signal their type to voters, thus reducing the importance of local information spillover. The same model is also tested using school inputs that are believed to improve students’ performance in place of education spending. The results show evidence for yardstick competition in education spending. Spatial auto-correlation is lower among the lame ducks and higher among the incumbents with minority support (a smaller vote margin). In addition, the institutional change introduced by the IDEB reduced the spatial interaction in education spending and input-setting, thus diminishing the importance of local information spillover. The second essay investigates the role played by the geographic distance between the poor and non-poor in the local demand for income redistribution. In particular, the study provides an empirical test of the geographically limited altruism model proposed in Pauly (1973), incorporating the possibility of participation costs associated with the provision of transfers (Van de Wale, 1998). First, the discussion is motivated by allowing for an “iceberg cost” of participation in the programs for the poor individuals in Pauly’s original model. Next, using data from the 2000 Brazilian Census and a panel of municipalities based on the National Household Sample Survey (PNAD) from 2001 to 2007, all the distance-related explanatory variables indicate that an increased proximity between poor and non-poor is associated with better targeting of the programs (demand for redistribution). For instance, a 1-hour increase in the time spent commuting by the poor reduces the targeting by 3.158 percentage points. This result is similar to that of Ashworth, Heyndels and Smolders (2002) but is definitely not due to the program leakages. To empirically disentangle participation costs and spatially restricted altruism effects, an additional test is conducted using unique panel data based on the 2004 and 2006 PNAD, which assess the number of benefits and the average benefit value received by beneficiaries. The estimates suggest that both cost and altruism play important roles in targeting determination in Brazil, and thus, in the determination of the demand for redistribution. Lastly, the results indicate that ‘size matters’; i.e., the budget for redistribution has a positive impact on targeting. The third essay aims to empirically test the validity of the median voter model for the Brazilian case. Information on municipalities are obtained from the Population Census and the Brazilian Supreme Electoral Court for the year 2000. First, the median voter demand for local public services is estimated. The bundles of services offered by reelection candidates are identified as the expenditures realized during incumbents’ first term in office. The assumption of perfect information of candidates concerning the median demand is relaxed and a weaker hypothesis, of rational expectation, is imposed. Thus, incumbents make mistakes about the median demand that are referred to as misperception errors. Thus, at a given point in time, incumbents can provide a bundle (given by the amount of expenditures per capita) that differs from median voter’s demand for public services by a multiplicative error term, which is included in the residuals of the demand equation. Next, it is estimated the impact of the module of this misperception error on the electoral performance of incumbents using a selection models. The result suggests that the median voter model is valid for the case of Brazilian municipalities.

Guia informativo dos cursos e oficinas culturais da Lapa - Rio de Janeiro

O objetivo dessa dissertação é apresentar um projeto para produção de um guia informativo dos cursos e oficinas artísticas e culturais da Lapa, Rio de Janeiro. Em termos metodológicos, além da recuperação histórica acerca da memória do lugar, dos planos de intervenção e transformação urbana, do levantamento dos artistas, grupos e instituições culturais e suas diversas atividades diurnas, foram realizadas entrevistas com aplicação de questionários com a finalidade de coletar dados para subsidiar a elaboração dos textos para o guia. Desde o final do século XX vem sendo empreendido um processo de revitalização do bairro através de transformação das formas-conteúdos das edificações. A dinâmica do processo de gentrificação mescla da recuperação dos casarios e sua utilização por artistas, grupos e instituições culturais, a políticas públicas e projetos implementados mais recentemente direcionados a interesses privados vinculados ao turismo, ao capital imobiliário e a empreendimentos comerciais. É possível verificar atualmente uma forte atuação empresarial através do marketing urbano da Lapa noturna como lugar de boemia. Em detrimento das dezenas de atividades artísticas e culturais diurnas que muito contribuíram no processo de revitalização da Lapa.

Jardins periféricos: estudo comparativo de dois loteamentos populares no município de Taboão da Serra

A presente monografia tem por foco de estudo os loteamentos populares que são a forma mais usual de produção produção de habitação para a população-de-baixa renda nas grandes cidades brasileiras. A margem dos programas habitacionais empreendidos por organismos estatais, por demais burocratizados e ínfimos se comparados à demanda que deveriam suprir, os loteamentos periféricos empreendidos por particulares sempre existiram nos arredores das grandes cidades.

Spatial spillovers and political coordination in public health provision

We estimate the impact of the main unconditional federal grant (Fundo de Participaçãodos Municípios - FPM) to Brazilian municipalities as well as its spillover from the neighboring cities on local health outcomes. We consider data from 2002 to 2007 (Brollo et al, 2013) and explore the FPM distribution rule according to population brackets to apply a fuzzy Regression Discontinuity Design (RDD) using cities near the thresholds. In elasticity terms, we nd a reduction on infant mortality rate (-0.18) and on morbidity rate (- 0.41), except in the largest cities of our sample. We also nd an increase on the access to the main program of visiting the vulnerable families, the Family Health Program (Programa Sa ude da Família - PSF). The e ects are stronger for the smallest cities of our sample and we nd increase: (i) On the percentage of residents enrolled in the program (0.36), (ii) On the per capita number of PSF visits (1.59), and (iii) On the per capita number of PSF visits with a doctor (1.8) and nurse (2). After we control for the FPM spillover using neighboring cities near diferent thresholds, our results show that the reduction in morbidity and mortality is largely due to the spillover e ect, but there are negative spillover on preventive actions, as PSF doctors visits and vaccination. Finally, the negative spillover e ect on health resources may be due free riding or political coordination problems, as in the case of the number of hospital beds, but also due to to competition for health professionals, as in the case of number of doctors (-0.35 and -0.87, respectively), specially general practitioners and surgeons (-1.84 and -2.45).

Human resource policies in public education: empirical evidences for Brazil

Esta tese traz três exercícios empíricos sobre questões de recursos humanos em escolas públicas brasileiras, aproveitando-se de uma ampla política implantada na rede estadual de São Paulo. Esta política aumenta os salários para os professores que trabalham em escolas urbanas pobres e sua regra de alocação, baseada em um corte arbitrário em um índice socioeconômico, permite a identificação de impactos causais. Em resumo, os três artigos apontam que políticas de subsídios são capazes de, de fato, manter professores nas escolas mais pobres e este efeito, por sua vez, melhora o desempenho acadêmico dos alunos. Além disso, concluímos também que esta política também reduz o absenteísmo dos professores. No entanto, como consequência do desenho dessa política, não há evidências de que o subsídio melhora o perfil dos professores alocados nessas escolas. O primeiro artigo avalia os impactos dessa política sobre a rotatividade dos professores. Concluímos que a compensação salarial reduziu a taxa de rotatividade em 7,2 pontos percentuais, o que significa uma queda de 15% sobre a média pré-tratamento. Em um modelo em forma reduzida, encontramos também evidências de que esta política pode impactar positivamente o desempenho dos alunos. O segundo artigo analisa os impactos sobre a aprendizagem dos alunos, com foco em três possíveis mecanismos: i) a rotatividade; ii) a qualidade dos professores; iii) o aumento do salário. As estimativas mostram que o único canal através do qual esta política compensatória afeta o desempenho dos alunos é a redução da rotatividade dos professores. Ao reduzir taxa de volume de negócios em um desvio-padrão, a política reduziu a proporção de alunos de baixo desempenho em cerca de meio desvio-padrão. O terceiro artigo avalia como a diferenciação salarial criada por esta política afeta absenteísmo dos professores. Os resultados mostram que, após controlar efeitos fixos de professores e escolas, pagar um salário mais elevado (em média 26% a mais) provoca uma queda de 8-22% nas faltas dos professores. Ausências que não levam a desconto de salário, como por licenças médicas, não respondem à diferenciação salarial e o impacto é maior para os professores que recebem maior incentivo.

The effectiveness of community-based interventions to improve maternal and infant health in the Northeast of Brazil

EMOND, Alan et al. The effectiveness of community-based interventions to improve maternal and infant health in the Northeast of Brazil. Revista Panamericana de Salud Pública/ Pan American Journal of Public Health , v.12, n.2, p.101-110, 2002

De repente, tudo mudou de lugar: refletindo sobre metamorfose urbana e gentrificação em Mossoró-RN

This study aims at solidifying the theoretical bases to provide, above all, an explanation for this phenomenon which currently happens, with a scenario of social, political, economic and cultural transformations worldwide in medium cities. Nevertheless, because it has different dimensions from its transformation axes, gentrification comes with change, but also with the introduction of a new purpose in the space using and occupation, outlining in this context the identity of places from the formation of centralities with the presence of flows with social and economic dynamicsThe current forms of geographic space appropriation show the directions of the senses and ideological profile which recreates the meanings and uses of content and materials from descriptions of a historical past. However, today there is an economic context in the urban space which refers to a search of strategies for change, i.e., the acquisition of parameter aimed at meeting the demands of the relationship between capital and labor, which ends up overriding some actions for the specification of the transformation methods within the urban space to be explained by new needs and also by the agents from the value adding to their interests and investments. Thus, we assume that the appreciation/gentrification of urban spaces may or may not result from the building of a public space, since the dialogic structure as a place of political interaction externalize conflicts and disagreements in general; it keeps segregating spaces. As new spaces are transformed, the access to them tends to happen with particular restriction, whereas some places like parks, shopping malls, high-rise and horizontal condos are the scene for major professional and family events. In this context, the gentrification process is used to designate interventions in the urban environment, in certain city spaces which are considered central to public and private investments. A historical place is permitted to be presented as a scenario, a stage full of attractions, through the transformation process. Studying gentrification consists of an analysis of the underlying interests in the transformation of these areas, and especially of the assessment of the interest level in the private sector to partner in order to modify the landscape. Gentrification results from the transformation processes of capital, which influences the efforts and investments application in order to establish and achieve optimal economic growth, focusing on a location socio-culturally centered in the urban space. Thus, the urban social structure develops in the light of some questions that relate not only the cities growth but also environmental conditions it provides in cities like Mossoro, State of Rio Grande do Norte, Brazil 2005 a 2011.