Keweenaw National Historical Park: Heritage Partnerships in an Industrial Landscape

This dissertation examines the genesis and development of Keweenaw National Historical Park in Michigan's Upper Peninsula. After the decline of a once-thriving copper mining industry, local residents pursued the creation of a national park as a way to encourage economic development, revitalize their community, and preserve their historic resources. Although they were ultimately successful in creating a national park, the park that was established was not the park that they envisioned. Over the next twenty years, the National Park Service, the park's federal Advisory Commission, and the communities on the Keweenaw Peninsula struggled to align unrealistic expectations with the actual capabilities and limitations of the park. The first chapter of this dissertation includes a short history of the decline of the copper industry in and around the village of Calumet, Michigan. This chapter also includes a discussion about the techniques and challenges of preserving and interpreting industrial heritage. Chapters 2 and 3 cover the events from the initial park proposal, to the expansion of the original idea, to the establishment of the park. Chapter 4 includes an examination of the enabling legislation and a discussion about the opportunities and challenges it provided. Chapters 5 through 8 cover the tenure of each of the four NPS superintendents as they navigated the complexities presented by a park model that was part partnership park and part traditional national park. Chapter 9 includes some key lessons, an assessment of the park's success, and some considerations for the future. In particular, Chapter 9 argues for an increased focus on the partnership aspects of the park, a reduction in the perceived scope of responsibilities, and a renewed effort to rally the existing partners in pursuing additional philanthropic support for the overall park.

AccessMod 3.0: computing geographic coverage and accessibility to health care services using anisotropic movement of patients

Background Access to health care can be described along four dimensions: geographic accessibility, availability, financial accessibility and acceptability. Geographic accessibility measures how physically accessible resources are for the population, while availability reflects what resources are available and in what amount. Combining these two types of measure into a single index provides a measure of geographic (or spatial) coverage, which is an important measure for assessing the degree of accessibility of a health care network. Results This paper describes the latest version of AccessMod, an extension to the Geographical Information System ArcView 3.×, and provides an example of application of this tool. AccessMod 3 allows one to compute geographic coverage to health care using terrain information and population distribution. Four major types of analysis are available in AccessMod: (1) modeling the coverage of catchment areas linked to an existing health facility network based on travel time, to provide a measure of physical accessibility to health care; (2) modeling geographic coverage according to the availability of services; (3) projecting the coverage of a scaling-up of an existing network; (4) providing information for cost effectiveness analysis when little information about the existing network is available. In addition to integrating travelling time, population distribution and the population coverage capacity specific to each health facility in the network, AccessMod can incorporate the influence of landscape components (e.g. topography, river and road networks, vegetation) that impact travelling time to and from facilities. Topographical constraints can be taken into account through an anisotropic analysis that considers the direction of movement. We provide an example of the application of AccessMod in the southern part of Malawi that shows the influences of the landscape constraints and of the modes of transportation on geographic coverage. Conclusion By incorporating the demand (population) and the supply (capacities of heath care centers), AccessMod provides a unifying tool to efficiently assess the geographic coverage of a network of health care facilities. This tool should be of particular interest to developing countries that have a relatively good geographic information on population distribution, terrain, and health facility locations.

Research on Alpine Landscape Development: From Research to Policy

Swiss National Research Programs (NRPs) are usually geared to addressing issues of major societal concern. In so doing these programs produce different kinds of knowledge: analytical knowledge necessary for revealing the driving forces, conflicting interests and institutional settings that govern the processes under scrutiny; target knowledge oriented towards revealing the directions in which the processes should be guided; and action knowledge that informs about the means by which this can best be achieved. Analytical knowledge answers the questions “what is the problem?” and “what causes it?” while target knowledge helps to define “what is our vision for the future?” and action knowledge deals with “how can we solve the problem?” Production of these 3 different types of knowledge is usually linked in an iterative process in the course of the research supported in an NRP.