Dawn Jourdan | University of Oklahoma (original) (raw)
Papers by Dawn Jourdan
Journal of Planning Education and Research
Journal of Planning Education and Research
Journal of Planning Education and Research
Journal of Planning Education and Research
In a time of rapid environmental change, it is increasingly necessary that scientists and planner... more In a time of rapid environmental change, it is increasingly necessary that scientists and planners engage with communities both to speed the coproduction of knowledge and to identify problems that are relevant and meaningful to those communities. While peerreviewed journal publications like JPER continue to be relevant to academic scholars seeking tenure and promotion, the urgency of environmental change demands alternatives to these traditional, detached methods. We now see major funding agencies such as the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health designing programs that require physical scientists, social scientists, and communities to work together, through programs like Smart and Connected Communities and the CIVIC Challenge. These programs are ripe for planning researchers, who are trained both to work across disciplines and to work with communities.
Journal of Planning Education and Research
Causation is a fundamental inquiry that humans ask so that they can anticipate and be prepared fo... more Causation is a fundamental inquiry that humans ask so that they can anticipate and be prepared for the future. Each action (cause) we take is in anticipation of a desired or planned outcome (effect). Many important scholarly debates within which planning scholars engage involve complex real-world events, where teasing out the specific causes and their effects can be difficult. Therefore, much of the empirical evidence in planning remains at the level of association or partial/incomplete causality. Journal of Planning Education and Research (JPER) calls for more efforts to overcome such challenges and to move toward causal evidence in planning scholarship. Natural experiments have been used in many disciplines as a way to establish causality within the framework of observational studies (Craig et al. 2011). Such experiments “examine natural or unplanned variation in exposures using design and analytical features that can support causal inference” (Emmons et al. 2018, p. 809). Many important research questions in planning that involve real-world settings and populations face ethical and/or feasibility problems when attempting to employ traditional causal research designs such as randomized controlled trials (RCTs) in real world settings. For example, it is not possible to randomly apply different planning policies across different cities/communities. It is not practical or ethical to randomly change the built environment or randomly assign people to live in different environments. On the other hand, certain planning topics inherently involve naturally occurring interventions such as hazards and pandemics such as COVID-19. This year’s Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences went to the three scholars who showed how natural experiments can demonstrate cause and effect in real-world problems that RCTs cannot be applied to (The Nobel Prize 2021). A paradigm shift is awaiting urban planners, where abundant natural experiment opportunities exist to assist in moving beyond cross-sectional evidence and toward causal evidence. Such a paradigm shift can elevate current planning decision-making processes to be more evidence-based and help to futureproof developed or developing areas. For example, many exciting natural experiment opportunities exist in planning for health. Many interdisciplinary researchers have used natural experiments to measure quantifiable impacts on behaviors or health outcomes resulting from urban planning interventions such as changes in built environments and policies. These studies still face challenges due to the complexity of real-world settings, dynamic interplays of numerous confounding factors, and multiple risks for measurement errors and selection biases. They often use pre-post and case-comparison approaches, sometimes involving multiple points of preand post-intervention assessments and multiple comparison groups, to help address these challenges. Despite the relatively small body of natural experiment studies available, there has been a growing and emerging (due largely to COVID-19) interest in this type of study across the disciplines. For example, an Australian natural experiment study showed that after moving to a suburban neighborhood with fewer utilitarian destinations but more open spaces, residents’ transport-related walking declined while recreational walking increased (Giles-Corti et al. 2013). Another natural experiment study with a light rail transit intervention in Salt Lake City, Utah, USA showed a significant increase in physical activity resulting from transit use (Miller et al. 2015). An urban trail intervention in the Knoxville–Knox County Metropolitan area in Tennessee, USA has been shown to bring significant increases in physical activity in the intervention neighborhoods (Fitzhugh, Bassett, and Evans 2010). Another study that evaluated park improvements used a case-comparison design based on a Propensity Score Matching method and found no significant impact on park use but observed positive changes in park safety perception (Cohen et al. 2009). One of the earlier natural experiment studies in planning, published in 1996, examined improvements in street lighting in London, England, and showed significant impacts on safety perception and night-time pedestrian activities (Painter 1996). Another early work from the United States involved children and school environments and showed higher walking/biking rates for school commuting among children traveling along the routes that received improvements in sidewalks or traffic control (Boarnet et al. 2005). These studies have added valuable causal insights into the significant place impacts on health behaviors and environmental perceptions, contributing to better understanding the roles of Social Determinants of Health (SDOH). SDOH are nonmedical contextual factors that affect health, such as housing, neighborhood built environment, socio-cultural factors, transportation infrastructure, and access to physical activity resources and…
Journal of Planning Education and Research, 2021
As cities grow, acute and large-scale issues related to alterations in urban spatial configuratio... more As cities grow, acute and large-scale issues related to alterations in urban spatial configurations also accrue. As such, new programs, initiatives, policies, procedures, and legislation are continually explored and implemented to assuage some of these critical problems as well as support the growing populace. The allocation and reallocation of urban space is, therefore, a producer of urban issues and a platform for solving them. The attempted planning of these dynamic processes has led the cities to be evaluated using multiple models, within a myriad of analogies and across multiple theoretical foundations. In this issue, for example, Nick Smith presents in his article “Planning Powers as Property Rights in Contemporary China” a planning model where the planner’s powers help to regulate land use rights which derive primarily from the ownership of urban land in an effort to allow local agents to better maximize the land-related revenue. Martin Krieger expounds on this approach and o...
Journal of Planning Education and Research, 2021
Journal of Planning Education and Research, 2021
Interdisciplinary Journal of Signage and Wayfinding, 2018
The first fully enclosed modern suburban shopping mall, Southdale Center, opened in 1956 and imme... more The first fully enclosed modern suburban shopping mall, Southdale Center, opened in 1956 and immediately established a standard for how retailers and signs were to operate within their confines. Enclosed Malls were one of the first unique building types designed for suburban automotive environments and have been a key retail economic driver in the United States for seventy years. The mall also reflected economic changes in the country and the increasing separation of income classes. Malls established a variety of sign innovations over the years, from developing strict sign guidelines, to creating formal zones with shared modular systems. This report will explore the sign advances that marked each of the five stages of mall evolution impacted design and development. The report will also show how precedents established early in the history of mall development as a center for a broad range of incomes changed as malls began to segment by class.
With the adoption of the standard planning and zoning enabling legislation in the early 1900s, lo... more With the adoption of the standard planning and zoning enabling legislation in the early 1900s, local government policy has typically been found to be legally defensible if it promotes the “general public health, safety, morals, and welfare” of a particular community. This standard is broad and has been used to justify a cacophony of local land use policies, including ordinances regulating signage. When called upon to review challenges to these regulations, courts find themselves attempting to discern if such regulations are arbitrary or capricious. Such findings are rare so long as there is at least some rational link between the proposed regulation and the problem it seeks to solve. Such determinations become more complex when they involve land use activities that are guaranteed some degree of heightened scrutiny as a result of constitutional protections, like those protected by the First or Fifth Amendment. This article focuses on the creation of evidence based standards for the r...
Interdisciplinary Journal of Signage and Wayfinding
Journal of Sustainable Tourism
Journal of Legal Affairs and Dispute Resolution in Engineering and Construction
Interdisciplinary Journal of Signage and Wayfinding
This article provides a review of a new book entitled, "Pathways to Better Community Way-Fin... more This article provides a review of a new book entitled, "Pathways to Better Community Way-Finding."
Journal of the American Planning Association, Dec 5, 2012
Before the automobile became the nation' primary mode of transportation, life was quite d... more Before the automobile became the nation' primary mode of transportation, life was quite different. Families either resided in cities or rural areas; suburbia as we know it did not exist. The popularity of the automobile, however, drastically altered this realty. In multitudes, households fled urban areas in order to gain privacy. As suburbia grew (and continues to grow), cities became
Http Dx Doi Org 10 1080 15575330809489732, Nov 25, 2009
As part of an effort to better understand the needs of youth living in public housing, the United... more As part of an effort to better understand the needs of youth living in public housing, the United States Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) sponsored an initiative to create community task forces to engage youth and adult residents of public housing in plans to revitalize communities with HOPE VI funds. This study describes the work of an intergenerational
... Degree Awarded: Fall Semester, 2004 Page 2. ii The members of the Committee approve the Disse... more ... Degree Awarded: Fall Semester, 2004 Page 2. ii The members of the Committee approve the Dissertation of Dawn E. Jourdan defended on October 25, 2004. ... citizen participation. The 1966 Act called for widespread citizen participation (McFarlane, 2001). In spite of this ...
Journal of Planning Education and Research
Journal of Planning Education and Research
Journal of Planning Education and Research
Journal of Planning Education and Research
In a time of rapid environmental change, it is increasingly necessary that scientists and planner... more In a time of rapid environmental change, it is increasingly necessary that scientists and planners engage with communities both to speed the coproduction of knowledge and to identify problems that are relevant and meaningful to those communities. While peerreviewed journal publications like JPER continue to be relevant to academic scholars seeking tenure and promotion, the urgency of environmental change demands alternatives to these traditional, detached methods. We now see major funding agencies such as the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health designing programs that require physical scientists, social scientists, and communities to work together, through programs like Smart and Connected Communities and the CIVIC Challenge. These programs are ripe for planning researchers, who are trained both to work across disciplines and to work with communities.
Journal of Planning Education and Research
Causation is a fundamental inquiry that humans ask so that they can anticipate and be prepared fo... more Causation is a fundamental inquiry that humans ask so that they can anticipate and be prepared for the future. Each action (cause) we take is in anticipation of a desired or planned outcome (effect). Many important scholarly debates within which planning scholars engage involve complex real-world events, where teasing out the specific causes and their effects can be difficult. Therefore, much of the empirical evidence in planning remains at the level of association or partial/incomplete causality. Journal of Planning Education and Research (JPER) calls for more efforts to overcome such challenges and to move toward causal evidence in planning scholarship. Natural experiments have been used in many disciplines as a way to establish causality within the framework of observational studies (Craig et al. 2011). Such experiments “examine natural or unplanned variation in exposures using design and analytical features that can support causal inference” (Emmons et al. 2018, p. 809). Many important research questions in planning that involve real-world settings and populations face ethical and/or feasibility problems when attempting to employ traditional causal research designs such as randomized controlled trials (RCTs) in real world settings. For example, it is not possible to randomly apply different planning policies across different cities/communities. It is not practical or ethical to randomly change the built environment or randomly assign people to live in different environments. On the other hand, certain planning topics inherently involve naturally occurring interventions such as hazards and pandemics such as COVID-19. This year’s Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences went to the three scholars who showed how natural experiments can demonstrate cause and effect in real-world problems that RCTs cannot be applied to (The Nobel Prize 2021). A paradigm shift is awaiting urban planners, where abundant natural experiment opportunities exist to assist in moving beyond cross-sectional evidence and toward causal evidence. Such a paradigm shift can elevate current planning decision-making processes to be more evidence-based and help to futureproof developed or developing areas. For example, many exciting natural experiment opportunities exist in planning for health. Many interdisciplinary researchers have used natural experiments to measure quantifiable impacts on behaviors or health outcomes resulting from urban planning interventions such as changes in built environments and policies. These studies still face challenges due to the complexity of real-world settings, dynamic interplays of numerous confounding factors, and multiple risks for measurement errors and selection biases. They often use pre-post and case-comparison approaches, sometimes involving multiple points of preand post-intervention assessments and multiple comparison groups, to help address these challenges. Despite the relatively small body of natural experiment studies available, there has been a growing and emerging (due largely to COVID-19) interest in this type of study across the disciplines. For example, an Australian natural experiment study showed that after moving to a suburban neighborhood with fewer utilitarian destinations but more open spaces, residents’ transport-related walking declined while recreational walking increased (Giles-Corti et al. 2013). Another natural experiment study with a light rail transit intervention in Salt Lake City, Utah, USA showed a significant increase in physical activity resulting from transit use (Miller et al. 2015). An urban trail intervention in the Knoxville–Knox County Metropolitan area in Tennessee, USA has been shown to bring significant increases in physical activity in the intervention neighborhoods (Fitzhugh, Bassett, and Evans 2010). Another study that evaluated park improvements used a case-comparison design based on a Propensity Score Matching method and found no significant impact on park use but observed positive changes in park safety perception (Cohen et al. 2009). One of the earlier natural experiment studies in planning, published in 1996, examined improvements in street lighting in London, England, and showed significant impacts on safety perception and night-time pedestrian activities (Painter 1996). Another early work from the United States involved children and school environments and showed higher walking/biking rates for school commuting among children traveling along the routes that received improvements in sidewalks or traffic control (Boarnet et al. 2005). These studies have added valuable causal insights into the significant place impacts on health behaviors and environmental perceptions, contributing to better understanding the roles of Social Determinants of Health (SDOH). SDOH are nonmedical contextual factors that affect health, such as housing, neighborhood built environment, socio-cultural factors, transportation infrastructure, and access to physical activity resources and…
Journal of Planning Education and Research, 2021
As cities grow, acute and large-scale issues related to alterations in urban spatial configuratio... more As cities grow, acute and large-scale issues related to alterations in urban spatial configurations also accrue. As such, new programs, initiatives, policies, procedures, and legislation are continually explored and implemented to assuage some of these critical problems as well as support the growing populace. The allocation and reallocation of urban space is, therefore, a producer of urban issues and a platform for solving them. The attempted planning of these dynamic processes has led the cities to be evaluated using multiple models, within a myriad of analogies and across multiple theoretical foundations. In this issue, for example, Nick Smith presents in his article “Planning Powers as Property Rights in Contemporary China” a planning model where the planner’s powers help to regulate land use rights which derive primarily from the ownership of urban land in an effort to allow local agents to better maximize the land-related revenue. Martin Krieger expounds on this approach and o...
Journal of Planning Education and Research, 2021
Journal of Planning Education and Research, 2021
Interdisciplinary Journal of Signage and Wayfinding, 2018
The first fully enclosed modern suburban shopping mall, Southdale Center, opened in 1956 and imme... more The first fully enclosed modern suburban shopping mall, Southdale Center, opened in 1956 and immediately established a standard for how retailers and signs were to operate within their confines. Enclosed Malls were one of the first unique building types designed for suburban automotive environments and have been a key retail economic driver in the United States for seventy years. The mall also reflected economic changes in the country and the increasing separation of income classes. Malls established a variety of sign innovations over the years, from developing strict sign guidelines, to creating formal zones with shared modular systems. This report will explore the sign advances that marked each of the five stages of mall evolution impacted design and development. The report will also show how precedents established early in the history of mall development as a center for a broad range of incomes changed as malls began to segment by class.
With the adoption of the standard planning and zoning enabling legislation in the early 1900s, lo... more With the adoption of the standard planning and zoning enabling legislation in the early 1900s, local government policy has typically been found to be legally defensible if it promotes the “general public health, safety, morals, and welfare” of a particular community. This standard is broad and has been used to justify a cacophony of local land use policies, including ordinances regulating signage. When called upon to review challenges to these regulations, courts find themselves attempting to discern if such regulations are arbitrary or capricious. Such findings are rare so long as there is at least some rational link between the proposed regulation and the problem it seeks to solve. Such determinations become more complex when they involve land use activities that are guaranteed some degree of heightened scrutiny as a result of constitutional protections, like those protected by the First or Fifth Amendment. This article focuses on the creation of evidence based standards for the r...
Interdisciplinary Journal of Signage and Wayfinding
Journal of Sustainable Tourism
Journal of Legal Affairs and Dispute Resolution in Engineering and Construction
Interdisciplinary Journal of Signage and Wayfinding
This article provides a review of a new book entitled, "Pathways to Better Community Way-Fin... more This article provides a review of a new book entitled, "Pathways to Better Community Way-Finding."
Journal of the American Planning Association, Dec 5, 2012
Before the automobile became the nation' primary mode of transportation, life was quite d... more Before the automobile became the nation' primary mode of transportation, life was quite different. Families either resided in cities or rural areas; suburbia as we know it did not exist. The popularity of the automobile, however, drastically altered this realty. In multitudes, households fled urban areas in order to gain privacy. As suburbia grew (and continues to grow), cities became
Http Dx Doi Org 10 1080 15575330809489732, Nov 25, 2009
As part of an effort to better understand the needs of youth living in public housing, the United... more As part of an effort to better understand the needs of youth living in public housing, the United States Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) sponsored an initiative to create community task forces to engage youth and adult residents of public housing in plans to revitalize communities with HOPE VI funds. This study describes the work of an intergenerational
... Degree Awarded: Fall Semester, 2004 Page 2. ii The members of the Committee approve the Disse... more ... Degree Awarded: Fall Semester, 2004 Page 2. ii The members of the Committee approve the Dissertation of Dawn E. Jourdan defended on October 25, 2004. ... citizen participation. The 1966 Act called for widespread citizen participation (McFarlane, 2001). In spite of this ...