All street hawkers are not the same in many Newly Industrialized Countries (NICs) of the global south as often portrayed by the media and documented in extant literature. This perception has created a gap in knowledge as researchers explore street hawking activities in NICs. In this study, I investigated a new informality trend of street hawking is coming into being within the capital city of Accra, Ghana. As governance is increasingly becoming entrepreneurial, informal activities are gradually becoming formal. Formal and registered businesses are increasingly capitalizing on hawking activities to occupy public spaces. The advent of the informality trend, I term corporate street hawking opens up new issues for the political economy, labor, and urban studies. By employing semi-structured interviews with 47 street hawkers in Accra, this paper sought to investigate three broadly interrelated questions. First, how do neoliberal policies impact the production of public space in Accra? Second, is corporate street hawking a form of creative destruction? Finally, how do corporate street hawkers practice agency within Accra?

Research suggests that using data driven solutions in policing strategies improves the quality of service provided by the police department. Unfortunately, many police departments, including the Denton Police Department, do not use their spatial data to inform beat zone placement. Analysis of the current beat zone configuration found that there are disparities in the workload, as measured by number of calls for service, between beat zones. Further, there was also a statistically significant difference between the median response times across all the five beat zones in Denton. This means that the median response time varies depending on where the call for service originates. Using readily available data, these police departments can apply methods such as UPAS to improve the quality of service provided by the department. UPAS is a deterministic algorithm that produces a given number of contiguous spatial partitions of approximately equal population size; in this case, calls for service are substituted for population. Although this algorithm was originally developed to create solutions for bio-terrorism response planning, it has been applied to the problem of creating beat zones of roughly equal workload in this research. I have shown that this algorithm results in a beat zone configuration that significantly …

The production of Hate, albeit a historical, long-existing, and relentless process, has been reinvigorated by the simultaneously globalizing and localizing power of cyberspace. Techno-capitalism, often perceived as the actuating force of neoliberal globalization, has emanated novel formations of social interaction, community formation, the dissemination of ideology, and political mobilization. Far-right ideology is being globalized throughout popular social cyberspaces like YouTube by thought leaders or ideological entrepreneurs, while users then localize within alternative social cyberspaces like Gab, wherein their beliefs are reaffirmed, identities are consolidated, and communities are formed. This process is integral to the materialization of far-right extremism, manifested as political action in real, physical space, and thus, illuminates new expressions of real virtuality, various politics of scale, and contemporary consequences of neoliberal globalization.

The Women's Revolution in 2015 has led to a drastic shift in the ways women are portrayed in professional wrestling. The Women's Revolution came as a result of the social unrest over the lack of time women were receiving on the televised shows. Where women's storylines had centered on their sexuality, they are now presented as equal to their male counterparts after the Women's Revolution. Through an exploration of concepts in globalization, commodification, and socially produced spaces, this research seeks to understand and contextualize the Women's Revolution, the degree to which the portrayed women's equality has been achieved, and the resulting impacts of the female superstars overall. I argue that that this "equality" has been achieved through inscribing the traditionally masculine qualities of wrestling to women, has resulted in an unequal distribution of opportunities to particular female superstars rather than equality for all women on the shows, and that phallocentric objectification of the female superstars still occurs in certain aspects of professional wrestling.

Disaster science is a procedural field often construed as producing blanket policies that attempt to cover everyone, but the complexity of human lived experiences must have a space to exist within disaster science if its research and findings are to be effective. This thesis illustrates that disaster policies and publications often leave out the most vulnerable communities—those in greatest need of collective support. Through critically analyzing beautification through green space, discussing photovoice interviews, and by deconstructing public preparedness documents published by Harris County Office of Homeland Security and Emergency Management (HCOHSEM), it is clear that accumulation by dispossession filters down through not only property and money but also access to green spaces and a healthy life. By dispossessing low-income communities of their right to green spaces and life, those communities end up in places that are environmentally dangerous, leaving them at a disadvantage in the disaster preparedness and recovery process. This thesis serves as a case study highlighting how HCOHSEM failed to provide low-income communities with assistance prior to, during, and after Hurricane Harvey. The lessons from these gaps in protective measures show that public policies need to be malleable to ensure residents of any community are covered. Though no …

Mall after mall was built in American cities, exhaustively emulated by developers often working in concert with civic governments. In service of capital, neoliberal urban governance engages in the risky subsidization of spatio-spectacle production, working together with private business entities to bolster tax revenue and aid in private capital accumulation. The extensive replication of malls in close geographic proximity to one another across the American landscape, erected through the neoliberal partnerships of civic governments and private business interests, has greatly contributed to mall decline and mall death. There is now, however, a new spatio-spectacle that has arisen to take the place of the "great American shopping mall"—the luxury mixed-use development. These luxury mixed-use projects have been adopted as a new trend within urban development following the reality of sweeping mall decline and are proliferating across the (sub)urban landscape. Luxury mixed-use developments, I argue, are merely a continuation of late capitalism's problematic spectacle fetish. Moreover, this process is revealed to be inextricably entangled with gentrification, driven by cities' neoliberal desires to become/maintain status as global, "world-class" cities, performed through the spatialized ideology of neoliberal multiculturalism.

Since the adoption of neoliberalism, many cities have taken to integrating nature with capital accumulation to create a sense of place. This has been closely tied to urban greening, or green "revitalization." As part of curating this desired character, city governments are working to roll out plans to restore and renew neighborhoods using their natural landscapes through methods such as reforestation, the creation of parks, and commercial development. These cities, deemed Entrepreneurial cities, are increasingly incorporating natural or green spaces into their development of character as part of their branding schemes. This research focuses on the role of nature as the site of economic development and community revitalization within Dallas, Texas. This research examines how the City of Dallas uses nature to attract capital, and how the narratives of development relate to residents' visions for development in the historically neglected Joppa neighborhood in the Trinity River Corridor. Development near Joppa could be an example of how the natural landscape is being used to not only attract developers but also to bring a different ‘class' of resident into the area. By exploring this intersection of nature and capital in Dallas, we can better understand the nuanced ways through which the neoliberalization …

The Dallas-Forth Worth Metroplex (DFW) serves as a diverse resettlement location for globally displaced refugees. While research examines how the nation impacts refugee resettlement, studies that examine the role of the city and community in placemaking are still lacking. In city resettlement investigations, research often focuses broadly on advocacy and political movements rather than the impacts of local-level structures and policies. In this paper, I develop an evaluation model using Jenny Phillimore's categories for successful refugee resettlement that examines how structural barriers, community interactions, and resource accessibility affect space and place for refugee populations. Through an ethnography of Chin and Rohingya refugee communities in DFW, I explore the differences between community-settled and state-settled refugee groups and the idea of an integrated resettlement program. Additionally, I argue that refugees who choose their settlement location in the United States are empowered and thus have a stronger connection to their host community than state-settled refugees. For example, in interviews, the Chin emphasized their ownership of Lewisville and feelings of home, while the Rohingya expressed feelings of placelessness and dispossession in Dallas. As governments push towards an entirely privatized system of refugee resettlement, this research argues for an integrated method that draws upon federal …

The number of public markets in the United States increased from more than 300 in the 1970s to more than 8,600 by 2016. This increase in markets is related to changes in food production, localism and the local food systems movement, socioeconomic changes, cultural changes, and perceptions of embeddedness. Research on the underlying conditions for the success of public markets is scant in the United States, and especially in the USDA Southwest Region. This study provides analysis of public market locations as compared with non-market locations by drive-time trade areas during a 20-year period, 1996 and 2016, to gain further insights into factors leading to their success. The results from logit regression analyses and simulations of socioeconomic, college-town status, and climate-grid classifications find an increased likelihood of public markets with population, education, college town status, and some climate-grid locations. Median income, surprisingly, has an inverse relationship with public market success. Qualitative data and a literature review point to three types of embeddedness that motivate customers to attend public markets. This study concludes that "local nontradable consumer goods" tied to place are offered at these "nontradable consumption amenities." These amenities are "third places" that promote social interaction and become important places …