University of Pennsylvania ScholarlyCommons Publicly Accessible Penn Dissertations 2016 Pushback in the Jet Age: Investigating Neighborhood Change, Environmental Justice, and Planning Process in Airport-Adjacent Communities Amber Victoria Woodburn University of Pennsylvania, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://repository.upenn.edu/edissertations Part of the Environmental Law Commons, Environmental Policy Commons, Environmental Sciences Commons, Transportation Commons, and the Urban Studies and Planning Commons Recommended Citation Woodburn, Amber Victoria, "Pushback in the Jet Age: Investigating Neighborhood Change, Environmental Justice, and Planning Process in Airport-Adjacent Communities" (2016). Publicly Accessible Penn Dissertations. 2101. https://repository.upenn.edu/edissertations/2101 This paper is posted at ScholarlyCommons. https://repository.upenn.edu/edissertations/2101 For more information, please contact [email protected]. Pushback in the Jet Age: Investigating Neighborhood Change, Environmental Justice, and Planning Process in Airport-Adjacent Communities Abstract Beneath the shadow of the aircraft and beyond the airport fence, communities wrestle with the impacts of airport expansion and operations. This dissertation builds scholarly foundations to explore the tensions between local residents who want to maintain healthy and stable communities and airport owners who want to grow operations and promote regional economic growth. The literature review contributes an overview of existing scholarship that investigates airports in an urban planning context, a realm of study I term ‘aviation urbanism’. To address gaps in aviation urbanism scholarship, I derived and investigated three research questions pertaining to neighborhood change, environmental justice outcomes, and the airport infrastructure planning process for airport-adjacent communities. The dissertation first asks: How has the population of historically marginalized groups living near airports changed with the rise of the jet age? The spatial analysis and descriptive statistics show that airport-adjacent communities in multi- airport regions generally increased persons of color and increased renters more than their respective metropolitan regions. Additionally, the communities often underperformed socio-economically with respect to their region. The second research question asks: Were hub airports more likely to expand if historically marginalized groups surrounded them? The exact logistic regression model, which was designed to be suitable for binary outcomes and small sample sizes, did not offer statistical evidence that environmental injustice is a concern at a systemic, institutional level for major airport expansion decisions. Next, I investigated environmental injustice on a case-by-case basis during the planning process, asking: How did the Federal Aviation Administration and airport owners frame and evaluate environmental justice in the planning process for airport expansion projects? After investigating the methodological framing of environmental justice in Environmental Impact Statements, I found that the methodological variation in comparison geography prevented the FAA and airport owners from recognizing and mitigating disproportionate impacts at two of the three airports with the most obvious and egregious levels of environmental justice concern. Overall, this dissertation contributes a methodological approach to define airport-adjacent communities and offers a basis for further inquiries into the relationship between airport infrastructure, airport-adjacent communities, and airport-centric activity centers. Degree Type Dissertation Degree Name Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) Graduate Group City & Regional Planning First Advisor Megan Ryerson Keywords Airport, Infrastructure, NEPA Subject Categories Environmental Law | Environmental Policy | Environmental Sciences | Transportation | Urban Studies and Planning This dissertation is available at ScholarlyCommons: https://repository.upenn.edu/edissertations/2101 PUSHBACK IN THE JET AGE: INVESTIGATING NEIGHBORHOOD CHANGE, ENVIRONMENTAL JUSTICE, AND PLANNING PROCESS IN AIRPORT-ADJACENT COMMUNITIES Amber Victoria Woodburn A DISSERTATION in City and Regional Planning Presented to the Faculties of the University of Pennsylvania in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy 2016 Supervisor of Dissertation Signature: _______________________________________ Dr. Megan Ryerson Assistant Professor, Department of City and Regional Planning Graduate Group Chairperson Signature: ______________________________________ Dr. Eugenie Birch, Lawrence C. Nussdorf Professor of Urban Education & Research, Department of City and Regional Planning Dissertation Committee Dr. Amy Hillier, Associate Professor, Department of City and Regional Planning Dr. Erick Guerra, Assistant Professor, Department of City and Regional Planning For Mom and Dad. I earned one degree for each of us! ii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS In Fall 2007, an enthusiastic doctoral student in Ugg boots regularly stood in front of me (and dozens of my fellow Cal engineering students) in the McLaughlin Hall basement and led supplementary lectures on statistical analysis. She was the graduate teaching assistant for CE93: Engineering Data Analysis, a required undergraduate class. I visited many of her office hours over the course of the semester, drawn to her effective teaching style and strong understanding of statistics. Later, she helped me secure my first professional internship and she offered me a job as an undergraduate research assistant. She would later become Dr. Megan Ryerson, my dissertation advisor and, affectionately, my ride-or-die mentor. It is difficult for me to adequately describe the impact Dr. Ryerson has had on my professional development. I hope that in listing what I was willing to do to be her student, you can begin to comprehend her value as a mentor, educator, and researcher. When she started her first professorship, she invited me to accompany her to the University of Tennessee, Knoxville as her graduate student. I left my job with the Federal Highway Administration in Vancouver, Washington and started as her Transportation Engineering PhD student in Fall 2011. When she accepted a faculty position at the University of Pennsylvania and invited me along, I transferred with her to the Penn Planning program in Fall 2013. I enthusiastically followed her across the country twice and studied for two qualifying exams at two different universities because I hold her mentorship in such high esteem. iii Since becoming Dr. Ryerson’s student, many doors opened up for me. I am so fortunate to have learned from her experience and received her encouragement for the past nine years. She is a tremendous example of early-stage academic success, firmly establishing herself as an expert, continuously winning awards and recognition, and aggressively publishing innovative research. As a mentor, she offers unyielding encouragement during rough patches. She exudes a brand of optimistic confidence and thoughtful advice, punctuated by straight talk about the reality of industry and the academy. It has been my joy to work alongside her and I am so grateful for the relationship we cultivated over these years. I owe substantial thanks to the friends and family who cheered me through this demanding endeavor. My parents, Mike and Lisa Woodburn, raised me in a home that instilled education as a core value. They were the armchair philosophers who encouraged me to think critically, challenge authority, and find strength in my words. My Nana, Carole Rolfe, provided a roof over my head during most of the time I spent in Philadelphia. And, importantly, she provided a replenishing supply of Tastykakes and hoagies from Joe’s Market. My fiancé, Will McNair, endured long bouts of distance as I alternated between living with my Nana in Philadelphia and living with him in St Louis. He forever holds an unparalleled status in my heart for his unwavering support during my quest for higher education. I am deeply grateful to my student colleagues and educators in Berkeley, Knoxville, Philadelphia, and St Louis who helped me complete my research. I worked into the night alongside fellow transportation engineering students in the basement of Perkins Hall at iv the University of Tennessee [Bryan Bartnik, Andrew Campbell, Dr. Stephanie Hargrove, Dr. Casey Langford, Dr. Jun Liu, Shanna Veilleux, Dr. Wei Lu, Dr. Ryan Overton, Dr. Hongtai Yang, Dr. Jianjiang ‘JJ’ Yang, and Dr. Taekwan Yun], I learned about the diverse research areas of the planning students in Penn Planning’s doctoral seminar [Dr. Meagan Ehlenz, Billy Fleming, Dr. Albert Han, Jae Min Lee, Theo Lim, Dr. Simon Mosbah, Dr. Mary Rocco, Dr. Ken Steif, David Stanek, Dr. Yushou ‘Jospeh’ Su, Daniel Suh, Josh Warner, and Eliza Whiteman], and wrote chapters over dark beers and black coffee with another long-distance PhD candidate finishing her dissertation from St Louis [Dr. Erica Koegler]. I will long remember their friendship and camaraderie. I am grateful for the generous amount of time my professors spent with me to critique and support my ideas. Their collective enthusiasm, patience, and guidance were critical to my development as a scholar. I would like to thank Dr. Mark Hansen for his continued support since I was an undergraduate at the University of California, Berkeley; Dr. Chris Cherry and Dr. Lee Han for their support while I was a PhD student at the