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A CAPABILITY-BASED APPROACH TO DEFINING
PERFORMANCE CHARACTERISTICS OF THE BUILT ENVIRONMENT
by
Ferdinand Lewis
A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE SCHOOL OF POLICY, PLANNING, AND
DEVELOPMENT
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
(POLICY, PLANNING AND DEVELOPMENT)
August 2008
Copyright 2008 Ferdinand Lewis
Object Description
| Title | A capability-based approach to defining performance characteristics of the built environment |
| Author | Lewis, Ferdinand |
| Author email | ferdinand.lewis@sbcglobal.net; ferdinal@usc.edu |
| Degree | Doctor of Philosophy |
| Document type | Dissertation |
| Degree program | Policy, Planning & Development |
| School | School of Policy, Planning, and Development |
| Date defended/completed | 2008-06-10 |
| Date submitted | 2008 |
| Restricted until | Unrestricted |
| Date published | 2008-08-14 |
| Advisor (committee chair) | Banerjee, Tridib |
| Advisor (committee member) |
Irazabal, Clara McCann, Edwin |
| Abstract | Primary research, policy recommendations, and audit instruments are three responses to the U.S. obesity epidemic offered by built environment-physical activity researchers. This study is concerned with the theoretical foundations of audits.; Primary research and audits play different roles: the former is investigative, the latter is evaluative. Those roles are too often conflated, I argue, altering the type and scope of information available to policymakers, and obscuring an audit's fundamental relationship to distributive justice. This study proposes eight defining characteristics of built environment audits to illustrate the distinctions between audits and primary research. Because audits are always normative, and always distributive, they necessarily contain definitions of distributive justice. Primary research, on the other hand, is not necessarily bound by normativity or the definition of distributive justice.; Three types of audit information are identified -- "satisfactions" "opportunities" and "capability" -- each corresponding to one of the three moral-philosophical definitions by J.S. Mill, John Rawls, and Amartya Sen. A "general model for built environment audits" is proposed here, based on the three types of audits proceeding from each of the three definitions. The general audit model is subsequently used to examine the "ecological models" currently guiding built environment-physical activity research.; I argue that ecological models are particularly suited to observing what Sen calls capability, especially when they employ the units of observation called "behavior settings." However, the value of the behavior setting unit is compromised, I assert, by the narrow definition it is often given. I propose an alternative unit of observation, J.J. Gibson's affordance, and undertake to demonstrate how affordance equates with built environment capability.; In the final section, I use a case study protocol based on the general audit model to examine six audit instruments. I attempt to determine the degree to which these instruments gather affordance data within the general audit model. I conclude that few of the audits could be called "affordance audits" outright, however, some of their methodologies could be extended to gather affordance data. |
| Keyword | urban design theory; quality of life measures; Lynch, Kevin; Sen, Amartya; Rawls, John; active living; childhood obesity prevention; built environment audit instruments; ecological model of perception; ecological psychology; urban design policy; built environment research; US obesity epidemic; distributive justice |
| Geographic subject (country) | USA |
| Language | English |
| Part of collection | University of Southern California dissertations and theses |
| Publisher (of the original version) | University of Southern California |
| Place of publication (of the original version) | Los Angeles, California |
| Publisher (of the digital version) | University of Southern California. Libraries |
| Provenance | Electronically uploaded by the author |
| Type | texts |
| Legacy record ID | usctheses-m1578 |
| Rights | Lewis, Ferdinand |
| Repository name | Libraries, University of Southern California |
| Repository address | Los Angeles, California |
| Repository email | http://www.usc.edu/isd/libraries/services/ask_a_librarian/email/ |
| Filename | etd-Lewis-2256 |
| Archival file | uscthesesreloadpub_Volume40/etd-Lewis-2256.pdf |
Description
| Title | Page 1 |
| Full text | A CAPABILITY-BASED APPROACH TO DEFINING PERFORMANCE CHARACTERISTICS OF THE BUILT ENVIRONMENT by Ferdinand Lewis A Dissertation Presented to the FACULTY OF THE SCHOOL OF POLICY, PLANNING, AND DEVELOPMENT UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY (POLICY, PLANNING AND DEVELOPMENT) August 2008 Copyright 2008 Ferdinand Lewis |
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