Theses and Dissertations from UMD

Permanent URI for this communityhttp://hdl.handle.net/1903/2

New submissions to the thesis/dissertation collections are added automatically as they are received from the Graduate School. Currently, the Graduate School deposits all theses and dissertations from a given semester after the official graduation date. This means that there may be up to a 4 month delay in the appearance of a give thesis/dissertation in DRUM

More information is available at Theses and Dissertations at University of Maryland Libraries.

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1979 - 197912010 - 20131

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    Washington, D.C.'s Streetcar Suburbs: A Comparative Analysis of Brookland and Brightwood, 1870-1900
    (1979) Prince, Thomas Eugene; Groves, Paul
    The evolution of public transportation systems in the large American cities of the late nineteenth century culminated in the innovation of the streetcar. Such transportation changes affected urban structure and by the last quarter of the century had produced a distinctive residential area, the streetcar suburb. Washington, D.C. had a number of such suburbs, some the result of subdivision development associated with the extension of streetcar lines to link existing village suburbs to the downtown core, others the product of concurrent residential subdivision and streetcar development. Such suburbs were predominantly middle-class, white, residential areas. An examination of two Washington, D.C. suburbs: Brightwood and Brookland, indicated distinct physical, social, economic, and demographic structures in these village suburbs in the early 1880's. After the subsequent introduction of streetcar links to downtown Washington--an employment core characterized by much white-collar government employment--the two suburbs became increasingly similar in terms of the chosen measurements. By the end of the century, there was little in their structures to indicate the very different paths they had taken to the same end.
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    Recycling Suburban Sprawl: Coming to Terms with an Existential Crisis
    (2013) Goldman, Julian Hulman; Bell, Matthew J; Architecture; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
    The sprawl development which typifies the American landscape has an uncertain future. Mounting costs, changing demographics, and an inherent instability in value threaten to lift some neighborhoods, gut others, and expand sprawl into the countryside in a relentless, destructive march. This thesis seeks to develop a strategy by which increased density and additional land uses may be inserted into existing tract housing developments as a means of protecting and improving our previous investments, rather than bulldozing and replacing them or seeing them laid to waste. These changes to the fabric of sprawl may lay the groundwork for breaking down barriers to further development and modernization which have been put in place by policy, systems of finance and land ownership, and the very nature of the places we have created. Adding density to current settlements may also reduce pressures to sprawl further, protecting the undeveloped wilderness beyond the city limits.