As Higher Education Developer and Analyst at Safe Software, I develop training modules for the data integration software FME. These modules are provided free of charge for instructors to use to teach FME. Each comes with a lecture and lab exercise, including real world scenarios and quizzes. These modules help instructors and students become familiar with the power of FME in an area relevant to their discipline.

So far one module has been released, focusing on Data Integration with FME Desktop. It guides students through the process of setting up a centralized geodatabase that combines data from disparate locations and formats, while also illustrating the importance of data integration for modern organizations.

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Walker, S. (2018). Crisis-Opportunity, Liability-Asset: Governing Vacant Land Reuse in Cleveland, Ohio (Ph.D. dissertation). University of Toronto, Toronto, ON.

My dissertation contributes to the literatures on post-2007 urban governance and urban greening by drawing novel connections between vacant land reuse, including urban agriculture, and the structures of urban governance. Through a historical analysis of housing vacancy, an institutional analysis of Cleveland’s community development industry’s response to the 2008 foreclosure crisis, and a case study of a vacant land reuse project, I argue that Cleveland’s community development industry shifted towards vacant land reuse and intervention to stabilize property values in response to the foreclosure crisis. This shift reveals a temporary resolution of the failure of subsidized housing construction following the crisis, but does not represent a significant departure from neoliberal community development.

While the City has been effective in fostering certain forms of reuse, the heavy involvement of the community development industry and community foundations, combined with a local government facing fiscal pressure, has resulted in a constrained political field of opportunity for vacant land reuse. By devolving the labor of lot maintenance onto residents and continuing to prioritize traditional economic development, many of the possibilities for using vacant land reuse for social and environmental justice have been limited. However, I also show that the incorporation of vacant land reuse within the community development industry in Cleveland was the outcome of a process of weak contestation, negotiation, and path dependency, not a simple imposition of neoliberal ideology. Additionally, my findings concerning reuse projects on the ground reveals the shortcomings of relying on under-resourced resident labor and shows cracks in the hegemony of private property and market logics in high-abandonment neighborhoods. My findings point to the importance of studying how greening projects are interacting with preexisting structures of urban governance. It suggests that the commodification of land and market-based community development places limits on vacant land reuse that directly benefits residents and works towards environmental and food justice.

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This digital bibliography is a collaborative effort to collect resources helpful in understanding the historical geographies of Cleveland, Ohio, from a critical and radical perspective. Over time we hope to add annotations to the content to make them more useful, but for now they are presented without comment. Note that some are primary documents and some present secondary analysis. Not all are written from a critical or radical perspective. Instead, some are useful for illustrating a particular empirical point or showcasing liberal or conservative viewpoints.

For more, visit Radical Cleveland.

Rosenman, E., & Walker, S. (2016). Tearing down the city to save it? “Back-door regionalism” and the demolition coalition in Cleveland, Ohio. Environment and Planning A, 48(2), 273–291.

In this paper, we explore what Cleveland, Ohio’s program of demolishing abandoned and foreclosed houses can teach us about the logics and politics of post-2007 austerity urbanism. We investigate the emergence of a local political coalition that has promoted demolition as a solution to the city’s housing crisis. In tracking how this political consensus is spatialized, we analyze how demolition both supports and complicates existing theories of austerity urbanism. We theorize demolition as a spatio-temporal fix, a locally negotiated response to the larger-scale political-economic limits imposed by neoliberal austerity. This fix occurs at both the neighborhood level, where demolitions clear land for future reinvestment, and at the regional level, where the increasingly more-than-urban nature of the US housing crisis allows demolitions to gain regional support among fragmented municipalities. In the seemingly paradoxical pursuit of demolition as a growth strategy, political actors in cities like Cleveland aggressively push to tear down the city in a desperate attempt to save it.

Walker, S. (2013). Growing ideology: urban agriculture in Vancouver and Detroit (MA Thesis). University of British Columbia. Retrieved from https://elk.library.ubc.ca/handle/2429/44889.

This thesis is an investigation of the urban agriculture movements in Vancouver, British Columbia, and Detroit, Michigan. I use both quantitative and qualitative methods and an urban political ecology theoretical framework to unpack how urban agriculture fits within the foodscapes of these two cities. My quantitative method draws on recent critique of food desert studies, avoiding an epidemiological method that seeks to statistically measure health outcomes in favor of an ecological approach with social inequalities as the primary focus of inquiry.

Through the use of cluster analysis, multidimensional scaling, and local indicators of spatial association, I conclude that foodscape composition and the location of urban agriculture is influenced by the housing and land markets, income inequality, and racial segregation. Drawing on interviews conducted in both cities, in my qualitative section I seek to understand how urban agriculture is seen as a sustainable solution to the very different problems faced by these two cities. I argue that urban agriculture has an ambivalent relationship to neoliberalism: it emerged largely as a Polanyian counter-movement to urbanized inequalities, but has more recently been enrolled as a device by the local state through which sustainability planning is seen to enhance economic competitiveness. Finally, I present vignettes of individual farms and gardens that show the political potential of urban agriculture to be closely linked to theories of political change and socionatural metabolic rifts.

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Walker, S. (2010, May). Differential Perceptions of Buffelgrass (Pennisetum ciliare) in the Sonoran Desert of Tucson, Arizona (BA Honors Thesis). Colgate University, Hamilton, NY. Retrieved from https://feastuoft.files.wordpress.com/2015/07/thesis-walker-2011.pdf

During my BA in Environmental Geography at Colgate University I conducted a research project on the invasive species buffelgrass (Pennisetum ciliare) in the Sonoran Desert of Tucson, Arizona. For this project I created and analyzed a mail survey which assessed the connection between residents’ perceptions of the desert, their environmental values, and their knowledge and opinion of buffelgrass. I used this research to write my honors BA thesis, with Jake Brenner and Jessica Graybill as my advisers.

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