This paper introduces the concepts behind estimating bicycle and pedestrian demand and provides an example of the development of a sketch-plan method for estimating bicycle and pedestrian demand from land use in San Diego County. The paper describes the methodology involved in collecting counts for the currently ongoing Seamless Travel project. The Seamless Travel project intends to develop a model for estimating bicycle and pedestrian demand within San Diego County. The project methodology includes conducting bicycle and pedestrian counts and intercept surveys over a two-year period throughout the County and evaluating the effects that socio-demographic factors and physical factors have on walking and biking rates within the County. The project is funded by Caltrans Division of Innovation and Research and is being conducted by the Traffic Safety Center of University of California Berkeley and Alta Planning + Design.

Among Objects seeks to explore the concepts and structures of thought that underlie Western percussion ontology. As an artform, percussion is often understood as not being rooted to a material practice, but instead defined based on practitioners’ intentions and relationships to any number of materials, from conventional instruments to so-called “found sounds.” This dissertation, itself invested in the ethical dilemmas of the art form, seeks to complicate this understanding. I begin, through a phenomenological lens, by analyzing the structures of action and consciousness that make such an ontology possible. I then illustrate, through the concept of touch, the contingent bodily and material elements that support these structures and mediate this action: conditions that are often overlooked in accounts of the artform. I argue that the predominant ontology of action is shaped by certain orienting structures of power, and that percussion’s ontology must be understood based on the consequences of these orientations. I proceed to imagine and outline a metaphysics of percussion rooted not in subjective action but in a form of inter-objective self-interpretation. Within this framework, the percussive work or event creates a more complex object of which the human is just one component part, rather than master or sovereign. The dissertation closes with a discussion of how, given this alternative metaphysics, the relationship of percussion to violence takes on a different form: no longer something that one commits only by choice, but something that is immanent to the embodied, material, and cultural practices of the artform. Given this understanding, I argue for an embodied, object-oriented ethics to help create and maintain a more habitable percussive world.

Universalism and Fragmentation in Percussion Practice is an examination of the formation of percussion repertoire and practice within Western Art Music. Through historical analysis, cultural anthropology, and autobiographical ethnography, I seek to explore the relationships between percussion, liberal universalism, postmodernism, and neoliberalism. I argue that percussion practice has developed in line with the Enlightenment-values that have driven the development of Western culture, despite its typical claims to revolutionary origins and percussion’s historical portrayal as Other. I also argue that this universalism as it manifests in percussion has been comfortably married to capitalist production and neoliberal values. I ultimately arrive at a deconstruction of the universal as it pertains to the intercultural dialogues at play within percussion, and propose an alternative model to universalism in the form of fragmentation driven by lived lives and non-teleological aesthetic judgments.