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Simulation? Machine Learning? Simulation X Machine Learning?: A decision system for research integrating building physic simulation and machine learning methods in the early design stage
Researchers have leveraged machine learning technologies and physics-based simulation in predicting daylight and other factors relevant to building energy consumption. However, this is still an emerging research area with comparatively less literature volume than its respectable fields. The less common expertise in building physics and machine learning is one of the significant attributes of the comparable smaller field. Moreover, there is no generalized method outlining the thought process behind integrating simulation and machine learning methods or cost-benefit analysis of choosing to implement simulation, machine learning, or both in the current literature. This thesis proposes a framework that identifies the considerations researchers should ask step-by-step in the simulation and machine learning workflow and analyzes these methods' advantages and drawbacks. The proposed framework is demonstrated with two proof of concept case studies. The first case study used daylight simulation with Climate Studio and Grasshopper to generate synthetic data automatically to train pix2pix, a conditional generative adversarial network (cGAN). The model was hosted on a web interface using p5.js that allows users to create their building designs and provide design feedback simultaneously. The second case study is a thought experiment that employs pedestrian wind comfort with Eddy3D and an artificial neural network (ANN) model in Python.
Adriatic Projects Revisited
The Adriatic Projects (1967-72) was a United Nations international exchange program in regional planning founded to transfer urban planning knowledge to Yugoslavia (1945-91). Established during the Cold War era in the non-aligned socialist Yugoslavia, the program brought together professionals from Eastern and Western cultural traditions to draft the urban development plans for the Adriatic coast. While these plans for extensive urbanization were never implemented, the planning technology was adopted into local urban culture engendering a spatial-economic development model that has dotted the small coastal towns with modernist urban forms. This thesis examines the international exchange established in Yugoslavia from the mid-1960s to the mid-1970s through two parallel historical narratives: the prism of the transfer of Western planning technology on the one hand, and the local Adriatic urban culture on the other. While tracing different spheres of influence, this study reveals how Adriatic development produced an alternative urban model under the socialist state that continues to inform the present spatial reality. After Croatia gained independence from Yugoslavia, a thirty-year-long transition to market economy has shaped coastal landscapes of abandoned modernist structures, informal urbanization, and speculative development. Today, it is clear how the post-socialist spatial reality has reversed the concepts of public and private, preservation and development, planning and informality. Using the lens of the Cold War urban development diplomacy, this thesis disentangles the formation of global planning epistemology, local traditions, and aspirations raised in the post-socialist era.
Seeing Mumbai Through Its Hinterland: Entangled Agrarian-Urban Land Markets in Regional Mumbai
The “money in the city, votes in the countryside” dynamic meant that in the past, agrarian propertied classes wielded enough power to draw capital and resources from cities into the rural hinterland. However, as cities cease to be mere sites of extraction, agrarian elites have sought new terms of inclusion in contemporary India’s market-oriented urban growth, most visible in the endeavour of the political class to facilitate the entry of the “sugar constituency” into Mumbai’s real estate markets.
Boston South Station: Re-imagining Mobility through the Mobile-Eye
A top-down design process using projection lines on a flattened surface has been a dominant design technique for us, as we commonly witness in our daily lives of studios and practices or in written disciplines. However, in building scale as large as intermodal stations, such design technique fails to address the realities – in Pragmatist’s term - of architecture that people perceive building primarily through cinematographic itinerary rather than through plans or sections or any holistic set of building images, since the latter requires thought process to appreciate those images in mind. This thesis addresses the issues of intermodal stations designed top-down. Their design follows 19th and 20th-century logic of efficiency, systematically flawless but illegible to the general public, failing to solve a disorienting experience. Above all, delivering the intended architectural imagery of such stations is limited because the traditional reading can no longer be applied in such scale; aesthetics is a hidden work behind the vast space that a verification process, or familiarization through multiple travel, is required to appreciate the architecture. As a solution, a design principle is developed based on a Pragmatist reality as opposed to Kantian truth, on perception, and on mobile-eye theory. Through the new principle, this thesis seeks to re-design Boston South Station to make the wayfinding more intuitive and deliver better architectural realities beyond the limit of traditional design technic in intermodal stations.
Being a Good Relative: Following Mni into the Future
This thesis engages with the challenges and disciplinary discourse of collaborative design with Indigenous people who are working to heal their homelands both ecologically and spiritually. The design project is located at a sacred site for the Dakota (an Indigenous people whose home is the state now called Minnesota). The landscape has been permanently altered by the infrastructure of colonization, resource extraction, and urbanization. I have been given permission to work on the site by the Indigenous caretakers who now maintain it. The site will function as a laboratory to enact a design practice that is embedded within, conceptualizes, and translates across multiple ways of knowing and being in relation to land. The project structures its methodology through three ethics of relationality which decenter the futurity of design to instead co-labor with the site’s Indigenous caretakers towards the realization of a shared, common future.
Planning for Resiliency
A Planning Framework for Large Resiliency Infrastructure
Tactics of Disappearance, Hiding in Plain Sight
“Pitching” is a complete, localized act that turns an idea into reality. When applied to space , it describes the quick and temporary transformation of a ground for sleeping. “A pitch” is also the meaningful distance between various points, such as the high and low notes on a musical scale, and in architecture, the slope of a roof. When applied to space, “a pitch” is the active boundary of a sports arena or a field of play. In all its tenses, “pitch” overlays boundaries and points of reference onto existing space that would otherwise not relate to the body. For this thesis, “pitch” is a design tool that turns fiction into reality, providing an origin, or at the very least, a convenient point of reference. Transforming an existing space without rebuilding or demolishing it is a form of spatial resistance often used by nondominant groups to momentarily exist/survive/express joy/freedom within an adversarial landscape. Therefore, pitching is also a way to describe spatial resistance—exemplified by quilombos, and capoeira rodas—in which impermanence is not only a quality, but a strategy of subversion. Within Los Angeles (a city that exists at the edge of reality in both cinema and urban sprawl), the LA River exists as a loose index of its natural form. What remains is a body of water cast in concrete—an environmental disaster. This thesis uses “pitch” as both a dimensioning tool and a geometric strategy to create spaces of freedom for water and people in the concrete container of the Los Angeles River. As a design tool, “pitch” suggests both an orientation and a temporal point of reference, recategorizing the river from an engineering project to an architecture project.
Field Anfractuous - Retrospection on Fluid Architecture and Difficult Arts
“Difficult Arts,” a post-AI era term, is closely related to a particular style of architecture that gained attraction and quite a favorable reputation in the mid-nineteenth century. Given its characteristics, techniques, and methods, Fluid Architecture almost falls under the category of difficult art like its subset. As we encounter more technological breakthroughs, we become a more inclusive society with non-binary and non-colonial standards; this thesis proposes to take a retrospective look at fluid architecture with newer analysis methods which doesn’t hold modern or traditional architecture as a metric to gauge its success. This thesis investigates the characteristics of the fluid and curvilinear architecture that moves away from the notion of “how a fluid wall is built?” to the idea of “what that fluid wall does?”. Field Anfractuous proposes an Artist Residency and Playground for artists working towards rarefied and inaccessible crafts and techniques to create “difficult art.” The field is conceived as a cultural project that hosts canonical artists from various backgrounds and is envisioned as a projective ground that becomes a voice for artists and creators worldwide. The binding idea of this thesis project is to function as a political device, working at an intersection of art, fiction, and culture. The project features a field of 16 nodes, each with a specific character. The playground is envisaged to function in a certain way. An artist or a group of artists inhabits each node for a particular period, where the artist forms a story around or through the assigned node. The playground will be a space whose character is unknown; it will change according to the witness and challenge architecture’s perception and legibility.
Building Characters
Building Characters arrive at City Hall Park from all boroughs of New York City, some on foot, some by bus, some by car, and others by train. Like leviathans in the mist, they materialize at the Park's gates. They muscle themselves into the existing City Hall Loop in such prodigious numbers that, at times, they climb and topple over one another to arrive, or more accurately, grasp in futility at its center point. In the ever-growing mass characters are forced so violently by the writhing number at their backs that they begin to merge--deforming around, into and amongst one another. Atriums, gallery vaults, 'fancy stairs' and grottos replace their innards as their individuality is subsumed--contorting, and folding--into the gelatinous whole. Others, content to simply observe the writhing corpusculature or too timid to mount a bid for the middle hover around the fringes of the Loop. The wallflower-homunculi thus find themselves colonized by intrepid passing folk: cafes, pavilion-shelters, and offices emerge, and in one particularly strange case, a small storage area housing reflective, multi-colored spherical garden ornaments and battery powered light up plastic wood sprites affixed to the ends of long, thin plastic rods, dragged out begrudgingly twice a year, once on Samhain and once on Beltane. Building Characters make up this building's character.
A Shell of a Good Time: A Design Framework for Oyster Sanctuaries and Playful Parks
Oysters play a crucial role in maintaining healthy marine ecosystems through their ability to filter water and provide habitat for various species. The Billion Oyster Project, a New York-based initiative, has been working tirelessly to educate the public about the importance of oysters and restore their populations in the waters around the city. This project combines education and restoration efforts, with a mission to engage both marine life and people in a symbiotic relationship. The central inquiry of this architectural thesis is: How do we design spaces that harmoniously coexist with marine life and serve as recreational and educational resources for the public? In the context of contemporary discourse, this research question addresses critical issues of marine conservation, urban environmental reclamation, and flood protection, as well as modular design and fabrication. The rapid depletion of oyster populations, the reclamation of post-industrial waste sites, and the need for resilient coastal infrastructure have become pressing concerns. By exploring a novel approach that integrates oyster restoration, public engagement, and architectural design, this thesis aims to bridge the existing gaps in these crucial domains. This thesis envisions the creation of an educational and recreational park for the Billion Oyster Project using modular forms inspired by existing wave dissipation blocks. While providing oysters with a habitat to thrive and filter the surrounding water of what was historically an industrial waste dumping site, the modularity also considers replicability and fabrication, as issues of marine conservation and coastal resilience are not endemic to only New York City. The park not only contributes to oyster restoration but also offers a unique platform for public education and recreation. The project postulates that architecture can be a catalyst for the synergy between human and marine life. The outcomes of this research project provide a conceptual framework for future urban waterfront development that can balance the needs of marine ecosystems and human communities.
Spaceport: Technical Lands for Departing Earth
Spaceport: Technical Lands for Departing Earth proposes a new way of understanding how technological uses of place-based science was designed and imagined for both industrial and military activities in postwar America. It is argued in this book, the American spaceport as a complex series of technical lands were enabled through its architecture and aesthetics in the background of Cold War politics, economics, and technologies. Beginning with the opaque blockhouse underground as a port and expanding facilities for assembly, the entire spaceport complex can be understood as an enclosed system of both architectural and geographic space. This design research of the spaceport is not a linear history of postwar America. As dissertation of design, this research is structured by moving across space and time—beginning inside the launch complex interior and outwards through the mobile architectural objects at the departure of earth. This translation of spatial movement starts with the core and ends with the capsules at the scale of the expanded geographic frontier. The spaceport signals changes in structure, scale, and space. Departing earth through a series of carefully enclosed and discrete objects, architecture began to move further outwards in space. As a nuanced condition, the spaceport as a constellation of architectural objects problematizes its contribution with respect to the policies and history of aerospace technology. As a non-linear critical narrative, this dissertation is told as a concept from the construction of the spaceport imaginaries to its inevitable abandonment as wasteland.
Body-ody-ody: A Formal Redress of Harlem
Ornamentation (architectural decoration) is a deliberate act of shifting perspective, envisioning possibilities that recognize contingency. Formalism (embodied ornamentation enabled by today’s technology) gives architecture agency to express people and place. Recent critiques of formalism echo the cultural elitism seen in modernist advocacy for functionality over ornament. Modernist architecture, designed with the body of a 6-foot-tall white man as its historical referent, persists in building norms, neglecting a broader set of bodies: the majority. The focus on a single body has created a misfitting urban fabric. But what if we could create an unapologetically formalist architecture strategy to create accessibility through beauty? And what if, through this, the architecture itself could become an activist work? The resulting constructions would surely counter rigid norms. Harlem offers an apt testing ground with its rich history of Black self-determination, social consciousness manifested through creativity and diverse populations. Peppered with retail spaces obedient to codes written around an unreflective people group amongst a palette of intriguing historic visual types, building with vernacular and a broader community can challenge contemporary disdain for formalism, reimagining a range of proportions, celebrating culture, and welcoming diverse identities. Close study and illustration of the New York code for historical districts provides a spatial ribbon of potential redress and selective adaptation to existing architecture at its skin that invites a range of bodies to engage with form and space. By embodying ornamentation, we can disrupt traditional hierarchies, inviting and exciting a broader array of human bodies into a new architectural body of work.
Liquid Pedagogy
Liquid Pedagogy is a critical reflection on pedagogy and the discipline of architecture which historically is shaped by but also has shaped the learning spaces in architecture schools. The thesis is materialized in a design project: a new graduate school of architecture in a dense urban fabric in Baltimore, Maryland. Zygmunt Bauman in "Liquid modernity" characterizes the transformations of today’s global societies from hard modernity to liquid modernity, where we believe there is no certainty and stability in the world, and everything is in constant flux. Consequently, the discipline of architecture is in turmoil. On the one hand, the sheer plurality of design trends fueled by technological developments has contributed to what we call today "disciplinary dilemma." On the other hand, design pedagogy as an institutional affair is resistant to rapid transformations, and it has lost control. In such circumstances, and in order to gain their agency back, architecture schools need to de-institutionalize pedagogy. The thesis attempts to develop a model for the future of the design pedagogy by proposing a decentralized curriculum as intellectual support, reflected in an open and adaptive architecture. As a critique of the contemporary model of architecture schools as big-box production factories disconnected and isolated from society, the school becomes more amalgamated and connected to the city, offering public resources to Baltimore residents as a part of its deinstitutionalization. Liquid Pedagogy is exploring a new model that sponsors the transformation of social relations, where the environment is constantly re-invented through community engagement and the potentials of architectural imagination.
ke kai momona: sustaining Kānaka Maoli identity through limu cultivation
The project explores cultural and ecological sovereignty through limu cultivation in Hawai‘i. Limu (seaweed) was a central component of the traditional Native Hawaiian diet and the personification of ea (sovereignty) in the ocean. The loss of indigenous limu ecosystems is directly tied to the loss of cultural practices, ‘ike (knowledge), and spiritual identity. Through theories and strategies of ahupua‘a reconnection, the project considers the process of reviving culturally and ecologically “dead” areas within an occupied urban sphere. Interventions seek to reactivate and rehabilitate the hydrology and ecology of the Waikīkī ahupua‘a to create the conditions for limu to thrive. Design compliments existing limu restoration efforts and advocates for spaces for ho‘ike (knowledge sharing) and community in these new hybrid environments.
Growth under Controlled Conditions to Explain the Hierarchical Distributions of a Moss, Tetraphis pellucida
Version of Record
Turing landscapes
published in Bradley Cantrell and Adam Mekies, 'Codify', Routledge 2018
Blurred Lines: From Fragmentation to the Common on the Urban Coastal Edges
Landscape architects often regard sea level rise on urban coastal edges as solely an environmental issue, relying on the design of edges and lines to fortify the coast. However, this thesis believes that climate adaptation is also a socio-culture issue. This project starts from inside to outside, as we need a new type of city to co-exist with future conditions. Castle Hill neighborhood on the Southern coast of the Bronx, New York City is selected as the case study site. Driven by urban developments of Manhattan, this area went through urban fragmentation and is likely to be severely impacted by the climate crisis or climate-related issues in the future due to the vulnerability of the community. This thesis regards the preparation for climate change as an opportunity to re-frame the urban system, bringing in the hydrological, ecological, and social infrastructure, blurring the edges and boundaries, and reversing urban fragmentation. The ecology acts as a means to activate the blurring, mediating the edges and lines with water and land. It encapsulates the social interventions that engage with multiple social groups to generate a matrix of eco-hydro-social conditions, gradually transforming the fragmented spaces into a common landscape. The thesis uses a website as the media to simulate an online forum. The forum connects governments, professionals, public interest organizations, and residents to plan and progressively carry out a series of transformative projects in the urban spaces within the neighborhood. The forum’s format can improve the efficiency and universality of communication, turning hierarchy into partnerships. It encourages all kinds of social groups related to Castle Hill Neighborhood to provide their opinions, forming a community with voice and power.
Mediated Departure, 22 January 2029
Since 9/11, Guantanamo Bay has provided the US with a legal loophole where detainees were captured without the same legal rights as if they were on the American land. Today 30 detainees still remain on site. This thesis proposes a temporary offshore airfield as a conclusion to this notorious past. On Jan 22nd, 2029, press around the world gather at the new airport to witness and document all 30 detainees leaving Guantanamo Bay permanently. The airfield is an architectural space that accommodates this mediated event. The sequence of actions and the spectating relationship together choreograph an event that would occur only once in history for the specific day of Jan 22nd, 2029.
Middle Ground: Between Monument and Fabric
This thesis re-assesses our contemporary distinctions between monument and fabric to discover methods for intervening in historic cities. Antwerp, like many European cities, was faced with the consequences of urban exodus and economic expansion during the 20th century, leading to extensive sprawl that left the core as a static center for commerce and tourism. Today, Antwerp has to contend with a crisis in the medieval center after a long focus on developments at the periphery. In response, the city is investing in cross-parceling strategies to create density, as well as investing millions each year on the restoration of its monuments. With these are two contradictory desires -the updating of medieval city fabric and the preservation of monuments – there is however no consensus or declarative strategy as to how these ambitions are to be reconciled urbanistically. This thesis looks at Antwerp’s mandated development of new construction not as a plague, but as an opportunity to re-evaluate both the symbolic and programmatic status of the church in a changing city. In this context, a double-sided approach is taken, adapting both the interior and surrounding fabric of Antwerp’s St. Jacobskerk (St. James’s Church). A conservation hall and a procession of galleries linked to St. Jacobskerk is proposed in order to house the church’s Baroque and Renaissance artifacts, as well as clear the nave for the conservation of hidden medieval murals. Coming together with a new housing proposal, the extension creates a continuous elevation in front of the church, addressing the monument’s symbolic status in the contemporary city.
THOSE PREGNANT IMAGES I WOULD LIKE TO BRING BACK TO CHINA
Since modernity, the term “atlas” has garnered a meaning beyond an accumulation of maps, referring also to the practice of collecting images. Aby Warburg collected 971 images in his Bilderatlas Mnemosyne to create a model of historical memory that transcends cultures. Gerhard Richter brings atlas to the level of a methodology, as a means to reflect upon his own geopolitical identity. It was never a rare practice even to architects — Aldo Rossi had his private Polaroid collection, Eduardo Souto de Moura has his “wall atlas” in his atelier. From the thousands of images that I have amassed, I collect 60. There are photos I took, illustrations I claimed, and pictures I borrowed. From there I dare to say, a building will be made. In these images, I am looking for what Roland Barthes calls the noeme - the essence. Punctum should be separated from studium to allow us to twist meanings. Images should be played with, just as they have by the likes of Richard Prince, Andy Warhol, Robert Rauschenberg, David Salle, and Annette Lemieux. Images ought to be exhausted, and only then can we make the jump to designing a building. The project in the end shall contain only images - those I collected as well as those I produced. Good architects rarely reveal the path from their images to their buildings, and are reluctant to explain their process. The thesis is to unfold this process.
Green Apparatus: Ecology of the American House According to Building Codes
In 2008, California introduced the first-in-the-nation Green Building Standards Code to encourage sustainable construction practices. While the adoption of the CALGreen Code marked a significant moment in the process of the greening of building regulations, it represents only one moment in the nation's history of code-making, and that of environmental action. Two parallel narratives, and their eventual mergence are the subject of this study. The first one is a story of the agendas that shaped the American house, and the regulations that govern it; the second an account of the rise of environmental awareness as gradually standardized by law-makers and normalized by economists. The goal is to evaluate the wide-ranging consequences of their convergence - not just the isolated green building standards. Essentially, while environmentalists criticize the devastating global effects of consumerism, free trade, and fossil fuels; governments and local authorities focus on fine-tuning of individual standards, and diffusion of efficient technologies at the scale of households. It remains to be seen whether these measures will minimize the environmental impact of American houses, or simply perpetuate the market-driven image of sustainability, and further complicate the multi-layered building code that they try to mend. This research is ultimately concerned with an apparatus which uses the house, and green technologies as a vehicle for economic growth. For this reason, it would remain incomplete if it exclusively focused on ecological ideas and legislative programs, disregarding economic forces, market instruments, and technology. The first part of this study provides an account of ecological ideas, economic agendas, and regulatory programs as they emerged, influenced each other, and informed the character of environmental action and American households, specifically those built in California, and the City of Los Angeles. The second part investigates the mechanics of the regulations used to standardize building practices, and financial incentives used to promote green technologies. As Bateson observed, ideas and programs interact and survive in circuits. It would then be a fallacy to assume that by changing ideas and programs, and updating standards and recipes, we can change our environmental awareness. Ideas and standards must be questioned, but the matrix from which they originate needs to be occasionally re-circuited as well.
The Storied Landscape of Tkaronto: Seven Generations Toward the Indigenous City
Cities across North America are built on the traditional territories of Indigenous peoples; their design and planning do not reflect this reality. Colonialism sought to disrupt the connections between Indigenous people and their land, culture, and nations through processes of assimilation. In Canada, Reconciliation provides a process to address these wrongs and dismantle systems that led to generations of Indigenous people knowing little of their cultures. With the adoption of the Reconciliation Action Plan in 2021, the City of Toronto committed to: decolonize their “structures, processes, and ways of working”, “give land back to…Indigenous communities”, and make “financial reparations” . This project explores how the colonial city of Toronto can give way to the Indigenous city of Tkaronto over the next seven generations through climate adaptations informed by Indigenous ways-of-knowing centered on storytelling, oral histories, and the regeneration of socio-ecological connections.
"As If!": Reimagining Suburban Forms through the Accessory Dwelling Unit
Featured in the New York Times article “The Next Affordable City is Already Too Expensive,” Spokane, WA finds itself in the throes of the national housing crisis. In response, this thesis proposes to design a series of ADUs (accessory dwelling units) along the back alleys of West Central, one of Spokane’s most affected single-family residential areas. In recent years, ADU construction has emerged as a viable method of increasing both the quantity and diversity of the existing housing stock. However, beyond these nominal benefits, the popular conversation around ADUs has not offered much critique of the suburban codes (both explicit and implicit) that privilege isolation and normative conceptions of property. Thus, there remains a latent opportunity to consider the insertion of ADUs as a method of interrogating the suburban forms that contributed to the housing crisis in the first place. In response, this thesis mines the Spokane municipal code for ambiguities in formal regulation in order to push the ADU out of its typical conception as architecture that merely miniaturizes the single family home into unexpected new territory. The question is posed: what if ADUs acted as if they were not ADUs at all? What if instead they acted as if they were the instrumental components that comprise and uphold the existing suburban fabric - like fences, balconies, or parking spots - in order to interrogate the assumptions embedded within them? Possible answers to this question may give rise to hallucinatory new neighborhoods - and along with them, new forms of living together.
The Evolution and Retrofitting of Work-unit Communities Under a Self-organizing Logic: Cases in Nanjing, P.R. China
During China’s thirty years planned economy era (1949-1978), including the following two decades, the work-unit system has played a significant role in the country and has effectively promoted its economic growth by virtue of the system’s combined political, economic and social functions. However, as the domestic and international environment changed around the 1980s, the government slowly abandoned the work-unit system after deeming it an impediment to the country’s modernization. While the policies could be implemented quickly, the system’s physical space, which mostly consists of the working quarter and the living quarter, was not so easily erased. In reality, because of the economic situation’ limitations and the political priorities concerning the working quarter redevelopment in the reform’s early stage in the country, there has appeared a separation of working and living, and a lag of the work-unit community (the living quarter) development in the country. While large numbers of working quarters have been regenerated, relocated or demolished, and lots of researches have been done on the work-unit redevelopment, the majority of which are centered around the working quarter, most of the work-unit community are left behind and faced with the lash of the market economy, rapid urban development and physical deterioration on their own. Today, forty years have passed since the 1978 economic reform, due to all kinds of changes that have happened in the country, such as the new economic situation, urban sprawl and the existing stock-based development policy, there now exists a viable housing stock in the work-unit community area and it would be necessary and enforceable to retrofit them. In this context, in order to fill the gap of the work-unit community study in the country, to provide innovative research ideas and methodologies for the field, to provide strategic support for the national existing stock-based development policy, and to enrich the research on work-units in the second-tier cities of the country, this research aims to explore reasonable and applicable retrofitting strategies that would follow the inner self-organizing logic of the work-unit community. This will be done by studying both the administrative and morphological evolution of specific work-unit community cases in Nanjing, with the self-organization theory as a supporting theory and the typo-morphology approach as the primary physically-oriented methodology. In summary, administratively, residents’ sense of autonomy is the key to the retrofitting of the work-unit community. In the meanwhile, other participants in the community management should assist residents in the process, especially the street office, residents’ committee, planners and designers. Morphologically, three main retrofitting strategies are finally proposed. Namely, to increase the degree of openness in a limited way, to improve the competition mechanism in the work-unit community, and to focus on variable retrofitting strategies.
THE GLOBAL OFFICE: A NEW OPPORTUNITY FOR THE CITY OF BUENOS AIRES?
Across industries, companies are reducing costs by minimizing office space and sourcing talent from geographic areas with lower salaries. These two changes have accelerated the adoption of teleworking and could foster an exodus of jobs from leading innovation hubs ("sending cities") to emerging areas ("receiving cities"). In response to the pandemic, municipalities have launched programs to lure workers worldwide and underpin sectors such as tourism and hospitality. This thesis analyzes the main enablers and barriers for teleworking in the City of Buenos Aires and explores the potential economic, spatial, and social implications, particularly considering the influx of high-income earners. Understanding the factors that affect these initiatives and their implications can contribute to the design of national and local policies that attract new visitors and residents, while preserving urban inclusion, resilience, sustainability, and livability.