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'Functional Follies' for an Urban Slum
“The challenge for Africa is no less than the restoration of its intellectual freedom and a capacity to create—without which no sovereignty is conceivable.”1 The general attitude toward architecture on the African continent is that it must primarily deal with needs, or that it should be involved in a retrospective exercise that imagines what could have been prior to European colonialism. This attitude denies Africans the freedom to create by looking within; instead, it insists on African creativity only as a relative other to whiteness, giving the impression that colonialism is the constant present lens through which to see the continent. This thesis rejects that notion, instead daring to imagine what is possible when African architects are allowed to dream, even while designing within difficult contexts and with limited means. The folly in architecture is a symbol of perverse indulgence often reserved for the architecture of the wealthy. Follies are individual sites for architectural expression and exploration. In this way, they allow the free exploration of architectural form. This thesis explores the erection of a series of “functional follies” in Agbogbloshie, an urban slum in Accra, Ghana. In a tradition where beauty divorced from tradition is an alien concept, these follies assume a usefulness that makes it possible for them to be assimilated into the community. These follies, therefore, act as both indulgent elements of beauty as well as tools to reintroduce traditional social and spatial relationships into the community that have been lost in the exodus from rural communities to the current urban reality. 1. “COVID-19: An Open Letter from African Intellectuals to Africa's Leaders,” accessed May 27, 2020, https://africanarguments.org/2020/04/16/coronavirus-open-letter-african-intellectuals-africa-leaders/.
Uncanny Nostalgia: Nine Homes of the Land Surveyor
Architecture is a desire where its origins are at once imagined but remain elusive. For Jacques Derrida, “the question of architecture is … the taking place in space. It invents something which didn’t exist beforehand and yet at the same time there is the inhabitant, man or God, who requires the place prior to its invention or causing it. Therefore, one doesn’t quite know where to pin down the origin of the place.” The permanent and stable house, as property and symbol, is so reassuring and comforting that many would call it a “home.” But “Home is where the heart is,” a space in the mind, in memory, a fabric that is beyond the built, physical, finite house, and as Gaston Bachelard aptly put, “a place that shelters daydreaming and protects its dreamer.” Synonymous with home, Architecture is a desire which seems to always express itself as missing or a lack. Similar to the search of the self, the desire for “being at home” is never fulfilled. Home is always on the move, oscillating between nostalgia and uncanny. Nostalgia is an accumulation of memories into a place; uncanny is the doubts towards that place. A home does not offer reassuring familiarity, nor does it regulate or limit its inhabitant. It provides the everyday needs but departs from the norms. It contains memories but asks for a different way of remembering. This home is completely incomplete, a starting point of departure——Architecture that liberates. Because of the transient qualities of Home, this thesis uses a different way to approach architecture through new representational methods that trace emotions, memories, thoughts, and dreams. The Thesis is a fiction that combines memories, dreams, thoughts, and emotions of domestic spaces, temporal stays, traveling, migrating into episodes of nine different abodes for an imagined Land Surveyor. It questions the notions of boundary, property, ownership, the self, and the singular archetypal home.
Incognito: Sensorial Interpretations of Covert Physiological Signals for Therapeutic Mediation
As our demand for technologies that mediate our environment continues to rise, our day-to-day activities have been increasingly overloaded with devices that collect our physiological signals. Our phones, watches, and jewelry now collect continuous personal data about us, from our location to our variable heart rate, and more features continue to appear in these technologies daily. And yet, despite the sensibility of these machines, little has been explored in decoding the highly informative signals collected by these devices to temper our physical environment. In particular, these signals have the potential to communicate one’s cognitive state and, in turn, address mental health. Embracing the open access to these technologies, this paper seeks to question how covert physiological signals can be turned into perceived sensorial experiences to increase awareness of one’s cognitive state and elicit positive affect through material interfaces. Acting not as a substitute for traditional therapies but as an alternative antidote, these sensorial interventions seek to process, analyze, and interpret physiological patterns, such as electrodermal activity and heart rate variability, to recognize signs of high and low emotional arousal and pair them with tactile, olfactory, auditory, and visual alterations in our surroundings. It is predicted that through the repeated association of the actuated stimuli with specific physiological states, a certain conditioning can be evoked to subsequently promote an instinctual response to malleable matter. The results illustrate that the fabric of our environment can not only be empathetic to our subconscious mood but also able to foster positive affect through psychophysiological adaptation.
Surface Traces: Tokyo’s Forgotten Rivers
The disappearance of the Shibuya River and water sources that were once vital to Tokyo have led to an introverted water culture. Despite recent picturesque efforts to reveal fragments of the Shibuya River through large-scale developments, water remains an elusive part of the city. Still, remnants of the lost river linger as urban ghosts, evoking episodic experiences of its absence within the built environment. In today’s dense urban fabric where the continuity of the river is neither possible nor productive, what are alternative methods of recollecting water’s significance? The thesis proposes a series of mnemonics – a fountain, botanical garden, and bathhouse – as urban elements to spatialize and reimagine the forgotten role of water through soundscapes and collectivity. Different modalities of addition, modification, and new construction envision the transformation of a locality. These interventions, scaling between artifact, architecture, and urban, posit the thesis’s bottom-up approach across Tokyo to unveil the city’s Anthropocene.
Apartment Number:N/A
“The modern apartment, or that which is referred to as a studio or one-room apartment, is the material realization of a tendency toward cell formation, which can be recognized as the architectural and topological analogue of the individualism of modern society.” – Peter Sloterdijk Lying beneath the condition of housing as aggregations of cells is the notion of private property. Capitalism has assigned the familial unit the minimum of space required to reproduce itself. The commodity of housing is simply that space where reproduction can occur and labor regenerate. Architecturally speaking, commodity housing in a dense urban development consists of individual cells connected horizontally by hallways and vertically by elevators. We should wonder why the universal urban housing typology is undifferentiable from for-profit temporary lodging, i.e., hotels. Is a neighbor just the stranger next door? This thesis is interested in how capitalism has infiltrated every aspect of our everyday life and the ways architecture orchestrates the endless repetition of work, rest, and consumption. It is an attempt to find moments where a new housing typology can exist within capital’s urban framework. So what if we get rid of hallways and relieve ourselves of the burden of discrete private properties? What if we utilize the embedded possibilities of elevators as collective spaces? If there is no “yours” or “mine,” then perhaps we humans are no longer merely agents to produce and reproduce. We, the people, are communities in spite of the imposition of a dense urban reality.
MORE THAN BAMBOO SCAFFOLDING
Over densification, scarce building plots and overuse of curtain walls are critical social problems in Hong Kong. My provocation of bamboo scaffolding in such a context aims to provide an additional layer of space with minimal ground impact as a parasitic “enclosure” or “facade” element. This thesis postulates several subsequent questions: With its ancillary and parasitic nature, can bamboo scaffolding be a protagonist spatial and design element in the architectural realm? Can bamboo scaffolding perform multiple functions other than pure structural and maintenance implications? What can the traditional and yet temporal construction technique transform the dense urban scenario in Hong Kong? The use of bamboo scaffolding is a traditional construction technique only utilized as a means of maintenance or construction, mainly on façade or surface level in Hong Kong. Tracing back to history, bamboo scaffolding had its origin associated with non-maintenance uses such as theatricality and ritual performance. Bamboo itself is also a very sustainable material for constructing different types of architecture. Therein lies the possibilities of bamboo scaffolding in other programmes. With the introduction of the domino system in modernism, structure is pushed further to the interior, and the load bearing needs are solved by columns and interior core walls to achieve freeplan. The enclosure of architecture is “set free” again. Inspired by the text ‘The Four Elements of Architecture’ by Gottfried Semper, bamboo scaffolding is a technique that can be perceived as a craft of weaving enclosure and applied back to the surface. Bamboo scaffolding can pursue the origin meaning of “enclosure” and possibly cast new implications with its structural integrity.
The Post Office Is Now A House
The Post Office Is Now A House positions the United States Postal Service’s national network of 35,000 post offices as a site for exploring two progressive policies: the Green New Deal and the Homes for All bill, which call for adapting and upgrading existing buildings and constructing 9.5 million social housing units, respectively. By integrating social housing and other public programs, such as day cares or credit unions, alongside updated postal services, the post office can continue to play a vital role in local civic life. Adapting post offices to meet these policy objectives requires a design approach that is at once repeatable, and thus nationally relevant, and highly specific, responsive to community aspirations and site constraints. Referencing the 20th century history of constructing post offices based on standard Federal plans, the project proposes a series of “assemblies,” common relationships between old post offices and new housing, which can be adapted for different sites and regions.
How to Mourn: When Life and Death are not Enough
Oh wretched ones, how cursed are your fates. The pair are frozen in the face of a pre-ordained demise, rendered dumb by forces uncontrollable and indomitable. What happens when something dies over and over and over again, or never at all? A search for a new term in place of both “Life” and “Death” is necessary for these two characters. Herter Park and the New England Deposit Library (NEDL) are accidental twins, inasmuch as they are paired in their search for meaning and nomenclature in the space between life and death. They were both built in the middle of the 20th century, and both are scheduled for demolition in 2030. Both, too, have witnessed inextricable scenes of political malpractice, financial mismanagement, and territorialist struggles. And so, they are yoked together by when and where they are situated just as much as how and why they will end. But, what if death is insufficient? They, instead, must be mourned. They must become melancholic, spiting their destruction in the face of doing nothing. A game arises wherein the troubles these buildings have served as scapegoats for are therein revealed by the very determination of them to last on and on and on and on. Mourning and Melancholia are tools of architectural reparation, of anti-idolic monumentalization, of post-capital reuse. As building is turned inside out, as bricks are counted, asbestos catalogued - as column stabilized, window replaced, trash carted out - so too is story unearthed, futures unbounded. Mourning proposes an infinite delay in the face of ramping capitalistic and symbolic enterprises bearing down upon “aging” architecture. It is palliative as much as it is a death knell. Reuse can extend beyond the adaptive and the monument. And so, we march on in our task of doing almost nothing. This thesis proposes the NEDL be deconstructed, catalogued, and stored within its own basement, as WWII documents found within the dead-books depository are declassified on site, and asbestos found within the architectural skin is interred permanently. The building site becomes a garden and also a radical unbuildable plot, spiting Harvard’s expansion plan into Allston - at least within a 200x250 foot rectangle. The building lasts forever in its astounding absence and sheer presence. The Herter Center, meanwhile is proposed to enter a cycle of infinite maintenance. The ecosystem of the park it sits within is too fragile to bear demolition, let alone construction. It, instead, becomes a school for maintenance, as the building itself becomes the corpse-operada. It is maintained, much to everyones chagrin or behest, forever. And so, the buildings learn how to mourn.
From Humboldt to Caldas: On Environmental Liberations by Means of Tropical Altitudinalization
When we stand on earth and think of the world in latitudinal terms, we are minimal, yet this is the world we attempt to conquer and pretend to comprehend. When we stand at low altitudes in the tropics, in front of tropical glaciers, we can see the world – through Altitude – without the need to go out in space to synthesize an image of this planet. This thesis proposes a deviation from reading the world in latitudinal terms, to see beyond North vis-à-vis South dichotomies, and to transcend binary norms that have largely defined and misinterpreted tropical environments. While many of these territories have achieved political independence, the colonial structures of power and imperial views remain, and they continue to govern us. The work is developed through two interconnected components. First, a group of essays that examine and conceptualize a series of “Environmental Liberations” in the tropical Andes, which include liberations of ecologies, grounds, and publics, but most importantly, liberations of the mind, social constructions, and imposed norms that are constantly manifested in the built and non-built environment. Second, these ideas are also narrated and abstractly projected through time and space to generate a “Tropical Journey,” as a timeline to disseminate history and a device to assess tropical diversity. This historical trip and landscape narration are an invitation to read the earth’s short elevation, which only extends a few kilometers, and explores how altitude becomes “a Tropical Liberation” – a disassociation from misperceptions of “Tropical” as a homogeneous hot and humid climatic condition.
Near-term environmental transition: A case study of Ulsan City
The focus of this study is Ulsan City, one of South Korea's largest hydrogen producers and consumers, and its collaboration with local industries to generate both grey and blue hydrogen as alternative energy source to reduce its carbon footprint sources by 2030. Using lifecycle and material flow analysis, the study reveals that the city's 2030 hydrogen targets will likely increase its dependency on LNG, leading to increased water consumption and CO2 emissions compared to levels recorded in 2019. Hyundai Heavy Industries (HHI), a prominent industry player in Ulsan City, has also pledged hydrogen production to reduce the reliance on fossil fuel in the near future. The lifecycle analysis for transitioning from fossil fuel consumption to waste-to-hydrogen generation at HHI points towards a significant reduction in the overall environmental impact. A multi-criteria decision-making model was utilized to assess HHI and Ulsan City stakeholders' alignment with the national hydrogen goal in terms of their renewable energy preferences. The findings point to a preference for grey and blue hydrogen due to their lower operational costs, and a lack of sufficient support for other cleaner hydrogen such as waste-to-hydrogen and green hydrogen technologies. In conclusion, the study explores the spatial and planning aspects in the Dong-gu area relating to waste-to-energy planning. It advocates for a behavioral change model for future industrial and municipal leaders and emphasizes the need to capitalize on local resources in scenarios where a decentralized energy hub is established in each community in Dong-gu area. This is particularly important in the event of potential deindustrialization of Hyundai Heavy Industries in Ulsan City in the near future.
Black Landscapes of the Collective Memory: Urban Renewal Reparations for Lakeland
Urban renewal was a United States federal land redevelopment program whose primary purpose was to address urban decay and blight in cities by restoring economic vitality. However, the areas most affected tended to be overwhelmingly African American, ultimately leading to the decimation of Black communities, displacing countless families and individuals in the process. Today, reparations for these communities continue to be a much-debated topic, especially in a post-George Floyd society. Urban renewal not only destroyed neighborhoods but also destroyed public space. Therefore, reparations should not only be for the ruination that urban renewal brought, but also as a direct replacement of public space that had previously existed. This thesis shall explore the agency of landscape architecture to establish urban renewal reparations and restorative justice manifested in the form of commemorative sites of healing and remembrance for Lakeland, a historic African American community affected by urban renewal.
Lessons from planned resettlement and new town experiences for avoiding climate sprawl
Abstract Climate change will cause substantial numbers of people to relocate, whether in a planned or more ad hoc manner. In receiving communities this could lead to substantial problems supplying physical infrastructure, preserving affordability, conserving wild and productive lands, maintaining social connections, and providing community services in new areas. Moving to comprehensively planned new settlements could be a solution to climate sprawl (fragmented and dispersed development) and climate gentrification (increased demand in existing areas). This may involve moving an entire settlement as a whole to a comprehensively planned neighborhood or town. We call this “whole community” retreat as it keeps social ties intact. An alternative involves creating a comprehensively planned new town or new neighborhood for people from a variety of locations. We refer to this as “new community” retreat as it provides a new environment, but social ties need to be developed. The paper examines lessons from two sets of experiences with large scale resettlement or community-building. One group of examples involves whole community resettlements after disasters or related to economic development and a second set of precedents come from the broader history of new towns. Challenges from both resettlement experience and new town history include land and infrastructure availability and cost, planning and development coordination, financing, and attracting a large enough proportion of people to keep social ties intact. A more comprehensive approach has benefits, but is easier to pull off at a neighborhood rather than a larger scale and for shorter rather than longer moves.
Between Skin and Bone: Constructing Air-Scape for Modernist Heritage
At first glance, the curtain wall seems like the ultimate solution for facade construction. As driven by economic considerations, it is natural to compress the thickness of the facade to maximize the floor area. The thinness of the curtain wall is later known to come with problems, resulting in a singular approach to transparency and weakened thermal performance. Solutions such as added reflective or tinted layers have presented choices between being a mirrored monolith or being overexposed This thesis takes on a modernist heritage as the site of intervention. Situated in Chicago and serving as the primary center for judicial activity, Daley Center is the epitome of International Style buildings in Chicago, which usually feature a single facade and grided structural frame. The architectural industry’s advancing requirements for skin performance deem this type of construction obsolete. However, as a landmark building among many other midcentury heritages, the exterior appearance of Daley Center is under protected status. If the exterior must stay, could the interior be transformed in a way to address the problems of enclosure? Taking a closer look at the curtain wall, it is never a two-dimensional surface but a space with depth filled with compressed air. How do air and depth enrich the visual and environmental aspects of those modernist heritages? How does the inherent flexibility in steel frame construction allow for a new interior that introduces air-scape into the existing enclosure? How do we reimagine a non-dichromatic appearance for the modernist skin?
Stacking Menageries: Densifying Toronto's Yellowbelt
What is indifference if not the desire to find oneself among the collective? What builds a community if not the need to connect across islands? The future of collective housing must first forget about collectivity, for interpersonal relationships are established upon the architectural agencies of difference and idiosyncrasy, not those of aggregation, repetition, or consolidation. Houses – individuals with collectivism, and housing – collectives with individualism, have always formed contradicting manifestations of these affects. My thesis, then, seeks an ideal middle ground where architectural individuality is no longer incompatible with stacking - a collection of stacking menageries. This pursuit coincides with Toronto’s search for the same missing middle, in her case, the need for a typology that would densify vast residential areas previously zoned for exclusively detached houses. In a scene of extreme polarization between sprawls of metroburbs and corridors of residential high-rises, my project seeks to incorporate two groups of residents whose needs are excluded by both options: elderlies living with care and young families with children. In this city of contradicting beliefs, I envision a form of housing where repeated living units embrace the peculiarities of every household within, where connections among neighbours and across generations are created by the collection of menageries through the tangible individualities of those that live around, above and below.
to cast a line in the san jacinto river
This thesis addresses agency of the body, of space, and of marginalized lifeways for subsistence fishers near Houston, Texas. It does so through a feminist approach that centers processes of change, instability, and emergence as mechanisms to leverage the fisher community’s embodiment of the landscape through the design of a near-future fishing spot along the San Jacinto River. This project is designed through hurricanes; understood not only as a moment of instability but as a moment of intensity that generates a closeness to water and a thickness of land at the site of the San Jacinto River Waste Pits. Storm surges from seasonal hurricanes play a role in activating change as debris accumulates and deepens the relationship between fisher people, their body, and the fish that they lure. Through this feminist approach, the project builds collective memory by designing with these hurricanes, as not a force of destruction, but an event that many on the gulf coast embody in a myriad of ways. In turn, I hope this offers a counternarrative to the top-down, official, patriarchal forms of knowledge that often hold greater value than embodied knowledge of those we work with. This project embodies more than a gendered feminist perspective on access and agency, and I position it as such – it attempts to illuminate the importance of intersectionality within our profession, and whole bodily agency as it pertains to space and power.
Becoming a Haenyeo-Architect, Making a Commons
What can an architect do to an imminent extinction of a culture? Through fieldwork, I documented traditional tools, architecture, land-seascapes, and rituals of Haenyeo in Jeju Island, South Korea, engaged with the community, and built a new commons on site. As early as 1105, Hae-nyeo (‘sea-woman’) or Jam-nyeo (‘divingwoman’) have subsisted by diving into the sea without breathing apparatus to catch animals and plants, in addition to farming their land and livestock. Across land and sea, they designed, built, and expanded these commons with scarce resources. Badang-bat, or ‘ocean-farmland’, refers to Haenyeo fishery where resources and productions are regulated and shared among them. Bul-teok is an outdoor ‘fire-place’ near a diving point, where Haenyeo changed clothes, rested babies, discussed issues, and prayed for safety. Haenyeo-ui-jip or ‘House(s) of Haenyeo’ were built in the late 1980s by the local government as a modern translation of Bulteok; these single-story bathhouses, cladded with local basalt stones, included a communal bathroom, living room, and kitchenette. More of these commons are being abandoned as the Haenyeo population ages and shrinks - as of 2021, the number of Jeju Haenyeo has decreased by ~83% since 1965. Using an abandoned Bulteok, I built a new commons within the Samyang Haenyeo community where I could stay and participate in their daily practices. The rebuilt fireplace and added roof open new conversations between the closed & closing world of Haenyeo, and the younger generations.
Croche-Matic – building a robot for crocheting 3D spherical form
Crochet is a textile craft that has existed since it evolved out of the practice of nuns-laces during the Great Irish Famine. Unlike other textile crafts such as knitting it has almost entirely avoided mechanization and industrialization except for a select number of one-off crochet machines. These existing machines are limited to only one or two types of crochet stitches out of hundreds of possible stitches. Since crochet machines do not exist in the textile industry, mass produced crochet objects and clothes sold in stores like Target and Zara are the products of crochet sweatshops where people make pennies for hours of their handicraft. In this paper we present Croche-Matic, a radial crochet machine for generating three-dimensional spherical geometry. The Croche-Matic is designed based on Magic Ring technique, a method for crocheting three-dimensional objects. This technique is commonly found in crochet Amigurumi, the art of crocheting small stuffed animals or creatures. Croche-matic is able complete the four main stitches used in Magic Ring Technique, and has the capability to crochet three-dimensional objects.
Space V: A Space-Vending System for Future Wellbeing in the City
The project investigates the commodification of space through constructing the narrative and user experience of a space-vending urban destination for everyday wellbeing. It imagines a near-future lifestyle where people purchase space usage for different activities through a vending system, the operations and experience of which facilitated by digital technologies like web apps and augmented devices. The vending system as we typically know it take various forms of selling goods and objects, and hovers between an infrastructure of utility and a place of experience. The commodification of space as a business in recent decades identifies temporary space provision as their primary product – think capsule hotels, co-working spaces, public storage units and car-rentals. The variety of provisions involved can readily support an individual’s day-to-day life in the city. They can sleep, store, work, travel, eat and shop all measured by the minutes and hours in these commodified space services. A space-vending system offers flexibility, personalization, privacy and affordability, making it a well-suited alternative to contemporary fitness centers – currently a primary option for wellbeing activities in the city. While the fitness centers create a biased view towards wellness that centers around physical perfection, stimulates anxiety through its exhibitionism culture and places economic barriers to wellbeing through its membership model, Space V, framed as a space-vending service product, has the capacity to promote a more holistic and accessible approach towards wellbeing by supporting on-the-go private usage of spaces for both physical and mental wellbeing.
Affordance Game: Co-Production of the Multispecies Streetscape
Seoul's low-rise residential neighborhood is a prevalent residential typology second to apartment complexes, yet it significantly lacks public space, parks, and biodiversity. How can we foster a multispecies streetscape within these neighborhoods? Historically, Seoul's urban strategy has oscillated between preserving the existing urban fabric and redeveloping areas into apartment complexes. This project proposes an intermediary solution that enhances biodiversity and nature accessibility without disregarding the established characteristics of the community. The "Affordance Game" introduces a collaborative framework for city officials, residents, and property owners to jointly cultivate a multispecies environment. This involves the introduction of a multispecies-focused building code and following housing typologies that extend the streetscape and are conducive to biodiversity. Haebangchon, a neighborhood at the forefront of Seoul's biodiversity conversation, will serve as the pilot site for this initiative. Through increased stakeholder engagement, strategies developed through this thesis will allow for greater adaptability and tailored design across various low-rise residential areas.
Rooms without Programs
The concept of housing has undergone various changes throughout the history. Once, it used to be a dwelling where different domestic activities took place in a room or a building without spatial divisions. As time passed, we began to value privacy and efficiency above all things; this was greeted by the rise of single-family homes that were arranged by a set of ‘rooms,’ each dedicated to a specific domestic program. This type of single-family homes prioritized certain households and lifestyles over others. The non-heteronormative population then had to adapt their lifestyle to the rigidity of the space. This has frequently resulted in a misalignment between the function of the rooms and the use. The problem persists today, heightened due to the pandemic. The violent intrusion of public life (productive work) into the private sphere has induced fatigue and confusion at another level we have yet witnessed. Although there is a recognition of a more diversified population in the housing market today, the only alternative to the generic single-family homes is the micro-unit for migrant single population. This thesis is a search for an alternative proposal that lies between the micro-units and the single-family homes. The proposal starts out by stripping away the standardized room types of their intrinsic programmatic indicators, maintaining the spatial divisions but bringing back the programmatic fluidity in order to accommodate the desires of various shapes of families we see today.
Exploitive By Design: Warning Signs From the Northwest Amazon
This body of work concerns the impact of imposed capital and culture in the 19th and early 20th centuries’ “Rubber Boom” and today’s 21st-century tourism industry in Iquitos, Peru, because there are parallels in the effects of their economic processes that I will argue can be seen as “warning signs” that appear through the territorial, urban, and architectural scales. These warnings reveal imbalances in power dynamics, cultural and caste hierarchies, and predatory structures that perpetuate and contribute to exploitive cycles with dire consequences on the people and environment of the Amazon. In identifying such warnings and excavating their histories, they can begin to provide insights into strategies that might shift places away from the repetition of exploitive cycles, not only for Iquitos and the broader Amazonian region but other exploited contexts globally as well.
SocioLens: Potentials and challenges of large-scale social media data to understand human behavior in cities
Urban scholars can now investigate complex phenomena on a larger scale and with lower costs, thanks to the advancements in big data collection and analyses. Among these data sources, social media data has been argued to be very useful for understanding human behavior and opinions. However, despite the considerable efforts in gathering and analyzing this emerging data source and the intense critics of its poor representation and potential biases, rare efforts have been made to compare the results generated by social media data and those revealed by other research methods. My dissertation lays out a research framework to explore the potentials and limitations of large-scale social media data in capturing and understanding human behavior, compared to traditional fieldwork methods (e.g., observation). Focusing on park use behavior, an essential pathway linking the built environment with human well-being outcomes, I extract behavior metrics from social media data using state-of-the-art machine learning models, triangulate social media-based results via systematic fieldwork, investigate how and why the discrepancies emerge, and propose responsible ways to deal with them. This study aims to create a heuristic about how to appropriately apply new technology for the betterment of cities and society.
Accessibility, urban form, and property value: A study of Pudong, Shanghai
The effects of metro system development and urban form on housing prices are highly depend on the spatial temporal conditions of the urban neighborhoods. However, scholars have not yet comprehensively examined these interactions at a neighborhood-scale. This study assesses metro access, urban form, and property value at both district- and neighborhood-levels. The study area is Pudong, Shanghai where metro system development has coincided with rapid urban growth. Two hundred and seventy-nine neighborhoods from 13 districts of Shanghai are randomly selected for the district-level investigation and 31 neighborhoods from Pudong are selected for neighborhood-level investigation. The analysis of variance shows that metro access is more positively correlated to property price in Pudong than other districts. The Pearson correlation, principle component, and ordinary least square regression analyses show that while accessibility attributes have positive influence on housing prices, neighborhood characteristics also exhibit pronounced impact on property price change over time. The present study extends our knowledge on how metro system development interacts with land use efficiency and discusses planning policies that correspond to different stages of development.
Notes on Utopia, the City, and Architecture
Version of Record
Redesigning China’s superblock neighbourhoods: policies, opportunities and challenges
In February 2016, China’s State Council released a set of guidelines representing a change in the country’s approach toward neighbourhood design: to move away from superblock neighbourhoods and create a finer network of urban blocks and streets. The paper traces the circumstances that prompted this change, drawing on a comparative review of international literature and practice, and explores the opportunities and challenges for urban design. While modifications of the superblock are somewhat overdue, this current mode of organization should not be entirely abandoned. The suggestions and overall blueprint warrant a more circumspect approach and should be adopted with discretion.