Kasama College of Education

Items

• Through Water and Air: Digital Infrastructures for Indigenous Land Management
  In many parts of the world, digital connection has become the norm, constantly present and overbearing. However, there are, at the same time, marginalized groups in more remote places who are suffering from a lack of connection. This thesis argues that those groups have the right and need to be connected, but in the building of those connections, there are opportunities to consider alternative forms and customs in the digital infrastructure that can support different systems of values. Along the Klamath River in Northern California, the Yurok tribe, one of those marginalized groups, has been managing the forest for centuries, caring for the land and shaping it to suit their needs. Building on their grounded connections and worldview of land and nature as sacred, my goal is to design a digital network that improves their quality of life while allowing them to continue and evolve their way of living.
• Blankness (留白): Revisiting the Future of Nostalgia
  In the era of “Make America Great Again” and other populist movements, an increasing demand for fictions of nativity has marked the global zeitgeist. In fear of racial, national, or cultural identity disappearance, we eagerly look at the past, whether accurate or not, to enforce our modern-day personhood with a collective identity. Urban appearance and iconicity supply our demand with nostalgia, upholding these fictions we so desire. But as the late Harvard philosopher Svetlana Boym warns, these architectures can either be used to innocently reflect upon history or sensationalized to stoke right-wing populism. In Shanshui painting, the artistic technique of Liú Bái (留白—“leave blank”) is the compositional technique of synthesizing ink and blankness. “Blankness” in this context is a relative notion to the other presences on the rice paper canvas; it is not to be confused with absolute whiteness. Liú Bái affords a universality for viewers to subjectively interpret the blank in relation to the inked figures. This thesis borrows from Liú Bái in hopes of capturing this subjective and nondeterministic quality to foster new collectives, identities, and communities on the test site of Queen's Road, Hong Kong. Until we depart from this paradigm of intense identity insecurity, Liú Bái aims to sidestep the over-determining gaze of the zeitgeist. What is proposed here is not a tabula-rasa emptiness, nor a laissez-faire conservation of as-found urban conditions, but something in between. Something that is intentionally “Liú Bái.”
• Country Parks from Hong Kong to Shanghai: Hierarchical Landscape as Economic Engines
  The past decade has seen a rise in the number of country parks in Mainland China, which are described as an “import” of those in Hong Kong. However, based on their different topographies (mountains vs. fields), the country parks in Hong Kong and Mainland China have developed into varied typologies. This thesis asks whether there are actual connections between the country parks in these two systems. I am looking at the newly established country parks in Shanghai to determine if their “precedents” derive from colonial and post-colonial Hong Kong because the adaptation of country parks from a colonial environment to a modern urban system indicates that while the purpose of parklands is green space, they appear to function in a very different manner in Hong Kong than in Shanghai, in order to 1) compare the country parks in Hong Kong that were created to maintain elite class identity by social exclusion, with the country parks in the modern Chinese system that fabricated pastoral tourism for the middle class and 2) to determine whether the British colonial model was adopted by the Chinese government to manipulate land use and change land ownership. My thesis uncovers the intersections of the economic, political, and cultural factors, both explicit and implicit, and the mechanisms of how they are applied differently to the context of country parks in Hong Kong and Shanghai. I further compare the differences in how the land policies function and how protecting the interest of certain social classes while excluding others is a common goal.
• Transitive Gestures: Everyday Structures at Play
  Transitive gestures describe the direct linkage between a space as outcome and the action as process through a physical form. In the case of mining, a mine prop not only mechanically supports the space of a mine, but also serves as means through which the action of mining takes place. The prop is more than just a component in a space; it is an embodiment of a mechanism that realizes the space through actions. Scaffolds, alongside fences, nets, and other utility props, outlast the most enduring buildings in New York City. These everyday structures embody a unique state of perpetual transience in the city. They establish a shared syntax of everyday architecture, directly connecting physical activities to the barest architectural forms. This inherent link between action and form offers a mechanism to shape an architecture that actively enables and engages everyday activities within parks and streets as their natural venue. This thesis examines architecture as devices that enable activities by mediating the relation between body and space across various scales. It proposes two temporal interventions in two parks on the Lower West Side of Manhattan: one involving partial disassembly of an existing structure as an interim solution and the other as a seasonal shelter for a sports court. Evoking everyday structures as both source and context, the thesis employs tactical appropriations to preserve and enhance parks as vital civic spaces against current challenges such as scarcity of public space, extensive deconstruction, and deterioration of aging urban structures.
• Machine in Bloom: Industrial Park and Energy Timescapes within the Remnants of the Colstrip Power Plant
  The relics of the Colstrip coal-powered plant in eastern Montana remain as a mausoleum to the once sublime, a polemic of American westward expansion in the name of efficiency. Engagement with the landscape and retained infrastructure for residents and visitors is a tense involvement as one acknowledges the level of toxicity these forms of non-renewable energy contribute to human and environmental health while simultaneously appreciating the economic prosperity the plant provides. As polluted groundwater is cleaned through phytoremediation technologies, the power plant transitions to biomass, using the phyto-crops as the new primary source of energy. Over time these industrial practices and additions will be broken down or repurposed as energy futures shift and renewed ecologies take over. The thesis contributes to ongoing practices of landscape architecture as a transformative tool for sites of cultural heritage and ecological reclamation and how the discipline may advance the underlying social conversation of mending polluted environments by non-renewable energy industries that are currently being decommissioned around the world.
• Schemas in a Design Problem: Building in Seismic Regions Diversely Considered
  In most design problems, there are multiple schemas, or ways or orienting and organizing the knowledge content in the problem domain, and which by extension defines the range and bearing of solutions. This dissertation examines the properties of individual and clusters of schemas in a problem domain through the highly specific problem of building in seismic regions, a persistent class of design problem found around across diverse cultures and geographic regions. Using case studies, mostly of exemplary historical and contemporary building projects from seismic regions, as well as examples from a wider range of genera and disciplines, including artworks, literature, religious texts, and academic papers, this dissertation identifies and traces six prominent schemas in contemporary design practice, examining its conceptual origins, historical development, and opportunities and limitations in design applications. The six schemas are: 1) lightness, or the subtraction of weight, 2) quickness, or the maintenance of readiness, 3) exactitude, or the need for approximations, 4) visibility, or the rendering of invisible problems, 5) multiplicity, or the curation of diversity, and 6) consistency, or the assurance of a predictable sameness. The general schemas structures, if not the specific know-how of seismic engineering, appears to be widely applicable across problem domains.
• Recess Reimagined: The Intergenerational Campus
  This thesis project tackles Los Angeles' severe housing crisis, evident in the Los Angeles Housing Element, while also addressing the urban heat island effect, social isolation, and a growing aging population. Elementary school campuses in Los Angeles are currently covered in heat-absorbing asphalt, intensifying the heat island effect. The central question of this thesis revolves around finding a comprehensive solution to Los Angeles' housing crisis, social isolation, and the urban heat island issue, with a particular focus on the elderly. The project's relevance lies in its response to urban development challenges and pressing societal issues. It draws from research demonstrating the positive effects of intergenerational programs and innovative strategies for reimagining underutilized LAUSD-owned land. The project proposes a prototype for senior housing on LAUSD elementary school campuses, complemented by redesigned play spaces and improved arts and fitness facilities. This holistic approach offers a scalable solution to the housing crisis, social connectivity, and heat mitigation, targeting up to 140 elementary schools strategically selected based on their proximity to hospitals and public transit.
• National Garden for Subterranean Heritage: A Repository for Human/Earthly Matter
  The National Garden for Subterranean Heritage reconceptualizes the botanical National Garden of Athens, Greece, as a networked repository for human/earthly stories. Critiquing colonial practices of transplantations and classifications of imposed fragmentations embedded in the National Garden, the repository investigates situated knowledges of ground matter exposed within the subterranean metro network. National is redefined as the temporal entanglements of human inhabitations and geologic transformations, unearthed in proposed Gardens of Human/Earthly Matter within the Syntagma, Acropolis, Monastiraki, and Evangelismos stations and curated at the Repository of Subterranean Heritage within the existing botanical garden. Reacting to the absence of earthly agencies in Athens’s historical narratives, the repository restores Theophrastus’s didactic empirical gardens exhibiting conglomerated strata as coauthored systems of air, water, earth, fire, and live matter. Ancient fragments, infrastructures, and material flows are resurfaced in the decentralized gardens, exposing the agencies of power, culture, economy, and life in the formation of the city.
• The Influence of Urban Form and Socio-Demographics on Active Transport: A 40-Neighborhoods Study in Chengdu, China
  In China, a centralized planning culture has created similar neighborhoods across the country. Using a survey of 1,048 individuals conducted in 2016 in Chengdu—located in a carefully conceptualized typology of neighborhood forms—we analyzed the associations between individual and neighborhood characteristics and active or nonmotorized transport behavior. Using several multiple logistic and multilevel models, we show how neighborhoods were categorized and how the number of categories or neighborhood types affected the magnitude of the associations with active transport but not the direction. People taking non-work trips were more likely to use active compared with motorized modes in all neighborhood types. Neighborhood type was significant in models but so too were many other individual-level variables and infrastructural and locational features such as bike lanes and location near the river. Of the 3-D physical environment variables, floor area ratio (a proxy for density) was only significant in one model for nonwork trips. Intersection density and dissimilarity (land-use diversity) were only significant in a model for work trips. This study shows that to develop strong theories about the connections between active transport and environments, it is important to examine different physical and cultural contexts and perform sensitivity analyses. Research in different parts of China can help provide a more substantial base for evidence-informed policymaking. Planning and design recommendations were made related to active transport need to consider how neighborhoods, built environments, and personal characteristics interact in different kinds of urban environments.
• Improving America's Housing 2023
  Sparked by pandemic-induced changes in household routines and use of living space, home improvement and repair spending soared to new heights in 2022, reaching an estimated $567 billion. Despite this enormous investment, the nation’s homes need more investment to prepare against disasters, improve energy efficiency, and meet the needs of an aging population.
• Lost in Translation: Creative Urban Regeneration in Bangkok, Thailand
  Over the last decade, developing countries across Asia are increasingly fostering creativity-based industries to regenerate neighborhoods in their global cities. Multilateral institutions, government agencies, and academics have lauded these new urban redevelopments as successfully supporting local creative industries and communities. With its development models originating from the Global North, does creative regeneration in the Global South represent successful fast policy transfer? Focusing on the creative district initiatives in Bangkok, Thailand, my thesis finds that while professional and government narratives illustrate successes, deeper on-the-ground examinations reveal deviations from policy intentions as well as the limits of market-based development. To understand the gap between image and reality, I posit a shift away from conventional planning metrics to a mixed-methods analysis of the roles of actors and socio-cultural capital to explain causes of development. I identify a piecemeal style of development that emerges from public institution and urban form limitations as well as from lifestyles-led, rather than market-led, redevelopment. Revealing implementation complexities beyond policy transfer logics, this research aims to expand analytical approaches and to develop richer examinations of regeneration processes in developing contexts.
• Factory
  In a series of essays critiquing industrialized manufacturing entitled Factory Work: As It Is and Might Be (1884), William Morris elucidated the social underpinnings of the British Arts and Crafts movement, which found in handicraft a philosophy that unified labor, education, and economic production. One hundred and forty years later, the relationship between learning and labor continues to bear relevance, with increasing visibility placed on the nature of work post-Covid, and the four-year bachelor’s degree regularly questioned as the best path to a career. This thesis foregrounds the contemporary importance of Craft as a theory of labor, tracing its educational ideology as it evolved within the context of American craft schools before investigating a manifestation of Morris’s vision for the present moment. Unlike a “makerspace,” “research incubator,” nostalgic craft school, or any other contemporary dilution of craft philosophy, Factory places on the table a method of production which considers the end-product secondary to the empowerment gained through traditions of learning that surround handwork.
• Yasser Elsheshtawy, Temporary Cities: Resisting Transience in Arabia. Review essay by Gareth Doherty.
  Book review.
• Uncommon Knowledge: Practices and Protocols for Environmental Information
  The databases that landscapes architects rely on to design future-oriented infrastructure—the SHP files and CSVs that describe a site’s climate, plants, and soils—often involve inadvertently appeal to extractive forms of knowledge production and storage. What if we were to design information infrastructures, both physical and digital, that are premised on collective ownership as opposed to existing systems that privatize, accumulate, and collect? This thesis, Uncommon Knowledge, responds to the contemporary environmental information economy at the site of Google’s first hyperscale data center in water stressed The Dalles, Oregon. On the banks of the polluted Columbia River straddling Washington and Oregon, the thesis projects futures where watershed scale data commons produce knowledge materially, through the infrastructure of plants, and immaterially, through networks and servers. By deepening the connection between people, their environments, and information, the landscape stokes political agency and action in at-risk watersheds through uncommon models of knowledge production.
• Advancing Housing and Health Equity for Older Adults: Pandemic Innovations and Policy Ideas
  During the pandemic, many older adults faced social isolation and disruptions in access to food, medical care, and supportive services. In response, organizations that support older people improvised solutions to address these challenges. This report, co-authored with The Hastings Center, examines how these responses, most of which were intended to be temporary, might improve housing and supports for older adults and address longstanding inequities.
• Comparing energy and comfort metrics for building benchmarking
  Benchmarking energy use is increasingly mandated and tied to consequences such as fines for underperforming buildings. Yet, standard benchmarking methods and metrics may not adequately align with policymakers’ or building owners’ goals. We demonstrate how benchmarking metrics are non-interchangeable and how they can lead to substantially different building rankings. We analyze the performance of 29 case study buildings using different methods and metrics, divided into three categories: simple energy benchmarking, regression, and comfort. We find that Energy Use Intensity (EUI) serves as a poor proxy for harder-to-measure but more meaningful metrics. For example, factoring in the number of occupants (“EUI per person” rather than EUI) changes a building's ranking in our group by 24%. We demonstrate how a custom regression analysis and the “Observed-to-modeled” ratio can be useful for large-portfolio building owners, and how this differs from available benchmarking tools like Energy Star. We benchmark a subset of buildings via reported and monitored comfort factors and, importantly, propose the metrics “Overheating/cooling Degree Days”. These metrics measure discomfort relative to a building's operation mode and highlight cases of energy waste. The Overheating Degree Days metric highlighted operational problems in one case study building.
• Chinese State Capital and the Politics of Mega Infrastructure in Sri Lanka
  This dissertation concerns the growing role of China, specifically Chinese state capital, in reshaping the built environment through financing, building, and operating mega infrastructure projects in Sri Lanka over the past two decades. In the early 21st century, China quickly emerged as the world’s largest official financier of infrastructure projects around the world, providing a cumulative total of nearly one trillion U.S. dollars by 2022. Of the 165 recipient countries, Sri Lanka stands out as a country that has seen one of the most dramatic – and uneven – restructuring of urban space. Observing that China-backed megaprojects had divergent performance and spatial outcomes in Sri Lanka during Mahinda Rajapaksa’s presidency, the dissertation explains this curious within-country variation by comparing three China-backed megaproject cases with otherwise similar characteristics. Why did the Colombo Port City project succeed in producing early agglomeration effects while the Mattala Airport project became a wasteful “white elephant”? Why did the Hambantota Port project become more successful over time after initial struggles? The dissertation finds that the length of time horizon in Chinese state capital and the degree of power concentration in Sri Lanka’s planning process are key determinants. It shows how a toxic combination of an authoritarian approach to planning in Sri Lanka and short-term oriented Chinese capital can lead to mega infrastructure projects built at the wrong scale, at the wrong place, or at the wrong time. It also shows how a patient form of Chinese state capital and a more inclusive approach to planning can result in better performance. In so doing, the dissertation highlights the politics of risk allocation. It details the circumstances under which specific risk management strategies were adopted, and how different incentive structures shape the relationship between planning power and Chinese capital. While the dissertation is focused on Sri Lanka, the findings hold broader implications for the theory and practice of megaproject planning across the Global South.
• Parallel Participation: A New Way to Engage in Mexico City’s Urban Planning
  My research examines how a group of middle-class Mexico City residents engaged in municipal planning by mobilizing against the Desnivel Mixcoac underpass (2014-2017). I argue that residents rejected formal “participatory” planning mechanisms such as master planning and neighborhood committees. Instead, protesters developed a new participatory planning framework by engaging academics, human rights agencies, the courts, the media, and civil society associations. I call this process “Parallel Participation” because activists engaged in urban planning through channels parallel to, but outside of, institutional citizen participation. Members of the National Regeneration Movement (MORENA) political party came to support the protesters. As a result, parallel participation became a political strategy to contest Mexico City’s in-power Democratic Revolutionary Party (PRD) between 2015 and 2018.This new form of urban participation, however, largely excluded the city’s working-class residents. Parallel participation, therefore, exacerbated many of Mexico City’s sociospatial inequities.
• Sympoietic City: a Forest of Plant/Human Kinship
  With the financialization of ecosystem services and putting forests to work, our relationship to the trees continues to be rooted in the design legacies of the botanic gardens, herbaria, and gridded property systems. Operating within these legacies perpetuates a land ethic that fosters inequality within our cities. The thesis proposes a reorientation of Americans’ relationships with trees. Situated within the complex palimpsest of political, colonial, and activist histories within the nation’s capital, Washington D.C., this process begins with a constitutional amendment that defines the spatial, visual, and political rights of trees. Moving through spaces inhabited by D.C.’s emblematic trees - the Japanese Cherry, American Elm, and Scarlet Oak, these rights are manifested throughout the District. By eschewing notions of ownership over nature and cultivating spaces that embody plant/human kinship, Sympoietic City renegotiates Washington D.C. as a landscape held in tandem by humans and trees.
• The Echoes of Sky River: Two Pre-modern and Modern Atmospheric Assemblages
  This thesis explores the territory of sky rivers- the atmospheric water resources and weather modification technologies and promotes two hybridized and decentralized indigenous techno-cultural communities. It identifies the formal, cultural, and functional similarity and continuity of the pre-modern landscapes for the sky and the modern weather modification approach, which can be regarded as a method of cultural conservation and territorial connection. This thesis seeks to bridge the gap between separated landscape discourses: the scientific reaction to climate change globally, and the cultural sense of weather locally. It sees the role of the landscape architect extending to both extremes of scale: one, it explores the dynamics of the atmosphere and extends the territory of hydrology; and two, it consolidates faith-based, productive, and technological alliances of interest in the community and residential scales to enable indigenous and vulnerable communities to develop resilience in response to climate change.
• Latent Morphologies: Encoding Architectural Features and Decoding Their Structure through Artificial Intelligence
  With the advent of Artificial Intelligence, new methodologies have been introduced to the architectural discipline, expanding the current possibilities of design processes. Specifically, generative models created a paradigm shift wherein, instead of spending numerous times designing the entire system for a specific task, designers allowed the overall principle and system to remain in the black box and instead focused on the desired results. These attempts, however, strongly rely on randomness and could not achieve overall controllability so those problems have hindered getting meaningful results. This paper started with building an encyclopedic architectural dataset that can represent general architecture for a general understanding of architectural styles, maintaining its variation. The dataset includes an image and a text together to stretch its application and versatility to the extent of multimodal. Several statistical methodologies are utilized to understand and unveil characteristics in massive data. It also suggests two methodologies to achieve controllability in StyleGAN, which are multi-class StyleGAN for general controllability of StyleGAN and multimodal StyleGAN+CLIP for its specific controllability. Multi-class StyleGAN helps navigate latent space to find hidden patterns we cannot identify and their regularity in architectural discourse and StyleGAN+CLIP shows numerous possibilities of text-integrated generative models. The concept of latent space shows incredible possibilities, generalizing architectural features and generating their continuous morphologies, presenting theoretically infinite variations.
• A Polyphonic Archipelago along the Faulted California Coast
  White Point projects off a peninsula that was once part of the Channel Island Archipelago. Descending from hill to sea within the San Andreas Rift, its 140 acres hold seemingly irreconcilable landscapes and uses. Traces of the Native Kizh people, Japanese farmers and fishermen, Spanish Rancheros, the US Military, and our world’s rarest butterfly species overlap in layered entanglements. These multiple legacies are all but indistinguishable, however, in the site’s current condition where fenced-off military infrastructure fragments nature preserve. This dominant, reductive reading of White Point is a product of our tendency to rely upon linear narratives to explain place. Such narratives invariably prioritize “culminations,” therefore burying manifold spatial histories. My thesis asks how architects might engage and reveal the complex interdependence of cultural, agricultural, ecological, and geological histories often culled from contemporary spatial narratives. By replacing linear history with polyphonic tableau, this project at White Point delivers the physical means by which the public may hold multiple timescales, voices, and truths in concert through a public landscape. A matrix of pathways ties together the archipelago of architectural interventions, offering explicit entanglements across several registers–from small scale tactility to overall site choreography. Existing built histories are harmonized with another spatial voice. In one instance a Cold War era artillery shed transforms into a band stand where habitat for the Palos Verdes Blue butterfly encircles the dance floor. In another, one gazes across coastal landslides while simultaneously watching a high school baseball game. In short, separate, incomplete histories overlap to form a constantly evolving, tentative “whole” for communal history.
• Governing Atmospheric Resources: State Institutional Dynamics in Wind Turbine Siting and Decommissioning in Contemporary China
  China has established itself as the global leader in wind turbine installation over the past few decades, but in recent years, it has also mandated the decommissioning of large-scale projects on lands marked for ecological preservation. What institutional setups and tensions explain these contradictory processes? By comparing the actors and processes that facilitated both the early success and subsequent malignment with state aims of two large-scale wind farms, in Inner Mongolia and Shandong, the thesis provides insights into how unresolved conflicts in national visions of development are worked out in localized energy development projects. Within a unique legal and governance context, China presents a configuration of wind energy development in which both the construction and decommissioning of turbines are occurring simultaneously, and debates over environmental and economic aims are another permutation of longstanding tensions on state actions toward natural resources for the national interest.
• Ovis Versatilis: Icelandic Sheep Farm as Land Art Museum as Evolution Lab
  This thesis explores the role of evolutionary biology in landscape architecture, examining designed landscapes as potential drivers for species evolution. It argues that any landscape design makes direct and immediate impacts on the fitness level of the inhabiting species. Therefore, landscape designs need to consider evolutionary consequences at longer time scales. The proposal focuses on the evolution of Icelandic sheep (Ovis aries) and designs a sheep farm network that serves as a land art museum and evolution lab in a northern Icelandic valley. The farm consists of an assemblage of landforms with farming and lab infrastructures designed for sustainable sheep farming, ecological restoration, and sublime visiting experience. The purpose is to create resilient sheep herds (Ovis versatilis, the fictional Latin name for the new sheep species) and revive the sheep farming industry, while generating an iconic cultural landscape that celebrates the cultural, economic, and ecological sheep farming traditions of Iceland.
• City | Forest: Reordering Plant-Human Relationships Towards Healthy Cities
  Based in the belief that the quality of the urban landscape directly reflects the quality of its soil, I propose to utilize processes of beneficial disturbance to reorder the vegetative and soil regimes in the city’s public realm. The outcome is a regenerative living infrastructure identified as the City Forest; a collection of trees, associated undergrowth, and soil where people live, work, and play. This typology offers an alternative to the isolated street trees that make up most of America’s urban vegetation and curates an intensive dialogue between people and forest, or city and forest, not possible under current spatial practices. In this case study, the City Forest redefines major corridors in Cambridge, MA as an efficacious place to begin intensifying the forest. Cambridge is a leader in urban forestry but has yet to boldly confront the socioeconomic practices inhibiting a healthy future. By rejecting the hierarchies and land use patterns inherent to our car-centric landscapes, the City Forest emphasizes solidarity with nonhuman nature and advocates against destructive forms of economic practice and ontological distinction, asserting that the natural capital that accumulates in the forest reciprocates directly with a healthy lived experience in the city.