Kasama College of Education

Items

• Motivations for Slum Dweller Social Movement Participation in Urban Africa: A Study of Mobilization in Kurasini, Dar es Salaam
  This paper examines what motivates the participation of African slum(1) dwellers in urban social movement activities. This issue is analyzed through a case study of grassroots mobilization around evictions in Kurasini ward, Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. The paper uses an analytic narrative approach to account for patterns in participatory behaviour, drawing on both quantitative and qualitative data gathered through interviews with 81 slum dwellers. The study shows that, contrary to the expectations of movement leaders, property owners were significantly more likely than renters to participate in a risky and time-consuming mobilization effort. The study identifies three factors that favoured owner participation: the nature of expected payoffs from participation; greater belief in their efficacy of action; and greater connection to place.
• Integrated Environmental Design and Robotic Fabrication Workflow for Ceramic Shading Systems
  The current design practice for high performance, custom facade systems disconnects the initial façade design from the fabrication phase. The early design phases typically involve a series of iterative tests during which the environmental performance of different design variants is verified through simulations or physical measurements. After completing the environmental design, construction and fabrication constraints are incorporated. Time, budget constraints, and workflow incompatibilities are common obstacles that prevent design teams from verifying, through environmental analysis, that the final design still ‘works’. This paper presents an integrated environmental design and digital fabrication workflow for a custom ceramic shading system. Using the CAD environment Rhinoceros as a shared platform the process allows the design team to rapidly migrate between the environmental and the fabrication models. The recently developed DIVA plug-in for Rhinoceros allows for a seamless performance assessment of the facade in terms of daylight. Glare and annual energy use are addressed through connections to Radiance, Daysim and EnergyPlus simulations. A custom Grasshopper component and additional Rhino scripts were developed to link the environmentally optimized CAD file via Rapid code to a novel ceramic production process based on a 6-axis industrial robot. The resulting environmental design-to- manufacturing process was tested during the generation of a prototypical high performance ceramic shading system.
• "Continuity, complexity and emergence: what is real for digital designers?"
  Author's Original
• Construction history: between technological and cultural history.
  Author's Original
• Architecture and public space: between reassurance and threat.
  Author's Original
• Nature et ingeniérie: Le parc des Buttes-Chaumont"
  Author's Original
• Engineers and engineering history: problems and perspectives.
  Author's Original
• French engineers and social thought, 18–20th centuries: An archeology of technocratic ideals.
  During the second half of the twentieth century, at the time of the foundation of the Fifth Republic, French engineers endorsed enthusiastically technocratic ideals. Their attitude was not only the product of a specific context. It was rooted in a long tradition of connection between French engineering and social preoccupations. This connection emerged at the time of the creation of the first corps of State engineers in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Indeed, State engineers were from the start convinced that they had a social mission. Subsequent episodes, like the Saint-Simonian reflections on the eve of industrialization, or the discussions held in the think tank X-Crise in the aftermath of the 1929 economic crisis contributed also to shape the engineers' sensitivity to social issues. Dwelling on these episodes, but also trying to go beyond their standard assessment, we would like to propose here a more general interpretation of the complex set of relations between French engineering and social thought. In this perspective, the Post-World-War-II French engineers' technocratic concerns come at the end of a long and complex evolution. This case study should enable a better understanding of the more general connivance between engineering culture and technocratic ideals.
• "Learning from utopia: contemporary architecture and the quest for political and social relevance."
  Accepted Manuscript
• Expositions universelles,doctrines sociales et utopies
• The pattern of foreign property investment in Vietnam: the apartment market in Ho Chi Minh City
  As globalization proceeds, transnational property development is increasing. Especially in emerging markets, foreign developers’ influence in changing the local landscape is becoming significant. In this research, the behavioral patterns of foreign developers in the apartment market of Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam were identified. To understand the dynamics of foreign developers, the types of products that were being created, where the investments were located, and the differences in development strategies adopted by foreign developers in comparison to domestic counterparts were identified. To accomplish this, data on apartment projects and statistics were collected, and a series of spatial analyses including sieve mapping, histogram analysis, factor analysis and logistic regression was conducted. In addition, closer examination was made of specific cases to understand the dynamics among foreign and domestic developers, also allowing the identification of some regularities in the patterns of foreign developments. Besides presenting detailed results, this paper also seeks to account for the conditions that appear to have generated these patterns and characteristics.
• Are master plans effective in limiting development in China's disaster-prone areas?
  The effectiveness of urban master plans in limiting development in a disaster-prone area of China was empirically investigated by measuring cities’ land-cover changes against their master plans. If a master plan serves as guidance for urban polices that reduce property loss from earthquakes, floods, landslides,land subsidence, and rises in sea level, it will substantially limit urban development in areas at risk from environmental hazards. An environmental risk map weighted toward valuable forms of land cover was generated using geospatial databases of China’s Yangtze River Delta region. Based on this data, the effects of five master plan measures—ring-road patterns, block size, the area of urban built-up lands, the locations of industrial sites, and preservation zoning—were tested using the multiple regression method. Cities showing a high degree of compliance, in particular with preservation zoning, had a smaller amountof urban land located in high-risk zones, on average, by 14 km2. Among the top ten cities exposed to disproportionately high risks, eight were towns and only two were cities like Huzhou and Kunshan.
• Does large-sized cities' urbanisation predominantly degrade environmental resources in China? Relationships between urbanisation and resources in Changjiang Delta Region
  Outward expansion of urban lands in the developing nations is often associated with a substantial loss of environmental resources such as forests, wetlands, freshwater and cash crop fields. Yet, determining how different aspects of urbanisation – such as city population size and spread pattern of built-up lands – contribute to the cumulative loss of resources remains controversial. In this study, data sets were constructed describing changes to land cover across 65,200 grid cells at 1 km2 spatial resolution for China’s Changjiang Delta Region over the past 60 years. The results showed that the region lost 12.2% of total resource sites. The distribution of resource degradation showed a highly dispersed pattern and was not confined to a few intense areas associated with large cities. No empirical evidence was found that city population size alone accurately predicts the distribution of resource loss. Very large cities (N = 4) contributed 35% to the total loss, demonstrating impacts similar to those of much more scattered towns (N = 230). Urban expansion of large cities may lead to extensive resource loss; however, a set of non-linear mechanisms, such as the diminishing effects of per-unit area urban spread on resources and interactions between urban patterns and the size of urban spread, can also play a significant role in downsizing the negative effects of large cities on resource sites. Thus, effective urban policies should carefully weigh the cumulative urban spread mechanisms of both large and small cities responsible for spatially dispersed degradation of environmental resources.
• Assessing Potential Public Health and Air Quality Impacts of Changing Climate and Land Use in Metropolitan New York: A Study by the New York Climate & Health Project
  Version of Record
• Architecture and the Sciences: Scientific Accuracy or Productive Misunderstanding?
  Proof
• Heliomorph
  Heliomorph is an investigation in testing the feedback loop of using solar geometry for architecture’s ability to react, transform, and inform existing and new architecture. Heavily influenced by the work Ralph Knowles developed with the “Solar Envelope”, this thesis continues explorations of heliomorphism through multiple scales: from the urban fabric to the building, the room, and detail manipulations. Research in Heliomorphism leans on stereotomic massing, boolean operations, and chiseled carvings. Heliomorph infuses the scientific research with artistic precedents from Gyorgy Kepes, , Kurt Schuerdtfeger, and László Moholy-Nagy's work of shadow and light play allowing the investigations to expand beyond stereotomy and carves. The body of work explores temporality and animation through surface tectonics, and concepts of double exposure, among other surface and medium transformations. The technological developments of the last decade enable an unanticipated degree of precision and recursion, infusing new possibilities into a Ralph Knowles process and bringing questions of how we navigate the liminal space between data input and output. How can we responsibly use available data, establish parametric flows, and arrive at an architecture that is more than the result of data inputs? Heliomorph tests architecture that negotiates between the precision of data points and the contradictions between the city's spatial and social politics and the desire for buildings to reach impactfully sustainable, ecological, and cultural conditions.
• Back to Basilica: A Triptych of Church Unbuilding
  Christian churches have accumulated disproportionate real and symbolic capital in America. A result of an outdated truce between Church and State, Christian monuments, however underused, are a protected discourse—too sacred to be touched and too private to be entered. Paralyzed in inertia, the implied homogeneity perpetuates a skewed system, urging the churches into private development or petrifying them into a slow public death. How do we re-form the church to retain it within the civic realm? How can we productively deconstruct the notion of sacredness to accommodate non-discriminatory public use? Imagining an afterlife for churches in the United States, this thesis points back to the beginning of the symbolic contest between Church and State. The medieval Church borrowed legitimacy from the Roman State in the architectural typology of the Basilica, a judicial and civic building. In this typological appropriation, the Church rotated the axis ninety degrees to accentuate the ritualistic single path, undermining the inherent ambiguity of the many in the original Basilica. This thesis proposes a triptych of church unbuilding as an act of reclamation. The publicness is reasserted with the program of USPS post offices, a pervasive State network fixture, serving a non-discriminatory, secular public. Through the architectural and programmatic re-formation, the project prompts the typological deconstruction of the sacred and the social construction of the secular public.
• Domesticated Exterior
  Human intention of domesticating nature has never stopped， projecting an anthropocentric imagination onto their surrounding, shaping the land and non-humans living in it to their own advantage. The architecture of domestication has been at the center of such acts of captivity. We build fences around farms to keep certain animals away, and coops and stables to keep certain animals in; we turn forests into non-forests and only prescribe certain species to grow in. When we talk about buildings for animals, we normally associate them with captivity and hostility, yet we forget the original intention we build, which was to protect and nurture. To be a human is to share space with other species; to build is to build for humans and other animals. To question the anthropocentric relationship with nature, the project aims to reverse the role of architecture from a tool of confinement to an instrument of rewilding, engaging the human presence in a way that stops to manage nature, and allows nature to take on its own course. And as we imagine the indispensable future of multi-species co-living, we confront the reality that this must go beyond the confines of human imagination.
• Degendering Suburbia: Speculations on a New Dream
  Made specifically for the white American nuclear family, the 1950s suburban tract house embeds gendered notions of space and excludes anyone not representative of the mold. The midcentury American dream was spatialized in visual media and advertising, reinforcing gender norms and the nuclear family. But the suburbs are changing, jobs are dispersing, and the cost of living in urban centers is increasing. The 1950s version of the “American Dream” has long been outdated, yet our suburban housing models continue to reinforce the social norms of a past era. “Degendering Suburbia: Speculations on a New Dream” proposes a degendering of the 1950s American tract house suburb through the speculative addition of shared social spaces and alternative housing typologies. These additions to the existing homogeneous suburban landscape produce interwoven social gradients that delaminate the traditionally isolating nature of the “feminine” domestic realm in the private house. The familiar construction methods of the framed wall and the gabled roof are reappropriated to make visible the fluidity and flexibility necessary for modern domesticity. Strategic deconstruction and reallocation of domestic program and property operate against the physical bounds of the private home and the social bounds of the property line. To this end, the thesis speculates on a new dream through the comparative retrofitting of two typical suburban tract housing developments.
• A Stadium Tower: Decongestion of congestion
  STADIUM A stadium is a place where a flock of people get charged and discharged at a moment in time, before and after a game. To avoid congestion in the city, stadiums have been pushed away from the center and are located at the border, where the urban fabric meets the suburban scenery. However, mass migration from the city to the stadium and from the stadium to the city disturbs urban traffic and exacerbates congestion. What if a stadium were to stay in the city and exploit the urban condition of congestion? The ambition of this project is to rid the stadium of congestion and explore a new method of gathering within the metropolis. MANHATTAN Limited by the two-dimensional discipline of the grid, buildings in Manhattan aspired to three-dimensional freedom. The invention of the elevator made that dream come true. As the horizontal density of the ground is absorbed by towers, the planar congestion becomes vertical congestion. Manhattan’s fully loaded towers set a precondition for this project in order to experiment with creating a new way to densify the vertical. Sited in the financial district of Manhattan, a stadium tower is interlocked by six office towers. Each office tower's density becomes a source for new density and occupies a stadium in the middle. A stadium tower proposes a vertical form of stadium that sustains its vitality by exploiting the vertical congestion prevailing in the city.
• Acoustemological Resonances: Brewster’s Archive and the Emergence of Ethical Observational Science
  This dissertation examines William Brewster’s (1851-1919) seminal yet underappreciated contributions to ornithology through the analysis of his extensive archival materials—including field notes, journals, diaries, systematic bird observations, photographic prints, and voluminous correspondence. The thesis elucidates the development and impact of Brewster’s ethically driven, non-lethal observational methodologies, contrasting substantially with the earlier practices of John James Audubon (1785-1851), which involved the widespread killing of birds for illustration purposes. Brewster’s approach marked a pivotal shift towards more ethical scientific inquiry and early conservation principles. Housed at Harvard University’s Ernst Mayr Library at the Museum of Comparative Zoology, Brewster’s archives span five decades and provide an unparalleled dataset of bird behavior, habitats, vocalizations, and population changes, alongside notes on the changing landscape. This dissertation probes the evolution from visually biased scientific methods to sensory-integrated observational practices, examining the implications of Brewster’s auditory and multi-sensory engagements in the broader context of 19th-century scientific epistemology. By intersecting theoretical frameworks such as Bruno Latour’s Actor-Network Theory, Tim Ingold’s work on “phenomena of the weather-world” and Steven Feld’s “acoustemology” with archival methodologies informed by Jacques Derrida’s concept of “archive fever,” Frédérique Aït-Touati’s analysis of Robert Hooke’s Micrographia, and Friedrich Kittler’s media theory, this work offers an analytical discourse of the archive as a technological apparatus. Key research questions guiding this dissertation include: How did Brewster and Audubon’s ornithological methods navigate tensions between scientific objectivity and subjectivity in the representation of birds? What do their methodologies reveal about the evolving notion of the scientific self and ethical engagement with avian species during the 19th century? How did contemporary technological advancements and cultural perceptions of the so-called “nature” shape their observational practices and understanding of human-animal-machine interactions? Critically, how did Brewster’s implementation of non-lethal observation methodologies and his meticulous documentation of ecological changes contribute to early notions of conservation and foreshadow contemporary multispecies approaches as articulated by scholars like Donna Haraway and Anna Tsing? By integrating frameworks from the history of art and sciences with critical theory across critical posthumanities, new materialisms, cultural geography, media, and sound studies, this interdisciplinary inquiry underscores the vital role urban environments play in conservation efforts. The study foregrounds how contemporary artistic practices and digital scholarship could not only contextualize Brewster’s legacy within the historical trajectory of ornithology but also advocate for the re-evaluation of ethical practices in current scientific disciplines. It underscores the urgency of fostering multispecies cohabitation and sustainable living practices in the Anthropocene (a contested term), thereby addressing broader ecological crises and redefining human-animal-machine relations. Engaging multispecies perspectives in multiple modalities offers insights for cultivating more ethical and sustainable ways of living on a damaged planet (Tsing 2017).
• Throwing Shade: Heatwaves, Emergency Preparedness, and Produced Risk
  Throwing Shade introduces a series of public cooling landscapes designed to offer relief both daily and in emergencies. Through considering networks of infrastructure and public acupuncture, the design proposes heat escapes situated within, and with the capacity to be leveraged by, the social infrastructure of New Orleans’ Seventh Ward neighborhood. Inspired by the routes of Second Line parades, held by Social, Aid, and Pleasure Club mutual aid organizations, the project focuses on movements and moments within the neighborhood—specifically, the library, park, highway underpass, and street medians. Each site has both distinct and connected histories, encompassing legacies of racism, resistance, and celebration, that are reflected in the design. Elements include infrastructure un-building, shade structures, tree plantings, de-paving, grading, water features, and solar energy capture. Through the throwing of shade, the project provides a framework for spatial memory and climatic justice.
• Reparative Planning in Theory and Practice: The Case of The Alliance for Community Transit - Los Angeles
  This thesis investigates the case of the Alliance for Community Transit Los Angeles as an example of reparative planning ‘in action’. Over the past few decades urban planning not only moved from a technocratic, topdown approach towards a more participatory one but also became more attuned with the harms and wrongs caused by the field in the past. There is a growing body of work on how repair and healing relate to planning theory, however there are few empirical case studies that examine how reparative planning translates into practice. Through this research I explore how a regional coalition of grassroots organizations advocate and plan for equitable development and transit justice in the Los Angeles area, specifically analyzing the tools and methods used by ACT-LA to better understand how these processes can be scaled up and implemented in planning practice to move the field towards a more reparative direction.
• Recombinant Urbanization: Agrarian–urban Landed Property and Uneven Development in India
  This article develops the concept of recombinant urbanization to show how agrarian landed property and land‐based caste/class relations shape the production of post‐liberalization urban real estate markets in India. I focus on two interrelated but differentiated agrarian property regimes in western Maharashtra to argue that real estate development is building on prior uneven agrarian land markets, which were themselves sociotechnically produced by colonial and postcolonial development politics. Through an examination of the organizational form of sugar cooperatives, which mediated agrarian capitalism in an earlier era, I track how these primary agricultural cooperatives are now being reorganized into real estate companies, sometimes with former sugarcane growers as company shareholders. The same caste‐based political and social capital that made sugar cooperatives possible in a capitalist agrarian society is now being leveraged by agrarian elites to ease their own and their constituents’ entry into an urbanizing economy. The concept of recombinant urbanization opens new methodological entryways to analyze the entangled agrarian and urban question in predominantly agrarian and late liberalizing societies.
• Congested Cities vs. Sprawl Makes You Fat: Unpacking the Health Effects of Planning Density
  Since the contemporary version of urban planning emerged in the nineteenth century, the field has been centrally concerned with the issue of density. Planners have variously tried to solve problems created by densities that were too high or too low, manipulate densities via regulations and infrastructure investments, and search for optimal density patterns to achieve social and environmental goals. Density has been of particular interest because, depending on the topic, different density levels and types appear to cause problems or create benefits, can typically be measured and compared with some precision, and are amenable to manipulation via the toolkit of urban and regional planning strategies. Here, Forsyth defines and classifies planning-related densities proposing that measured planning-relevant densities come in two types--discrete and proportional--both with area in the denominator of the calculation.