Kitwe College of Education

Items

• 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.
• A clinical review of phototherapy for psoriasis
  Psoriasis is an autoimmune inflammatory skin disease. In the past several decades, phototherapy has been widely used to treat stable psoriatic lesions, including trunk, scalp, arms and legs, and partial nail psoriasis. A variety of light/lasers with different mechanisms of action have been developed for psoriasis including ultraviolet B (UVB), psoralen ultraviolet A (PUVA), pulsed dye laser (PDL), photodynamic therapy (PDT), intense pulsed light (IPL), light-emitting diodes (LED), and so on. Because light/laser each has specific therapeutic and adverse effects, it is important to adequately choose the sources and parameters in management of psoriasis with different pathogenic sites, severities, and duration of the disorder. This review aims at providing most updated clinic information to physicians about how to select light/laser sources and individual therapeutic regimens. To date, UV light is primarily for stable plaque psoriasis and PDL for topical psoriatic lesions with small area, both of which are safe and effective. On the other hand, PUVA has better curative effects than UVB for managing refractory psoriasis plaques, if its side effects can be better controlled. PDL provides optimal outcomes on nail psoriasis compared with other lasers. Although the trails of low-level light/laser therapy (LLLT) are still small, the near infrared (NIR) and visible red light with low energy show promise for treating psoriasis due to its strong penetration and encouraging photobiomodulation. IPL is rarely reported for psoriasis treatment, but PDT-IPL has been found to offer a moderate effect on nail psoriasis. In brief, various phototherapies have been used either in different combinations or as monotherapy. The modality has become a mainstay in the treatment of mild-to-moderate psoriasis without systemic adverse events in today’s clinical practice.
• Climate Gentrification: From Theory to Empiricism in Miami-Dade County, Florida
  This article provides a conceptual model for the pathways by which climate change could operate to impact geographies and property markets whose inferior or superior qualities for supporting the built environment are subject to a descriptive theory known as ‘Climate Gentrification.’ The article utilizes Miami-Dade County, Florida (MDC) as a case study to explore the market mechanisms that speak to the operations and processes inherent in the theory. This article tests the hypothesis that the rate of price appreciation of single-family properties in MDC is positively related to and correlated with incremental measures of higher elevation (the ‘Elevation Hypothesis’). As a reflection of an increase in observed nuisance flooding and relative SLR, the second hypothesis is that the rates of price appreciation in lowest the elevation cohorts have not kept up with the rates of appreciation of higher elevation cohorts since approximately 2000 (the ‘Nuisance Hypothesis’). The findings support a validation of both hypotheses and suggest the potential existence of consumer preferences that are based, in part, on perceptions of flood risk and/or observations of flooding. These preferences and perceptions are anticipated to be amplified by climate change in a manner that reinforces the proposition that climate change impacts will affect the marketability and valuation of property with varying degrees of environmental exposure and resilience functionality. Uncovering these empirical relationships is a critical first step for understanding the occurrence and parameters of Climate Gentrification.
• Highway urbanization and Land conflicts: the challenges to decentralization in India
  Version of Record
• BioComplexity, Systems Thinking, and Multi-Scale Dynamic Simulation: Foundations of Geodesign
  Landscape Architecture and Planning have long used visual simulations for design ideation and communication, but the complex demands of the twenty-first century will require more than simply visual simulations; dynamic simulations across a spectrum of scientific, social and perceptual issues will be key to effective design in the future. The new science and art of ‘geodesign’ promises to harness digital and computational technologies, from Geographic Information Sciences (GIS) and remote sensing to software engineering and algorithmic design, in the service of imagining, designing, simulating, implementing, and evaluating better environments, worldwide, enabling collaborative design informed by scientific knowledge. Landscape ecology, engineering, and other disciplines have contributed non-visual, and sometimes non-static, analyses to the repertoire of impact assessment in natural systems management, transportation, energy, and urbanization projects, etc., but these additions are mostly still of limited scope and complexity. The interrelated nature of natural systems at all scales is still only becoming apparent to us and to the scientific community, as the recent interest in ‘biocomplexity’ and ‘systems thinking’ demonstrates (e.g. NSF Biocomplexity initiative). Increasingly, geodesign projects will need to incorporate systems thinking across all aspects of the process, be informed by the findings of biocomplexity research, and make maximum use of multi-scale dynamic simulations in the process of evaluating impacts of proposed designs
• A Proposed Map of a Geodesign Research Agenda: Eleven Key Questions in an Eight-pole Space
  The development of a robust and credible geodesign discipline will depend equally upon an ever-growing inventory of excellent real-world examples of projects embodying geodesign principles, and upon the development and pursuit of a rich and rigorous research agenda that informs geodesign theory and practice. To this end, following a consideration of several precedents from the GIS literature, a research space with eight poles is proposed. Mapping twenty or so not-quite-randomly collected examples of proposed research ques­tions into this space yields a promising framework for an emergent research agenda, summarized by eleven key geodesign research questions.
• The concept of urban intensity and China's townization policy: Cases from Zhejiang Province
  Urban intensity, in this paper, is measured by four related concepts: compactness, diversity, density, and connectivity. Together they lead to a single idea when considering spatial distributions potentially in a virtuous manner with regard to resource consumption, economic opportunity, social integration and environmental performance. The methodologies applied here included Moran's I, Shannon's index entropy, and accessibility isotimelines, which were then applied to real case scenarios in 20 towns in Zhejiang Province, selected based on their economic performances, population sizes, and geographical locations. Further inspection discovered that density, an outcome of urban form, is highly correlated to compactness, leading to its elimination. The results showed that among the varying spatial arrangements of urban activities, building footprints and infrastructural elements characterized by monocentric centers of use inscribed with well-defined and relatively uniform grids of streets and related networks, alongside of relatively integrated zones of use, seemed to perform best with regard to urban intensity. At the other end of the morphological spectrum, towns with sharp separations of uses and zones of development, often resulting in overall bifurcation of a town's spatial layout, performed less well. Also, linear forms for small towns were less favorable.
• Striking balances between China’s urban communities, blocks and their layouts
  Accepted Manuscript
• Exchange between researchers and practitioners in urban planning: achievable objective or a bridge too far?/The use of academic research in planning practice: who, what, where, when and how?/Bridging research and practice through collaboration: lessons from a joint working group/Getting the relationship between researchers and practitioners working/Art and urban planning: stimulating researcher, practitioner and community engagement/Collaboration between researchers and practitioners: Political and bureaucratic issues/Investigating Research/Conclusion: Breaking down barriers through international practice?
  Exchange between researchers and practitioners in urban planning: achievable objective or a bridge too far?/The use of academic research in planning practice: who, what, where, when and how?/Bridging research and practice through collaboration: lessons from a joint working group/Getting the relationship between researchers and practitioners working/Art and urban planning: stimulating researcher, practitioner and community engagement/Collaboration between researchers and practitioners: Political and bureaucratic issues/Investigating Research/Conclusion: Breaking down barriers through international practice?
• Revitalizando Ciudades: MejorandoViviendas y Barrios desde la Cuadra a la Metrópolis
  Revitalizando Ciudades: Mejorando viviendas y barrios desde la cuadra a la metrópolis, enfatiza ejemplos internacionales y mexicanos e identifica políticas, programas y estrategias de planeación para implementar las políticas de vivienda mexicanas del 2012.