Kitwe College of Education

Items

• Intermission
  Nine spaces: A billboard, a stretch of scaffolding, a stretch of caulk, a street shrine, a car park, a water tank, a missing brick, a pedestrian bridge, a pocket watch. Each: An intermission in the urban fabric. An in-between space, connective tissue between discrete moments. A pause, a break, an interlude, a respite. A timeout. A place outside of the trajectory of time’s linear progression. A portrait of such a space can only be captured in the oblique, in fragments that aren’t able to be strung together, not without interpolation, inference, imagination to fill in the blanks. representation A story—a fictional narrative that weaves through and across each space—also approaches it from the oblique, not centering it as an object-in-the-round, but inhabiting it as spatial, material, social framework. A walk—a journey woven across specified spaces—adds yet another layer of inferential representation, experienced in linear temporality yet suggestive of layered, non-linear spatial and temporal experiences. Drawing from social theory and literary theory to inform a methodology for space-based narratives, this thesis takes the form of a collection of multi-media short stories titled Intermission. Pairing prose fiction with a guided walk, Intermission is a narrative exploration of the act of movement out-of-place, into the margin, the in-between, the timeout. By shifting the focus away from space as a designed and embodied structure, to space as a discursive construct, this thesis aims to bring to the fore systems, relationships, material and social networks, as well as standpoints (both human and non-human) that are integral to the existence and maintenance of the built environment, but that remain invisible in existing architectural narrative frameworks. The subject matter of these narrative exercises in text and lived experience are spaces, characters, and perspectives that step outside the fabric of everyday life. The experimental narratives woven around these subjects cast as the center the edges, namely those between spaces and experiences that are real and imagined, between remembering and forgetting, between documentary and fiction. In breaking with linearity, convention and expected mediums in architectural representation and speculation, the collective body of work produced through this thesis hopes to offer a fertile test bed for experimentation with discursive frameworks.
• Digital Starlight Memorial: An Online Memorial System with Tangible Interactive Interface
  The Internet has created countless possibilities for commemorations dedicated to tragic or catastrophic events and for exercising collective memory, which has not only gradually hidden our physical bodies but is also changing the way we experience the death of those around us. People who died in some extreme events could not be buried well. Meanwhile, their relatives shared collective memories and trauma. Thus, I want to create a digital cemetery that collects the digital "soul". Besides, the digital cemetery could gather the people who have relatives who died in the same event and experienced the same trauma, forming a place that not only communicates but can heal each other. I will create a website as the main digital platform for the community where people can bury their loved ones in a virtual Constellations system and build them a monument. Along with an Augmented Reality mobile application, people can see the exact location of their relatives or friends buried in the constellation and resonate in the community. What's more, they can have an additional physical interaction device. When someone visits a buried person, the interactive device will produce haptic feedback, and people can experience tangible visualizations from the device and comfort from those who have shared trauma. To join the community or merely to experience it, both strains and reinforces the mutuality of the “Collective memory” said to be in this together.
• The Architecture of the Collective: The Block and Ideas of the City in Modern China
  This dissertation interrogates the idea of the block and its manifestations in the socio-spatial development of the modern Chinese city—particularly from the 1950s onward. It delineates the existing discourse of the block and renews its idea against the continuity and transition of modern China. The underlying argument this dissertation puts forward is that, as opposed to conceiving the block as a modernist development directly imported from the West, the architectural and urban operations, together with its socio-political processes in modern China, constitute a rather internal yet continuous logic in understanding the Chinese city. By introducing the dialectical logic of tongbian that encompasses continuity through change, this dissertation examines one of the most canonical Chinese cities—Xi’an—as a case study by focusing on its planning practices in the transitional periods of the 1950s, 1980s, and 1990s, alongside the urban and architectural developments of the Xi’an Textile City project. It maps out the trajectory of Xi’an’s urban form and the role of block in the modern era while foregrounding its transitional episodes through major urban and architectural projects, policies, and socio-cultural practices. In doing so, the idea of the block and the modern Chinese city is theorized through three key propositions: First, it interrogates the concept of the block against its realities—the developments and nuances manifested in specific architectural, urban, and social configurations in China. In doing so, it defines the concept of the block in modern Chinese cities as two specific models: the perimeter-block and the parallel-block, and reconsiders such concept as a modern iteration of a long-existing and continuous socio-spatial construct in the Chinese city. Second, it concerns the block in modern China as an essential planning apparatus in cultivating a common socio-spatial framework, one that is informed by both the continuity of its internal cultural logic and the transitions of specific socio-political conditions, strategies, and practices at moments in time. Third, it postulates the idea of the modern Chinese city as one that spatializes the social collective and encompasses the ‘largeness’, ‘multiplicity’, and ‘bounded figure’ in constituting the architecture for the collective, which remains consistent with the idea of the Chinese city as a continuous cultural project at large and has the possibility to be charted towards a renewed model of urban and architectural production for the future.
• Dissolving Urbanism: Trans-scalar Spatial Framework for Water Integration
  This thesis research investigates a spatial framework to effectively address urban water management in Chennai, a city facing extreme hydrological events and climate change-induced challenges. Given the inadequacies of current management approaches, the research introduces a concept and method to incrementally integrate water into the urban form, thereby “Dissolving Urbanism.” This strategy intends to foster more sustainable livelihoods for the residents by breaking down existing physical, spatial, and governance barriers between scales, spaces, and policies. Utilizing historical studies, literature reviews, and data evaluations, a tripartite framework is proposed to (1) spatially address scalar mismatches in urban water management, (2) integrate 'water space' at a neighbourhood scale via proposed water “blocks,” and (3) incentivize private stakeholders to adopt progressive water management solutions through advocacy tools and policy methods. Using an extreme event projection with scenarios and a cost-benefit analysis between traditional and proposed models assess the framework’s efficacy. The study highlights that the proposed framework establishes an interconnection among various scales by creating the currently lacking “middle scale” characterized by the inventiveness, creativity, and imaginaries of water “blocks” that facilitate water-sharing and promote equitable water access and bottom-up flood management. These findings will contribute to urban resilience and water management in the context of climate change, offering valuable advancement to core knowledge and contemporary expression in the field of urban design.
• The Dust Up: Adapting Kuwait's Civic Infrastructure to SDS
  This thesis aspires to redevelop public infrastructural spaces in Kuwait to interact with the natural phenomena and challenges of local sand and dust storms (SDS) that disrupt the city, by embracing these processes to create unique social and ecological relationships for the city and its people. The research challenges the existing ‘greening’ strategies that arose from Kuwait’s 1952 masterplan developed by the foreign practice of Minoprio Spencely and Macfarlane. The work specifically explores the neighborhood parks and highway interchange networks. Today these exist as static landscapes that require excessive irrigation and resources to maintain their ‘green’ image, while disregarding the cultural and climatic context. As they currently stand, these networks have proven to fail at the scale of the ecological process, neither designing for or against these storms, but instead completely ignoring them.
• Seismic Futures: Expanding the Retrofit
  Advances in structural engineering and updates to building codes have rendered older buildings in seismic regions obsolete. Evans Hall, a hub for the economics, mathematics, and statistics departments at UC Berkeley, faces demolition due to its poor seismic rating. The future of buildings like Evans Hall is guided by financial and engineering constraints, often leading to demolition or a strict seismic retrofit. The traditional seismic retrofit, largely ignored in the discipline of architecture, relies on structural engineering principles through mathematical analysis. How can architecture expand the spatial possibilities of the retrofit? This thesis challenges and expands on structural engineering techniques for seismic retrofits through architectural interventions such as spatial methods of twinning, overscaling, replacing, and subtracting structural and nonstructural elements. The dual use of structure restabilizes Evans Hall while also generating adaptability by introducing new public space, access to light, and flexible space for existing and new program.
• land (reciprocity and other methods of defining the) fill
  Tomkins Cove Quarry is a marginal site expressing a central contradiction: once a bustling open pit quarry that supplied crushed limestone for construction in New York City, it is now abandoned and slowly filling with water while rusting conveyor lines stretch to a Hudson River they no longer supply. Absurdly, the current plan by Tilcon New York Inc. to fill the quarry with demolition waste from the city and cap it with “nature” underscores the standard practice of erasure of such zones of otherness, ultimately seeking to sanitize a wasted landscape and recycle it into salable land. Through a semantic approach, this thesis sets out to deconstruct and examine the relationship between the "land" and the "fill," specifically between the quarry and the waste as symptoms of culture and symbols of labor and extraction. This thesis asks: are there other ways to facilitate the flow of matter and simultaneously the sustenance of abused landscapes? Moreover, how can we resist relegating waste to the margins and instead foster a practice of centering it as an invaluable resource that recycles the dominant and spatial order? Lastly, is it possible to untangle the politics of waste and its designated sites and think of materials not as inert products but as continuous with land and the people that shape them?
• The Memory of Sangatte 1999 - 2002
  Despite the complete demolition of the Sangatte camp in 2003, both its existence and the fear consistently portrayed in the political and media campaign still deeply influence the political and geographic formation in Calais. The complexity of the history of Sangatte Camp was reduced to a useful political rhetoric to dehumanize homeless migrants and illegalize humanitarian support provided by the solidarity network in Calais. In this text, the history and the memory of Sangatte Camp unfolds with the process of bordering in Calais from 1999 to 2002 through policy and spatial analysis, literature and archive review, archival findings from the French Red Cross, UNHCR, and GISTI, and testimony from former Red Cross staff, migrants, and social workers. In this text, the immigration and border policies, including local government orders, national, bilateral, trilateral, and regional policies and collaborations in controlling and removing undesirable migrants from Calais are analyzed in the context of how those policies shaped the experience of asylum seeking and border crossing. Then, the spatial transformation in Calais is portrayed, including the migrants’ occupation of abandoned buildings and public parks with the support of local solidarity networks, along with the process of bordering and fencing in ports and the Eurotunnel site. Next, the development of the Sangatte Camp is explored, including its spatial evolution, camp management, and the daily life of migrants living there. Finally, the stories of female migrants are recounted, ranging from memory segments in Calais to a whole journey across several countries. Though the stories of women were not often portrayed in the media and literature findings at that time, buried in silence, this research has uncovered the stories of women, who each had their own memories of Sangatte.
• Like Oil and Leisure: Narrative Landforms for Curaçao
  ‘Like Oil and Leisure’ is a reimagining of Curaçao’s central harbor and beating heart, Schottegat. This port is home to the now-retired Refinery Isla, leaving an enormous economic and social gap that the refinery has filled for over a century. This landscape is a living memory of the past 500 years of human occupation. From the horrors of the colonial slave trade to safe haven for persecuted Sephardi Jews, economic boom to ecological disaster, these shores bear the scars of a complex history. Using the narrative arc of a round of golf, this thesis explores the stories embedded in the lands of the former oil refinery through a reshaping of its material grounds. Visitors navigate nine sites around the harbor that compose the course, immersed in different elements of the island’s history. Tourists and locals alike engage with the legacies of Schottegat and imagine the site’s next five centuries.
• Single Non-family Home
  Travel is inherent to the development of our social instincts, used as a means to raise our sensitivities to unfamiliar contexts and peoples. The act of travel itself had architectural impositions during one’s journey. Shelter became the backbone to support long journeys, but was also tied to additional program that was relevant to its context - Roman bathhouses as rest-stops for traveling tradesmen to engage with local consumers, or monasteries offering beds for both nomads and laymen in the middle of a long journey. In these scenarios, the place of shelter was primarily an anchor for the local community, while the act of shelter was more of a secondary possibility to this other-programmed space. By tying home, as quality, to shelter, as program, a space is domesticated. When accommodating transient and temporary use, this provokes a parallel between the politics of domesticity - who and how we are at home - with the business of shelter - what do we need to get by and how can this be mutually beneficial. Sited in Amman, Jordan, given its developmental history tangled with surges of transience and unintentional stay, this thesis will study how architecture can engage with existing urban and sociocultural conditions to facilitate the relationship between the permanent and the transient user of a city. A housing project for the non-resident user, the architecture will explore program as a series of interpersonal, interspatial exchanges through the lens of domesticity.
• After Bath: Crossing the Social Skin
  Water is an immersive body, and bathing is a medium of not only physical but also psychical identification and connection, through the bodily proximity created between strangers. The thesis explores notions of body and identity in the urban context through a contemporary re-read of the Turkish bath from an intersectional feminist point of view. Starting from the notion of gaze and objectification of female bodies, permeating into concurrent forms of oppression and solidarity, the thesis aims to liberate the bath from its orientalist architectural context and leak into the city of Istanbul by tapping into its water infrastructure. It explores ways of warming up (in terms of social intimacy) to create tactics of immersion in the public space for marginalized bodies. By liberating the bath representationally from the male gaze and the orientalist canon, the project inverts and fragments the interior space of the bath and attaches it onto the existing public water infrastructure of Istanbul. Dispersed across neighborhoods and the waterfront, the “leaked bath” explores gradients 
of collectivity, identity, and immersion. Architecture takes on affective characteristics that break binaries of interior / exterior, heavy / light, permanent / ephemeral. The interventions become a set of surfaces and desires: fountain, pool, deck, mist, shade, lingering, swimming... They attempt to take an interiorized typology and disperse it across the urban fabric to create spaces of comfort and engagement. They’re not about encasing but sheltering. They’re not about the thick poche but the dashed line. Partitions instead of walls, canopies instead of roofs, groundscapes as permeable surfaces... Depths of water and shade define levels of engagement and proximity, reactivating the collective body to cross the social skin and create new forms of solidarity.
• Migrant Middle: Revealing the South-Asian Diaspora through Community Making in Shrewsbury
  Recent quantitative data shows that the American suburb is rapidly diversifying, prompting the question: How is American space produced, and who is producing it? The South-Asian diaspora represents 2.2 percent of the total American population and has significantly contributed to the American cultural, economic, and political landscape. To understand the South-Asian diaspora in the context of Shrewsbury, a suburb located in Massachusetts, this thesis uses an ethnographic study to weave together patterns of transnational migration, identity, and everyday culture through the lens of the South-Asian community. Stories and investigations of the temporal relationships between diaspora and the built environment reveal that the architecture of everyday South-Asian life is internalized and distributed throughout the region. Migrant Middle proposes an alternative reading of the American suburb, not as an auto-centric place defined by its spatial boundaries but rather considered as a heterogeneous, regional network. How might (or not) a regional mobility strategy enhance connectivity and more prominently reveal the South-Asian diaspora?
• A Walk in the Grid
  How could the design of a regional shopping center reconcile the loss of architectural scale in globalized brownfields? This thesis explores alternative arrangements of form and proportion in search of a new composition that redefines an architectural typology and optimizes its agency for public service. It positions arcades, or mid-door corridors, as the operative mechanism with which architects can organize spaces. When organized in a grid, as a field of intersecting linear massings, architecture obtains an inverted role that defines boundaries from outside-in and therefore encloses exterior rooms of charged voids, stageable for diverse scenarios. Since the key factor is density and not footprint, this experiment seeks to create an instrument to dissolve the single object, subdivide its volume, and return to a scale that could effectively weave the surrounding fabric, thereby instigating alternative strategies and tactics for the city to maintain a high-quality environment as it continues to expand – spatially, socially, and ecologically. This design concept challenges the usual ways in which we shop as well as our perception of commerce as a normative – and isolated – activity; it also serves as a counter monument that critiques contemporary maneuvers of star architects conquering regional sites by implementing their signature symbols in a foreign architectural language that locals could seldom relate. Situated in Sunnyside Queens, an exemplary suburban neighborhood amid overscale developments, this thesis aims to conceive, rather than a universal solution applicable everywhere, a tailored design method with which architecture could begin to engage a particular context, through an empathetically regional gesture.
• DeepGreen: Additive Manufacturing of Carbon-Negative Algae Biocomposites
  As populations rise, the global building stock is predicted to double in floor area in the next 40 years. As a result, the embodied carbon footprint of the construction industry, which the UN has estimated to be 11% of global emissions, becomes a critical impasse in attempts to confront the climate crisis. This dissertation attempts to develop a new material system to address the issue of embodied carbon in construction from both a top-down ecosystem and a bottom-up material perspective. A circular approach to the cultivation of carbon-sequestering microalgal biomass is proposed, and the research develops the technological capacities to 3D print the micron-sized biomass into structural objects. After optimization, the final algae-based material features similar mechanical properties to engineered wood products. The proposed systems exhibit a negative upfront carbon footprint, as the carbon dioxide absorbed by the algae through photosynthesis outweighs the cultivation and manufacturing emissions. Furthermore, analysis shows an immense capacity to grow this biomass as a part of nutrient recovery systems. The dissertation points towards a possible future in which architecture itself is used as a carbon sequestration device, storing tons of atmospheric carbon for the lifetime of the material.
• Sanctuary State: California's Cowscape in Transition
  Sanctuary State, set in an idealized future in which cows are not exploited for meat or dairy, transforms an 800-acre feedlot into a sanctuary, a healing site for cows. Feedlots, common in California’s San Joaquin Valley, are degraded landscapes that demonstrate fraught human-animal relations that invisiblize, instrumentalize, and condemn domesticated animals. While cows have been implicated in over 10,000 years of domestication, the feedlot-to-sanctuary transformation envisions alternative relationships with animals in a future where transitional interspecies justice is achieved through ecological reparation and animal liberation. Humans must first dismantle the feedlot to initiate the restoration, in the process confronting the injustices of mass animal production. Infirmaries replace slaughter loading docks, woodlands memorialize cow passings, perennial plantings remediate the damaged soil, and waste accumulates into feral habitat islands that entice cows to meander and forage. Cows and other beings participate as co-designers, revealing the feral sociality of the site’s post-industrial reality. Feral ecologies and self-determining animals, at the sanctuary and the Valley beyond, establish themselves as agents of resistance and growth in the most degraded of places and situations.
• Biking is Labor: App-Based Food Delivery Cyclists and Infrastructure as Justice in New York City
  In New York City, app-based food delivery cyclists face exploitative labor conditions as independent contractors for the gig economy and dangerous streets as vulnerable road users. By defining biking as labor and street as workplace, this thesis applies labor justice theory to transportation planning. The gig economy imposes a changing political economy, requiring a reimagining of who uses the street, how, and why. How could transportation planners respond to the rise of the gig economy’s influence on urban space in New York City by providing app-based food delivery cyclists with the physical infrastructure required to perform their work safely and fairly? Qualitative methods draw from three perspectives: delivery cyclist, policies and plans, and public narrative. Findings may inform transportation planners of the ways in which they can provide fairer and safer infrastructure by understanding delivery cyclists’ essential status, recognizing policy’s spatial limitations, balancing safety and efficiency, understanding delivery cyclists’ disproportionate risks, and acknowledging that delivery cyclists have a specific understanding of their infrastructure needs. Applying a labor justice perspective may be useful for creating safer streets for all existing roadway users as the gig economy continues to reshape who uses streets and in what ways.
• Charging America: car access & incentive in a decarbonized future
  Throughout the 20th century, the US invested heavily in a national highway network and sprawling communities that prioritize cars over people. Today, as we rush to find solutions to tackle the climate crisis, electric vehicles (EVs) should be a complement to the decarbonization puzzle, not the primary solution. While safer, more equitable modes of decarbonized transportation must be a priority, such modes are not possible everywhere. In these places, EVs may be the best solution for addressing the climate crisis. This thesis analyzes where and how the public and private sectors have developed EV charging stations to date. As the new Biden Administration and the private sector prepare for rapid development of EV infrastructure in the coming decade, understanding current patterns of development can inform future decisions to ensure EV infrastructure is prioritized for areas that lack alternative modes rather than contribute to incentivizing a culture of cars over people.
• The World Was Their Garden: Plant Introductions at the US Department of Agriculture, 1898-1984
  In 1898, the US Department of Agriculture established an Office of Foreign Seed and Plant Introduction (SPI) to systematically collect and introduce plants of economic interest to US soil. Employing a cadre of trained “agricultural explorers” to collect plants from all over the world, the office is credited with establishing a dazzling array of multimillion-dollar industries—mangos, avocados, date palms, and soy, to name just a few—as well as securing staple crops against diseases, pests, and drought with infusions of genetic material for breeding improved varieties. However, in the histories of US plant introduction, a persistent American exceptionalism obscures the USDA’s dependence on, and contribution to, imperial scientific networks, as well as its operative role in facilitating settler-colonial expansion. This thesis thus resituates the SPI’s administrators and explorers as actors in the US imperial “environmental management state” emergent at the turn of the century by examining their living and non-living material traces. First, I attend to the SPI’s exhaustive record-keeping system—bulletins, inventories, photographs and films—as constitutive of its scientific authority and reputation, but also productive of a modern national identity. Then, I situate federal plant introduction work in the specific geography of Southern Florida, mapping out its impact on the landscape through the creation of the Fairchild Tropical Garden. Finally, with soy as perhaps the most significant crop introduced to the US in the 20th century, I follow the soybeans collected from the Dorsett-Morse Expedition of 1929-31 to East Asia to explore how living plant germplasm endures across changing institutions and landscapes. In so doing, this thesis elaborates how the SPI—and all its institutional complexity—serves as a conceptual and material precursor to our contemporary agrobiodiversity preservation initiatives and environmental politics.
• Street Choreography
  Street Choreography elevates the dynamic qualities of the city, designing through sequence, time, and experience. The street is highly regulated, often defined by its boundaries and limitations rather than its movements and rhythms. The work focuses on the public space of the street, defined as the surfaces between urban street trees, and imagines a future city that is carefully calibrated to the daily routines of its residents. The street is no longer dominated by vehicular movement and storage. It is not beholden to commercial activity, utility conveyance, and wasteful construction. Instead, it is the public space for urban life. Through the recovery and articulation of the surface, the insertion of canopy, and design of a new maintenance regime, the experience of being on the street is foregrounded. The design is observation-based and instructs a public realm that accommodates the upkeep of materials and public programs over time.
• The Infant and Parent Urban Experience: Enhancing daily life and development through personal-scale interventions
  Humans develop 90% of their brains during the first five years of life, a time where they are the most physically vulnerable they will ever be. Thus, it is both surprising and concerning that the built environment does not revolve around such a critical period. The longevity of a city and adulthood far preponderates the duration of infancy, causing architects, planners, and builders to design for the necessities and ergonomics of older and larger humans. With infant and parent ecologies more intertwined than ever before, the physical and environmental challenges a city poses ultimately pushes families to look for an easier, safer and more affordable environment to raise a child in. This thesis proposes artifact solutions that make use of varied technologies and analog interactions to improve the daily life of the urban family. A review of developmental milestones, an infant proxemic analysis, and a design thinking approach for identifying problems in the urban fabric suggest that interventions at the personal space scale can significantly facilitate care, increase mobility and improve safety. Some of the solutions are: for the micro-apartment, a furniture-scale baby station to replace the baby room; for the subway station with no elevator, a robotic self-walking stroller that can smoothly navigate stairs; for the downtown open-plan office, an office chair harness that promotes skinship while allowing parents to engage in focused work. Ultimately, these solutions make cities more accessible to both infants and caregivers.
• Expanded Domesticity: Visual Sequencing in Collective Housing
  The essence of the neighborly or collective interaction has all but disappeared from the housing experience. As one moves between and occupies a series of similarly standardized rooms, glimpses may be caught of the outside world, but these momentary glances lack any semblance of substance. Despite a close visual and physical proximity, views from residential units produce relatively little in terms of social connection to the collective experience of the city. Though a person may view others, they remain continually isolated. In contrast to this growing trend of housing in which domestic space has become increasingly internalized, autonomous and neglectful of their collective surroundings, this project explores opportunities for formalizing visual connections in order to provide new forms of intimacy both between neighboring residential units and the greater community. Visual relationships become physically manifested as mediators between households; creating shared spaces that act as ambiguous thresholds between the public realm and the individual housing unit. Sited along a public canal and cultural trail, larger visual forms bridge the divide between the public condition and the inmate household. Through visual sequencing, hierarchies within household spaces are reestablished and grow beyond the established boundary of the residential unit; rejecting the normalized spatial conditions prevalent in much of contemporary housing.
• FROM PASTURE TO PRESERVATION : CATTLE AND CATALYZING AGRICULTURE AND REFORESTATION
  Terceira Island, part of the Azores archipelago, is known for being home to more cows than people, its dairy industry, and its booming tourism. However, overgrazing and the influx of visitors threaten the island's agricultural economy and cultural heritage. To address these challenges, dairy farming is integrated with reforestation using Richard Foreman's 'Patch-Corridor-Matrix' theory. Corridors of degraded soil from cow movement are reforested with endemic Juniperus brevifolia, connecting patched woody ecosystems. The matrix of the stone lava walls across the island frame these new wildlife corridors and supports rotational grazing. The increased biodiversity and forested areas offer new streams of income for dairy farmers who can also provide spaces for tourists to interact with cows and stay in the pastures. This integrated approach promotes sustainable agriculture and tourism, while preserving the island's cultural heritage and opportunities for tourists to interact with and sample products from the island’s “happy cows.”
• Cultivating the Renewal of Armenia's Housing Supply
  The Republic of Armenia’s inadequate and deteriorating housing stock is among the nation’s most pressing challenges. With resources limited, how can policymakers and private developers help overcome this crisis, expanding access to safe and affordable housing for all Armenians? Centered on data from over 110 individual housing projects and in-depth case studies of four more, informed by official statistics, laws, and media reports, and enriched by interviews with developers, planners, brokers, and lawyers, this thesis reaches a cautiously optimistic conclusion. Over the past seven years, Armenia’s much-debated mortgage income tax credit has aligned with developers’ own strategies to produce large volumes of relatively affordable and high-quality new housing. This recent progress can be significantly expanded if Armenian policymakers wield land use and taxation tools to further promote affordability and seismic safety.
• Planning for Urban Satisfaction
  This paper aims to examine the strengths and weaknesses of social media platforms and proposes a vision for a better platform to invite bottom-up citizen participation in data-driven urban planning for urban satisfaction. The research proposes a method to measure the emotional response of individual citizens to the characteristics of the built environment focusing on proximity and convenience between pedestrians and nearby commercial and cultural activities. My proposed method requires a geotagged dataset with some measure of individual satisfaction with the built environment. The research demonstrates this method using Weibo posts tagged "Jiaxing", a small-sized city in China, coupled with a measure of each post's positivity, as estimated by the Baidu AI platform. The results illustrate that the combination of social media data and sentiment analysis is insufficiently specific to usefully inform planning decisions. I conclude with the proposal of a social media platform that could better measure individual satisfaction with the built environment.
• Outside-In: A Hybrid Domestic Typology
  With the increasing phenomenon of global migration and cultural diffusion today, fundamental questions of integration and assimilation remain an ongoing theme in the United States. Immigration has emerged as a very decisive, yet sharply divisive, topic in the U.S., with the country experiencing repeated waves of hostility toward immigrant populations, often viewed as a threat to the integrity of the nation’s culture. These triggering conditions for change require that current policies and practices be adapted to facilitate the integration of new immigrants into American society. That said, can social change be achieved through the mechanism of housing? Housing and immigration are both divisive issues, but addressing changing needs through focusing on common values can result in the advancement towards a more equitable and inclusive future. Sited in Dearborn, Michigan, housing the country’s largest Arab American population, the project aims to create a new domestic typology, addressing the unique needs of the community. The proposal aims to apply lessons learned from the MENA domestic fabric, integrating notions of privacy, interiority, and density with existing American typologies. The project addresses new ways of thinking about sharing and ownership, and attempts to attempts to address two starkly different domestic urban conditions, with very different ideas of what a home should look like.