Kitwe College of Education

Items

• Teachers’ Perceptions about the Mission Buniyaad Programme – A Large-Scale Foundational Literacy and Numeracy Initiative in Delhi Government Schools
  There is a prominent shift in the discourse surrounding education policy and practice in India, specifically addressing the need to improve students’ learning outcomes. Several national and global reports have pointed out students’ dismally low foundational learning levels across India. In a bid to improve the learning levels of the students, the government runs national, as well as state-level intervention programmes. This study explores the perceptions of teachers and mentor teachers regarding one such state-level intervention programme: the Mission Buniyaad programme, a foundational literacy and numeracy improvement initiative implemented by the Delhi Government in its Directorate of Education (DoE) schools from 3-8 grades. It is grounded in qualitative research design, employing semi-structured interviews with 10 teachers and 5 mentor-teachers actively involved in the programme. The data is analysed via Braun and Clarke’s (2006) thematic analysis. The following four major themes emerged from the interviews, providing a comprehensive understanding of the participants’ perspectives – the programme’s need, its design and pedagogical approach, its impact on students’ learning outcomes, and implementational challenges and improvement suggestions. The findings from this study summarize the process, complexity, and overall dynamic nature of implementing the Mission Buniyaad programme. By analysing teachers’ and mentor teachers’ voices and thematically decoding their experiences, it presents a comprehensive understanding of the Mission Buniyaad programme and its impact on learning outcomes against the everyday realities of government schools in Delhi. The key findings pointed towards improvement in foundational learning of children who participated in the programme, inconsistent cascading of the programme, teacher shortage, and resource and infrastructural constraints. Overall, the insights gained from this study hold significant potential to inform policymakers, educators, and programme designers in refining and enhancing the FLN programmes.
• A hole in my stocking: Disrupting power through play in the Kickstarter Creative Arts project
  This article focuses on the importance of play as a necessary and developmental tool for creating democratic spaces in rural South African Primary schools through examples in the Kickstarter Creative Arts pilot project case study (The KS project). The KS project is an Educational teacher empowerment and artist in residency programme, designed as a case study to assess the impact of the Creative Arts at the Intermediate level (Grade 4, 5 and 6). The project illustrates how play, as supported by Winnicott and Vygotsky, is developmental and can be a mechanism for greater humanization in the classroom. The metaphor of a stocking is employed to advocate for experience, as per the work of John Dewey. As the methodology of the Kickstarter project is experiential, it encourages personal artistic growth for teachers, allowing play and creating shifts in the power dynamics and relationship between teachers and pupils within the classroom. As teachers engage with a democratic approach, they find learners more willing, more empathetic and more engaged. It is proposed that the KS project become aligned with the Basic Department of Education and rolled out nationwide in South Africa for the “Arts as method” approach to all subjects.
• Negotiating the Incorporation of Multimodal Materials in Literacy Learning: Some Observations in One Secondary School in Uganda
• The Intercorrelation Between Executive Function, Physics Problem Solving, Mathematical, and Matrix Reasoning Skills: Reflections from a Small-Scale Experiment
  There are now many studies in the disciplines of psychology, neuroscience, and education concerning the contribution of executive function skills to the student learning process during school. Less work has been conducted on links with executive function skills and science, especially physics, compared to other school subjects. Here, we focus on physics problem solving skills because they are core elements of physics instruction in secondary education. In addition, teachers are concerned that students are not reaching the desired level of physics problems solving ability by the end of formal schooling. Physics problem solving skills seem to rely on strong mathematical skills, an area where there is robust evidence of links to executive function skills. In addition, matrix reasoning skills seem to impact executive function and mathematical skills. However, little is known about the complex links between these skills. Such work would elucidate cognitive processes underlying physics problem solving. In this small-scale study, 20 Greek high school students (Mage = 16.81 years, SD = 1.87) completed a battery of tasks measuring executive function, physics problem solving, mathematics, and matrix reasoning skills. The results indicated strong positive correlations between physics problem solving skills and mathematical skills. One of the executive function skills (i.e., switching) had significant positive correlations with physics problem solving and mathematical skills. Matrix reasoning skills positively correlated with physics problem solving and mathematical skills, and two of the executive function skills (i.e., switching and working memory). These findings suggest complex intercorrelations between executive function, physics problem solving, mathematical, and matrix reasoning skills. These findings could be the springboard for further studies involving more detailed measurements of these skills. In the long run, results from this type of work could lead to designing pedagogical interventions in physics education based on executive function skills to address teachers' concerns about students’ acquisition of physics problem solving skills.
• The Potential Benefits of Using Film as Part of Literacy Lessons- An Introduction to the Bradford City of Film Media Literacy Scheme and PhD
• Pragmatics in the Saudi EFL Classroom: Investigating Textbook Content and Teachers’ Perceptions and Practices
  Pragmatic competence is a crucial component of communicative competence and language knowledge. It plays a significant role in second language learning and teaching, especially in English as a foreign language (EFL) context (Cohen, 2012). Despite its recognition as a core objective in the EFL curriculum by the Saudi Ministry of Education, recent studies highlight a concerning lack of pragmatic awareness and conversational proficiency among Saudi EFL learners (Almegren, 2022). Furthermore, there is limited information available on the pragmatic content covered in EFL textbooks designed for Saudi students. Consequently, this study analyses the pragmatic content of a textbook series used nationwide in Saudi secondary schools. It specifically examines the type, frequency and distribution of speech acts, with the metapragmatic information covering topics of politeness, appropriacy, register, usage, illocutionary force, and cultural aspects. Quantitative and qualitative content analyses are employed to analyse the textbook data, using checklists based on Searle’s (1979) taxonomy of speech acts and on metapragmatic information, drawing on the framework of Vellenga (2004). Furthermore, the study investigates whether teachers follow or diverge from these textbooks when teaching pragmatics, and their perceptions of the covered pragmatic content. The initial findings indicate that the textbooks include a wide range of speech act types; that there is limited coverage of contextual and metapragmatic information; that there is a lack of a discernible pattern in the distribution of pragmatic information across textbooks; and that teachers mostly rely on textbooks to teach pragmatics; with unanimous dissatisfaction among them regarding the quality, albeit perceived adequacy in quantity, of SA in the textbooks. Based on these findings, pedagogical suggestions are proposed to enhance learners’ pragmatic competence through improved teaching materials and classroom instruction
• Rethinking Employability of International Student Graduates of US and UK Universities from a Postcolonial and Critical Realist Lens: A Narrative Review
  From a critical realist and postcolonial angle, this paper explores the underlying socio-cultural mechanisms driving international students in their decisions and actions when transitioning from university to employment. For international students coming from the Global South (Asia, Africa, and Latin America), studying in a university in the US or UK requires not only multiple steps of actions involving a lot of money, effort, and time, it places them in a consistent state of uncertainty and emotional struggle from systemic racism, insecurity, and structural integration. In this paper, I will use Homi Bhabha’s (1994) concept of ‘third space’ or ‘hybridity’ and Roy Bhaskar’s (1975, 1989) critical realist ‘stratified ontology’ to rethink international students' employability and provide an alternative perspective to understand the realities of international student employability. This narrative review explores the conditions that enable students to transition to the workplace and experience shifting their identity from an international student to an international employee. Rather than problematizing international students’ ability to gain employment, I will take away the general focus from ‘student competence’ and use a morphogenetic approach (Archer, 1995), where I rethink employability as a process rather than as an ability. This allows us to uncover the cycle of social injustices that international students encounter since coming to study in the US/UK. In this review, I illustrated how current ways of learning in universities in the global north might oppress their transition options and mobility. I will conclude by discussing how hybridity can be used to uncover sociocultural mechanisms in international student transitions to the workplace and suggest perspectives that can be useful for universities, employers, policymakers, and future international students.
• Teach or Treat: How do Teachers and Applied Behaviour Analysis Therapists in Hong Kong Conceptualise Autism?
  Relatively scant research has been conducted on linking conceptualisations of autism to practice, especially in non-western contexts. To gain an in-depth understanding of how frontline staff for autistic students conceptualise autism in Hong Kong educational settings, 5 mainstream classroom teachers and 5 Applied Behaviour Analysis (ABA) therapists based in Hong Kong were virtually interviewed. The semi-structured interviews were coded using an abductive thematic analysis. It was found that teachers and ABA therapists in Hong Kong generally demonstrated a medical conceptualisation of autism while teachers showed a weaker understanding of autism and more negative attitudes towards autism. Moreover, therapists and teachers were also consistent in showing an ableist approach in instruction and intervention. These findings are subject to a small sample size. The findings of this study indicate an unchallenging deficit-based model of understanding autism in Hong Kong education, and call for proactive interventions from the local government to shift the landscape of conceptualisations of autism to provide an equitable education for autistic students.
• Learning Beyond School in Mentoring for Leadership development of middle managers in Singapore primary schools
• Metabolic Urbanism: Epistemologies, Lineages, and Prospects
  Every building, infrastructure, or city is the spatial manifestation of metabolizing multiple materials, energy, labor relations, and capital investments from local and distant sources. Yet, an overemphasis on specific sites or projects easily obscures these metabolic interdependencies at a broader scale. Working on urban metabolism concepts, this dissertation examines the role of design in regulating how materials and energy flows circulate, metabolize, and produce urban form. It articulates how the separate realms of extraction, production, circulation, accumulation, and disposal of metabolic flows are integral and generative for design. It elucidates a critical position for design discourse and practice through a boundary-exploding inquiry of transcalar feedback loops between design projects and their life-supporting spaces. Selecting wood as the metabolic flow of analysis examines how the laborious effort of orchestrating its associated social and ecological processes can enable designers to engage with urgent problematiques of anthropocentric and non-anthropocentric concern. Articulated via the concept of metabolic urbanism, this dissertation proceeds in three parts: epistemologies, lineages, and prospects. Part I offers an intellectual history of the epistemologies of urban metabolism by different scholarly clusters. Part II re-examines an intradisciplinary lineage of design discourses, models, and interventions driven by metabolic considerations. Finally, Part III reflects on metabolically significant design prospects where wood, as one critical flow of urbanization, plays a key role. Metabolic urbanism critically advances the knowledge of urban metabolism in design by following the intricate flows that comprise the urban fabric at a planetary scale. It articulates the discursive and projective potentials of architecture and urbanism when shaped by metabolic transcalar interdependencies.
• House on the Side of the Mekong
  The Mekong River is a life source and space for spiritual belongingness that binds people on both banks, yet it also serves as an unnatural territorial boundary that divides northeastern Thailand from Laos. This thesis speculates on the nature of the Mekong middle basin’s fluid zone of exchange, whose state of “in-between” is constantly renegotiated by those living along it. Specifically, it explores embedded meanings within local fishing practices, spiritual cohesion, and border subversion against the logic of a national boundary to represent indigenous spatial imaginaries of the riverway. For northeastern Thai and Lao people, the Mekong embodies an assemblage of ideas about a cultural conception of space wherein animals, spirits, and humans comingle to influence one another. Sited along the river at the edge of a border town, the project proposes a guesthouse for ghosts, fish, and itinerant humans. The program leans into the region’s occult, mythology, and notions of fluidity in an attempt to return the mind to local conceptions of space where demons, deities, nature, humans, and animals roam in interrelated realms. Using haunting as a medium and local fishing gears as architectural precedents, “House on the Side of the Mekong” aims to bring within view (hi)stories that previously remained at the margins.
• The Uncanny City
  The Uncanny—a state defined by Freud to be “that class of the terrifying which leads back to something long known to us”—has long been a wellspring for artists, writers, and philosophers. It captures a particular sensibility of anxiety and alienation inherent in the human condition, and is now more than ever a precise distillation of the isolation and hopelessness felt in our modern age. Unheimlich, the German form of “uncanny,” can also be taken to mean homelessness. Amid recent social-political turmoil and perpetually unattainable property prices in my hometown of Hong Kong, the aching lack of a place to call home is a social malaise that is erupting from beneath the polished commercial logic of the city’s architecture and urban plan. This thesis translates the Uncanny from a philosophical and literary state into an architectural form and physical experience that reflects the human condition, lying in a state of delicate oscillation between the foreign and the familiar, the real and the imaginary, the rational and the irrational. The project distills and magnifies the relentless disquiet of Hong Kong’s urban experience even as it endeavors to reconceptualize public space as an escape, providing a guise of relief as the city endures on.
• Natural Ventilation Control Strategies and Their Effectiveness in Different Climates
  Natural ventilation (NV) is a sustainable building strategy that improves building energy efficiency, indoor thermal environment, and air quality. The successful implementation of natural ventilation relies on various factors, such as local climate, ambient air quality, floorplan, adjacent urban environment, window configuration, and urban noise. Among these factors, climate is the most influential one that determines the potential for natural ventilation, whereas the control of the heating, ventilation, and air conditioning (HVAC) system along with the window system becomes the most critical element for the successful natural ventilation in a given case, when only a few features are feasible to change. This dissertation investigates global natural ventilation potential through NV hours and cooling energy saving percentage and estimates China’s natural ventilation potential by taking into account the additional factor of ambient air pollution. The aggregated energy savings and carbon reductions were estimated at the city level across 35 major Chinese cities. This dissertation then focuses on developing optimal NV control strategies to coordinate window operations with HVAC systems, aiming for an optimized synergy to achieve minimal energy consumption and maximum thermal comfort. A reinforcement learning control strategy is proposed, which demonstrates better performance compared to the rule-based heuristic control in accommodating stochastic internal heat gain, maintaining steady indoor thermal comfort, and reducing HVAC system operation. Finally, the effectiveness of different levels of automation in NV control is tested in a variety of distinct climates. Specifically, spontaneous occupant manual control, informed occupant manual control, and fully automatic control (including rule-based heuristic control and model predictive control [MPC]) are evaluated. The results demonstrated the superiority of fully automatic control with MPC, which significantly enhances building energy efficiency and thermal performance. The findings from this dissertation provide information for architects, building owners, and policymakers to realize the potential for natural ventilation in buildings.
• Architecture of Thresholds: Discrete Liminality Between Spaces of Different Territorial Claims.
  Boundaries define space. Thresholds define place. Through their crossing, they define both the place you have left and the place you are entering. They have the power to craft expectations and reverse existent hierarchies. Crossing a Threshold is an act of transition. It is a willful desire to experience something new. Thresholds are places of learning and mediation; a transition from one state of being to another. The definition of a threshold in building architecture is as the material forming the sill of a doorway. Its purpose is to prevent the flowing out of interior flooring material. It is also understood as a synonym of entry. The Threshold is an object and an experience devoid of ambiance as deep as a door frame. Herman Hertzberger writes of thresholds as ‘transitional spaces between adjacent areas of different territorial claims’ and places of exchange and interaction. They are where two worlds overlap. This thesis takes the Embassy as its project. Within the embassy, rooms are overlapped with each other to create spatial Thresholds. They are dynamic places of transition where boundaries of space are provoked, territories are questioned, and spatial hierarchies are made ambiguous. A previously inert and rigid program becomes an abstract composition of complex experiences.
• A House to Grow In: A Proposal for the Contemporary Re-Pioneering of the Iowa Prairie
  While the complexities of contemporary life have many considering a rural relocation, the current American imagination of a desirable rural life has contributed to uninformed urbanite settlement and a lack of population growth in agricultural rural communities. The thesis seeks to write promise and adventure back into these agricultural communities by proposing a contemporary re-pioneering of current farmland. In Clinton, Iowa, a new farmhouse typology and site strategy will aid in the incremental establishment of the former Iowa prairie and a pioneering family; this will become the foundation of a new rural narrative based on the resources of rural America: ecology, tradition, and the transcendent. In this reformed rural narrative, the transcendent value of stewardship will guide the design and is made manifest through the hidden abundance of the native prairie and a contemporary reimagining of traditional building and agricultural practices.
• Sacrificing Cities Modernity, Religions, and Urban Spatial Dynamics in Dhaka, Bangladesh
  This dissertation examines the complex interactions between urban religiosity and modernity in the context of Dhaka, Bangladesh, focusing on the celebration of Eid ul Adha. As a South Asian megacity, Dhaka undergoes significant transformations during this annual religious festival, temporarily disrupting the city's usual modernist development trajectory. The thesis introduces the concept of "Sacrificing Cities" to describe how Dhaka, like several other South Asian cities, tends to sacrifice its modern development mandates temporarily to accommodate traditional religious practices. These sacrifices manifest in various urban domains, including infrastructure, institutions, markets, and technology. The study is based on three years of ethnographic fieldwork in Dhaka, exploring how the city manages the influx of millions of rural cattle farmers and traders, the transformation of urban spaces into makeshift cattle markets, and the temporary suspension of regular urban activities during Eid ul Adha. The research highlights the adaptability of Dhaka's urban infrastructure and institutions to non-secular functions and the role of the informal economic sector in managing the festival's demands. It also discusses the challenges posed by digitalization in maintaining traditional communal practices and religious sentiments. By situating Dhaka within the broader frameworks of postcolonial, modern, and global city discourses, the thesis argues that the city's temporary disruptions during Eid ul Adha challenge conventional understandings of urban modernity. The concept of "Sacrificing Cities" provides a new lens for analyzing how cities in the Global South negotiate between tradition and modernity, revealing the unique ways in which urban religiosity shapes economic and political pathways. Through detailed case studies, the thesis explores the justifications and mechanisms that enable Dhaka to temporarily deviate from its modern development goals, emphasizing the importance of understanding these practices within the context of South Asian urbanism. The findings contribute to broader discussions in critical urban development, postcolonialism, modernism, and developmental studies, offering insights into the evolution, development, and functioning of cities like Dhaka.
• Manatees and Margaritas: Toward a Strange New Paradise
  Florida manatees gather in the warm water discharged from power plants, which they have come to rely on during cold winters. The “55 and better” also seek warmth - and a life of leisure - at the state’s booming “active adult” communities. As populations increase, human waste leaks into the lagoon and seagrass dies. Manatees starve in record numbers and are fed romaine lettuce in a last-ditch effort to keep them alive. This project probes the strange ecologies of Eden in the Anthropocene – that of romaine lettuce and power plants, manatees and margaritas. It finds, in landscapes of paradise, spaces where one can love nature, while killing it at the same time, where the “obscene” realities of the body – waste, aging, death – are kept concealed outside the figurative garden wall - to deleterious effects. This thesis proposes new visions of paradise for a world where this separation can no longer stand, where no ‘elsewhere’ remains and entanglement is unavoidable. A series of gardens – or, more accurately, anti-gardens – serve as prototypes for a strange new Florida paradise, where the obscene enters and new forms of coexistence – between the retiree and manatee, the human and the nonhuman – emerge.
• Spatial Paradigm of Sentiment
  How space brings emotional impacts? This question is often answered in ambiguous way. “Vast space creates loneliness and small, cozy space is much more acceptable for human’s psychological well-being”, empirically described by designers. However, this loosely defined relationship has produced unexpected user experience, in which a neuro-architectural framework needs to be involved. This thesis project will be delivered in two parts—a research to set up design framework and a proof-of-concept design prototype on chosen site. The research part of this thesis introduces a new framework to evaluate the relationship between human emotions and architectural space with a focus on spatial sequence. It presents how the reaction of emotional states onto spatial qualities can be respectively and collectively measured through qualitative and quantitative methods. Through the technology of electroencephalography and establishment of virtual environment, we can collect emotional and behavioral data, specifically in relation to arousal of positive emotion and neurocognitive ability to concentrate, from participants immersed in virtual environments that vary in lighting, furniture layouts, and spatial partitioning. The findings will suggest that these criteria draw crucial impacts on emotional states and propose a design project that can implement this framework of space-sentiment paradigm to boost spatial design for architects. The design part of this thesis creates a building prototype for the new space-production relation of work-from-home to rethink spatial adaptability on supporting mood and productivity. The chosen sites will be vacant pier lands along the Boston waterfront, which will be retrofitted as new affordable apartments for home workers.
• What Brings More People to Parks? Open Space Environment and Visitation in Tokyo
  In dense urban settings, efficient use of land is a crucial issue. Especially, urban parks take a large amount of space in high land value areas. Creating an attractive park environment for current and future visitors has the potential to increase the benefits provided by parks to surrounding communities as well as individual park visitors (Dramstad, Tveit, Fjellstad, & Fry, 2006; Roberts, McEachan, Margary, Conner, & Kellar, 2016; Whyte, 1980). This study provides models to predict the number of annual visitors to parks, and identifies the associations between park visitations and environmental factors in parks with a specific focus on medium sized neighborhood parks. The main research questions that this study addresses include the followings. Are the proportions of specific land covers (tree, water, and building) associated with visitation volumes after removing the effects from park land size and demographic variables? If so, what are the characteristics and magnitudes of the associations? This study uses neighborhood parks in Tokyo, Japan as its samples. Among more than 5,000 official urban parks in the 23 central wards of Tokyo, 185 medium-sized parks between 1ha and 10ha were selected. The annual visitation to parks was estimated through cell-phone GPS records. This GPS processing method effectively estimates visitation to medium sized parks that oftentimes are impossible to acquire. Through this application, this study exemplifies how newly emerging industry scale data can contribute to understanding of everyday activities of people that can aid more efficient planning and design (Calabrese, Diao, Di Lorenzo, Ferreira, & Ratti, 2013; Girardin, Vaccari, Gerber, Biderman, & Ratti, 2009). This study investigates the research questions through both OLS and multi-level models. First, a baseline model with three most probable factors - park size, surrounding population, and building footprint - were carefully established. The associations between land cover variables and visitation volumes were estimated on top of the baseline model. To enable a more robust conclusion, several sensitivity tests were conducted. The final baseline model found to have a very high fit (R2=0.8628), and the estimation remained robust when multi-level modeling was introduced. When several models were tested, the quadratic relationship between visitation and tree cover percentage appeared clearly and consistently. Although less clear than tree cover percentage, there was a positive association between visitation and water cover percentage in an acceptable significance. Also, the magnitude and certainty of the association between visitation and tree cover percentage remained almost same after water cover was added to the model. This study found there is an approximate optimal value of tree cover, which is 45%. When tree cover percentage increases from 10% to 30%, the number of visitors is likely to go up by 21,696 people yearly and 59 people daily. When tree cover percentage increases from 60% to 80%, the number of visitors is likely to decrease by 22,124 people yearly and 61 people daily. As for water cover, 10% increase in water cover percentage is likely to be related with 14,168 more visitors per year and 39 more visitors per day. The magnitudes of these associations are considerable, even when compared to the baseline factors. For example, 1ha increase in park land area is associated with an increase of 15,527 visitors yearly. These results, although not strictly causal, suggest that design or environmental quality variables in parks are important in attracting more people to parks. Careful design of parks with appropriate amount of diverse environmental elements may be more effective than creating large parks in terms of benefitting individuals and community. Furthermore, considering the high land values of large cities such as Tokyo, these findings can help the government with cost-effective park planning.
• Aqua Firma/Incognita/Communi
  This thesis drifts into the ocean’s dark, turbulent depths to envision how urbanized seas erode landed geologics. Modernity has figured the ocean as an unknowable expanse opposed to land yet suffuse with extractable resources. In this way, the ocean has played backdrop for contested visions: as a space of biopolitical mobility as well as competition for natural resources and the policing of political borders. The 1982 United Nations Convention of the Law of the Seas (U.N.C.L.O.S.) attempted to reconcile these conflicting seascapes through the international legal principal of res communis, or “the common heritage of mankind.” Ultimately, this thesis portrays the ocean-as-commons through the Blake Plateau, a deep-sea landform 300 miles off the southeast coast of the United States currently subject to aggressive prospecting for rare earth minerals. The site acts as the locus of the Ocean Column Observatory (O.C.O.), a multi-scalar assemblage of decommissioned maritime infrastructure that supports vibrant relations between life and matter. Imagining new ways of inhabiting the ocean necessarily entails creating new representations attuned to watery ways of seeing landscape.
• Machina.NET: A Library for Programming and Real-Time Control of Industrial Robots
  Machina is a .NET library for programming and control of industrial robots. It is designed to build applications that interface with robotic devices in real time. The library features a high-level API of simple, device-agnostic action verbs to issue motion requests to robots, and translates them to device-specific instructions using low-level communication protocols and managing priority queues. It also features a set of execution-related events to notify users of changes in the asynchronous state of the robot, fostering programming styles that are reactive rather than prescriptive. These features promote an enactive approach to robotics, and provide an immediate and intuitive entry point to real-time robot control, making Machina particularly suitable for controlling systems that require concurrent responsiveness to sensory or user input. While Machina currently supports mostly six-axis industrial robotic arms, it can be easily extended to any actuable device that moves in three-dimensional space, such as 3D printers, CNC machines, drones, robotic toys, etc. Machina is geared towards users in the creative fields, like designers, artists, makers and creative coders, and promotes features such as interactivity, intuitiveness, feedback, concurrency and cross-platform compatibility, over performance or feature-fullness. We hope this framework will help ease access for novice users to the field of robotics.
• Built Environment and Self-Rated Health: Comparing Young, Middle-Aged, and Older People in Chengdu, China
  Objectives: This article explores how the building-scale built environment is associated with self-rated health, examining differences in this association among younger, middle-aged, and older age groups. Features examined included building type, building condition, and sidewalk presence in front of dwellings. Background: Understanding how the relationships between built environments and health vary across age groups helps to build a healthy environment for all. However, most studies have concentrated on the neighborhood or indoor environment, rather than whole buildings, and few have compared age groups. Methods: This study analyzed survey data from 1,019 adults living in 40 neighborhoods in Chengdu, China, recruited through a clustered random sampling approach. It used a Bayesian logistic mixed-effects model with interaction terms between age-group indicators and other variables. Results: Significant differences exist in the relationships of self-rated health with some environmental and other indicators among age groups. For older people, living in multi-floor buildings, having a household smoker, and undertaking fewer hours of weekly exercise were associated with lower odds of reporting good, very good, or excellent health. These relationships were not identified among middle-aged and younger people. More education was associated with higher odds of reporting better health among older and middle-aged groups. Conclusions: Older people experience more health-related challenges compared to middle-aged and younger people. However, among the examined built environment factors, building type was the only significant factor related to self-rated health among older people. To promote health among older people, this study recommends adding elevators in the multi-floor buildings.
• A New Evangelical Church: Constructing Social Liturgies
  This thesis imagines an American evangelical church architecture for the twenty-first century. Church architecture has long played an important role in the discipline as a type which ordered Christian worship and acted as a civic monument within the urban fabric. However, as Christianity’s cultural power in the United States waned, the civic and architectural role of church buildings declined. This has emerged in two trends in American evangelical church architecture: the construction of banal, warehouse-like structures for suburban megachurches and the appropriation of non-sacred spaces such theaters, gymnasia, and schools for small urban congregations. In both cases, architecture is reduced to a shell for a privately consumed performance, rather than a formative space of social and sacred community. This thesis proposes a new American evangelical church architecture to recover and reassert the importance of Christian sacred space as both formative for worship and civic engagement. By incorporating both liturgical and public gathering spaces, the church is an architectural citizen of the city that welcomes worshippers and non-worshippers alike. Drawing upon Christian theological principles, the church simultaneously embodies its faith identity and engages openly in the civic realm, committed to the social generosity embodied within the core principles of evangelical faith. The thesis blends the sacred and social, liturgy and community, worship and welcome. The new evangelical church is a space of Christian formation and public gathering, embodying both the commitments of the evangelical faith and a generous engagement with the civic realm.
• An Analysis of Public Transportation and Residential Segregation
  Segregation is a complex social phenomenon that occurs across various socio-spatial domains and operates on multiple levels. Past research indicates that segregated residential areas can lead to social and economic exclusion. This study aims to investigate whether bus networks address present spatial inequities or if they perpetuate the inherent segregation in our metropolitan areas. This is achieved through quantitative analysis of two geographies, ZIP Code Tabulation Areas (ZCTAS) and Transit Route Service Areas (TRSAs), in four metropolitan regions (Boston, Chicago, Dallas, Los Angeles). Indexes of dissimilarity and isolation are employed to measure and compare the degree of racial segregation in the respective geographies. Analysis shows that TRSAs indicate less segregation than ZCTAs, that is bus networks demonstrate less segregation.
• DMV / RCP : Inside the Agency
  The Department of Motor Vehicles is a state agency full of contradictions: originally established for the purpose of abating the public nuisance of speeding drivers, the agency is now imprinted upon the cultural imaginary as a public nuisance itself. Though it is an arm of the state government fundamentally important to our democracy, charged with granting identification and voter rights, no agency is more loathed across the population. In spite of helping itself to all the rhetoric of scientific management, boasting a modern, efficient, cost-effective and convenient service, it remains an infuriatingly ineffective process, requiring long wait times and frustrating paperwork. To so many Americans then, accustomed to convenience and service, the Department of Motor Vehicles has paradoxically become a cultural counter-icon to the American way of life. My thesis recasts the current organization of the DMV experience by retrofitting one particular branch of the agency in Detroit, Michigan. In recent years, the former General Motors Headquarters and other tall office buildings in the New Center were bought by the state of Michigan and transformed into state administrative offices. This project intervenes on the first two floors of the General Motors building by inserting a new spatial ceiling-scape into the deep plan to host the DMV and the Department of Records. The proposed ceiling shapes this continuous interior office space into a series of rooms at different scales, which differentiate between public atria and intimate examining rooms, embodying the biometric and individualizing processes of the DMV as spatialized interfaces between the individual, the pubic, and the state. The processes of this new DMV, drawn out along the entire extent of the queue become both all waiting, or no waiting at all. While the ceiling is often added as an afterthought, I put forward the reflected ceiling plan as a site of invention in redirecting hierarchy, program, and spatial differentiation. As Raymond Hood once said, “the plan is of primary importance because on the floor are performed all the activities of the human occupants," - implying the plan is the primary instrument of getting things done efficiently. But at the DMV, people spend most of their time waiting, that is, not doing anything. Here, more than the plan, it is the ceiling, with its atmospheric and immersive attributes, that can operate as a tool for activating and reclaiming this idleness as the instigator for the creation of a collective, bringing together the waiting public, and transforming the DMV into a new civic type.