Mansa College of Education

Items

• The Housing Affordability Crisis: Property Tax as a Problem-Solver or Trouble-Maker
  The global housing affordability crisis has reached critical proportions in major cities like New York and Taipei, where soaring housing prices have placed immense pressure on homebuyers and residents. Governments worldwide are actively seeking effective solutions, with property tax emerging as a commonly employed approach due to the regulatory powers governments possess in tax systems. New York State initiated property tax caps in 2012, known as the levy cap, which restrained property tax levy growth to either 2% or the inflation rate. In contrast, Taipei City introduced distinct measures, namely the Hoarding Tax, in 2014, aiming to encourage property hoarders to release vacant units into the housing market. These divergent approaches raise critical questions: What motivated these cities to adopt such contrasting policies, and what are the outcomes in terms of housing affordability? This dissertation contributes to the discourse by conducting semi-structured interviews, validating hypotheses through interrupted time series (ITS) and Difference-in-Differences (DID) analyses, and offering insights into the effectiveness of property tax caps at the regional or district level. Our quantitative models indicate the potential for property tax caps to raise housing prices, but the Hoarding Tax's intended objectives were not fully realized. Surprisingly, the Hoarding Tax did not effectively mitigate inflation and appeared to facilitate the transfer of the tax burden from sellers to homebuyers, leading to higher prices in most areas. This study contextualizes these findings within market, cultural, and governance factors unique to each case, offering comprehensive insights into policy effects and their underlying rationales, decisions, and multifaceted implications.
• Gendered Sao Paulo: Towards an equal city for all.
  Cities are complex sociopolitical, economic, and cultural organizations perceived and used differently based on social class, gender, and race. This thesis acknowledges many voices were omitted in the urbanization of Sao Paulo, affecting the right to the city and safe access to basic services. Women are underrepresented in decision-making positions and processes. This study examines the mechanism and consequences of gender-based inequality, the neglect of social infrastructure, and the rising violence resulting in fear as the city’s modus operandi. Women face hardships in the household and limited opportunities for prosperity and growth due to social reproduction and lack of support from public infrastructures and services. How can we propose an urban design practice and culture acknowledging women’s needs for mobility and civic participation, reflecting on social infrastructures that are safer and more welcoming to all? Gendered perspectives thus can strengthen community bonds and create more equitable access to the city.
• The Vascularization of Buildings: Micro- to Milli-Scale Flow Systems for Heating and Cooling in the Built Environment
  Things are getting smaller. Energy use is getting bigger. These statements roughly summarize the current state of the material sciences and climate control in buildings, respectively. This thesis presents a novel opportunity to translate micro-scale technologies into environmental building design. This work looks to the fabrication, design, and thermodynamic principles of micro- and milli-scale flow systems from a broad range of industries and scientific applications. The thesis asks how and where these technologies may benefit building design. Strategies for building heating and cooling that prioritize low-temperature lift heat exchangers and increased connectivity to freely available energy in the building environment are identified. From this, a series of experimentally intensive studies are conducted that ask: How do we design and size vascular flow systems? Where do we apply these systems? And how do we make them? The resulting work contributes novel design methods for the vascularization of buildings. The novel contributions of this research include the following: (1) Experimentally derived design rules and a numerical modeling method for optimizing the design and element sizing of a thin film micro-channel device that can provide cooling fluxes suitable for thermal regulation in buildings using modest flow of room temperature water; (2) Fabrication strategies, prediction models, and experimental data for a novel vascularized chilled ceiling prototype that achieves increased heat transfer and cooling performance through the design of laminate micro-channel water-circuits embedded in origami-inspired surface geometries; (3) Prediction models, numerical models, and experimental data for the design of heat-exchanging vascular-porous materials that pre-heat incoming air that is pulled across a building's envelope by a fan or chimney.
• Centering Rurality: Building Rural Theory in the Black Belt
  Urbanity has long been the practical and epistemological domain of design and planning theories. As such, the methods and tools for addressing global climate challenges and persistent social inequalities have also been disproportionately urbane in scope. Conversely, rurality has remained a largely peripheral area of study despite its outsized global footprint and importance to contemporary human existence. Unlike the limitations of our intellectual domains, global challenges transcend the territorially constrained urban typology. Reducing our carbon emissions while sustainably meeting ever-increasing energy and resource demands will involve a dramatic rethinking of both urban and rural forms of human settlement. This thesis seeks to develop a theoretical and methodological framework for ‘rural design’ by analyzing the historic and contemporary development patterns and lived experiences of communities in the Black Belt Region of the Southern United States and concludes with a provocation towards the future development of rural design and planning practice as a critical area of study.
• At-Your-Service: Gas Station Futures in Post-Industrial USA
  This thesis explores the unrealized potential of service stations in shaping environmental progress, social infrastructure, and food equity in America. Leveraging architecture to tackle challenges like food system design and environmental remediation, service station sites offer a promising canvas for innovative land use and spatial interventions across the nation. Three catalysts drive this body of research: the imminent climate-driven energy transition, EVs disruption of the traditional user experience, and reductions in social infrastructure funding. With over 115,000 sites in the U.S., (nearly 80,000 acres) and projections suggesting that up to 80% of fuel retail businesses may face unprofitability by 2035, scalability lies in plain sight. As a result, this thesis envisions service stations as dynamic hubs for services beyond traditional convenience retail, with a specific focus on last-mile food logistics, public space access, and environmental research. In addition to their economic and environmental potential, the study also addresses the sociocultural evolution of service stations. From their origin as pharmacies in 1885 Germany to specialization with the automobile era, the research traces the influence of the American dream, post-war expansion, and the convenience age on these spaces. In conclusion, this research poses two pivotal questions. What if service stations played a central role in an ecologically positive future? What if they became hubs for equitable access to public space, fresh food, and well-being services? By reimagining service stations with these considerations, we unlock the potential for resilient, inclusive communities and innovative solutions to pressing environmental and societal issues.
• Seadoo Seaway: Four Tales of Cultural Imaginaries and Climate Futures on the Trent-Severn
  Water, ice, and snow are key figures of Canadian cultural identity, and rightly so as Canada has more bodies of water than the rest of the world combined. This cohabitation with water has sponsored a unique cultural landscape, shaping ideas of leisure, sport, and recreation directly informed by water in all its states. The Seadoo Seaway looks to understand, augment, and expand this cultural landscape within the context of changing climates, and resultantly changing relationships between Canadians and water. The project investigates this change within the Trent-Severn Waterway, a recreational waterway in Southern Ontario that is at the forefront of both contemporary reproductions of this cultural imaginary, and rapidly changing climate as the region is set to be the first in the nation to experience winters without frozen waters. The goal of the project is not to longingly reproduce relationships with water but to accept climate realities and provide modes to expand this cultural imaginary into new relationships with water, in all its forms.
• Synthetic Ecologies: Design and the Ecological Imagination
  The present historical condition has been characterized by the impasse between two seemingly opposing narratives, one of modernization, mastery, and progress (usually associated to economic growth), and another of interdependence, precaution, and balance (usually associated to ecological integrity). In addressing the relationship between design and ecology, this dissertation’s aims are threefold. First, it problematizes the relationship between design and ecology defined by the apparently self-evident discourse of mainstream environmentalism developed since the seventies around the institutional notion of sustainability. The dissertation reveals how ecology, in its different acceptations (as a scientific field, a synonym for environmentalism, and a particular worldview) played a central role in the processes of de-politicization and re-politicization of design discourse, first as a cultural metaphor in the theoretical writings of the late 1990s and early 2000s, then as the result from the maturation of political ecology accelerated by the Global Financial Crash of 2007-9. Second, drawing from a comparative literature analysis of representative texts from different bodies of ecological scholarship (environmentalism, techno-managerialism, political ecology, and ecological philosophy), the dissertation probes the limits of different instances of the ecological metaphor and the effect these have on the construction of political narratives. Third, the dissertation rearticulates the relationship between design and ecology (now understood as an aesthetic as much as a political problem) asserting that the current cultural impasse can be overcome if politico-ecologic problems are restated as design problems.
• Delineating urban park catchment areas using mobile phone data: A case study of Tokyo
  Urban parks can offer both physical and psychological health benefits to urban dwellers and provide social, economic, and environmental benefits to society. Earlier research on the usage of urban parks relied on fixed distance or walking time to delineate urban park catchment areas. However, actual catchment areas can be affected by many factors other than park surface areas, such as social capital cultivation, cultural adaptation, climate and seasonal variation, and park function and facilities provided. This study advanced this method by using mobile phone data to delineate urban park catchment area. The study area is the 23 special wards of Tokyo or tokubetsu-ku, the core of the capital of Japan. The location data of over 1 million anonymous mobile phone users was collected in 2011. The results show that: (1) the park catchment areas vary significantly by park surface areas: people use smaller parks nearby but also travel further to larger parks; (2) even for the parks in the same size category, there are notable differences in the spatial pattern of visitors, which cannot be simply summarized with average distance or catchment radius; and (3) almost all the parks, regardless of its size and function, had the highest user density right around the vicinity, exemplified by the density-distance function closely follow a decay trend line within 1–2 km radius of the park. As such, this study used the density threshold and density-distance function to measure park catchment. We concluded that the application of mobile phone location data can improve our understanding of an urban park catchment area, provide useful information and methods to analyze the usage of urban parks, and can aid in the planning and policy-making of urban parks.
• A Living Room Is A House Is A School Is A Home Is A Home Front: Re-opening The Cambridge School
  The Cambridge School of Architecture and Landscape Architecture (1915 - 1942) was a short-lived but significant experiment in architectural education. Over its 27-year lifespan, it produced over 800 graduates, more than 250 women-led firms, and was one of the larger schools at the time. It was also the first US architecture school to offer women master’s degrees and the first school to combine the teaching of architecture and landscape architecture. It redefined architectural pedagogy, cross-disciplinary collaboration, and academia’s relationship to practice. Today, its history is hardly known. This thesis unearths the Cambridge School’s rich but forgotten history by reappraising its past and envisioning a new future: How, in 1928, the Cambridge School started in a living room, later moved to a house, and eventually transformed into a school. How, in between two world wars, the Cambridge School became a home, and a home front, to women who wanted to access architectural education. How, then, in 2028, the Cambridge School reopens as an institute: a living archive remembering the school’s past and facilitating its future. This institute is housed in the school’s old site of an 1827 colonial-revival house and its 1928 alumni-designed extension in Harvard Square. Through architectural interventions, the thesis reignites the school’s legacy of resistance. These interventions turn the building into an institute that resists institutionalization: an architecture as a living archive. Through built form, the new Cambridge School reframes history and acts as a tool to reinform architectural pedagogy and practice today.
• Spatial Opportunities for Self-Produced Environments
  Physical planning has contributed to perpetuating spatial inequality in Caracas, Venezuela, a dynamic that has many parallelisms with other processes that result in social and economic inequalities in Latin America. The consequence has been the reduction of access to spatial opportunities for people living in Self-Produced Settlements. Working with a historical lens, this thesis aims to identify the reasons why this has happened. The study begins in 1657 with the founding of Caracas and culminates in the government of Hugo Chávez the first decade of the twenty-first century. The research highlights the end of the Guzmán Blanco period at the end of the nineteenth century when the government carried out the first national population census, and the experience of Banco Obrero, a federal institution created in 1928 focused on the subject of housing for underprivileged communities. To achieve this goal, this thesis proposes an index to measure spatial opportunities, and a methodology that applies the index to the analysis of government sponsored project as well as planning reports by federal agencies since the Venezuela oil-boom to our days. Self-Produced Neighborhoods are known worldwide as slums. This thesis understands them as a form of urban development that occurs when communities manage the construction of their neighborhoods with no prior planning but through an incremental yet effective system of self-organization. From the analysis of technological, accessibility, and other infrastructural networks for the case of Latin America, we conclude that Self Production is efficient for the progressive construction of housing although fundamentally deficient in its lack of access to networked infrastructure systems. Nevertheless, most planning strategies of divergent ideological approaches have assumed fragmented and localized perspectives in planning Self-Produced Neighborhoods by providing scattered and spatially disarticulated “points of resources,” most often aimed at the construction of housing units. Instead, this thesis proposes that the framework of Spatial Opportunities, when applied to Self-Produced Environments could result in the integration of these extensive parts of the city by prioritizing networked infrastructural systems over housing units. This instrument is hinged on the right to the city discourse, which posits that cities are environments that either allow or limit the development of the capabilities of their citizens, in which the networked access to the opportunities offered by the city is a fundamental variable.
• Photobiological Material Systems: Spectrally-Selective Surfaces for the Regulation of Indoor Alertness
  Color, light, and their interaction within the built environment have always been pertinent spatial and aesthetic factors that architects consider in their work; however, their study has been limited to a primarily perceptual perspective. This thesis studies the relationship between color, light, and design from a physiological perspective, and, in particular, through the lens of newly discovered findings in human neuroscience and photobiology. Those findings pertain to the discovery of light as a promoter of alertness -or sleep- depending on its spectrum, as introduced through the discovery of a non-visual, photosensitive system in the human retina. That system consists of a network of intrinsically photosensitive retinal ganglion cells (ipRGCs) and is responsible for synchronizing human circadian rhythms and a series of associated bodily functions such as sleep/wake cycles and hormone production. The key photopigment that activates that system is melanopsin, a blue-light sensitive photopigment that, depending on the spectra and the illuminance of the light, triggers a biochemical cascade that signals the brain on the synchronization of the body’s daily rhythms. Specifically, melanopsin photoreceptors have a peak light absorption at wavelengths of approximately 480 nanometers. To date, research in lighting and photobiology has examined alertness and sleep effects mainly in relation to light spectra, overlooking the role of architectural surfaces and materials in the shaping of an environment's photobiological behavior. Moreover, research has not yet addressed photobiological behavior in an adaptive context where interiors are designed to affect both daytime- and nighttime-appropriate spectral content. To address this problem, the thesis proposes Photobiological Material Systems as a design framework for spectrally selective surfaces that, in combination with adaptive lighting infrastructures, can promote alertness effects during the day and sleep-promoting effects during nighttime. The proposed framework is developed through a series of physical and simulation studies of increasing complexity, as well as a contextualization of the studies' results within contemporary theories of color and areas of architectural discourse. Through the introduction of this new framework, the thesis contributes to the areas of Architectural Design, Lighting Design, and Photobiology in various aspects: at a fundamental level, the thesis produces new knowledge on how spatial elements such as color, light, and surface geometry contribute to an interior environment’s alertness and sleep effects on its occupants; from a standards perspective, it explores the limits of photobiological efficiency of commercially available color swatches when combined with light sources of different spectra; at an application level, the thesis introduces a new, science-grounded and biology-driven framework for using color in design and architecture.
• CRIPPING ARCHITECTURE
  A study in critical heterogeneity. Cripping Architecture argues that what we think of as “universal design” - a least-common-denominator model - does not and cannot produce fully equitable architecture on its own. “Universality” is in fact a colonial value; what is required instead for a truly equitable world is a proliferation of diversity to capture edge cases, not just a reduction in diversity that attempts to capture everyone. What is required for a truly equitable world is what I have termed critical heterogeneity - an echo of Kenneth Frampton’s critical regionalism - calling for a proliferation of diversity to capture edge cases, rather than solely a reduction in diversity that attempts to capture everyone. Today, the disabled community exists physically fragmented, isolated, and excluded across an ableist world. This dehumanising inequity burgeons as the global population ages and life expectancy extends, expanding the already 20% of people who are disabled. Meanwhile, in the urban realm, Chinatowns, Koreatowns, Little Italies and Polands thrive - a model that microcommunities of the disabled could ostensibly also benefit from, if only it existed for them. The project thus asks what multi-family housing would look like if it was designed for a community of bodies in wheelchairs as the “neutral” norm. The resultant housing estate establishes sequences according to a different temporal experience - a nod to the “crip time” described in disability studies. Instrumentalising the ramp at multiple scales, it multiplies horizons both interior and exterior, creating an architecture flexible in vantage points for less flexible bodies. It is diverse in ways different than ableist architecture, yet through typological dialogue with the English terraced house and the London railway-adjacent linear housing estate, remains unexceptionally rooted in its local context. Seven unit types serve a range of household structures - those who can live independently outside of ableist spaces, those who require live-in care, those who cohabitate with able-bodied family. Interior interventions speak to the experience of the body: a 5’ turning circle is privileged throughout, while a unique inverted bay window allows for the face to be fully pressed up against the glass. Periodic polyrhythmic aggregation of these units yield local heterogeneities at the scale of the sub-community between neighbours; other communities are formed along the alternate temporal axis of the outdoor ramp that links otherwise disparate units together. The Makian group form of the whole yields a new urban topography built on a 1:20 slope - negotiating dramatic local grade changes and stitching opposite ends together with a public green corridor. The result is a unique community that inverts the status quo of able-designed and wheelchair-adapted to wheelchair-designed and able-adapted. By inviting the public to participate as passers-by, the community is given a place to call home without segregation or isolation - creating a new relationship between a marginalised group finally able to gaze upon the majority, and be gazed upon on the same level.
• Envisioning Child-Friendly Neighborhoods: From the Context of Brazilian Cities to the World
  In recent years, child advocates, international organizations, and foundations have seen a move toward child-friendly cities (UNICEF, 2004). This movement advocates for urban interventions that reflect children's rights, policies, and programs, all designed to enhance child health and wellbeing (Woolcock, G., Gleeson, B., & Randolph, B., 2010). Children's environments can either provide the conditions for biological systems to produce positive health outcomes, or enable toxic environmental experiences in the early stages of life. Negative environments can affect the brain architecture of a child, and lead to negative developmental and mental health outcomes later in adulthood. (Shonkoff, J.P. & Phillips, D.A. (Eds.), 2000; Center on the Developing Child at Harvard University, 2010). Spatial constraints of young people's lives today in cities direct our attention to the necessity of creating cities where children can successfully develop rather than constraining them to particular play spaces (Freeman, 2006). Despite this need, policy makers still struggle to adopt the mindsets and behavioral changes needed to create child-friendly cities (Moore-Cherry, 2014). If cities aren't child-friendly, then how can we make them so? In order to answer this, we need to understand the following: - What are child-friendly cities, and what is preventing them from being created? - How are local actors working on the ground toward building positive environments for children in cities? - How can we understand, define, develop, and implement a new approach for child-friendly cities that takes into account differences across cities and nations? This dissertation argues that it’s not only a priority to invest in building child-friendly cities based on other than European models, but also to design local specific approaches where every child within every neighborhood is reached in a more effective, just, and equitable way. Building on a conceptual framework through literature review and on a comparative analysis using interviews, this study has sought to understand how local actors are working on the ground to implement different processes of child friendliness in Brazilian cities. This research has aimed to identify barriers that are preventing such cities from becoming child-friendly. Further, its interpretations bring a contribution to the field by advancing new possibilities and perspectives that promote social inclusion, equity, and justice for all children when envisioning and implementing child friendliness in cities worldwide.
• Big Tech's Emerging Roles in Local Housing Delivery: Two Case Studies of Corporate Affordable Housing Initiatives in United States Tech Hubs
  This thesis consists of two case studies examining the development and implementation of Microsoft and Amazon’s recent corporate affordable housing initiatives. Between 2018 and 2021, in the wake of mounting public concerns about gentrification in the regions where Big Tech companies are headquartered and facing the possibility of new local corporate taxes to fund affordable housing, Big Tech companies announced funding for new affordable housing initiatives. The case studies analyze two of these initiatives’ theories of change, partnership strategies and decision-making processes. Research relies on primary and secondary source materials and semi-structured interviews with individuals involved in the initiatives. The analysis seeks to distill the implications of these new initiatives for partnership models for affordable housing development and concludes with lessons for future corporate affordable housing funding partnerships. This thesis makes the broader argument that as voluntary corporate philanthropy emerges as a substitute for regulatory approaches to redistributing the benefits of regional economic growth, the public should remain vigilant and vocal in these companies’ decision-making processes.
• The Last REFUGIA: Wild Seeds Takeover the Riparian Buffer in North Central Wisconsin
  Begin with the discussion of Survivalism within a more unpredictable future biosphere; this thesis explores a new agency for the collaborative land stewardship and collective policy-making of the Fox-Wolf watershed riparian zones. In this region, riparian zones are recognized as the last “refugia” for wild seeds and wildlife. Due to the ambiguous regulation, the entire riparian zones became fragmented by the extreme expansion of pasture-crop-based agricultural production.  By retracing the Indigenous Menominee practice of land stewardship and existing agricultural practices in North Central Wisconsin, this project reimagines how landscape architecture would act as a medium for public decision-making and co-knowledge. Six typologies of collaborative stewardship of the riparian zones emerge based on the existing condition and ownership of riparian areas, advocating for a community-driven policy-making process of the riparian zones’ stewardship.
• Chip-budDing: Garage, Garden, Graphics
   Chip-budDing is a horticultural adaptation of Peabody Terrace’s garage, designed by Josep Lluís Sert. In both its concept and its method, this thesis adopts the horticultural technique of 'chip budding' as a model for the ecological adaptation of an existing building. In both public aesthetics — ‘eco-brutalism’ is the most popular architecture-related prompt for AI-imaging technologies—and critical inquiry—the emergence of arguments against the conventional “growth” of the built environment—specific designs are connected to environment ethics. This thesis pursues an 'ABC' of techniques to develop a design intervention into existing urban situation: C) Graphics - Chipping archival stock: Using the digitized drawings from the Sert archive as the site of the project; B) Garden - Grafting metasequoias: Using dawn redwoods as a 'metaphor bud' that spur a modular architecture intervention; A) Garage - Budding new housing: Using modular tiling inspired by both forestation and textile to design an 'eco-brutalist-style' transformation of infrastructure.
• Marronage as Methodology
  Marronage, the practice of escaping bondage from slavery, is an inherently spatial practice. Maroons, or fugitive slaves, understood their environments as fluid, multilayered, and inseparable from the land; they superimposed multiple forms of spatial knowledge in order to communicate with one another, find cover for social and spiritual rituals, organize work stoppages and other labor tactics, and to navigate the world both inside and outside the plantation. Historians, geographers, and other scholars have used marronage as a conceptual tool to illustrate the political and topographic importance of spatial autonomy for fugitive groups, both in the context of chattel slavery in the Americas and in other historical and geographical contexts. Understanding marronage as a methodology or mode of inquiry for any discipline means examining inherited tools and methods, questioning who has wielded them to what ends, and learning ways that we might use them differently. Despite their utility, or perhaps because of it, architectural drawing conventions neutralize the potential political and social agency of architecture as such. If architecture has been acknowledged to be complicit with histories of white supremacy and imperial conquest, architects today require a different set of methodologies to overcome the politically neutralizing function of our inherited drawing conventions. Marronage as methodology opens up the possibility for architects to challenge and subvert the logics of enclosure and domination that inform both drawing and building today. By examining a firsthand narrative of marronage in Alabama alongside archival building records from 18th- and 19th-century Cambridge, how can we uncover spatialized histories from the margins and reorient architectural practice away from rigid material and symbolic hierarchies and toward mobility, mutualism, and liberation?
• Dot as Architecture
  This thesis project investigates the role of a Dot, first by defining the Dot within Architecture and second by situating the Dot within the contemporary city as a new proposal of nonfigurative architecture. Introducing the Dot in the contemporary city disrupts the urban scenography as the current image of the urban landscape no longer reflects the entire present condition of work. The Dot becomes an active instrument in addressing contemporary workplace needs by questioning the role and relation of those who represent new forms of work and workers to the city. The Dot doesn’t dictate how one works. The Dot is a place that allows those who don’t have a place to work within the city a place to go. The Dot represents a form of work based on individualism, startups, and the public as agents; the Dot presents a new form and image of work within Detroit.
• The Way of Mount Tai: Cultural Heritage and Everyday Life in Contemporary China
  What does the past mean, and how might it be operationalized, in contemporary China? “The Way of Mount Tai” explores these questions through a heritage-informed urban regeneration project at the foot of one of China's most famous peaks. The project develops 2km of streetscape, with adjacent parcels, from the historic temple to the base of the mountain. This area is equally an everyday urban neighborhood and an internationally significant pilgrimage route; the project’s strategies—shared mobility, graduated spaces, different directional experiences, and flexibility of building use over time—manage the tension between tourism and the everyday through the cultivation of an intense street life. This cauldron of bubbling sociality is a shared urban heritage as ancient as it is novel, as quotidian as it is spectacular.
• Planning Climate Philanthropy
  Nearly every local climate plan in the United States is, in some way, funded by philanthropic sources, whether through direct underwriting of government programs, capacity building, sponsorship of academic research, or support for not-for-profit advocacy organizations. This exchange represents an extension of the historic and ongoing dialogue between public sector planning and philanthropy, which remains a relatively opaque phenomenon. This thesis argues that there is a need for holistic evaluation of philanthropic programs in the public interest rather than solely programmatic or internal analysis. With this goal, I examine foundation-funded climate programs in Boston to determine their success at leveraging future funding, creating policy change, and furthering equitable outcomes. Utilizing this analysis, this thesis puts forth a framework for the evaluation of future funding and best practices for identifying needs moving forward into the next phase of climate philanthropy for adaptation.
• Big Roof, Little Roof
  Towards the end of the 19th century, American architecture came into its own. The houses of the briefly ascendent Shingle Style took full and unapologetic advantage of the Gilded Age’s gaudy romanticism. Shingles wrapped uninterrupted around interwoven gables and complexly curved surfaces. Dormers seamlessly devolved from roof planes, and covered porches emphasized horizontality amidst the proliferation of building wings. Conic rooflets, spiraling towers, bending walls, and other architectural anomalies were all contained within the vacuum-shrunk uniformity of the shingled aggregate. In the words of Vincent Scully, the genre’s pre-eminent scholar, the houses of the Shingle Style comprised “the freest and, on the whole, among the most generous forms that the United States has yet produced. In their own way they were also the gentlest forms: the most relaxed and spiritually open.”
• A Pool in the City
  American municipal pools exist in cities, often surrounded by car-centric spaces such as freeways, parking lots, big-box stores, and industrial sites. They have traditionally employed a typology of “maximum building, minimal boundary.” This typology concentrates the bulk of design and construction in one building (with essential amenities such as changing rooms), whereas the boundary, required by law for safety purposes, is lightly built and often realized in the form of chain wire fencing. Careless boundaries like chain wire fencing not only exposes swimming pools to their industrial, car-centric sites, but it also heightens an image of exclusion that has long plagued American municipal pools. This thesis proposes a typology of “maximum boundary, minimal building” for the American municipal pool. Through a study of materials, lighting, proportions, tectonics, and local construction practices, this new swimming pool seeks to revive the American municipal pool as an active public space by altering the way swimmers relate to their surroundings and the way the public relate to the pool.
• Playing with Fire: Three Stories of Burning the Forest
  This thesis follows the language of fire between three characters and a forest in the foothills of California’s Sierra Nevada mountains. In this region, growing interest in the “good fire” of prescribed burning is routinely deployed in a non-human ecological silo, failing to embrace its histories -- and potentials -- as an agent of social and political transformation. This project invites that challenge, suggesting forms of communal burning that highlight fire’s potential as a catalyst of dialogue between each other, the stories we bring, and the forests we inhabit. This reading of fire invites complexity, framing the site as at once an experimental forest operated by the U.S. Forest Service, a home for the town of Challenge, and the ancestral homeland of the Nisenan people. These stories guide us into a future of fire in three acts: as participation in the burn, as the cultivation of non-extractive forest-relationships, and as leverage for land access. Within each, spaces of design welcome us into the frictions of burning together -- in pursuit of fire as a collective and elemental force of human nature.
• Form Transition: Decarbonization Beyond Settler Modernity
  Recent discourse about climate change and the spotlight it has put on global energy systems have raised calls for new relationships to energy under a variety of open-ended terms: decarbonization, energy transition, green economy, etc. Following architectural theorist Elise Iturbe [and others], this project understands such calls for energy transition as a deeper contradiction in the structures of global modernity as not just dependent on fossil fuels but in fact shaped by their logic, perpetuated through practices, norms, and institutions in a self-replicating carbon form. Carbon form works to name carbon modernity as form inclusive of the cultural, economic and political conditions of social life sedimented into a spatial algorithm made possible by a certain source of energy, though not dependent on its continued usage. Thus, as Iturbe writes, “if solar panels are increasing the value of a real estate object, in a precarious neoliberal economy, that is carbon form” – that is, it is not just decarbonization of energy infrastructure but the dismantling of carbon form itself that is needed to break the structural norms of carbon modernity. Drawing on indigenous epistemologies, critical feminist studies, decolonial theory and situated entanglement, this thesis identifies carbon modernity not just as carbon form but as form shaped and maintained by the violent legacies of settler colonialism, and argues that dismantling cycles of extraction and exploitation – settler form – requires form transition. Form transition must be messier terrain than energy transition, by design. Bound up in form are affective orientations, electrical wires, invisible signals, concretes, silicones, borders, bodies and world-views. A turn to form transition demands experimentation in methodology and praxis. This project contemplates form transition through a multiyear engagement with a collective indigenous initiative tending to climate change planning at home in the Yukon Territory, Canada – a landscape where the impacts of climate change and questions of conservation are taken up in different ways by the First Nation and State bodies that co-govern the territory’s lands and resources. Highlighting aspects of methodology, process and results, the project reflects on epistemological frameworks supporting settler form and those needed to transcend it.
• Divided we drown: Segregation and climate resilience in Metro Manila
  In a flood-prone megacity like Metro Manila, how does urban segregation impact a city’s ability to prevent, mitigate, endure, and recover from climate-related disasters? In this thesis, I combine urban form analysis with qualitative methods to understand how the physicality of the city interplays with the lived experiences of government officials and residents during flood events in Metro Manila. Through the examination of two barangays, Damayang Lagi of Quezon City and Malanday of Marikina, I identify cases in which segregation poses a threat to the safety of residents, such as walls obstructing critical evacuation routes. The thesis culminates in a proposal that explores alternatives to disaster risk management and governance set in motion by spatial negotiations that transcend segregation boundaries. The institutional and urban design interventions that make this possible show that a fragmented barangay could become united against the impending crises that threaten its security.