Malcom Moffat College of Education

Items

• Responses of 73 Ecologists Important in Developing the Foundations of Ecology: Summary of a 1952–59 and 1972 Survey
  Many of the early leading ecologists, especially Americans, were surveyed (primarily between 1952 and 1959) to learn what (1) initially inspired an ecological interest, (2) stimulated a major career direction in ecology, and (3) was one’s major career accomplishment. Patterns of responses from 73 ecologists, primarily in their own words using their own typewriters, are summarized. Yale, Duke, Illinois, Michigan, Oxford, and Wisconsin are the most frequent primary institutions of respondents, who were initially not only concentrated in the U.S. Midwest, but also working in the Northeast, South, West, and abroad. The initial ecological stimulus of survey respondents was most reported as plants, between ages 9 and 11, and a parent. Victor Shelford, Henry Cowles, Edgar Transeau, and Stanley Cain were most mentioned as catalysts of a career direction. Also, the opportunity to teach or work in a new place, or reading a key publication(s), often inspired a career direction. The many early ecologists most frequently knew or interacted with H. Cowles, M. Buell, F. Clements, V. Shelford, S. Cain, and H. Oosting. The most frequent major accomplishments or contributions reported by a leading ecologist were analysis of the ecology, vegetation, or flora of a particular area; elucidated ecosystem, productivity, and nutrients; produced a book(s); furthered understanding of natural communities or vegetation; analyzed succession or vegetation dynamics; and established or ran an administrative unit or natural reserve. These survey response patterns are complemented by a wide range of specific responses by individuals. Selected unusual observations and experiences provide insight into the leading ecologists as people. A perspective provides key insights into the survey, the earliest phase of ecology and its later maturation, and environmental/social conditions affecting early ecologists and ecology.
• Informed Residential Retrofits through THERO (Thermal Resiliency Evaluation using OpenStudio-HPXML)
  Of roughly 111 million buildings in the US, 90% of the buildings are single-family homes. Therefore, residential building stock in the US consumes higher energy than commercial stock. The National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) has proposed ten residential retrofitting packages to decarbonize the existing residential stock in the US. However, their study currently focuses primarily on energy efficiency. There is a catastrophic impact on the resiliency of buildings and the safety of residents due to rising global temperatures leading to uncertain weather. This research aims to evaluate these proposed retrofit packages across energy efficiency and thermal resiliency paradigms during future, extreme weather, and power outage conditions. To achieve this, a framework called THERO (THErmal Resiliency evaluation using OpenStudio-HPXML ) was built on the foundational framework by NREL, which expands the competencies to run batch simulations for indoor thermal comfort metrics. Simulations were performed on a sample of the energy models in Chicago (n = 500) and Phoenix (n = 200) for future, extreme, and power outage conditions. Three cases were considered from the retrofitting packages: the baseline, an upgrade with enhanced enclosure, and an upgrade with high-efficiency whole-building electrification. The indoor thermal resiliency was evaluated across the metrics of Energy Use Intensity (kWh/sq. mtrs.), Time Not Comfortable based on ASHRAE 55-2004 (hrs), Heat Index Hours (hrs), and Humidex Hours (hrs). We were able to successfully interact with the NREL database, perform batch simulations and compute thermal resiliency using THERO. The current studies show that for indoor thermal resiliency, an enhanced enclosure upgrade performs better in Phoenix, while whole building electrification with high efficiency performs better in Chicago, not only in the current but also in future and extreme weather conditions. However, in the case of a power outage scenario, in both cities, an enhanced enclosure upgrade performs better thermally than a high-efficiency electrification upgrade. Conclusively, this study establishes that indoor thermal resiliency and energy efficiency for residential building retrofitting does not always lead to similar recommendations. Additionally, this project enables the building science community to harness the potential of the rich NREL dataset while informing architects and policymakers on comprehensive retrofitting solutions that make the residential stock more resilient to climate change.
• Learning from Quartzsite, AZ: Emerging Nomadic Spatial Practices in America
  Quartzsite, in Arizona, is a popular winter home base for vehicle dwellers who identify as nomads. While vehicle dwelling in America has diverse motivations, this thesis focuses on 4 million Americans who live in their cars full-time as their sole home and rely on them as a means of seasonal migrations. Building on the author's participation in the nomads’ biggest annual gathering in Quartzsite called Rubber Tramp Rendezvous (RTR) and subsequent interviews; the thesis investigates their spatial practices in urban and non-urban settings. It seeks to shed light on invisible mobile communities emerging from the ongoing decentralization process in the US, driven primarily by economic crises, climate change, and technological advancements. Los Angeles County serves as an urban case study, while Quartzsite serves as a non-urban case study. The thesis advocates for differentiating between houselessness and homelessness, asserting that a houseless nomadic lifestyle can serve as an effective adaptation strategy for individuals confronting the loss of conventional homes. In this context, design intervention aims to enhance nomads’ visibility and vehicle dwelling reliability through systemic thinking, proposing complementary infrastructural modules to address deficiencies along their migration route.
• Open City: Applying Participatory Planning Theory to Open Data Initiatives
  Open data initiatives are nearly a decade old and are purported to foster government transparency, public accessibility, and civic engagement; the open data portal is the material expression of these initiatives and is the object of study for my thesis. My hypothesis is that civic engagement is a highly cited goal but is rarely a feature on portals. I include a review of transparency and accessibility as points of comparison to engagement through a content analysis of 68 municipal open data portals. The resultant findings confirm this hypothesis. Subsequently, I discuss the existing limitations and imagine ways planning theory and planners can improve open data as a forum for participation.
• Personal Robot: navigator in the lattice world
  This thesis describes the microscopic origin of the city as the infinite lattice world. Cities have their own structures. Some are criticized for having a physical layout that defines a hierarchy of dominant social groups. And some of the others are cherished by having so-called semilattice-like structures. But in a microscopic view of the city, these structures fade away, and the remaining is the infinitely distributed nodes. This thesis, “Personal Robot: navigator in the lattice world,” suggests methods of defining the lattice world using low-discrepancy sampling methods and hierarchical path planning for the robots to move around the lattice world. The golden ratio sequence is used to define the lattice world. And to generate the hierarchical path, the potential field, which is used as a heuristic function by a search algorithm, is applied to the lattice field. And by order of the hierarchy of the paths, each path adds costs to the actions that are connected to the generated path. At the end of this thesis, several cases of the application of this technology are introduced: a prototype of a 4-wheel robot, a mobile application that users can modify the potential field of the lattice world, and scenarios of imaginative city transportation.
• What is Aging in Place? Confusions and Contradictions.
  Aging in place is a policy goal for many governments and a personal goal for numerous older people. But what does it mean? Drawing on both scholarly and gray literature, this article outlines seven themes underlying definitions of aging in place. Some are descriptive: never moving, staying put for as long as possible, or remaining in the same vicinity. Two are related to care: staying out of a nursing home or receiving progressively higher levels of care in the same residential care facility without moving. Others are more normative approaches: aging in place as a policy ideal or as an exercise of choice. Definitions have implications for policy debates, urban planning activities, development approaches, and personal decisions. Recognizing that the term has many different definitions and nuances will help clarify policy, planning, and development options.
• MAINTENANCE
  The triangulation of work along flexible and fragmented lines requires a new approach to organizing. Subcontracting and third-party employment have exacerbated structural ambiguities over who works for whom and under what conditions. As such, the legalities of these arrangements are often discredited by employers from the onset of a dispute. To break this cycle, new movements must redefine the nature of this relationship in the eyes of the public, rather than the law, by rearticulating the norms and cultural values that underpin public conceptions of justice and fairness. This project draws from the practicalities and particularities of everyday and ongoing maintenance at Harvard’s Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts to investigate and expand new possibilities in organizing the service sector.
• Management of Vacant Land in Small Communities after Floodplain Buyouts
  What happens to bought-out vacant lands after people move out? After major flood events in the United States, FEMA buys out people’s homes in the 100-year floodplain, and the property must be maintained as open space in perpetuity under the municipal government’s ownership. While municipalities have no specific obligations for bought-out vacant land management, FEMA encourages developing open space development to utilize this land for communal and ecological purposes. However, there are significant challenges for many municipalities around bought-out vacant land management, such as lack of resources, lack of community interest and motivation, and the checkerboard pattern of the land. How can municipalities overcome these barriers and develop context-specific land uses? Through a case study of Princeville, North Carolina, the study analyzes how small communities approach managing bought-out vacant land. First, the study explores the motivations for bought-out vacant land planning in Princeville after Hurricane Matthew. After that, the study investigates the processes through which Princeville forged partnerships and secured funding for projects and what land use planning principles and frameworks were developed. Lastly, resident perceptions and challenges were identified to inform future planning implications. The study found that land use planning for bought-out vacant land can be utilized to address community issues followed by disasters and buyouts, such as historic preservation, flood resilience, food access, and economic development. Municipalities can overcome the challenges in bought-out vacant lot repurposing such as lack of resources and checkerboard land patterns through partnerships, utilizing public land and acquiring additional land, and implementing land leasing and donating programs. The study indicates the need to integrate post-buyout land management as part of the buyout process for better outcomes. Increased federal and state support for post-buyout land management and the need for an integrated platform that manages buyout properties are potential implications.
• Forms of Ecology: Towards New Epistemological Binds Between Landscape Architecture and Ecology
  Forms of Ecology examines the main narratives through which ecology has come to the forefront of landscape architecture during the last two decades, criticizes their reductive implications for design, and proposes a series of alternative narratives of ecology that emphasize ideas of form, by which it fosters new relationships between ecology and landscape architecture as a way to bolster the agency of design as a cultural project. The dissertation departs from a critique of the emphasis on the operative capacities of landscape brought about by ecology’s move to the foreground of landscape architecture. Indeed, the last decades have witnessed a proliferation of ecologically-grounded landscape architecture discourses and built works that emphasize notions of performance—the capacity to carry out work—and adaptation—the capacity to accommodate change in order to endure. While performance and adaptation, as the revision of several case studies shall show, have been extremely fruitful ideas in expanding the field of landscape architecture and its modes of practice, they also entail limitations for design. Through performance, landscape architecture is often invoked as a problem-solving practice, invested in the production of systems to assist in the ecological project of environmental efficiency, and largely unaware of landscape formal associations, that is, landscape’s possibility of being looked at and deciphered. Adaptation, on the other hand, calls for landscape strategies that privilege ecological complexity and its process-based notions of indeterminacy, unpredictability, and open-endedness, which often restrain landscape architecture’s agency in favor of passive positions that relinquish the specification of design outcomes to external forces. In order to overcome these limitations, the dissertation investigates the origins of these ecological views and their biased interpretations of system and process. In so doing, it draws a lineage of the core debates in the evolution of ecological theory during the twentieth century. Amply overlooked in contemporary landscape architecture, core to these debates were questions around the fundamental ecological entity—whether it is the biotic community or the individual organism—and the different modes of interaction that exist between them, as well as around the homeostatic and stochastic nature of environmental processes. The research looks back into the nineteenth century embryonic stages of ecological theory, where these ideas were not so neatly delineated but, instead, embedded within metaphysical and epistemological concepts of form. In seeking to forge new relationships between ecology and landscape architecture, the dissertation applies the conceptual frameworks derived from these debates to the examination of a series of case studies that emphasize the legibility of the different modes of interaction established between designed landscapes and their environment and the different ways by which design deliberately speeds up or slows down the processes through which the environment is formed. In so doing, it contributes to the formulation of new epistemological binds between landscape architecture and ecology. Such an expanded field of reciprocity between design and science allows for a better understanding of the formative processes and interactions of designed landscapes and for an increase in landscape architecture’s potential to articulate new forms of thought that both work on the environment and render it legible as a social construction.
• The Economic Effects of Green Spaces between Planned and Unplanned Communities in Los Angeles County
  This paper examines the relationship between the sale price of single-family properties and green-space characteristics for three communities in Los Angeles County. The results shed light on how green spaces geographically influence property values in two different prototypes of urban growth: planned versus unplanned communities. Quantitative results reveal that property values inconsistently reflect the five major attributes of green spaces (view, distance, size, type, character). In the planned community, active recreational green spaces have a negative impact on property values, while views, larger-sized green spaces, proximities to parks, greenways, and passive recreational green spaces have significant positive impacts. In contrast, in the communities characterized by unplanned growth, only proximity to park is directly reflected in housing values. The findings signify that different attributes of green spaces impact property values in unique ways in planned versus unplanned communities. Considering overall effects, green spaces have a more positive influence on housing values in a planned community.
• Of Unfrozen Waters
  Of Unfrozen Waters adaptation for the deep thaw Retreating sea ice and coastlines are resulting in habitat loss for human and non-human species. A deep investigation into the flux of Arctic materials reveals a need for temporal and malleable infrastructural interventions, which are inherent to the overarching habitat transition strategy for human and non-human species within the Bering Strait region. The Pacific Walrus, a keystone Arctic species, is considered the benthic rototiller of the Arctic and is understood as the primary protagonist. The project offers a lexicon of sedimentary and hydrological analysis-interventions that work with and slow down erosive forces while prioritizing the long-term survival of the walrus as it begins a habitat shift northwards following sea ice retreat. The design of ephemeral and ecologically responsive infrastructure serves to challenge current practices of static coastal adaption interventions. In so doing, it takes an acupunctural and interim approach to mitigating habitat loss and stimulating intertidal ecological growth.
• Suburbia as Tool of Soft Power Projection: A Case Study of Washington Heights Dependents Housing Area, Tokyo (1946-61) and the Proselytizing of the Garden Suburb for Rebuilding Japan under GHQ
  During the Allies’ occupation of Japan between 1945 and 1952, Japanese architectural and industrial design expertise was mobilized by the American leadership to provide for the housing needs of the occupying forces. The resulting residential compounds were known as Dependents Housing (DH) areas, and in terms of formal characteristics, replicated those of the Garden Suburb prototype in the United States. More than functioning as an enclave for an “average Western” setting of living, the archetypal DH through various channels, was also tasked with proselytizing the American suburban model as an exemplary solution to Japan’s own chronic shortage of housing and postwar rebuilding. Using the Washington Heights Dependents Housing Area in Yoyogi as the primary example, this thesis probes the project’s self-declared “forerunner” role as a tool of soft power projection, through analyses of inquiries into Washington Heights’s urban forms and architectural characteristics, its association with and inheritance of past military and defense industrial precedents’ adoption of the Garden Suburb Form, as well as the deployment of propaganda promoting subjects directly or obliquely related to Dependents Housing design under the stricture of occupation.
• Hyphenated Housing: Healthcare-Housing for those Experiencing Homelessness in LA
  Hospitals are the most expensive form of housing. New research suggests that it is far more cost-effective to purchase dedicated housing for homeless patients for an entire year than to house them in a hospital bed for a single week. In response, healthcare systems are experimenting with purchasing housing for their most vulnerable patients: the chronically homeless. I argue that these two programs of healthcare and housing are inextricably linked and that such institutions must be better integrated to address the needs of the communities they serve. The thesis proposes a hybrid typology that operates at a middle-scale – in between an institution and a house – combining clinical care with supportive housing. Building on Dr. Charles Davis’ description of architectural hyphenation, this “hyphenated” typology stitches together layers of elective care to address the individualized needs of unhoused people. The project also serves as a counterpoint to strategies of defensive urbanism, which aim to restrict public space to specific populations. Uncomfortable urban furniture, fences, and spikes prevent homeless occupation. Therefore, while spiky, rough, or overtly figured surfaces prohibit, lack of texture, smoothness, or blankness might serve as an invitation – creating an anti-anti-homeless architecture. Through careful examination of the site in downtown Los Angeles, Hyphenated Housing theorizes a method for introducing a new architectural type into neighborhoods already populated by those experiencing homelessness. Its vocabulary seeks to harmonize both the blank banality of nearby light-industrial buildings and the culturally and aesthetically significant architecture of the area’s historic Black community.
• Walking Culture in China
  Due to its potential significance to both individuals and society, walking as a type of transport mode or physical activity has been intensively discussed by scholars in urban planning and public health fields. However, the impact of culture on walking needs further research. This dissertation poses two questions: 1) What are the characteristics of the culture of walking in China? and 2) How does culture influence walking behavior? For this dissertation, culture is defined as the shared values in a social group. This dissertation uses a mixed-method research strategy to obtain a multi-perspective understanding and to allow triangulation between results. The data were collected through analyzing documents, observation, in-depth semi-structured interviews, and questionnaires recruited with non-random sampling approaches. Data analysis methods include content analysis, critical discourse analysis, the analysis of variance, and regressions. This dissertation finds that 1) Chinese culture has advocated walking in both ancient and modern times; 2) In Beijing, people commonly walk for physical health and other benefits such as mental health, communication, and observing the city, contributing to a culture that views walking as good; 3) urban residents in Beijing inherit the value that walking is good for physical health from traditional Chinese culture, while contemporary culture influences individuals through education, peer influence, and other incentives; and, 4) people with strong positive values about walking are likely to spend much time walking for either transport or leisure or both. This dissertation concludes that culture supports walking in China, and it influences walking by transmitting values. It implies that cultural strategies such as long-term publicity and education can be used to further strengthen this culture and thus encourage walking in Chinese cities.
• Investing in the Rural: Regional Opportunities for More Equitable Development Through Restructured Agriculture Supply-Demand Chains
  Today in India, small and marginal farmers (SMFs) in rural areas are exploited by skewed development which favors large corporate farmers which are directly linked to accelerating urban development. SMFs continue to be exploited due to a lack of market transparency, withholding of training and knowledge for more productive farming, and uneven distribution of resources and modernized tools. The current agriculture production chain is built on one-directional supply with both demand and organizational power resting in the hands of the urban consumer and it’s territoriality. This uneven power dynamic found in the linear supply chain reinforces the extraction of labor, produce, and resources from the farmer. The current market structure requires the use of various intermediaries, such as commission agents, transportation agents, and wholesale marketplaces, also known as Mandi's, which are institutions remnants of colonial power's persistence that date back to the British Raj’s rule. This thesis will use a case study of my grandfather’s plum farm in Himachal Pradesh to observe evidence of exploitation of the rural small landholding farmers and will propose a new approach that reimagines territorial supply chains that can generate equal income for all actors. This proposal will analyze existing systems of production and suggest new forms of government, specifically cooperative societies as an option for organization that connects local farmers through legal state entities which are formed by agriculture producers and share profits and benefits amongst the members. The aim of this thesis is to reveal the one-sided extraction of resources enabled by market supply chain for agricultural products. The thesis re-imagines alternatives to economic growth and suggests investments into infrastructural development that can improve transportation networks, processing factories, and storage facilities as a tool to recenter the rural and revitalize the region. The aim is to provide a means of empowering small farmers who support the urban food supply chain within India. Infrastructural development in the realm of agricultural production must move beyond the outdated idea of rural contexts being used purely for raw production and urban contexts for processing due to their industrialized nature. Furthermore, this thesis will challenge the contemporary preoccupation with the urban as the privileged site for urbanization which is a partial consequence of globalization and liberalization. It proposes that integrating rural producers with entities in city contexts will overcome to the existing urban-rural divide, based on the recognition that infrastructure development has been a significant gateway to development in previous historical moments. Rural communities can obtain help for developing organizations that manage and coordinate the infrastructure and linkages that were absent in earlier state-driven rural development plans by utilizing the benefits of state government, which normally prioritize the metropolis. Benefits stemming from this proposal will be reduction of food waste, more targeted food production, and reduction in food prices. This circularity will shift power and relieve farmers of the pressure to sell produce immediately for lower prices, allowing them to maintain decent livelihoods with more transparency of where and how much their products are sold. On a larger scale, rural industrialization will mobilize farmers to engage with urban centers more directly and encourage positive interaction between urban centers and rural hinterlands. This connection between the two has the potential to create means for future equitable development in India.
• Boundary Form Effects on Woody Colonization of Reclaimed Surface Mines
  Woody plants and evidence of browsing were measured on eight reclaimed strip mines in Maryland and West Virginia to see whether revegetation patterns differed adjacent to concave, straight, and convex forest boundaries. Two clonal species predom- inated (Rubus allegheniensis and Robinia pseudoacacia), followed in abundance by three wind-dispersed species (Fraxinus americana, Acer rubrum, Betula lenta), and a variety of animal-dispersed species. Mine transects adjacent to concave forest boundaries had 2.5 times as many colonizing stems as those next to convex boundaries. Stems of colonizing species extended > 61 m from concave boundaries, but rarely > 13 m from convex bound- aries. Stem density of all the common animal-dispersed species was correlated with their abundance in the adjacent forest edge, whereas no relationship existed for Robinia or the wind-dispersed species. Evidence of browsing was greater adjacent to concave boundaries than opposite convex boundaries. These strikingly different colonization patterns appear to be primarily the result of the immigration process interacting directly with shape as a spatial characteristic. Through time, a "concave-convex reversal" in boundary form is evident. This results from a "cove concentration effect" where the greatest boundary ex- pansion rate is in coves being colonized. Almost all patterns next to straight boundaries were intermediate between those opposite concave and convex boundaries. We conclude that boundary form may exert a powerful control over adjacent ecosystems in a landscape. This presents significant opportunities for planning and managing surface mines and other colonizing areas.
• From Data to Learning: The Role of Data Pathways in Advancing Cross-Functional Public Sector Team Inquiry Cycles
  Addressing climate change requires public and private organizations with varying disciplinary approaches to collaborate in cross-functional partnerships. This research investigates how cross-functional teams learn new knowledge and skills while developing adaptive responses to large scale climate challenges. Two case studies of cross-functional teams working on sustainability programs in a federally owned electric utility in the American South demonstrate the importance of managing data pathways as the basis for team learning. Project scope and preconceptions of colleagues’ professional identities were major factors that affected how the teams acquired and utilized information. Technological advances have made tools for complex data analysis and interpretation widely accessible. The findings from this research provide guidelines that help leaders of cross-functional public sector teams maximize the data their teams use to learn about and develop adaptive solutions to climate challenges.
• Seeding Grounds: Working Beyond Arcadia in the Pyrocene
  From drought to fire, Australia’s landscapes face multiple existential threats. A response to the tectonic loss of life in the 2019-2020 ‘Black Summer’ bushfires, Seeding Grounds: Working Beyond Arcadia in the Pyrocene, seeks to reckon with Australia’s perception of country that has engendered its ongoing dance with ecological annihilation. Positing the establishment of the Fireline National Park along Kangaroo Island’s ‘Black Summer’ burn scar line, the thesis inverts colonial land management infrastructures in an attempt to cultivate acts of disturbance as a means of growing ecologies forward into uncertain climatic futures. In so doing, Seeding Grounds resists the impulse of a static preservationism, rejecting the preeminent consumption | conservation paradigm in favour of acknowledging that our landscapes are embedded in processes of decay and renewal. Here, the anachronistic mythology of a static ‘Arcadia’ yields to an understanding of country as archival palimpsest, one in which we look – not toward the past – but gently grow into the future.
• Public Housing, Private Landlords: Managing Poverty with Patient Capital
  Public Housing Authorities (PHAs) across the United States are running substantial financial deficits and having to curtail operating costs. To fill this funding gap, PHAs have turned to HUD’s Rental Assistance Demonstration (RAD) and the Opportunity Zones program to leverage private debt and equity and move distressed properties to the Section 8 Voucher portfolio. Advocates of RAD argue that such a model is revenue neutral and an efficient way to confront the attrition of public housing units, while critics argue that it threatens affordability. This project weighs such arguments against recent RAD conversion precedents to explore short-term benefits, such as alleviating capital needs, and long-term challenges, such as preserving affordability. More broadly, this thesis investigates whether PHAs can strike a balance between giving investors market rate returns while protecting the long-term affordability of converted units. Will PHAs in high poverty areas have the same leverage as PHAs in strong housing markets? This project shows that relying on private investors to preserve deeply subsidized housing represents a further erosion of redistributive programs and exacerbates housing insecurity among vulnerable groups.
• Home Work
  This project misreads gingham fabric, finding within this ordinary, patterned material the possibility of making and representing architecture and the city. While architecture has in the past looked to fabric as undulating surfaces and forms, this thesis instead considers fabric as a graphic, flat, constructed material. Reading gingham using the conventions of architectural drawing, this project finds novelty in collapsing together things that we already recognize. The word fabric holds multiple meanings that collapse multiple scales relevant to architecture: the common meaning of woven textile which clothes our bodies and furnishes interiors (curtains, tablecloths, napkins, etc), the fabricated material structure of buildings (beams and columns), and the third figurative meaning for the underlying structure of things, such as urban or social fabric. Both gingham fabric and the site’s urban fabric serve as found material from which to cut, fold, flatten, and sew into a building fabric. The thesis proposes a building that stitches together live and work in New York City’s Chinatown and Lower East Side—a site where the different connotations of fabric coincided historically. In the 19th century, the American garment industry began as “home work” in the tenements but was pushed into specialized districts elsewhere when the child labor reform movement pushed to ban work in domestic spaces. The industry thrived there once again with the new wave of Latin American and Asian immigrants in 1970s-80s but has since disappeared. Returning “home work” to the neighborhood, the building proposal pleats together spaces for garment production and living within a structure which, in plan and section, reflects the site’s urban fabric. Drawing with gingham conflates the scaled down artifacts of architectural representation with the real scale artifacts of everyday utility. It imagines continuity in our inhabitation of the interior, building, and city.
• Dung, Death, and Disease: Livestock and Capitalist Urbanization from the early Nineteenth Century to the Present
  Nonhuman animals are a key parameter for processes of urbanization, but have been marginalized in both mainstream and critical frameworks of urban theory and design. This dissertation critically analyzes this proposition in relation to the history and theory of Western urbanization, using livestock production in the United States as a lens. Four core areas of engagement form the theoretical landscape of this analysis: the persistent nature/city binary in theory and design; modernity as an ideological force reifying city and nature in theory and practice; creative destruction as the propellant force driving machinations in the built environment; and, urban metabolism as a conceptualization of urbanization that offers a counter-narrative to fixed spatial boundaries. Each has played a prominent role in how we think about cities and urbanization in theory and design over the last hundred and fifty years. Underpinning this exploration is a twofold hypothesis. First, while there has been vigorous debate over what constitutes ‘the urban’, an unexamined anthropocentric core in urban theory and allied design disciplines remains under explored, leaving nonhuman animals black-boxed. Second, while ‘nature’ has in recent years played new and larger roles in discourses like urban political ecology, landscape architecture, and architecture - its use in extant literature has tended to be narrowly focused, reducing the heterogeneity of the nonhuman to an undifferentiated mass. This dissertation argues that the coupled reduction of nature as roughly synonymous to being ‘green’, with the black-boxing of nonhuman animals, produces serious epistemological, analytical, and empirical blind spots in our understanding of urbanization. If we are to take seriously the possibility that we have entered a period of generalized urbanization - a period in need of an urban theory without an outside - then we necessarily need to bring nonhuman animals into our frame of reference, and work to incorporate them into our conceptual and theoretical apparatus. Organized around thematic concerns that foregrounds livestock bodies as a register in which cycles of capitalist urbanization in the United States can be understood, dung, death, and disease are explored to gain analytical clarity with regard to the proposition that nonhuman animals have been, and continue to be, important to processes of urbanization. The position developed in the pages to follow is that ‘urban’, ‘nature’, and ‘urban nature’ operates beyond ‘good’ nature, and that the metabolic processes and biological labor of livestock – a kind of ‘bad’ nature - pulse through the creative destruction of the urban fabric. By illuminating these dimensions of the ‘urban’, ‘nature’, and ‘urban nature’, we can begin to render into existence a theory of urbanization as processes formed through manifold and intersecting human and nonhuman worlds.
• MEASURING THE IMPACT OF AIRBNB ON LOCAL HOUSING RENTS: THE CASE OF ISTANBUL, TÜRKIYE
  Both academia and the business world have paid increasing attention to the growth of the sharing economy. They were often driven by their curiosity about how this new business model shapes market mechanisms. Quite a number of authors have already examined the sub-category of sharing economy, home-sharing. Specifically, they studied how this platform affects the hospitality and residential housing markets. Although researchers have extensively covered relevant topics despite the short history of home-sharing platforms, policymakers still grapple with the negative externalities of the rapid growth of home-sharing. However, municipal decision-makers cannot make reasoned policy decisions without an in-depth, strategic analysis of this topic. The term ‘Airbnbfication’ was even recently coined to describe Airbnb-induced gentrification, a morphological transformation of a community into a tourism commodity. However, the existing literature heavily focuses on the United States and Western Europe. No scholar has studied whether the same issues are happening in Türkiye, a unique location where Europe and Asia meet. Specifically, this research focuses on whether rental price increases are correlated with home-sharing concentration at the district level. Based on empirical data in 39 districts of Istanbul, this thesis explored the home-sharing housing supply (2017–2022), rental prices (2019-2022), and population growth (2018-2022), verifying a solid association between holiday rental concentration and increasing rental prices. Depending on the lag, every percentage point increase in the number of Airbnb listings was associated with an increase that ranged from 0.368% to 0.497% in average monthly rents, fixing the effects of time and district in the districts with more than 1,000 Airbnb listings.
• Mud City: Perceptions and Misconceptions of Diriyah
  This project investigates contemporary practices tapping into Saudi Arabia’s powerful past by deploying the ‘heritage’ label to promote new developments. More precisely, this thesis looks at recent re-development plans centered around Saudi Arabia’s 18th century capital, Diriyah, which envisions a new ‘mud city’ building upon the UNESCO-inscribed World Heritage Site, and evokes a nostalgic commemorative perspective of the past to steer its future. In the face of materialistic, neoliberal motives of revenue-seeking through the heretofore untapped local market of heritage tourism—aided by global cultural guardians claiming exclusive stewardship over ‘universal sets of values’—as well as non-materialistic motives relating to identity-creation and the construct of a ‘collective memory’ by the utilization of the built environment, the need for a paradigm shift becomes a necessity. By merely sponsoring a unifying aesthetic appearance that is based on subjective interpretations of a selective past, and by creating an aesthetic confusion—which bets on the untrained eyes’ inability to differentiate between what is actually original and faux facades that are new but made-to-look-historical, the projected development is jeopardizing the very principles which it ostensibly seeks to protect. Instead of reducing Diriyah’s professed historical significance and confining the local understanding of what constitutes ‘heritage’ to the mere aesthetic surface layer of UNESCO-registered ruins, this thesis project argues for a more expansive paradigm which reflects Diriyah’s processual and prolonged past, to locally guide its future in a comprehensive and an equitable way.
• The Problems and Politics of Authenticity in Chinese Heritage Practices
  Despite obvious distortion and intentional biases, heritage has a history. When did a particular heritage story arise? Why did it arise at that time? What purposes does it serve? Using archival and ethnographic fieldwork, I examine the power interplay and conflicts between UNESCO’s Outstanding Universal Values, Chinese nationalistic discourses and practices of heritage, and local responses from a perspective of authenticity construction. The research is conducted through a careful examination of spatial and socio-cultural changes at two Chinese sites: Quanzhou World Heritage Sites in Fujian Province and the Taoxichuan Creative Park in Jingdezhen, Jiangxi Province. By dissecting the construction of discursive authenticity, affectionate authenticity, and living authenticity, I argue that authenticity and the consequent heritage conservation practices are inevitably political because there is always a failure of mapping the living cultural practices onto the authorized heritage discourses/doctrines. In contrast to a binary thinking in the prevalent heritage studies adopt, the contemporary Chinese heritage practices show us there is less of a clear demarcation between the majority and the minority, the ruler and the ruled, the elite and the common folk, etc. Thus, by thinking across scales and looking beyond the legibility project of the state, this dissertation analyzes how the socio-cultural and political agents have empowered themselves to muddle through the contemporary Chinese heritagization process and the power geometry of it. A porous discursive mechanism of authenticity is the tie and the means for weaving the power web. The following questions are addressed in this dissertation to reveal the underlying power structure behind contemporary China’s use of heritage and history: How does UNESCO intersect with different levels of the Chinese government to affect the narratives and spatial and socio-cultural character of the heritage site? What kinds of spatial interventions are imposed on the heritage site and how do the spatial changes inform socio-cultural changes on the heritage site? How are different levels of governments, local social groups, and conservation experts engaged in the formation of heritage narratives and spatial practices? What different roles do they play in the knowledge production of heritage?
• KEUR FÀTTALIKU - The House of Recollection
  The Western canon valorizes its ability to define, critique, and comprehend itself through the lens of its recorded histories. Credence and legitimacy are assigned to the documents produced, with alters constructed to their study and exploration. For societies whose histories are retained in orality, a dynamic methodology of social memory transmittance and cultural production, such paradigms are limited and reductive. Orality calls out to the architect for a space to be housed and edified. But how must this amorphous memory-keeping practice and the act of its recollection dwell? Taking on the themes of memory and repair to envision the architecture of oral history, this thesis aims to challenge the notions around memory institutions, shed their status as static repositories, and conceive an architecture that establishes the intimacy of understanding the past and is the site for conceiving the why of the future, in the capital city of Banjul, The Gambia.