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Digitizing Urban Governance: Understanding the transformation in a mid-size American city
Dissertation Advisor: Professor Antoine Picon Mojdeh Mahdavi ABSTRACT Digitizing urban governance: Understanding the transformation in a mid-size American city This dissertation explores the digital transformation of urban governance, the city and its governing institutions, and its dynamic relationship with urban restructuring and economic development. As digital transformation policies expand in the political agendas of local governments of various sizes and socioeconomic backgrounds, the in-depth and up-close study of existing smart cities becomes critical to understand, challenge, and improve this policy instrument. The dissertation asks: how path-dependent is the digital transformation of governance in a mid-size American city? To set the analytical framework for the empirical inquiry, the research asks what policymaking context mainstreams digital governance institutions and whether digital governance is a new governance model or the continuation of existing models through new technological tools. In Syracuse, NY, a mid-size and post-industrial city, which serves as the contextual focus of this research, the digital transformation policy agenda is instrumentalized to reverse the urban and economic decline through Syracuse Surge, the city’s strategic plan for the growth in the New Economy. This research is enacted through four main lines of inquiry: first, investigating how digital transformation policy responded to the complexity of coordinating operationally autonomous yet systematically inter-dependent networks of individuals and organizations in a rapidly changing environment. Second, identifying actors, the symbolic media of communication such as money, law, and knowledge they use, and its efficiencies to create a shared agenda to advance urban governance transformation. Third, tracing moments of disjuncture that happen through accidents, errors, and disruptions due to the immaturity of the technological tools and methods and insufficiency of infrastructural and implementational capacity. And fourth, grounding the smart city spaces of visibility and related urban revitalization projects to pinpoint the change in intra-urban geographies of uneven development within capitalist production processes. The investigation brings together perspectives and methods from political science, critical governance and policy studies, and urban studies to bear upon some of the most pressing issues facing local governments and their constituents as cities transition towards emerging paradigms of digital transformation. The main finding is that the utopian rhetoric of the project did not correspond with the reality due to the lack of resources, problematic national regulations, organizational readiness, and co-ordination problems among multiple stakeholders and expectations. Therefore, the implementation of the policy agenda is highly context-specific and path-dependent. At the theoretical level, the research finds that even though the extant political and economic policymaking conditions have not changed, multiple interdependent actors, perspectives, and resources involved in the digital transformation policy agenda negotiation and implementation have changed the organizational settings and governing techniques. I conclude that the heterarchic urban governance that foregrounds and is forged by the instrumentalization of the digital transformation policy agenda captures the current changes in urban governance.
Crossing Paths: Strategies for the Gowanus Basin
Over the past few centuries, the Gowanus has transformed from natural to pastoral to industrial to post-industrial. Its history is tied to the development of Brooklyn. Once a tidal inlet with orchards and mills, it industrialized when the local population exploded in the 19th century. A canal replaced the marshland to service very polluting plants settled along its banks. Soon one of the most polluted waterways in the country, it remains so today. The industrial legacy is one of deep soil contamination and toxicity which, with the site’s natural cycles (rain, tides, hurricanes) combine to make it a forbidding ground for development. Yet, the city is proposing a massive densification of the area, one opposed by the varied communities living and working there. This project considers the entire Gowanus watershed as its site. It positions itself as an interface between the natural and the built. It offers solutions to connect the neighborhoods now surrounding the canal by making use of the fragmented urban grid and existing structures. Taking inspiration from Japanese models, it proposes to restore horizontal and vertical continuities by developing city blocks as a series of landscapes where floodable and inhabitable surfaces are layered and woven to accommodate ecologies, architectures, and people. An infrastructure of access organizes new development and facilitates the interactions between the shifting natural ground, and existing architectures. Ramps and platforms define the spaces of public life while leaving room for a dynamic ecology below. The circulation structures bridge the public spaces and streets to new and existing buildings, while defining the perimeter of public and private life. Lessons from Ando’s Azuma House, Shinohara’s House in Uehara and Atelier Bow Wow’s Tower House, among others, inform this effort to imagine circulation as dwelling, and conceive of the organization of the urban block as an urban house. The project goes on to suggest building rules to establish an ecologically sound relationship between the built and natural environment.
Traversing the Monumental and the Vernacular
Instead of activating culture, the museums exist in Hanoi, Vietnam as a political tool that propagates the Communist Party’s ideals. Most major museums, which are dressed in cavernous and colossal architecture, are politically affiliated, including Ho Chi Minh Museum, Military History Museum, Police History Museum, Air Force, and Air Defense Museum. The thesis questions how architecture can negate the concept of the museum as institutional indoctrination and reclaim the art museum as a public cultural amenity. The new museum inserts itself in the middle scale between the monument and the vernacular, exists as an intermediary between the institution and the residence. It is an institutional program cross-dressing in vernacular architecture language. The building will be a Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, situated on the same block as the monumental Soviet Friendship Palace, surrounded by political institutions such as the Hanoi Police Headquarter, the Ministry of Public Safety, and the Museum of Police History. Externally, the museum responds to its context, camouflaging its monumentality in the scale of the residential context. Internally, the experience provokes the spatial quality of the typical tube house residence – the most representative typology of Vietnamese modern dwellings. The new modern art museum aims to be educational, inclusive, and participatory: the program includes not only the exhibition and gallery wing but also an education wing with workshops, studios, classrooms, and an art library.
Architectural Arbitration: The Lore of Land, Law, and Home
Architects who appropriate ancient “primitive” forms and construction draw on a foundation of “indigeneity” that appears to overlap with, but fundamentally contradicts, the use of this concept by tribal nations. Architects privilege aesthetic symbolism or “primitive” building techniques as defining indigenous architecture. Tribal nations, however, articulate their own architecture as reflective of political status and cultural dynamism in the present. The understanding of “indigeneity” written into United States Federal Law illustrates foundational notions of identity. This thesis explores the various lores of indigeneity that are the foundation of Tribal Law. I draw examples from legal cases that entangle legal rights to land, native culture, architecture, and citizenship with folklore of essentialized indigeneity. This thesis explores the legal lore of land and home through the case of the Cherokee Nation because of the tribe’s lineage of land dispossessions and impact on American Indian Law as well as the tribe’s legal prominence in matters of sovereignty, land, and nationhood and domestic architecture that questions essentialist identities. I examine contexts of indigeneity necessary to understanding legal land conflicts and tribal law, including territory, citizenship, and sovereignty that confronts essentialist lore. Complications between lore and law are explored in a close analysis of five legal cases: the first three are known collectively as the Marshall Trilogy, the fourth, “The Dawes Act,” and the last - McGirt v. Oklahoma. Architecture arbitrates these legal, intellectual, and material foundations to affirm and contest the lore of land, law, and home.
Hyphen - American: The Making of Hybrid Identities
ON BELONGING – DISPLACEMENT We seek to feel “in place.” However, one cannot feel a sense of belonging if there is nowhere to belong. In the 21st century, globalization has increased the mobility of people, information, and goods, ultimately destabilizing the spatial permanence associated with identity. The mass displacement of people contributes to a conflicted sense of self – a crisis of belonging. Waves of immigration in America established pocket enclaves throughout the country. Born out of systemic oppression and discrimination, these ethnic enclaves historically served as an entry-port, generating forms of collectivity around the basis of shared culture and identity. They were a recreation of a remembered past home, providing a sense of belonging in the context of displacement. ON MEMORY – IDENTITY The nostalgic memory of a space emerges from a dislocation in place. It is a sentiment of loss and longing for a past identification with a specific time and place. Originally thought of as a psychological disease, nostalgia is dismissed as an unproductive engagement with the past, consistently paired as the opposite to progress. However, nostalgia and progress are two sides of the same coin. If remembering the past and imagining a future are parallel processes, what can the contemporary overlay of two cultures, the ‘American’ and the ‘other,’ look like? This thesis explores the grafting of a personal past cultural-scape with the present American urban-scape to reimagine a dying enclave and project an architecture that encapsulates the condition of hybrid identities within an immigrant nation.
The Unspoken Narratives of the Empty Quarter
The desert, commonly understood as a barren and infertile landscape, is not empty. This thesis reads the desert landscape as an archive full of social, economic, and political narratives using the Empty Quarter as a case study. The Empty Quarter, in Arabic Rub al-Khali, stretches across the southern part of the Arabian Peninsula including Oman, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and Yemen. The overarching understanding of deserts as a void has obscured the Empty Quarter’s image as a home to Bedouin tribes and a site of natural resource extraction, agricultural land, and a testing ground for scientific research. Furthermore, the inability to understand the desert ecology is causing current urban processes to be resource intensive as the adjacent cities expand. By providing a new reading of the desert ecology, this thesis speculates how design and planning in arid regions can mediate between social values, aesthetics, and environmental challenges to arrive at ecological urban development. This thesis draws from multiple sources, including the analysis of archival materials, historic maps, artworks, field observation, myths, and tribal poetry, in order to arrive at a novel understanding of the Empty Quarter’s ecosystem. It is not a void, but rather a space that adjacent cities depend upon to meet the social and material needs of their inhabitants.
Spherical deployable shield for robot arm
This thesis focuses on the construction of deployable shields for robot arms in extraterrestrial situations that protect them from possible threats by minimizing the area of the robot's end-effector that is exposed to external job site conditions. The deployability is key since the shield’s shape should be compact not to hinder robot’s movement when folded, but also able to adapt to the various geometrical characteristics of the job site when deployed, which could include flat surfaces, curved domes, or even edged areas. To address this necessity and meet those constraints for the shield, this research proposes a deployable spherical shield after exploring a few of the potential possibilities. The research explores scissor, parallelogram, and spherical linkage patterns as possible ways of creating deployable spherical geometries. Parametric modeling and simulation of those linkages were conducted to analyze deployment movement and possible collision. Ultimately, the research focused on a multi-layered spherical linkage construction method that can create a fully covered sphere surface while minimizing overlapping area while it is deployed. Physical prototypes actuated by multiple motors demonstrate how this method can be used to achieve the goal of creating deployable shields that are adaptable and provide full-coverage. This research has great potential for robot arm applications in a variety of risky environments both extraterrestrial and terrestrial.
The Borges Cloisters
The 20th-century Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges is best known for his fantastical stories of labyrinths and libraries, but his early poetry evokes the sacredness of ordinary urban spaces in his native Buenos Aires: patios, for instance, that are “the slope / down which the sky flows into the house.” The monastic cloister operates analogously. As the heart of the monastic polis, it synthesizes street, public square, and paradise garden, situating the daily rhythms of life “at the crossway of the stars.” It embodies a deep story of hope. The cloister therefore offers an ideal typology for the urgent ecological task of urban rewilding: the practice of reawakening latent ecosystems in their sacred complexity. Less a means of exclusion than of inviting the soul to turn inward, the cloister can become a rich space for reconnecting cities with the land to which they belong. The unique perimeter walk, in particular, forms a contemplative and social space between inside and out, blurring “culture” and “nature.” This thesis reimagines part of the Austin State Hospital’s languishing campus in Austin, Texas — the city where Borges writes he “discovered America” in 1963 and which he found reminiscent of Buenos Aires — as a communal urban village structured around cloisters of varied shape, size, and ecology: a monastic mat urbanism where architecture, city, and landscape entwine. The Borges Cloisters are spaces of discovery and refuge, of cultivation and symbiosis, of death and new life, inviting residents and guests into renewed relationship with the earth family.
Body-ody-ody: A Formal Redress of Harlem
Ornamentation (architectural decoration) is a deliberate act of shifting perspective, envisioning possibilities that recognize contingency. Formalism (embodied ornamentation enabled by today’s technology) gives architecture agency to express people and place. Recent critiques of formalism echo the cultural elitism seen in modernist advocacy for functionality over ornament. Modernist architecture, designed with the body of a 6-foot-tall white man as its historical referent, persists in building norms, neglecting a broader set of bodies: the majority. The focus on a single body has created a misfitting urban fabric. But what if we could create an unapologetically formalist architecture strategy to create accessibility through beauty? And what if, through this, the architecture itself could become an activist work? The resulting constructions would surely counter rigid norms. Harlem offers an apt testing ground with its rich history of Black self-determination, social consciousness manifested through creativity and diverse populations. Peppered with retail spaces obedient to codes written around an unreflective people group amongst a palette of intriguing historic visual types, building with vernacular and a broader community can challenge contemporary disdain for formalism, reimagining a range of proportions, celebrating culture, and welcoming diverse identities. Close study and illustration of the New York code for historical districts provides a spatial ribbon of potential redress and selective adaptation to existing architecture at its skin that invites a range of bodies to engage with form and space. By embodying ornamentation, we can disrupt traditional hierarchies, inviting and exciting a broader array of human bodies into a new architectural body of work
Beyond Nature: Envisioning New Alaskan Supernatural Geothermal Landscapes
This thesis examines the impacts of a "supernatural landscape" on public awareness and political action toward climate change and clean energy. A supernatural landscape refers to landscapes where specific natural characteristics or processes are artificially intensified to make the landscape appear more natural than nature itself. This thesis focuses on Alaska's conflicted approach to rapid climate change due to its hindered climate policies and identifies geothermal energy as a potential solution. The proposal imagines a set of supernatural landscapes heated with geothermal energy and used as climate change plant laboratories and forecasting landscapes. These landscapes intensify and accelerate climate change processes to act as political tools to encourage climate policies through their aesthetic appeal and scientific research output. Ultimately, this thesis expands landscape architecture's influence on political decisions through aesthetic means.
Climate Grief: Relearning the Future
Prince Edward Island (PEI), Canada, is eroding at an average rate of about one foot per year. People are grieving the losses, both past and future, of meaningful places embedded with memory. While the field of landscape has often separated climate change adaptation projects from work focused on human healing, this thesis brings the two sides together in a community-centered landscape regeneration project on PEI. The meaning of loss is different for every individual on the island, whether human or non-human. At the root of environmental degradation is the property line, a legacy of ongoing colonial practices that continue to facilitate deforestation at the edge and exacerbate land loss. These imagined lines motivate landowners to try and stop erosion, and limit many other peoples’ access to the shoreline. However, steady levels of erosion are also part of a broader ecology of disturbance that supports biodiverse habitat. This project imagines how environmental strategies can be integrated across property lines to reweave the ecological gradient from the inland forest to the intertidal zone, creating new relationships with healthy erosion. As the fabric of the island is rewoven, human and ecological healing become intertwined.
Repair in Spaces of Exception: The Encampment of Refugees in Jordan
Refugee camps, although designed and perceived as temporary structures that support communities in times of crisis, are long-lasting. On average, a refugee spends seventeen years living in a camp. In Jordan, a 74-year-old refugee camp presents a paradox. Although part of the urban fabric, it is not fully integrated with the city and impoverished conditions. This raises questions regarding the social, political, and spatial dynamics between the camp, the refugees and the host city’s institutions and services. To address these concerns, this project pursues the potential of repair and maintenance as a design alternative for the camp, allowing it to adapt and accommodate varying influxes of people. Through examination of the camp from the architectural to urban scale, this research aims to shed light on how the space of a refugee camp intertwines with the urban fabric by revealing its perception and evolution, typology, and relationship to the existing city.
ERASURE
Despite technological advances in AR and VR, a clear dichotomy between virtual and real still dominates. Current augmented reality (AR) experiences—characterized by floating UIs and low-poly models—augment rather than merge with our reality, underscoring the need to redefine this relationship. This thesis proposes a new concept of 'Augmented Reality' that reimagines the digital and physical as partial contributors to a composite whole, achieving a new balance of interaction. It examines the field of mixed reality, dissecting the persisting divide between the physical and the digital, through a film format. The film, with its world-building, captures the banal lives in a post-augmented city that are often overlooked in sci-fi fantasies. With occasional glitches, it finds serene purity, capturing both the “aftermath” of the physical space and the emergence of a new augmented urbanism.
Housing Adaptation: The Fall and Rise of Modernist Residential Districts
This thesis analyzes design strategies used to adapt modernist housing projects. During the first decades of the twentieth century, the modernist residential district was designed as the new and standardized form of collective living in response to the mass relocation of workers from the countryside into urban production centers. These districts became the most widespread manifestation of Modernist architecture, housing millions of civilians worldwide. From the turn of the twentieth-first century, these projects face physical degradation, cultural obsolescence, and socio-economic challenges. In response, we are witnessing an unprecedented number of demolitions and adaptations of these architectures. Demolition is problematic because it necessitates the eviction of residents, typically elderly and low-income, and discards usable material and energy. In contrast, adaptation becomes a vehicle for social, environmental, and cultural regeneration of cities. Through the analysis of one hundred case studies across the world, this research reveals six distinct spatial strategies of adaptation: addition, subtraction, diversification, reprogramming, camouflaging, and augmentation. The thesis deepens understanding of eighteen case studies turning the architectural, urban, and landscape practices deployed to enable this work and their impacts on communities into visible objects of contestation and debate. Collectively, these cases describe a renewed role for designers supporting the adaptation of modernist housing projects rather than their neglect, abandonment, or demolition.
Living Chinatown - Familiar Unfamiliar
Over the last two centuries, San Francisco Chinatown’s resistance towards architectural change has resulted in the identity of the neighborhood becoming increasingly misaligned with the present – a place losing its sense of purpose and serving as a shelter rather than a home. What were once distinctive elements within the city have now become fixed iconography, more destructive towards immigrants’ dreams than an image of opportunity and rebirth. Without the freedom of an evolving identity in buildings, existing Chinatown architecture will only perpetuate the fatigue in the built environment. It becomes critical to ask: how do we design buildings that are sensitive to the cultures of those who inhabit them? How can we move beyond the shells of previous architectural tropes and towards a more dynamic vessel? Though we have typically considered façade preservation synonymous with honoring cultural identity, many residents create their own communities within these exterior walls. This thesis proposes two residential buildings that demonstrate a new attitude towards a transformed Chinatown; one that prioritizes the people living and working there and respects the connection between past and future. These humble spaces express deep cultural values and the vitality of the people they house through contextual responses, innovative structural strategies, material sensibilities, and ultimately evocative atmospheres. These animate frames call for an urban change and a shift from the ornament to activity; from iconography to a framing of energy. A constant transformation and an architecture that adds to the air that we breathe. Amidst the growing redundancy and formulas of familiar cities, the two interventions aim to respond to the sincere imperative to prioritize cultural identity in the postulation of tomorrow’s world.
Aesthetics of Extraction: Reconfiguring Images of Empire
The so-called “Company Paintings” or Kampani Kalam in Urdu and Hindi, developed in the Indian Subcontinent over the 18th and 19th centuries under the “patronage” of the East India Company as a result of British attempts to survey, record, and display the practices, people, architecture, flora, and fauna of the region. Even today, these paintings continue to be displayed in major museums and private collections and all over the world Distinctive of these paintings is their “anthropological” aesthetic stylization. That is, these paintings endeavor to portray their subject-matter in a “natural” manner in order to persuade viewers that such subject-matter is neutral, scientific, and objective. However, both this stylization and the continued curatorial practices and contexts in which these paintings are displayed are highly problematic. The stylization of these paintings was an attempt on the part of British colonizers to efface the authorship and labor of native artists as well as to commodify and fetishize the peoples and practices of the subcontinent. Still more problematic for our own historical moment, though, is the fact that this culture of effacement persists today in the ongoing curation of the paintings. Even now the paintings are typically displayed in museums with no acknowledgement of their original authorship, let alone any historico-cultural contextualization provided by critical postcolonial, decolonial, or subaltern scholarly discourses. By focusing on these “images of empire”, I seek to offer an alternative ground, a “determination otherwise” (Spivak) of our understanding of these paintings and the ways in which museums and archives continue to efface them through a legacy of epistemic violence. Accompanied by a collection of annotated exhibition labels and paintings, I investigate how the creation of empire and the politics of image making are entwined.
Territorial Instruments
This thesis investigates the reciprocal relationship between architecture and territory. How are discrete architectural instruments shaped by the territories which they inhabit? In what ways do these instruments structure and order the territories in which they are found? How can architecture be conceived as a fulcrum between built and un-built, between object and void, between building and territory? Tuktoyaktuk, NWT was established in the 1950s, around a Distant Early Warning Line station - one in a series of radar stations constructed in the Canadian Arctic to detect incoming aerial threats from across the north pole. These decommissioned artifacts, like other architectures of distance, oscillate between the technical as well as the ordinary and the local and the global. This thesis proposes three buildings for this town at the forefront of an environmentally and spatially changing Arctic: a small airport, a research station, and a road maintenance depot. These instruments leverage a historical analysis of technological and representative tools to imagine new modes of understanding, responding to, and establishing territory.
An Attempt to Approach A Void, or Georges Perec, Cause Commune, and the Infraordinary
In February 1973, Jean Duvignaud, Paul Virilio, and Georges Perec introduced the infraordinary in the fifth issue of their small journal, Cause commune. The infraordinary subsequently became attributed mostly to Georges Perec, to describe his keenness for the everyday in his prolific literary works. Infra-, a spatial preposition, meaning under or below, modifies the ordinary, or everyday life, in a call to action “to question that which seems to have ceased forever to astonish us.” Such a simple, local act can have immense consequences. Rather than removing “the everyday” from its context in order to defamiliarize it, as Cause commune critiques of mass media, the infraordinary studies the context itself, a seemingly blank space, or void, upon which the everyday is written. By choosing interdisciplinary essays to include in Cause commune, with a vast array of subject matters, the editorial team demonstrates the infraordinary is not just applicable to the literary, sociological, and architectural disciplines, but formulate an art of living upon this blank background. The following thesis is an attempt to approach the infraordinary not only as the subject of exploration, but as a method of writing itself. The aim of this thesis is to trace the infraordinary conceptually through the immediate textual context of Cause commune issue No. 5, the work of Georges Perec, and the work of Cause commune’s other contributors. It is not an origin story, but a text enumerating ideas and forms of thought on everyday life that coalesce in this journal. By excavating what is below everyday life, the infraordinary shows just how unfamiliar we are with everyday life in the first place as we constantly come up against and avoid a void, and how we are equipped to do something about it—through creative acts and life itself.
Enactive Robotics: An Action-State Model for Concurrent Machine Control
Industrial robots have been around since the 70s, with massive rates of adoption in the manufacturing industry. Additionally, during the last decade, there has been an increasing interest in the potential of robotic making in non-engineering fields, such as digital fabrication, architecture and art installations, with designers, researchers and artists experimenting with creative applications of these technologies. However, the typical tools used to program and control robots usually fail to address the needs of these groups. Most robots can only be controlled by writing routines through their own graphical user interfaces or vendor-specific programming languages, which often require significant knowledge of spatial transformations, forward and inverse kinematics, mechanical engineering and computer science. These requirements make robots notoriously hard to program, and pose a great entry barrier, especially for novice and non-technical users. Moreover, and similarly to 3D printers, robot programming tools are biased towards the offline control style, one where all the planning and decision making are pre-generated on a digital environment and, upon execution of the compiled instruction file, the programmer becomes completely detached from it. This model is suitable for highly calibrated and predictable environments, but can hardly accommodate more complex forms of control such as responding to feedback from the context, adapting to changing conditions on a construction site or on-the-fly decision making by a controller agent. This research introduces Enactive Robotics, a conceptual model for the design of concurrent control systems for mechanical actuators. The main goal of this model is to blur the distinction between creating and executing a robotic program, integrating them into a process where behavior can be enacted on the machine during the design phase. Drawing inspiration from developmental and cognitive theories, the model is grounded on the capacity of a central decision-making agent to interface in real time with the control system via a set of high-level, universal and platform-agnostic requests named actions. These actions conform the atomic units of cognitive interaction with the robot, and their effect on a particular device is dependent on its nature and state. This paradigm crucially involves considering the large-scale shift between mechanical and computational run times, and proposes the centrality of a state representation as the core mediator between them. The action-state model seeks to break from the unidirectional offline control paradigm, and favor programming styles that are reactive to changes in the dynamic execution of the robot, rather than prescriptive about it. The main thesis in this dissertation is that applications built following the principles of the Enactive Robotics model provide an easier and more immediate entry point to robotics for novel users, since they provide an enactive, rather than symbolic representation of the system, hence aiding the cognitive processes that lead to understanding motion planning and control. Additionally, it provides a framework with greater depth of possibilities for advanced users, in which its real-time nature and immediate feedback facilitates experimentation, flow of thought and creative inquiry. While the work presented in this dissertation focuses mainly on industrial robotic arms, it will be shown how this model can be extended to any programmable machine that performs spatial motion. In this dissertation the general architecture of the model is presented, as well as two sample technical implementations following these principles. The first implementation is a pure .NET library designed for power-users and tech-savvy individuals, while the second is an ecosystem of UI-based applications and utility libraries geared towards novice and entry-level users. A collection of projects built with these implementations is presented as case studies, to showcase the capacity of the model to systematically enable richer interaction paradigms with robotic systems. Furthermore, the results of a controlled user study are presented, in order to evidence the capacity of the model to provide an easier and more accessible entry point to robot programming for novice users.
On the mathematics of Memetics
As technology, embeds itself in almost every facet of our society, new rules of interacting and signalling emerge, specifically in the case of mass communication. These new imitated non-genetic behaviours that are called memetics are the chief area of inquiry of this thesis. The thesis is an exploratory project in which I present a study of memetic social behaviour and how belief structures form amongst groups online. I specifically look at the case of Reddit. More interestingly, I look at early belief propagation, how and what causes conflicts amongst these groups, and the interdependence of beliefs and the conflicts that result in the mutation and spread of memes. I hypothesize and verify that these belief spread methods are a function of the differential rates of updates in the belief sets of the groups. In the process of enquiry, I draw upon existing trans-scaler methods of studying social behaviour and build upon them to introduce new metrics based on proxy information as derived from sentiment data of messages exchanged amongst groups. Subsequently, I present a method by which to plant these ideas, in this case, memes, so that they may propagate most effectively amongst people as a verificatory process. Lastly, I examine other online spaces where these memetic exchanges take place and speculatory prospects of applying these methods and tools that were developed; looking at the case of fake news and response methods that are proactive as opposed to reactive
VOLUNTARY ENERGY EFFICIENCY PROGRAM: The Work from Home (WFH) Trend Presenting a Win-Win Opportunity for the Triple Bottom Line
The global pandemic COVID-19 has led to an advanced exploration of the remote world, with many employees and employers wanting to continue with the current work-from-home scenario even after offices reopen. Consequently, it becomes essential to understand the impact of energy load shifts from commercial to residential buildings and the resultant opportunity for the energy-efficient design community with this new trend. Simultaneously, businesses and companies are increasingly declaring net zero goals and adopting various green market approaches, to tread a socially and environmentally responsible path. In this thesis, we are proposing the creation of a new program for such companies which would bring them closer to their carbon reduction goals while also benefitting their employees. It encompasses an opportunity for employers to incentivize energy efficiency upgrades of their employees’ homes, in a manner which proves to be financially feasible for both the primary stakeholders, i.e., companies and employees. We began the research by analysing utility load shifts due to employees shifting to a workfrom-home (WFH) setup. Then, we collected information for residential green building retrofit techniques, identifying the most cost-effective and impactful ways to create healthier WFH environments while reducing GHG emissions. Further, we evaluated the viability of the new proposed program relative to the widely used existing decarbonization strategies. Next, we theoretically tested the implementation of the program through a case study of Cambridge Savings Bank, Waltham. The report culminates with different suggestions to standardize the roadmap of such a voluntary energy-efficiency program and a discussion about its practical implementation to enable win-win feasibility for the triple bottom line of the planet, people and profits.
Unpaving Paradise : Envisioning a Healthy Hialeah
Hialeah is a city of “unhealthy” urban character in terms of green coverage, economic opportunity, and medical care; however, its strong sense of community and interpersonal “weak ties” could help overcome these characteristics with reinvigorated participation for a reformulation of the city. Imageability as a method of participation invites the minds of community members acting as designers to formulate a strategy for the health of their own city, ascertaining “what does a healthy Hialeah look like?” This relationship between individuals in the act of imageability is not merely a connection, or even many connections, rather it is defined by an exponential almost intangible network of relations and actions, known to us as complexity. The fruits of this discussion on imageability and health are integrated and designed into a framework for Hialeah that challenges its health infrastructure by redesigning a connective network centered on a synthetic urban orchard.
Extending Material Preservation: A Bridge Reconstruction Festival in a Chinese Rural Valley
This project explores the preservation of the Covered Bridge as heritage in a rural valley of Southeastern China and develops a form of resiliency for the local community against capitalist development. The Covered Bridges are an infrastructure heritage that embodies broad social and religious significance. The material conservation of the bridges is challenged by intensifying summer floods, together with aging, depopulation, and poverty of the rural population. This design prioritizes the process of culture preservation over material conservation. The preservation of local knowledge and culture practices are the keys to cultivate a continuous and sustainable relationship between village development and bridge preservation. Set in the context after a prospective flood, the design involves the bridge reconstruction process in a two-year bridge festival which encapsulates the meaning of intangible vernacular heritages, through a combination of local rituals, food cultures, geomantic knowledge, traditional forestry, and the native hydrology system.
Cheap Wonder, TYP.
The materials available on institutional building projects with limited budgets today are not the concrete of Le Corbusier, the bricks of Louis Kahn, the terracotta of Louis Sullivan, or the steel of Mies, instead they are inexpensive building products: sheet-rock, metal studs, gypsum board, and ducting. Instead of determining a building’s overall form and subdividing it into these materials, this thesis focuses on the strange beauty of these building products, mines them for their perceptual and experiential potential, and deploys them to create effects of wonder. The creation of a sensibility of wonder and vastness has been accomplished already in architecture through the design of large and repetitive spaces on private projects that can afford the material and real-estate. In art, it has been realized with material and labor that serves one function for a short period of time and is visible to an audience already seeking it out. This thesis tests how vastness, luxury, and flicker can be created instead with an economy of means: in small spaces with the material implicit in the flows of ordinary construction. Through the design of an urban public high school on an ordinary site – a brief that involves default tectonics, practical problems, and a collective fractured by cliques – the project seeks to enchant the tectonics of common materials and to create a diversity of experiences within a singular whole. Can this focus on material effects carve out spaces for collectivity that feel grand and vast but are actually practical, inexpensive, and small?
Dwellings, Paths, Places: Configurative Habitat in Casablanca, Morocco
The Modernist project in Casablanca resulted in unique urban and architectural interventions in a quasi-forgotten city. In particular, distinct typo-morphologies such as Michel Ecochard’s Carrières-Centrale housing development have been in a constant state of flux, thereby transforming the urban fabric, its architecture, and interiors in rather ad-hoc ways. Responding to the ways in which such typo-morphologies have changed over the decades, the thesis operates on Ecochard’s original proposal to speculate on how a modernist housing development could allow for growth and change in such a way that retains the original typological features (e.g: courtyards, streets), but also remains relevant to Moroccan spatial traditions. The goals of the thesis seek to determine the possible urban design strategies that would allow for configurative habitat in this particular context, to determine the appropriate density to support a dynamic urban environment, to position this site amongst many others across the city that suffer from similar typo-morphological shortcomings, and to recognize them as imperative constituents in the development of urban design between North Africa and Europe.