Architecture Commons^™

Willow Heights Livability Improvement Plan, Community Design Center

Project Reports

Willow Heights is a 43-year old public housing complex owned by the Fayetteville Housing Authority (FHA) within the federal public housing portfolio administered by the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD). The school’s design center was commissioned by a local foundation to study an alternative to the FHA’s plan to sell the downtown Willow Heights complex to a developer of high-income housing, necessitating relocation of low-income residents to another complex outside of downtown. Using equity as a driver of decision making, the studio introduced scenario planning to organize reluctant stakeholders in considering transformations to the five-acre complex.

Urban Metabolism And Land Use Modeling For Urban Designers And Planners: A Land Use Model For The Integrated Urban Metabolism Analysis Tool, Mohamad Farzinmoghadam

Doctoral Dissertations

Predicting the resource consumption in the built environment and its associated environmental consequences (urban metabolism analysis) is one of the core challenges facing policy-makers and planners seeking to increase the sustainability of urban areas. There is a critical need for a single integrated framework to analyze the consequences of urban growth and eventually predict the impacts of sustainable policies on the urbanscape. This dissertation presents the development of an Integrated Urban Metabolism Analysis Tool (IUMAT) – an analytical framework that simulates urban metabolism by integrating urban subsystems in a single comprehensive computational environment. It reviews the existing literature on urban …

The Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy Greenway: Making The Vision A Reality, Alec E. Zebrowski

Masters Theses 1911 - February 2014

The $15+ Billion "Big Dig", replaced Boston's deteriorating six-lane elevated Central Artery, known as the Green monster, with a widened highway tunnel running underground through Downtown Boston and crossing the Charles River, creating more than 27 acres of new land area for reuse in Downtown Boston.

Today, a significant portion of the land has been turned into a system of parks known as the Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy Greenway. Since its completion in 2008, five civic and recreational developments planned for the Greenway have been abandoned due to poor funding, rising construction estimates, and a general lack of support. Disconnected, under-programmed …