Other Architecture Commons^™

To Open A Clearing: Cultivating Spaces Of Endurance In The Upper Amazon, Brunno De Melo Meirelles Douat

Masters of Environmental Design Theses

To effectively challenge the policies of extraction implemented by late liberal regimes, the Waorani communities from Upper Amazon have devised spatial strategies to defend their traditional territory. By re-examining the concept of the contact zone and unfolding settler and Indigenous literature, spatialities, and worldviews, this thesis suggests the concept of forest Clearings as a means to explore spatial forms of endurance.

Clearings emerge within the Amazon in sites where encounters between divergent worldviews embody otherwise modes of existence. Through a series of fieldwork reflections, these Clearings are perceived as spaces where ontological negotiations are more likely to occur, strategies of …

Environmental Cues And The Sociospatial Imaginary: An Examination Of Spatial Perception And Meaning-Making In A Gentrifying Neighborhood, Todd Levon Brown

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

What could be more ordinary or pedestrian than two people walking down an urban street and talking about what we see and what we make of it? Yet this simple, quotidian act of walking a street—seeing, perceiving and experiencing physical spaces, places and objects—and making meaning of what is encountered, is the basis of my dissertation. It is also my basis for claiming that I have learned a great deal—and much unexpectedly—about how differently different people see and interpret the urban streetscape. What are the various environmental cues that stand out to different individuals? What are the psychosocial imaginaries that …

Young Children's Play In High-Rise Housing: A Window Into The Changing Lives Of Urban Middle-Class Families In Pune Metropolitan Area, Sruthi Atmakur-Javdekar

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation aims to identify the combinations of spatial arrangements and physical features that influence young children’s access to play and the quality of their play opportunities in a heterogeneous sample of high-rise housing in India. Using Bronfenbrenner’s Ecological Model of Human Development as a framework, the study examines two large umbrellas that contribute to young children’s play opportunities in high-rise housing developments: (1) The play environment that is made available for children by developers and design professionals; and (2) Parents’ and caregivers’ ways of using the designated and undesignated spaces based on their own play values and beliefs. A …

Community-Based Initiatives For Neighborhood And Community Rehabilitation: A Case Study Of The Mission District, San Francisco, California, Francesca Monique Gallardo

Cal Poly Humboldt theses and projects

Through the case study of San Francisco, CA’s Mission District, this research project addresses how community-based affordable housing development is operationalized to rehabilitate communities and neighborhoods experiencing effects of gentrification, mass displacement, and cultural dilution. My goals were to identify how the processes of building a sense of community, trust, and cohesion- rehabilitating and critical to affordable housing development efforts in the Mission District? And, how are nonprofit community development organizations engaging with these processes in collaboration with citizen and community partners? The final objective is to provide evidence-based strategies to assist other at-risk minority communities and neighborhoods in the …

Imagining The Unimagined Metropolis: Privilege, Liminality, And Peripheral Communities In The Contemporary Urban Situation, Colton R. Sherman

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Various works of psychogeographic literature explore privileged and non-privileged communities and spaces through narrative and character development. Novels of this sort—specifically those by China Miéville, Neil Gaiman, and J.G. Ballard—feature narratives where their respective protagonists undergo a liminal metamorphosis and transform from a monotonous, albeit privileged urbanite into a free-associating inhabitant of the urban periphery: the unimagined, non-privileged space of urban detritus. By engaging with these authors’ novels alongside the works of the Situationists, Walter Benjamin, Rob Nixon and others, the goal of this thesis is to explore how the dominant urban epistemologies are subverted—whether or not they should be …

Operational Jakarta: The Problem Of Representation, Kevin Patrick Jeffers

Masters Theses

As the twenty-first century unfolds with newly formed degrees of hypercomplex interactions and reactions amongst space, time, economy, politics, social dynamics, and cultural paradigms, we are observing new typologies of urbanism that are different in kind, rather than degree, from the previous “urban” upon which the vast majority of present theoretical and practical discourse has been based. The techniques, strategies, and methodologies of the twentieth-century no longer serve to adequately represent or to explain the phenomena of today’s incipient mega-cities. A new vocabulary must be developed. A new way of seeing is required in order to understand and therefor to …