To control urbanisation and to improve urban quality, Egypt has adopted the concept of master-planned estates (MPEs). This form of urbanisation is the latest manifestation of utopian place-making derived from the Garden City movement. With the emphasis on ‘landscape’ rather than ‘architecture’, the development of these MPEs is underpinned by expectations that landscape characteristics have the potential to produce liveable communities. Located in the desert, the MPEs have often been criticised because of their weak connections with history, geography and culture. This study challenges this criticism and argues that some of these landscape practices when analytically related to residential mobility and satisfaction, are crucial to the enhancement of liveability. However, these relationships need to be carefully examined and subsequently reconstructed in a holistic conception rooted in the challenging physical and cultural settings. To achieve this, the study draws on an extensive literature from several disciplines to develop a conceptual framework which provides a platform for meaningful analysis of practices, attitudes and aspirations. Drawing on an empirical study of six MPEs in New-Cairo, the massive master planned extension to the east of Cairo, the research examines the strategies employed to attract residents and the factors required to satisfy residential needs. Using a variety of qualitative data collection techniques, the core of the analysis is centred on the fundamental role played by different stakeholders in making these MPEs into liveable places. These stakeholders include the officials involved in applying urban policy, the planners and developers who are the providers and the residents who live there. The thesis offers a range of insights into what constitutes a liveable community and the contextual influences on landscape practices in MPEs. It also demonstrates that consideration of MPEs with respect to liveability and infrastructures opens up innovative alternatives to understanding how these MPEs are shaped and function. The thesis concludes that landscape is an essential factor in enhancing liveability in the desert MPEs. There is a potential therefore in pursuing the consideration of landscape as infrastructure, worthy of further investigation both in Egypt and elsewhere.

This study aims to explore accessibility for disabled people through the concept of social construction of disability. Impaired bodies are mainly disabled by disabling social and physical impediments. The built environment reflects how society understands disability and accessibility. How can disabled people individually and collectively resist, transcend, and change those disabling barriers? This research is qualitative in approach and based on mixed methods. The discussions are divided into two main themes: 1) meaning, and its product of understanding disability, and 2) the process of negotiating inaccessibility. Firstly, understanding of 'pi-gam' or disability is examined through culture representations such as language, literature, and media. Information from secondary data is used together with primary data in the form of in-depth interviews complimented by a postal survey. Through a focus on public facilities the thesis investigates how understandings of disability produce the built environments and what are spatial constraints and needs of disabled people. Secondly, the research investigates processes through which disabled people individually and collectively overcome access barriers. A process of disabled people as a collective in overturning existing socio-political structure to press for their access requirements through a case of footpath renovation project is explored in depth as is a lived experience of a disabled individual in Bangkok. The analyses indicate that disabled people resist an idea of disability linked with individual tragedy and illness by changing language use and reproducing the self through daily life. Performing daily activities in public places can be a way to demonstrate to society as a whole that the common notion of disability equalling dependency is mistaken. By actively participating in the movement, disabled people are overturning this dominant ideology. Fusing access issues with mainstream agendas such as quality of life and contributing to the prestige of an icon in Thai society provides opportunities for disabled people as a collective voice to achieve their access requirements. In sum, by individually and collectively acting as agents for change in challenging popular perceptions, disabled people are drawing attention to the social construction of their disability. It is disabling physical environments that must be excluded not their impaired bodies. This research proposes ways in which the environmental experiences of impaired bodies as well as the role of disabled people as partners in creating accessible facilities can be included in consideration of access policies and their implementation in Thailand.

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Early and medieval Muslim culture exhibits a preoccupation with boundaries. Called "wall thought" in the dissertation, this preoccupation takes exemplary architectural form in the high-sided, labyrinthine structure of Fes' walled city, or medina. In Islamic law, it takes the form of The Book of Walls, a genre pertaining to the regulation of external and party walls within the medina environment. In the gendered aspects of Islam, it commonly takes the form of women's enclaustration and veiling. The locus of all these and other aspects of "wall thought", the medieval medina of Fes presents a sociologically interesting environment, but one whose nature has never been investigated. The following dissertation represents an attempt to correct this. Demonstrating the medina to be defined and determined by its walls, the dissertation uses the legal genre The Book of Walls to identify the meaning of a wall in medieval Muslim thought. Applying this meaning to Fes medina, the dissertation arrives at a conclusion concerning the nature of its environment. Lastly, the dissertation compares this deductively reached conclusion with one inductively reached by way of Fes' medieval historiography, including the foundation legend recorded there. As an interdisciplinary investigation, the dissertation comprises a number of subjects from within the academic field of Middle Eastern Studies, including Maghribi history and historiography, Islamic law, gender and urban studies. Its predominant concern is architectural, attentive to the spaces architecture bounds and people inhabit.

In history, anthropomorphism was central to architecture. From Vitruvius to Le Corbusier, the human body served as a measure for proportion in the architectonics of embodiment. Some argue that Le Modulor represented the end of the body metaphor. However, contemporary theory points to new analogies between body and building, which are based on relationality rather than transprojections or physical emulations. With postmodemism and post-structural feminism, the humanist body was replaced with extendibility and a crossbreeding between body and environment. With this came a shift in body theory from objectification to an emphasis on SUbjectivity - where the body of the user is seen as measure again. However, this measure is based on the performativity and sensibility of a conscious subject who performs an act. Simultaneous to this development, emerged the notion of interface. With cyber culture, the interface is not only defined as a technological element but as an aspect of embodiment. In this context, I suggest an ana(ogy based on 'Relationallnterfacings', where a sensible and locational interface intervenes with a virtual construction (or a map) in architectural site. This in tum allows for a particularisation of memory, site-mapping and suspension of boundaries. Relational interfacings, I argue, promise to redirect the forces from monumentality to intimacy in architecture, and from a passive body to a conscious user in action. Three interventions test the affects of relational interfacings on users performativity, sociality and site-specificity. These interventions took place in real architectural sites and involved using intuitive and locational technologies to produce a virtual map on site. In the course of examining these interventions, I discuss the development of an Intervention Protocol as a diplomatic framework to guide the interventions design and analysis. This protocol helps to mark a crucial intersection of discourses and practices and sites, which locate the intervention within a definite social/architectural formation. It also promises to secure a shift from body objectification to subjectivity. The intervention protocol involves three main processes: (a) site-mapping to study memory, sociality and site-specificity, (b) ethnographic mapping where body movement becomes a measure of performativity, and (c) the possibility of a horizontal replication. In the conclusion, I revisit the postmodem body and discuss the body of user as a possible measure in architecture. I also redefine the interface as an aspect of embodiment, and discuss the impact of virtuality and interfacings in the body-architecture analogy. The thesis ends with a discussion of the interventions' development and of the outcomes, usefulness and possible applications of the interventions.

This thesis is an attempt to develop some analytic resources for thinking about problems and possibilities arising from the incorporation of Information Technology (IT) into the design of public spaces, especially in the early stages of design process. The main concern is about how to deploy IT components, such as microprocessors, sensors and actuators in order to positively affect various qualities of place. The framework developed in the thesis begins with an analysis of public places, and then proceeds to an identification of the spatial conflicts that impair qualities ofplace such as territoriality, privacy, identity and ambience. Components of IT were then spatially correlated to those qualities, thus revealing how these might be potentially applied as part of a system that would combine IT with spatial/physical solutions. The thesis focuses in particular on the development of the framework, which is traced by the close examination and scrutiny of three situations in which the design of public places was supported by this theoretical approach. The projects that arose from these are studied as case studies with the aim of determining the efficiency of the framework as a tool, and amendments to the framework were made in light of the necessity to clarify how the deployment of components of IT as part of an integrated design solution with place attributes might be justified. Finally, the thesis demonstrates that the analysis of the individual cases leads to the conclusion that the use of the developed framework is able to provide a basis for a coherent set of decisions regarding the application of IT in public places. In addition, possible ways in which the approach described might be improved and ideas for future research are suggested.

This thesis was mainly motivated and initiated by the need of Bahrain to develop building energy standards. The main concern, therefore, has been the establishment of a systematic approach for evaluating building energy performance using a state-of-the-art building simulation. The approach was established based on the discussion of energy standards, building simulation, office building design and performance evaluation methods. This study first investigated the most recent types of energy standards, and then examined two of them with respect to Bahrain. To evaluate the impact of energy standards on building performance a weather data file for building simulation was developed and a methodology for performing the evaluation introduced. For better understanding of how the application of energy standards influences the energy performance and how this influence can be measured the evaluation methodology was implemented to case studies in Bahrain. In order to show how researches and contributions described in this thesis can support the development of new standards the methodology was integrated into a systematic framework with the aim of optimising building energy design in Bahrain. The optimisation outcome represents a source of prescriptive and performance standards for office buildings. The building designer is giving more flexibility with respect to the prescriptive standards by providing a performance sensitivity scale. This scale was tested on a multi-storey office building in Bahrain. In conclusion, not only has a methodology for performance evaluation been introduced, but also an energy benchmark has been established, a weather data file developed and a systematic framework for setting new standards presented. However, in order to build on the achievements of the present study more work is required in two areas. One is concerned with energy performance benchmarks for different types of commercial buildings. The other is concerned with integrating the building regulation in Bahrain into the simulation programs.

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