<p>Arson has economic, structural and psychological repercussions. As a crime with such wide- ranging consequences, it has received little academic attention. Our goal in this research is to highlight how arson can be understood from two perspectives: the anthropogenic environment and the physical environment. Study one employs a generalized linear mixed regression model to explore the relationship between street network permeability and the incidence of deliberately- set fire events in the City of Toronto. This research aims to highlight the important influence that navigation of the built environment has on crime, specifically arson, in addition to the social characteristics of place that support criminal behaviour. We hypothesize that neighbourhoods with more permeable (less complex) street networks are more likely to be affected by deliberately-set fire events in the case of Toronto. Also using a multivariate regression model, study two aims to highlight the role of heat aggression on the incidence of fire-setting behaviour in the same study region. We consider fire events occurring between the months of May through September, and particularly those occurring during extended heat-wave conditions. We hypothesize that prolonged episodes of high temperatures will have a positive relationship with arson events. This research highlights that two conceivably different forms of geography (anthropogenic and physical) can impact that same phenomena: criminal fire-setting behaviour.</p> / Master of Arts (MA)

<p>The purpose of this thesis was to explore how health units servicing large rural populations in Ontario are integrating the built environment into public health interventions related to physical activity for the purpose of fostering healthy and sustainable communities. Additionally, this research sought to identify barriers and/or enabling structures that rural health units face in addressing the built environment within physical activity programming.</p> <p>This exploratory research study employed a descriptive qualitative approach. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with a purposeful sample of public health practitioners and managers identified by participating health units (n=12) as those most knowledgeable about program planning, implementation, and policy development in relation to physical activity and the built environment. Key themes were identified using qualitative content analysis and an inductive approach.</p> <p>The types of interventions were: engagement with policy work at a county or municipal level; building and working with community partners; gathering and providing evidence; hosting knowledge sharing opportunities; program development and implementation; social marketing, information sharing and awareness raising; and resource development and dissemination. Barriers and enabling processes and structures were identified at an organizational, community, and systemic level. Specific rural contextual enablers and barriers were also identified.</p> <p>This was the first study to the researchers’ knowledge that has examined current practices of Ontario’s rural health units related to built environment initiatives. In-depth perspectives elicited from public health practitioners and managers address gaps in the literature and contributes to new knowledge regarding built environment interventions to enhance physical activity in rural settings.</p> / Master of Science (MSc)

Mobility within the community is a necessary part of urban life for enhancing personal well-being and happiness. However, autistic individuals may not be the natural players in this context and have risks of using public transport, including getting disoriented, meltdown or shutdown, and being discriminated against in motion. This can be attributed to their difficulties in social communication and cognitive abilities brought about by autism. However, autistic individuals’ lived experience is rarely explored in the field. Thus, this study aims to examine their personal experiences and pay attention to how autism is enacted in public transport settings, and various encounters in a material environment. A two-month ethnographic study was used from the perspective of a micro-lens of a specific autistic adult individual. Through a narrative analysis of “key events” happening in the process of movements, the materiality of mobility by taking public transport for autistic individuals’ ordinary life was presented.  The findings and analysis are unfolding from three oriented dimensions. Firstly, I point out that as a material practical form of moving, encounters of the autistic participant with other passengers in a public moving space are merely a temporary gathering, shaping a relationship that avoids communication. Additionally, risks exist including information overload and being disoriented that show how autism is enacted in public transportation settings. Secondly, I suggest that as the material basis of the movements of taking public transport, the outside landscape presents the materialistic appearance of the modern city, bringing a sense of security as well as a channel for the autistic participant to learn new things, but at the same time the de-naturalization and modernity exacerbates the autistic one’s negative relation to the urban environment. Last, I demonstrate how the coercive nature of the technological objects intervenes in the originally pure tension between autistic individual and moving services, thus indirectly exposing the loss of discursive power and resources experienced by the participant.  Based on these findings, I draw on the discussions of the strategies and the built environment. From the standpoint of the former, it shows that prioritizing fast mobility has led to the neglect of actual needs for a higher standard of moving experience. This also indicates that the autistic one's resistance to movement often manifests as an attachment to the fixed and secure space of the home, forming the strategies of responsiveness and resistance. The latter suggests the ‘perspective turn’ to the social model of disability, realizing that being disabled might be a universal experience of a person, and everyone could be in a state of disability either permanently or temporarily. Therefore, optimizing the built environment of public transport not only benefits autistic individuals but also represents an investment in broader social well-being.

This dissertation examines how institutions and individuals navigate the histories of racial difference and settler colonialism by focusing on architectural preservationists' explanations of what are referred to as white cities. Through dialogue between architectural history, international relations, and critical heritage studies, I map the making and remaking of the histories of white cities, or what were designed as "European" zones – in opposition to "Indigenous" zones – that brought together modernist architecture, white supremacy, early twentieth-century European settler colonialism, and architectural preservation. My focus on preservationists' narrations of these white cities extends interdisciplinary work charting their historical production from a group of scholars focusing on the relationship of architecture in the production of domination in European colonialism. My work extends this scholarship by shifting to preservationists' narrations of white cities through the question: how do preservationists remake the histories of racial difference and settler colonialism that underpinned the production of white cities? In this dissertation, I argue that preservationists remake the histories of racial difference and settler colonialism that produced white cities by relying on what I refer to as didactic narratives to legitimate preservation interventions. Preservationists use these didactic narratives to reframe white cities as part of national histories, the universalism of the World Heritage List, and the history of the modernist movement in architecture and planning. My argument advances by showing preservationists' appropriations of the didactic narratives in the World Heritage List inscription materials for White City of Tel Aviv (2003), Rabat, Modern Capital and Historic City: A Shared Heritage (2012), and Asmara: A Modernist African City (2017) and through ethnographic fieldwork with local preservationists in Casablanca and Tel Aviv. To frame these analyses, I map the institutional changes within the UNESCO World Heritage Committee that sought greater legitimacy by expanding the typological and geographical scope of the World Heritage List. To do so, the institution enlisted the International Committee for the Documentation and Conservation of Buildings, Sites, and Neighborhoods of the Modern Movement (DOCOMOMO-International) to recraft the criteria to include twentieth-century modernist architecture onto the List. However, DOCOMOMO promoted a particular way of interpreting white cities through the didactic narratives that led to the proliferation of white cities on the World Heritage List. By charting the different ways that preservationists appropriate the didactic narratives in the World Heritage List materials and in the text of semi-structured interviews and from participant observation, I show how the intersecting power structures of white supremacy and settler colonialism that were embedded in the production of white cities are adapted by preservationists in the co-constitution of international institutions, disciplinary knowledge, and individual subject positions. / Doctor of Philosophy / This dissertation considers how the histories of race and colonialism are narrated by architectural preservationists. I do so by focusing on preservationists' narrations of white cities, "European" enclaves designed in opposition to "Indigenous" zones in early 20th century settler colonialism. By focusing on the preservation of what were designed as racialized spaces, I explore how these histories of racial difference and colonialism are mediated by forms of knowledge, institutions, and individuals. Yet it is the focus on preservationists that I detail how preservationists silence, downplay, or mobilize the histories of white cities through three different narrative tropes of national histories, the universalism of the World Heritage List, and modernist movement architecture and design. I show how these narrative tropes justify preservation interventions while making some histories more accessible and others less so. To analyze how preservationists remake the histories of white cities, I map the creation and transformations of the primary international preservation organization, the World Heritage List. These institutional changes led to the addition of white cities in Asmara, Rabat, and Tel Aviv based on preservationists' adaptations of the three narrative tropes. I then show how these same narrative tropes are appropriated by local preservationists to remake the histories of race and colonialism in white cities. By drawing attention to the ways that the histories of race and colonialism are remade through the intersections of individuals, institutions, and forms of knowledge, the project shows how knowledge on the modernist movement is implicated in the constitution of power in the World Heritage List and in consolidating privileged subject positions. Moreover, my analysis opens up questions on the co-constitution of institutions, forms of knowledge, and individual subject positions. Lastly, the analysis demonstrates that individuals have the potential to challenge – rather than to uphold – the constellations of power etched into white cities. I show one instance of architectural preservationists challenging these structures of power in the preservation effort of Les Abattoirs in Casablanca in 2009-2013.

Urban environments have been identified as a non-point source contributor of nutrient loadings into watersheds. Interannual surges of nutrient loadings into local water systems are more damaging than mean interannual nutrient loadings. Virginia has outlined the need to reduce urban nutrient loadings. Mean interannual nutrient loadings and interannual nutrient loadings variability are expected to increase under climate change (CC). However, there are few studies that provide a predictive framework for abating nutrient loadings under CC. Thus, there is a lack of information regarding how effective water quality policy will be in the future. Using the Difficult Run watershed in Fairfax County, VA, as a site of study, we used mathematical programming to compare how the costs of abating nutrient loads differed under differing climates in the Mid-Atlantic. We first compared the costs of abating mean interannual nutrient loadings in the watershed based on historical climate conditions to those predicted for CC. We then evaluated how changes in the interannual variability of nutrient loadings for CC affect the costs of meeting watershed goals. We found that abating mean interannual nutrient loadings was substantially costlier for CC relative to meeting the same goals under historical climate conditions. Further, we found that the costs of abating interannual nutrient loadings variability increased under CC relative to meeting the same goals under historical climate. One implication of this study suggests that policy makers seeking to meet water quality goals over time must front-load supplemental BMPs today in order to offset the changes predicted for CC. / Master of Science

Die gebaute Umwelt spielt eine entscheidende Rolle in unserem täglichen Leben und beeinflusst maßgeblich unser Wohlbefinden, insbesondere im Kontext von Krankenhäusern und Pflegeeinrichtungen. Dies wird in aktuellen Forschungserkenntnissen verdeutlicht. Ziel ist das Entwerfen von nutzerzentrierten und zukunftsfähigen Gebäuden, die den Anforderungen des medizinischen und technologischen Fortschritts sowie den gesellschaftlichen Veränderungen gerecht werden. Das ARCH4HEALTH Student Research Lab ist eine regelmäßige Serie von Lehrveranstaltungen an der Professur für Sozial- und Gesundheitsbauten. Die Studierenden widmen sich aktuellen Fragestellungen zu einem semesterbegleitenden Thema. Im Sommersemester 2023 fokussierten sich die studentischen Forschungsprojekte auf den Themenschwerpunkt „Psyche & Raum”. Dabei sollten innovative Ideen und Lösungsansätze für die Schnittstelle zwischen der gebauten Umwelt und dem Wohlbefinden der Nutzer:innen entwickelt werden. [... aus dem Text]

This thesis investigates the reception of the updated directive, Energy Performance of Building Directive, from the EU. The focus of the study is to analyse eight referral responses from chosen stakeholders and investigate their perspectives on the updated directive, negative and positive, any specific interests, are there any patterns that emerge in their responses and what are their concerns regarding the possible impact on society. The intention is to map the possible outcomes in society, focusing on social sustainability, including issues such as economic impact, social justice, and community impact.    The empirical material in this study is eight different referral responses on the updated version of the Energy Performance of Building Directive. The chosen methodical approach for this study is document analysis and thematic analysis. The findings are presented in four themes and later analysed and discussed through the lens of the chosen theoretical framework, which is environmental justice.    The findings show a large focus on accessibility to housing, resources and cost efficiency, excessive regulation and micromanagement, and the need for financial support and incentives. The stakeholders fear that the number of details in the Energy Performance of Building Directive will sub-optimise Sweden’s production. Even though the directive states that this initiative will protect the most vulnerable groups in society, the stakeholders fear it will aggravate the situation due to increased rents and economic burdens in general for the whole society.    This study concludes that such details should be discussed at the national level and it is important to include an environmental justice approach to avoid increasing the current inequalities and ensure that the needed transition will not be made at the expense of vulnerable segments of the population.

The concept of the circular economy has existed for a long time in various historical and political contexts. Still, it has gained significant popularity over the past decade, primarily due to the efforts of the Ellen MacArthur Foundation. Today, it is embraced by diverse stakeholders, including governmental bodies, influential forums, leading corporations, consulting firms, cities, and regions. This thesis details the development of narratives surrounding the circular economy and examines how contemporary university researchers perceive and define the concept. The findings reveal strong contrasts between different narratives, both in the literature and among interviewed researchers. The varied interpretations of the circular economy concept allow it to be adapted to different contexts, contributing to its widespread appeal. However, some view the circular economy as a consultant-driven concept that struggles to meet its promises, while others see it as the only viable alternative to the linear economy. Despite its name, the circular economy is primarily a model of material flows rather than an economic model. In the built environment, particularly in the construction and demolition sector, the principles of the circular economy—such as reduced resource use and increased recycling—are of higher interest due to the sector's substantial emissions and waste. / Cirkulär ekonomi som idé har funnits under lång tid i olika historiska och politiska sammanhang, men dess popularitet har ökat de senaste tio åren, främst till följd av Ellen MacArthur Foundations arbete. Idag har begreppet omfamnats av allt ifrån statliga organ, inflytelserika forum, ledande företag, konsultfirmor, till städer och regioner. Denna studie undersöker hur narrativen kring cirkulär ekonomi har utvecklats över tid och hur samtida universitetsforskare uppfattar och definierar begreppet. Resultatet visar att det finns en stark kontrast mellan de olika narrativen, både i litteraturen och bland de intervjuade forskarna. De varierande tolkningarna av begreppet cirkulär ekonomi gör att det kan anpassas till olika ändamål, vilket har bidragit till dess popularitet, även om synen på cirkulär ekonomi skiftar – vissa ser den som ett konsultdrivet koncept som har svårt att uppfylla sina löften, medan andra ser den som det enda hållbara alternativet till den linjära ekonomin. Trots sitt namn är cirkulär ekonomi främst en modell för materiella flöden snarare än en ekonomisk modell. Inom den byggda miljön, särskilt inom bygg- och fastighetssektorn, är grundprinciperna för cirkulär ekonomi såsom minskad resursanvändning och ökad återvinning av större intresse på grund av sektorns betydande utsläpp och avfall.

In the last decades of the eighteenth century, urban lives were touched by a series of innovations in the technology and aesthetics of illumination. Unfamiliar combinations of new fuel sources and auxiliary equipment (for example, curtains, blinds, glass, mirrors and lampshades) meant that cities looked and felt different during both the day and the night. The spheres of elite, popular, public and private culture explored, exploited and were fascinated by the cultural value of light. Through four case studies in the aesthetics of urban illumination, my thesis demonstrates how the acquisition of skills for the manipulation of transparent and reflective surfaces were crucial when negotiating a balance between self-expression and standards of taste, morality, gender and class. Rather than relying upon canonical examples of the period’s fascination with light, such as the high Romantic idealization of nature’s sunrises and sunsets, my thesis investigates more everyday encounters with light in the built environment: the fashionably genteel pastime of transparent painting; the gendering of light to design both domestic interiors and female identity; the appropriation of patrician top-lighting for public buildings of education and exhibition; and the popularity of illuminated spectacles in commercial pleasure gardens. I argue that these new possibilities of lighting temporarily enabled new possibilities of subjectivity. My historical phenomenology suggests that the formation of perception between 1780 and 1840 was actively directed towards changes in the world through a finely-attuned consciousness of light.

Introduction. Les programmes de vélos en libre-service (PVLS) représentent une innovation en transport actif. À ce jour, la sensibilisation à cette innovation en tant que prérequis à l’accessibilité n’a jamais été étudiée. Objectif. Identifier les facteurs liés à l’absence de sensibilisation à l’existence du PVLS à Montréal. Méthode. 7011 Montréalais âgés de 18 ans et plus ont été interrogés au cours de 3 sondages téléphoniques sur une période couvrant deux saisons : avant la première saison (n=2000), après la première saison (n=2502) et après la deuxième saison (n=2509). Des analyses de régression logistique ont été réalisées sur 93,6 % (n=6562) de l’échantillon pour examiner l’effet du temps, de la proximité des stations de vélos et du niveau d’éducation sur l’absence de sensibilisation à l’existence du PVLS. Résultats. Nous constatons que, après la première saison d’implantation du PVLS, la probabilité d’absence de sensibilisation au PVLS est plus élevée chez les individus dont le niveau d’éducation est faible que chez ceux dont le niveau d’éducation est élevé (RC = 1,60; 95 % IC : 1,18; 2,19). Aussi, nous observons que, après la deuxième saison d’implantation, la probabilité d’absence de sensibilisation au PVLS est plus élevée chez les individus dont le niveau d’éducation est faible et qui vivent dans un voisinage pourvu d’un PVLS, que chez ceux dont le niveau d’éducation est élevé et qui vivent dans un voisinage dépourvu d’un PVLS (RC = 1,63, 95 % IC : 1,01; 2,64). Conclusion. Malgré l’accessibilité au PVLS dans un voisinage, des inégalités sociales persistent. / Background. Public bicycle share programs (PBSP) are an active transportation innovation. No study has examined lack of awareness of PBSP as a factor limiting accessibility. Objective. Identify factors associated with lack of awareness of a PBSP across time in Montreal. Methods. Within the context of a larger study, a sample of 7,011 Montrealiers aged 18 years and over were recruited to participate in one of three telephone surveys occurring prior to implementation (n=2,000), after season 1 (n=2,502), and after season 2 (n=2,509). Multivariable logistic regression analyses were used to investigate associations between survey period, proximity to docking stations, and education with lack of PBSP awareness. Results. There was a greater likelihood of being PBSP-unaware among those with lower education after season 1 implementation in comparison to those with higher education (OR = 1.60, 95 %CI: 1.18, 2.19). There was also greater likelihood of being PBSP-unaware among those with lower education after season 2 implementation in neighbourhoods where the PBSP was available in comparison to those with higher education in neighbourhoods without PBSP docking stations (OR = 1.63, 95 %CI: 1.01, 2.64). Although lack of awareness decreased over time, greater likelihood of being PBSP-unaware was observed among those with lower education. Conclusion. Despite the physical presence of PBSP docking stations in neighbourhoods, socioeconomic inequalities persist.