published_or_final_version / Urban Design / Master / Master of Urban Design

published_or_final_version / Urban Design / Master / Master of Urban Design

published_or_final_version / Architecture / Master / Master of Architecture

published_or_final_version / Urban Planning / Master / Master of Science in Urban Planning

A degree submitted for the requirements of Masters of Arts in Geography School of Geography, Archaeology and Environmental Studies / Mary Fitzgerald Square is an iconic public space in Newtown, Johannesburg. In spite of its iconic status, prolific social history and commercial role in the city, there is very little that is known about it and its users. In 2009 and 2010 I undertook an ethnographic exploration of the public space using Henri Lefebvre’s (1974/1991) conceptual spatial triad, the Right to the City and Elements of Rhythmanalysis frameworks. Through informal interviews, unstructured participant observation and exploration of archived newspaper articles, public space governance by-laws, published urban literature and research, I managed to situate this public space in urban geographical discourse as contested public space. By means of conceptual analysis, this research found Mary Fitzgerald Square to be an important public space that is dominated by neoliberal politics that create struggle for inhabitants to use it meaningfully in the context of everyday life. The proliferation of neoliberal relations of urban governance have led to a situation whereby the public space is subjected to private management practices that encourage its elitist uses and thus prioritizing its commercial exchange-value over its use-value. This process as the research uncovered, undermines the public space’s use-value and consequently leads to a subliminal marginalization of ordinary inhabitants who require and desire it for their varied practices in the context of everyday life. Urban management strategies like human surveillance, Public Open Space by-Laws, architecture and planning design, public-private partnerships, and the removal of the television monitor, discourage creative African youths, skateboarders, the urban poor and elderly in the city from appropriating Mary Fitzgerald Square. Inhabitants using Mary Fitzgerald Square manage to do so by overriding and transgressing existing spatial prohibitions by conducting their social practices in the contested space outside official policing times. Other inhabitants, through play and creative expression, have devised alternative means to challenge their marginalization in and uses of the public space in spite of existing by-laws, changing architecture, and visible human surveillance including law-enforcement that are conceived in an effort to deter their social uses of it. This research proposes a return to Mary Fitzgerald Square that warrants a critical discourse analysis of the public space in an effort to gain a better and deeper understanding of inhabitants’ everyday life experiences and their political situation in the current city through the public space. This should enable a sound critique of the production of Mary Fitzgerald Square in the African metropolis where the abstract struggle between private interests and public need for the public space materializes. Key words: Mary Fitzgerald Square, Henri Lefebvre, Johannesburg, Geography, South Africa.

This project will address the environmental and social issues associated with conventional community planning and propose solutions to these through written documentation as well as through masterplan-scale concepts of a proposed mixed-use project using principles derived from the New Urbanist movement. The site chosen to display these conceptualizations is that of the existing Delaware County Fairgrounds located in Muncie, Indiana. Two concepts for a traditional neighborhood development shall be the graphic product of the project. The concepts shall be used in a comparison of the potential for New Urbanist design principles applied within the confines of existing zoning and development regulation and New Urbanist-derived design principles applied in an unrestricted setting. The concepts will be used to illustrate the potential of the site as a primarily residential space. / Department of Landscape Architecture

In response to growing social inequality, environmental crises, and economic instability, sustainability discourse has become the dominant "master signifier" for many fields, particularly the field of urban planning. However, in practice many sustainability methods overemphasize technological and economic growth-oriented solutions while underemphasizing the social dimension. The social dimension of sustainability remains a "concept in chaos" drawing little agreement on definitions, domains, and indicators for addressing the social challenges of urban life. In contrast, while the field of public health, with its emphasis on social justice principles, has made significant strides in framing and developing interventions to target the social determinants of health (SDH), this work has yet to be integrated into sustainability practice as a tool for framing the social dimension. Meanwhile, as municipalities move forward with these lopsided efforts at approaching sustainability practice, cities continue to experience gentrification, increasing homelessness, health disparities, and many other concerns related to social inequity, environmental injustice, and marginalization. This research involves multi-site, comparative case studies of neighborhood-scale sustainability planning projects in Portland, U.S.; Copenhagen, Denmark; and Nagoya, Japan to bring to light an understanding of how the social dimension is conceptualized and translated to practice in different contexts, as well as the challenges planners, citizen participants, and other stakeholders encounter in attempting to do so. These case studies find that these neighborhood-scale planning efforts are essentially framing the social dimension in terms of principles of SDH. Significant challenges encountered at the neighborhood-scale relate to political economic context and trade-offs between ideals of social sustainability, such as social inclusion and nurturing a sense of belonging when confronted with diverse neighborhood actors, such as sexually oriented businesses and recent immigrants. This research contributes to urban social sustainability literature and sustainability planning practice by interrogating these contested notions and beginning to create a pathway for integration of SDH principles into conceptualizations of social sustainability.

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This is a three-paper dissertation on placemaking, urban space, and the Southeast Asian American (SEAA) experience in San Francisco. The first part is a quantitative spatial study of SEAA demographic patterns in the San Francisco Bay Area, the second part is an archival study of community formation through the Tenderloin Neighborhood Development Corporation archives, and the third part is a volunteer ethnography with a community organization. Part 1 explores three methods of reporting residential patterns: (1) concentration profiles, (2) density maps, and (3) proximity profiles. I analyze U.S. Census data to map and evaluate the residential patterns for Southeast Asian Americans in the nine-county San Francisco Bay Area. Drawing from the field of urban planning, I report two measures of segregation and concentration (a) dissimilarity indices and (b) spatial proximity indices, and I discuss their limitations. Since mapping and spatial statistics are essential to understanding the histories, development, and advancement of Southeast Asian American communities, it is important to promote their broad usage. The paper's findings lend evidence to three arguments: (1) pioneering moments (the establishment of new immigrant communities) can in fact start path dependent community growth, (2) clustering and dispersion to some extent can be predicted by classic theories of spatial assimilation, but new dynamics are playing out in today’s communities from Asian and Latino origins, including Southeast Asian American communities, and (3) residential clustering cases are circumstantial, dependent on unique local circumstances. Part 2 draws from Tenderloin Neighborhood Development Corporation (TNDC) archival materials, housed in the San Francisco History Center at the San Francisco Public Library, to present a case study of how the SEAA residents and a collection of actors collectively affected the local Southeast Asian American space (1980–2000). This article (1) examines the discourse of ‘neighborhood stabilization’ amidst housing precarity, (2) discusses the implications of refugees as ‘revitalizers’ and ‘entrepreneurs,’ and (3) documents the role of community partnerships and urban planning in building a SEAA community in the heart of San Francisco. Overall, the article argues that efforts to build affordable housing within a unique urban planning environment were instrumental in the formation of the Southeast Asian American community of San Francisco, and it demonstrates how local affordable housing and the built environment in refugee resettlement sits at the nexus of competing discourses about development and about inclusion. Part 3 documents a volunteer ethnography. Thousands of Southeast Asian American (SEAA) refugees and immigrants have called San Francisco’s Tenderloin District home, and their role in placemaking, community advancement, and cultural contributions are harbingers of future demographic dynamics in the North American metropolis. However, this community has been largely invisible in the urban planning and public policy literatures. In this ethnographic work, I document my experiences volunteering with a nonprofit and advocacy organization (referred to as The Center) that has served the SEAA community for several decades. Through these experiences, I find that (1) The Center provides a concrete anchor for the community, consistent with recent urban planning literature on placemaking, (2) the organizational motivations and self-narrative helps staff to confront logistical and contextual challenges, and (3) that volunteerism brings pragmatic resources and provides a critical lens for documenting and recording the history of the organization. The case study illustrates key elements of the political-economy of the social service industry in which the dynamics of immigrant placemaking, community advancement, and urban politics coalesce.

published_or_final_version / Urban Planning / Master / Master of Science in Urban Planning