In times of crisis, what tools do planners and designers have to inspire a sense of well-being? How can we heal community through dialogue, recognizing the ongoing need for connection with or without a crisis? Are there ways to uncover unknown concerns and values in a community? The engagement approaches many planners and designers rely on do not typically aim to access these deeper questions in society. Surveys, public meetings and focus groups seek tangible results that target specific issues. They are often conducted out of context, taking the public out of the environment at issue to answer questions on a defined topic. What tools do professionals designing our urban environments have for discovering unknown issues in a more spontaneous and practice-based way in places where community exists? Through the Eudaimonic Tree Pilot I explored these questions, using the framework of eudaimonia to guide my process. The objective of my study began with my desire to inspire a sense of well-being, eudaimonia, in my community during a time of great loneliness and mental health decline due to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. This historic moment left many people feeling disconnected and hopeless, exacerbating a national trend that started well before COVID (Ammar et al., 2021). In response, I produced three installations using trees in the landscape to offer the public a means of expression. Each tree housed a different prompt rooted in eudaimonic sentiments and blank note cards for public response. Their messages hung from tree limbs and became an embodiment of the collective consciousness. This study of public engagement through participatory art unearthed profound implications for the planning and design fields. Some of the primary takeaways suggest that participatory art can catalyze community dialogue; spontaneity heightens co-creation; and highly co-created initiatives are likely to generate a eudaimonic effect. This process was led by results as they emerged, highlighting previously unknown resolutions and considerations. This heuristic, emergent methodology could be used more often by planning and design professionals as a means to perform design research that embraces the ephemeral and eudaimonic aspects of communities.

The processes to develop community plans share certain standard activities and stages while remaining distinctive and without pre-scripted procedures. This study documents the process that yielded the South Broad Street Corridor Plan June 2012 draft. The objective is to present the decision-making processes and their connections to the final plan document along with the plan document itself.

Los Angeles is experiencing a loss of inventory with Industrial land due to adaptive reuse and property conversion. The primary factors behind the conversions are inconsistent land use regulations and a strong market demand for residential property. In an effort to streamline land use regulation, the city will create a new zoning code. In conjunction with the zoning update, the purpose of this project will be to develop a form-based code for the Los Angeles Arts District. The new land use regulation will explore methods to preserve job producing industrial space and accommodate the growing residential market in the area. Data for this study was collected and presented as a site analysis. The study also includes a literature review that examines the history of land use regulation in Europe and the United States. The site analysis for the Arts District includes an investigation of circulation patterns, economic factors, development profile, community input, and review of planning documents. Research includes a chronological investigation of the Arts District’s history, land use policies, and regulations. The study indicates that the Arts District, though primarily industrial, contains multiple residential nodes. Additionally, it reveals that industrial jobs and building stock are at risk from new development. The purpose of The Arts District Form-Based Code, as the new land use regulation, is to create a predicable development pattern that improves the quality of the built environment.

An important component of Planning Information Systems for municipal planning agencies is a comprehensive land use inventory that provides information on the location, distribution, and intensity of land uses throughout a community. This data is a necessary prerequisite for the informed creation of planning documents such as General Plans, Specific Plans, Housing Inventories, and Climate Action Plans. Beyond location, distribution and intensity of land uses, planners may also wish to incorporate additional information at the parcel level, such as the number of housing or commercial units, building condition, and/or access and connectivity to adjacent streets. Because some of this information is best observed in the field, agencies require methods of collecting this data that will ensure data precision, accuracy, and consistency, while minimizing data collection and processing time. Electronic data collection tools that are compatible with Geographic Information Systems provide a potential solution that can facilitate these desired data collection parameters. This research illustrates the development of an electronic data collection tool that planning agencies may utilize within various planning efforts, and compares the efficiency of the tool to traditional ‘pen-and-paper’ data collection methods in terms of time savings. It is recommended that planning agencies widely adopt and implement electronic tools for land use data collection, for the demonstrated benefits related to data consistency and reduced data collection time in the field.

This study investigated the potential for development of station catchment areas around the proposed California High-Speed Rail System. The study was prompted by a review of practices of Japanese railway company groups that engage not only in train operations, but also in business diversification and property development within the station areas of their lines. These actions allow the company groups to diversify their revenues streams, increase ridership on their lines, and operate as a whole with net profits. This is in contrast to transit agencies in the United States, which only focus on transporting passengers along their lines and do not engage in other commercial activities. This situation limits the potential for transit in the United States to play a larger role in urban transportation. With the implementation of the California High-Speed Rail System, an opportunity exists to introduce the commercial transit model seen in Japan to the United States. Since the California High-Speed Rail System is a brand-new system with few entrenched interests to impede change, it has the potential to lead as an example of transit operating with net profits and providing additional benefits to the station areas it serves. However, since planning for station areas to turn into commercially successful activity centers is still a new concept and practice in the United States, a methodology has to be developed to assess the potential for development of station areas. This study set out to answer the two questions: 1) To what extent are the locations of the California High-Speed Rail System’s planned stations currently attractive to development within their respective contexts? 2) Given the information gathered from the study, what policies should be taken to enhance the future development potential of the California High-Speed Rail System’s planned stations as activity centers within their respective station areas? The potential for development was quantified by calculating accessibility indices for each station catchment area using the inputs of number of jobs, population size, and number of housing units within a gravity model. The results of the analysis indicate that the station areas at the ends of the alignment in the San Francisco Bay Area and the Los Angeles Metropolitan Area will benefit the most. The next biggest beneficiaries are the major population centers in the San Joaquin Valley, which are Fresno and Bakersfield. Other stations that are not likely enjoy the benefits of a high-speed rail connection as much as other stations are those that have very little development around them currently, such as Kings Tulare and Madera. However, the potential exists for all stations to enjoy substantial development opportunities if the proper plans, policies, and business strategies are implemented early on and at the corridor level to make the station areas attractive for development. The study makes the following recommendations: Promote the commercialization of train operations and station areas to capitalize on their long-term economic value; Integrate the planning, construction, ownership, and management of train operations and station area development and services to reduce transaction costs; Develop plans or business strategies for each station area to create roadmaps and timelines for their development; And plan for land use activities at station areas on a corridor level to capitalize on specific synergies between station origin-destination pairs (e.g., land use activities that accommodate long-distance travelers between the San Francisco Bay Area and the Los Angeles Metropolitan Area, or those that accommodate commuter needs between up-and-coming station areas in the San Joaquin Valley with major job centers).

There is a large body of literature in the planning field on the topic of collaborative processes of decision-making, particularly in the United States and Europe. However, there appears to be less debate on the subject of complementing these ideas with contributions from urban governance. This research aims to contribute to that complementary work. In order to accomplish that, this thesis presents first a theoretical analysis of collaborative rationality and urban governance contributions. This analysis focuses on the articulation of those aspects that can offer a more holistic framework for addressing urban issues in a more inclusive way. Second, it provides a case study that takes place in the City of Rafaela, Argentina. The case study consists of an assessment of the regulatory and institutional framework that affects planning and the exploration of two contentious recent processes. One of them is the ‘Downtown Revitalization’ project and the second one is the ‘Future use of the Old Bus Terminal’. Several interviews with key actors were conducted in order to gather the information, which was combined with public and media documentation available. These two processes help to understand how significant decisions regarding uses and renovation of urban space are made and the opportunities to implement more collaborative processes in planning. The results show that the combination of the aspects highlighted by both bodies of theory can help to better address conflicts that arise regarding urban space, while increasing citizen participation and addressing issues of inequality in the process of decision-making.

<p>North American suburbs are facing decline and obsolescence. They cannot meet the needs of North America’s ageing society, future climate change, or higher energy prices. Compounded with their negative environmental impact, non-resilient is an appropriate label for North American suburbs.</p> <p>Resilient suburban communities can be realized through retrofitting to meet current and future needs. Community scale retrofitting is in the early stages of development. House-level retrofitting tools exist but must be synthesized into a useable form for homeowners.</p> <p>Homeowners arguably have the largest stake in the future of the suburbs for both financial and social reasons. Empowering them with tools to make their suburban home and community more resilient is considered to be desirable.</p> <p>This thesis empowers homeowners by developing a prototype decision support system (DSS) that will help them (or their contractors) make choices about adapting and retrofitting their home for resilience. This Microsoft Excel-based DSS addresses the following suburban needs: new housing types, reducing the environmental impacts of the home, and decreasing reliance on fossil fuels. The DSS does this through three constituent ‘modules’.</p> <p>The first module, <em>Dividing Suburban Homes</em>, demonstrates the feasibility of dividing large suburban homes into multifamily dwellings. The second module, <em>Sustainable Additions</em>, selects resilient building materials for housing additions. The last module, <em>Reducing the Home’s Environmental Impact</em>, helps homeowners choose methods for reducing the environmental impact and fossil fuel usage of their home.</p> <p>Through these three modules, this DSS addresses a considerable number of the current and anticipated issues facing the suburbs.</p> / Master of Applied Science (MASc)

It is my contention that through activating participatory design and community engagement strategies, in conjunction with innovative construction methods that address issues of resource scarcity, the standard of living and level of accessibility to critical resources in impoverished portions of Honduras can be drastically improved. The newly provided model of construction can be done it such a way that it is cost effective in its building method, and provides highly sought after scarce critical resources. This allows participants to allocate more of their finances towards other necessary resources they normally would not be able to acquire. A new community center designed to address the issues of resource scarcity and job opportunities will stand as a first built model with the intent that the methods of construction and innovations employed will be replicated in further applications. The center will be innovative in its construction in such a way that it recognizes local building practices, and brings some new ideas to them allowing for a method of construction that is both improved and more affordable. The center will also take a fresh look at ways the community can address issues of food and water through architectural innovations. The intent is that the success of the center’s combined interventions will encourage local people to replicate the design ideas in their own residential applications. This will improve the quantity of resources available in the community and also start to build a new job market for installing the newly desirable systems. Resource scarcity has wreaked havoc on the typical Honduran villages’ sense of community. Hondurans are in constant competition with their neighbors for scarce critical resources required to sustain life. These resources include, food, water, shelter, and employment opportunities. Violent conflict often arises within communities as individuals compete with their neighbors for the basic necessities required to sustain life. While architecture alone cannot solve all the issues that contribute to the problem of violence, a new center with a program that builds community and provides needed resources stands to potentially curb neighborhood conflict and begin the community healing process. The center stands as not only a replicable model, but also as an immediate community element to bring neighbors back together physically in daily interactions and emotionally in the new resources being provided.

The removal of New York Interstate- 81’s (I-81) 1.4 mile stretch of raised, four-lane highway in Syracuse will highlight the critical role of socioeconomics, accessibility, and community building in urban neighborhood reclamation. The removal of what had been previously deemed an urban renewal project, presents Syracuse with new opportunities for space restoration and place-making efforts, atoning for careless and traumatic historic divisions, all the while exploring more substantive design responses tailored to the realities of the City. This thesis explores these fundamental planning considerations through a design lens; by proposing a comprehensive and integrated vision of physical and spatial opportunities provided by the removal of the Viaduct. Through a series of demographic, socioeconomic and spatial analyses, this thesis begins by working to understand the effect of these proposed changes on the communities most directly affected both by I-81’s construction and now its destruction. Then, the thesis examines what it means to be a Sanctuary City in the United States and explores methods in which the vacancy of this land can be found to serve Syracuse’s most disadvantaged and at-risk populations. If Syracuse deems itself a home for everyone, what types of facilities could exist to serve that designation, both built and imagined? In this thesis I propose my own theories about the role of architecture in helping to create a true sense of sanctuary. Finally, the thesis explores the design and programming of a series of buildings, spaces, and urban interventions which serve as a means to this end. In so doing, the thesis critically examines the role of socially integrated urban renewal in Syracuse, NY, and offers design explorations that might mediate social inequities.

Access to water from San Antonio Creek was critical in Claremont’s growth from a small stop on the Santa Fe Railroad to an agricultural powerhouse and an elite college town. While Claremont has sought to distinguish itself from surrounding communities since its founding in 1882, the innovative Pomona Valley Protective Association (PVPA) aligned Claremont with the City of Pomona and its other neighbors in a scheme to conserve the Creek’s resources at the turn of the century. Organized around the discovery of local confined aquifers and the development of a strategy to recharge them with water from the San Antonio Creek, the Association was a contradictory moment of cooperation in an otherwise highly contentious zero-sum game of water rights politics. As conflicts wore on, the PVPA quietly orchestrated the purchase of large tracts of land in the San Antonio Creekbed, where the construction of diversion dams and spreading grounds served dual purposes of water conservation and flood control. As dam building in the Creekbed continued, large tracts of the previously undevelopable Wash were transferred to the aggregate mining institutions that gouged the area’s many gravel pits. This thesis uses the story of the PVPA and the contemporary example of the Claremont University Consortium Gravel Pit to explore the context of development in the San Antonio Creek Wash. Understanding the political and social contexts of the gravel quarry problem reveals possibilities for a more integrative, conscious, and sustainable approach to improving the former gravel quarries that currently occupy the Wash landscape.