The goal of this study is to investigate the association between different types of play area design and level of physical activity of 3-5 year old children. Rationale 1. The majority of USA children are in some type of childcare provision. 2. The childcare centre is the highest predictor of preschool physical activity. 3. Being outdoors is the strongest correlate of physical activity. Three childcare centres in North Carolina, USA, were selected to carry out the study (n=90). A variety of methods were used to establish sample comparability: Early Childhood Attention Deficit Disorder Scale EC-ADDES, body mass index (BMI), the Test of Gross Motor Development TGMD-2 and children demographic information. Accelerometry was used to measure children’s activity. To link the amount of physical activity to play settings and environmental features two methods were used: 1. Behaviour mapping (processed with GIS), and 2. Video tracking of selected children (analysed using The Observer, Noldus). Setting diversity was measured using a 1-4 point scale developed by the researcher. Findings The study strongly suggests that: • The amount of physical activity afforded by preschool play areas can be intentionally improved by design. • Diverse play areas containing pathways and natural elements, and combining a range of setting sizes are expected to be the most active. • The most effective setting for motivating physical activity in this study is predicted to be a wide, curvy, wheeled toy pathway. • Compact play areas, where greater numbers of children play together, are likely to support more physical activity. • Educational programs that foster outdoor learning are likely to secure greater amounts of sustained physical activity. As a research contribution to the emerging field of design for active living, a key purpose of the study is to influence childcare policy and accreditation. Appropriate design and childcare licensing policies are viable vehicles to produce environmental and behaviour change in early childhood institutions.

Determining the criteria and then evaluating schoolyard environments is a challenge due to the myriad aspects of what may constitute successful design of schoolyards. The intention of this study was to identify the design elements, qualities, or processes of elementary schoolyards that determine the success of these environments. Descriptive and comparative data analyses were conducted following the distribution of questionnaires and the application of criteria checklists to a sample of public elementary schools in Tucson, Arizona. The discovered patterns contributed information as to how well these schoolyards are providing a successful outdoor experience for staff and children, as well as what factors determine that positive outcome. The findings are useful for the design of future school outdoor environments and the redesign of existing schoolyards in Tucson and the Southwest, and may be applicable in other regions.

This study explores: (1) Attitudes and perceptions of Tubac residents that may have an impact on their QOL--both personally and at the community level; and (2) QOL measurement techniques that may contribute to the utilization of QOL indicators as a tool for studying and monitoring human communities toward a sustainable future. Informal interviews were conducted with seventeen Tubac residents followed by the distribution of a questionnaire in a "snowball" sampling method (Bernard, 1994). Fifty-two responses were compiled and compared for similarities and differences. Results demonstrate the majority of Tubac residents are extremely satisfied with the QOL and feel fortunate to live in a community they believe is unique--mostly for its surrounding natural scenery. Results also support the idea that qualitative approaches to QOL measurement techniques are necessary for further comprehension of the complexities of human communities.

According to Environment Canada, across the country there are currently over 1400 abandoned gas station sites that are contaminated. Unbeknownst to local residents, many of these sites are undergoing remediation. Temporary interventions called remedial landscapes can be designed by landscape architects to communicate to the public the remediation activities, which are otherwise hidden from view. Environmental psychologists note that pro-environmental behaviour stems from increased awareness of environmental degradation. Furthermore, by presenting first hand information in the form of a landscape, people can make their own decisions concerning their role in unsustainable practices. This thesis posits that by experiencing remedial landscapes, people will change their environmental attitudes and or behaviours. Remedial landscapes also offer opportunities for public art and further exploration of alternative forms of remediation. It includes not only precedent studies of other remedial landscapes, but a public perception survey concerning a gas station undergoing remediation in Kerrisdale, Vancouver. The survey indicated that the remediation of contaminated sites is a community concern and that the remediation should be made more visible. Participants also agreed that the use of a designed landscape would be a viable tool for communicating the status of the site. This research informed a set of design guidelines for the Kerrisdale ‘test site.’ A remedial landscape has been designed using these guidelines and is included as part of the thesis.

The Haarlemmermeer Polder resembles the Sleeping Beauty awaiting the Prince's kiss: it is a void filled with opportunity in the dispersed metropolitan landscape of Randstad, Holland. Like Houston, it is densely urban, yet its urbanity is for the most part placeless. This dual personality is an exciting constant in a model of transformation into an 'empty' metropolitan area in which urbanity is exploited to its extreme: the density of the void. Two aspects will be significant to its future. The first is Homo Viator who has constructed a new domain linked together by motion. Second, there is the landscape of the open city. Exciting opportunities abound in stretching the contrast between the human and natural orders to an uncomfortable extreme by Dutch measures. The resulting landscape through colonization will be a new chapter in the Dutch tradition of treating the landscape as a work of art, continuously reinterpreted and rewritten.

Control of water in the metropolis has occurred most dominantly through methods of channelization, or moving water across the landscape, contributing to the current infrastructural organization of bayous. If the principle method of control favored the movement of water through the earth, the landscape could begin to behave and perform much differently and complexly. The project investigates a situation where speculative non-structural methods of flood control interface with governmental acquisition of private residential property in a strategy to increase open space for parks. The variable landscape under investigation is always in transformation, be it in terms of physical growth (accumulation of land), in terms of entropy, or in terms of political and economic parameters. In such fluid territories multiple futures are projected through variable states, rather than a fixed solution, in a system that never reaches a point of crystallization and never settles on one scale of effects and implications.

The plot is the basic delimitation where a diverse range of systems (natural or artificial) interact and begin to form the cartography of the land. "Building a new plot cartography" is a proposal to understand the interaction of a diverse range of systems (economic, ecological, and technology), and with this data start to create a new narrative of the land. "Building a new plot cartography" would be series of sustainable strategies, methods and tools, that allow us to form and understand new and old synergies between forces that shape the process of creating a new landscape which has its own contemporary, beauty, ecology and grammar.

No description available.

No description available.

The city of Guelph, an element within one of the largest conurbations in North America, the Greater Toronto Area/Greater Golden Horseshoe, is utilized as a metonym of a more general problematic. Certain narratives, logics and instrumental rationalities inform the production of this sprawling polycentric agglomeration forming an almost continuous urban and industrially developed area. Spaces and things within the built landscape, iconic, tropic forms and definitions, recurring presences or absences and 'symptomatic' silences within media and public debate provide a means for addressing discursive productions of Nature and identity in a mapping of the present. This materialist analysis addresses the exchanges and relationships occurring beneath and behind the city's surfaces; the nature and dynamics of the socio-ecological inter-play made manifest by urbanized landscapes and the city's metabolism. Artefacts that involve an engineering of material provide rubrics for considering questions attending spaces, representations, and practices related to urbanization. The basis and topographic implications of meta-schemes created to plan and organize the city, from those of the Canada Company to current Ontario Provincial legislation, is examined. Topography is considered as a material organization within a strategic system employing cybernetic apparatuses and reproductions, consisting of texts/artefacts enrolled into structures of political economy. Intertwining natural, cultural and technological systems, Guelph reveals a practiced urban geography that is a condition and translation of relations effected by global capitalism. The built environment involves conflations of object, image and symbolic space, their practices and principles. Institutional practices and historical relations here shape and impinge upon the biophysical ground. Boundaries and the presences and absences entailed are structured, organized a / La ville de Guelph, un élément dans une des plus grandes agglomérations en Amérique du Nord, la plus grande région de Toronto/une plus grande région du Golden Horseshoe, est utilisé comme un metonym d'un plus général problématique. Les certains récits, les logiques et les rationalités instrumentales informe la production de cette agglomération de polycentric tentaculaire formant un secteur presque continu urbain et industriellement développé. Les espaces et les choses dans le paysage construit, idole, les formes de tropique et les définitions, reproduisant des présences ou des absences et les silences 'symptomatiques' dans les médias et dans le débat public fournissent un moyens pour adresser les productions décousues de Nature et l'identité dans une cartographie du présent. Cette analyse de matérialiste adresse les échanges et les relations arrivant en dessous et derrière les surfaces de la ville; la nature et la dynamique de l'inter-jeu le socio-écologique manifeste fait par les paysages urbanisé et le métabolisme de la ville. Les objets qui impliquent une ingénierie de matériel fournissent des rubriques pour considérer de questions assistant des espaces, les représentations, et les pratiques lié à l'urbanisation. La base et les implications topographiques de meta-arrangements ont créé pour planifier et organiser la ville, de ceux-là de l'Entreprise de Canada à Ontario actuel la législation Provinciale, est examiné. La topographie est considérée comme une organisation matérielle dans un système stratégique employant des appareils et des reproductions cybernétiques, consistant en des textes/objets inscrits dans les structures d'économie politique. Entrelacer les systèmes naturel, culturel et technologique, Guelph révèle une géographie urbaine exercée qui est une condition et une traduction de relations a effectué par le capitalisme global. L'enviro