During the last decade creativity has become one of the buzz concepts of urban practice and research, and new concepts such as the creative city, creative economy, the creative class, creative industries and creative clusters have emerged (Florida, 2002; Landry, 2000). There are studies in economics and cultural geography, sociology and, to some extent in urban planning, exploring the creative city phenomenon. To date, however, there have only been a limited number of studies on understanding the dynamics and factors of the spatial conditions of the creativity debate in the discipline of urban design. The growing body of literature in these disciplines emphasises the need to identify and define the preferences and tendencies of creative industries, and also clustering activities. Hence, the characteristics of cities that attract and retain the creative industries and creative types have become important; this concept is termed quality of place (Florida, 2002). In this context this research focuses on the morphological analyses of film industry-based inner-city creative clusters and explores the dynamics between creative clusters, quality of place and place-making processes. It aims to understand the spatial conditions and factors relating to the emergence, sustainability and growth of creative clusters, focusing on the location decisions of creative types (i.e. companies and people involved in creative production). This exploratory, cross-national case study is conducted in Soho-London and Beyoglu-Istanbul. They are the inner-city locations where creative industries, in particular the film industry, and creative people cluster. The study applies qualitative and quantitative research techniques such as interviews, questionnaires, observations, and cognitive and cluster mapping. The research concludes that there are three main factors contributing to the emergence, growth and sustainability of creative clusters; these are economics of clustering, location and quality of place, and face to face interactions. The research suggests a tentative analytical framework for understanding the quality of place for the film industry-based inner-city creative clusters and for mapping the creativity potential of places. The overall quality of place involves the process of place-making of a particular location, not just the product it represents. Walkability and permeability are identified as the key performance criteria of urban place, providing the movement and interaction which are the necessary conditions for clustering. Permeability of urban form enhanced with interactive micro urban public places plays a major role in facilitating the social interactions which collectively comprise the key aspect of urban and individual creativity, as people are inspired by each other. In addition, these complex layers, juxtaposed with urban form and land-use activities, are also interlinked with the socio-cultural setting and hence café culture, sense of community, and image also appear to be other factors contributing to clustering. Participatory planning enhanced by community leadership and the involvement of landowners, creative entrepreneur-led initiatives and other informal processes related to the organic spatial dynamics of the place contributes to clustering; particularly the small-scale interventions. In addition to these organic approaches, research suggests that urban design and planning could contribute to sustainability of these clusters through ensuring the right scale of intervention, through controlling mechanisms and place-management strategies. Key words: Creative clusters, quality of place, place-making, the film industry, Soho, Beyoglu.

One of the main underlying foundations of good cities is the quality of their social and public urban spaces. The needs for these quality spaces are uncompromising; if they lack rigor in planning and thorough implementation the affects and consequences can be dire upon the sustainability of these cities. The availability of and quality of such public places will take on increasing significance as we move towards 75% of the World's population living in urban areas by 2050 (Burdett & Rode, 2007). High-rises and tall buildings are increasingly becoming the solution in accommodating growing populations in areas opting for high-density development (Marcuse, 2000). With increasing and intensifying urbanization has come a growing awareness of the relative qualities of living, socializing and public life. This has increased the consciousness among architects, planners and developers to design social places for people to use for the many layers of social exchange within the design of high-rises and tall buildings. How do we theoretically approach the design of social and public spaces in these new evolving urban settlements? This thesis focuses upon analyzing attempts to design and realize place-making within social and public spaces of a recent high-rise residential development in Singapore. The Pinnacle @ Duxton Public Housing Project (2009) by the Housing Development Board of Singapore claims to succeed in achieving the concept of place-making within a high-rise settlement. This research utilizes post-occupancy methods from urban design theory in order to assess the perception of users and to record actual use and activity in these places. In doing so, this paper will attempt to identify the good and bad practices that make successful social and public places. The Pinnacle & Duxton Plain Public Housing has attained huge publicity for its design of public and social spaces vertically on a grand scale. Evaluation of this project by empirical testing adapted from urban design could provide a new theoretical platform to how and why it could work for future developers, councils, architects and planners alike.

Energy is potentially at the hub of modern civilization and right from Industrial Revolution, technology has refined and redefined the way we use energy; but technological advancement in all spheres will continue to depend and use energy to progress. However, fossil fuels (coal, gas, oil) have remained the dominant energy resource accounting for a larger proportion of world energy consumption when compared to nuclear energy and renewable energy resources. There are mounting fears of both the climate and our environment reaching a characteristic tipping point due to global warming. This is associated with the relentless use of fossil fuels and uncontrolled emissions of greenhouse gases. The persistent trend has triggered the need for alternative and renewable energy options which are now being considered and pursued globally to avert the possibility of climate change attaining a state of irreversibility. This research describes the development of a novel 2kWe biomass fired Organic Rankine Cycle (ORC) system intended for remote off-grid locations, employing a multi-vane expander as the prime mover. The expander is a four vane model 6AM-FRV-5A 3kW Gast Air motor manufactured by Gast Manufacturing Inc. The prime mover will harness power produced by high pressure vapour to generate torque and rotational motion on the shaft and the mechanical energy generated is converted to electricity by means of an automotive alternator. The conversion of low and medium temperature heat from biomass to electricity by using low cost, lightweight and low maintenance expander as well organic substances or hydrofluoroether, HFE 7100 and HFE 7000 is the subject ofthis research. In order to assess and predict the performance of the system an EES simulation of a basic cycle is carried out in order to compare the the outcome with the actual cycle. A preliminary air test of the system was also carried out to have a perspective on actual performance using compressed air. However, the organic substance, hydrofluoroether (HFE) to be used in further tests is selected because of its thermodynamic properties of having a lower specific volume and higher molecular weight than steam allowing for smaller, less complex, less costly energy applications like expanders and smaller diameter tubes to be employed for low temperature micro system. This is achieved through a phase change transformation in a Rankine cycle process between specified temperature limits when compared to turbines which operate at higher temperature and pressure. An experimental study and initial testing is carried out using a Chromalox- Model CES-12, 9 kW boiler providing temperatures between 100oC and 115oC and test measurements collated and analysed to predict performance and assess outputs and possibly fluctuations in the system. A test involving the use of the biomass boiler is carried out later and analysed results compared with that of the electric boiler. The process will involve the supply of heat from the biomass boiler and the high pressured vapour generated in the ORC cycle is expanded through the prime mover with a fall in temperature and pressure at the exhaust and exiting as saturated vapour or a mixture of vapour and liquid. The energy stored in the working fluid in the vapour state is converted to electricity by work on the shaft while the exhaust heat can be tapped for domestic uses as thevapour is expanded down to low pressure in the condenser and the saturated liquid is pumped to a high pressure in the evaporator to resume the cycle.

An increase in population recorded in traditional Nigerian communities facing rapid urbanization created a demand for housing. This has necessitated research regarding the socio-cultural needs of different cultures in the country. This gap is most evident the North East region where little or no intense architectural studies have been carried out in part due to mountainous terrain. Furthermore, no culture specific studies have addressed the relationship between social problems such as insecurity, delinquency and slum environments with changes in lifestyle nor investigate the failure of prototype housing in some of these communities. The present study addresses these issues via two surveys in Tangale land, North East Nigeria. Interdisciplinary approaches combined in ethnography were employed to document the culture and lifestyle of the community for possible relationships between changes in the culture and social problems. Space syntax techniques, scaled drawings and space use patterns were utilized in a measured survey to document and analyse housing in the community. These became instrumental in explaining changes in housing typologies, the sustained use of some socio-cultural values/themes and functional spaces such as courtyards, forecourts for outdoor living as well as spatial and morphological differences between community-produced housing and government-provided prototype units. Results reveal that changes in the culture of the community largely due to external influences are linked to the observed social problems. Four housing typologies and compound transformation patterns also exist in the study area, correlating with four major historical events. Furthermore, the socio-cultural factors of kinship, security and basic needs were not adequately reflected in the design and location of the prototype units which may account for their abandonment and modification. This has implications for future policies in urban planning and architectural design in Tangale land.

Heritage is a constituent of the cultural tradition, and an important component of societal and community welfare. This comprehensive vision merges both tangible and intangible dimensions; architectural and historical values. As a result of globalisation, local communities of heritage sites have started to realise the significance of their influencing voices in shaping their lives and futures. Several rehabilitation and development initiatives have been selected for this study to review lessons learned from a variety of methodologies adopted for different historical districts of distinctive urban, political, and socio-economic contexts. Historic Cairo is home to the largest concentration of Islamic monuments in the world and was designated a world heritage site in 1979. Despite historic Cairo's international and national significance, it is highly vulnerable to negligence and deterioration as a consequence of modernisation and rapid changes in urban and cultural lifestyles. Historic Cairo has attracted numerous rehabilitation, preservation and restoration studies, proposals, and projects through governmental, national, and international efforts. These rehabilitation schemes however have lacked the sustainable urban development delivery in this heritage context. Moreover, most of the schemes neglected yet another significant dimension for sustainable urban development considered key to many successful schemes; community participation and involvement in the planning process. The study aims to fill the research gap identified to achieve sustainable urban development in historic Cairo. Thus, a thorough, evidence-based, and theoretically informed methodology has been proposed for developing a tailored intervention that attempts to tackle some of the most critical problems in historic Cairo. The present study adopts a mixed-method strategy with an in-depth case study to undertake a comprehensive analysis of the research problem. This mixed methodology has had the benefit of combining data collection techniques, interviews and questionnaire in order to explore more fully the context of the case study. The combination of methods has provided a basis for exploring how community participation plays a vital role in the success (or failure) of the delivery of a development intervention in historic Cairo. Results from questionnaires and interviews have provided a robust vision of how the bottom-up and top-down views complement each other to provide a foundation for the researcher to build the proposed intervention on. The analysed results are to provide recommendations to decision makers on how best to encourage and incorporate stakeholders' views in future interventions implemented within their rich historic context. Drawing from the survey results along with lessons learnt from other development initiatives in heritage sites, and complementing this with space syntax analysis techniques, a set of tailored design guidelines is generated for sustainable development in historic Cairo. The proposed design guidelines comprise recommendations that have dealt with the five main urban zones of historic Cairo based on the most critically required design principles for sustainable development; diversity and choice, distinctiveness/sense of place, users' needs, self sufficiency/participation, and pollution reduction. The proposed strategy has aimed to consider the development of the physical urban context of historic Cairo whilst enhancing the social, economic, and environmental aspects within the local community to guarantee the sustainable delivery and outcomes of the intervention.

This thesis reads contemporary British motorway service areas as questions of place, and as instances of what I call ‘lounge space’, a space of transient consumption that conceals the power of the host. Motorways and service areas are sites where clear boundaries have been asserted, materially as well as theoretically, between local and national, traditional and modern, country and city, place and ‘non-place’. Through close readings of service area forms, details and materials in context, this thesis shows how such absolute distinctions cannot be maintained. Rather than instances of ‘non-place’ – Marc Augé’s term for spaces lacking social relations, history or identity – service areas show place as process: as never absolutely fixed and always dependent on interrelated material, socio-cultural and historical contexts. This is not to dissolve the differences between places, but to show how they are contested and the power relations involved. The thesis thus explores a notion of place informed by what Jacques Derrida calls ‘iterability’, a logic of irreducible contamination, of repetition with difference. Chapter 1 considers two typical recent service areas, Hopwood Park and Donington Park. It shows how boundaries of place are dissimulated and yet tightly policed, how allusions to ‘public’ space also recall the ‘private’ space of the home, and how an illusion of unlimited hospitality conceals the power of the host. By comparison, ‘independent’ operator Westmorland, the focus of Chapter 2, appears to be an exception. On one level, the company’s Tebay Services reclaim the roadside for the locality; on another, however, the sites, and the region they represent, become caught up in the cultures, forces and economies they claim to resist. Westmorland the company is conflated with Westmorland the place. As this ‘natural’ host offers an idyllic Lakeland refigured for the outsider’s consumption, it contests how and by whom that place is to be consumed.

The research has shown that cooling in UK Office buildings can be undertaken far more efficiently than generally occurs at present, by combining the selection highly efficient air conditioning systems, such as chilled ceilings, and by ensuring building design and operation is undertaken in an energy efficient manner. The potential energy consumption, carbon emissions and running cost savings appear to be comfortably over 50% compared to current practice.

This dissertation provides a reassessment of the design documents and historical discourse concerning Le Corbusier's Chapel Notre-Dame-du-Haut, Ronchamp. Chapter 1 provides historical background for Le Corbusier’s acceptance of the commission, and resituates the primary literature on the Chapel within its original context: a tense ideological conflict between the French Dominicans and the Vatican hierarchy, who had placed the principal patrons and their chosen architect under covert surveillance. Chapter 2 presents a comprehensive review of the secondary literature on the Chapel, providing chronological evidence that Le Corbusier’s explanations of Ronchamp have exerted a predominant influence upon this discourse since the Chapel's inauguration in 1955. Chapters 3 and 4 present an exhaustive content analysis of the portion of the primary literature on Ronchamp published between 1953 and 1955, highlighting the considerable discrepancies that these texts contain. Upon the basis of this review, I suggest that there is sufficient warrant to be skeptical about the canonical explanations of the Chapel's design, which first appeared within these texts. The study concludes in Chapters 5 and 6 with a renewed investigation of the extant archival materials pertaining to the initial phases of Le Corbusier’s design work for the Chapel. I argue that the canonical explanations of Ronchamp have overlooked many early drawings that played a fundamental role in the architect's creative process, and, on the basis of these discoveries, propose a revised sequence of design development for the first three phases of work within the atelier. An alternate explanation of Le Corbusier's creative process is also proposed, based upon a revolutionary approach to architectural design that he developed after the war, which, I suggest, he did not wish to disclose to his professional peers or to the public.

Germany’s first Garden City was founded at Hellerau in 1908; it represented different aspects of the Reform movement, and was a remarkable coincidence of progressive manufacturing (Karl Schmidt’s Deutsche Werkstätten furniture factory), housing and urban design (masterplanned by Richard Riemerschmid with significant contributions from Hermann Muthesius and Heinrich Tessenow) and cultural innovation (the Festspielhaus, promoted by the patron Wolf Dohrn who commissioned Tessenow) where the Swiss musical pedagogue Emile Jaques-Dalcroze established his school of eurhythmy. Tessenow’s work, in the form of executed buildings, drawings, and writings, forms an architectural corpus which concludes many nineteenth-century concerns and lays the foundations for much of the technical and aesthetic agenda of the Neues Bauen of the 1920s and beyond. His nineteenth-century inheritance is emphasised by considering his work as a series of dialectical pairings representing the fundamental ‘spirit’ and ‘matter’ discourse of that era. The focus on ‘space’ and ‘matter’ of the late 1800s becomes the theoretical engine of the analysis of Tessenow’s work: in terms of ‘light’ (the ‘light box’ of the Festspielhaus) and ‘fabric’ (the aesthetics of flatness aided by Tessenow’s patented wall construction); ‘the grid’, where his work is related to contemporaneous concerns of Behrens and Lauweriks, and ‘the everyday’, which concludes with the parallel of his ‘ordinary’ designs with Muthesius’s encouragement of ‘the type’. Tessenow’s architecture is interpreted as a critical development of Gottfried Semper’s ‘Four Elements’, and it is here that the overly simplistic dialectic of ‘spirit’ and ‘matter’ is found wanting, particulary as concerns the Semperian ‘hearth’ element. The thesis concludes by charting Tessenow’s changing critical reception throughout the twentieth century against its key architectural staging posts, and suggests that the lesson we might learn from him is to adopt a Humanist outlook incorporating an ethos both materialist and ‘spiritual’ in outlook.

The design and proper operation on the above-ground drainage systems can be challenging in a densely populated city like Hong Kong. Discharge loading imposed to a single vertical stack can be large enough that those systems without a proper design, installation or maintenance would suffer problems such as backflow of foul water, contaminated foul air, or even soil waste to the sanitary fitments at lower floors. Any of these nuisances can be regarded as failure because the soil and waste water cannot be properly disposed away from a building. The risk of such a failure would be higher in densely occupied tall buildings. SARS outbreak in 2003 revealed that the consequence of failing to properly manage the drainage system can be as serious as a fatal disaster. The contaminated aerosols, with water droplets with the microorganisms are fatal to human like the SARS virus since it will flow back to the living environment. This research aims at proposing advanced design and monitoring practices upon the drainage system and its components, to minimize the risk of failure and nuisances occurrence. A brief review on several types of failure will be gone through. Besides, a simulation model has been established to predict the air pressure in drainage system. The result will be compared with those from real 1:1 test-rig experiments. This assists the development of innovative inventions of system components such as 8S twin drainage stack which is designed to self-balance air pressure generated by falling water discharge in drainage stack. It ensures better protection of water seal in traps. Smart trap is available to enlarge retention time of water seal due to evaporation. Regarding the management of existing installed drainage system, a protocol has been proposed to troubleshoot the nuisances. It includes remote-control air pressure monitoring and statistical analysis with the development of probability density functions to decide future remedial engineering measures. All of these are integrated as a risk management model aimed to reduce the risk of occurrence of the nuisances.