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Mémoire numérisé par la Division de la gestion de documents et des archives de l'Université de Montréal

This thesis documents and highlights - within the context of other exclusionary practices - some of the spatial and architectural strategies deployed by the government and the privileged classes to exclude and evict homeless citizens from the spaces of the city. Although various spatial scales are incorporated into the argument - from the national to the municipal - this investigation focuses primarily on the Capital Region of British Columbia and the City of Victoria, where much of the statistical and empirical research has been gleaned. Through the implementation of regressive legislation, oppressive urban planning, and exclusionary architectural design, the visible and abject homeless body is systematically concealed, wrongfully prohibited, or violently evicted from private and public space. Indeed, not only are homeless citizens denied a fundamental right to a private space of secure, adequate, and affordable housing, they are also denied fundamental political and physical rights to the public spaces of the city.

In spite of its spontaneous and improvised character, the informal sector has provided virtually the only appropriate housing, in terms of the organization of the outdoor space, for the urban poor of the developing countries. Through an analysis of the outdoor spaces in Eziukwu-Aba, a low-income and informal settlement in Aba, Nigeria, this thesis investigates the organization and mode of use of outdoor spaces, in relation to the day-to-day activities of the urban poor. It focuses on the patterns of outdoor spaces, the categories of activities found in them and the periods of time of the occurrence of the activities. / The findings of this study are compared with those of earlier studies, and the broader implications of these findings on contemporary low-income urban housing in the developing countries are briefly outlined. This study posits that for the urban low-income group of the developing countries, (a) usable space takes precedence over aesthetics and permanence and (b) housing and environmental quality in terms of construction standards are of little significance, compared with employment.

Mobile technologies are the latest technologies in the realm of communication media. They have the potential to flatten the world by making it a place where gender, age, class, race and nationality can no longer hold us back from being heard and being informed. We have learned that these technologies can help to liberate and empower us, and they can lead to a collective cognition as much as they can distract us from what we need to know about the world we live in. In Greece thousands of years ago, a selected number of Greeks had a public space called the Agora to discuss the issues that concerned the public, meaning each and every citizen. They were the first to be able to create the space and place were the word “democracy” could be brought into language; the very word that was used to start a new war in the era of a communication revolution in the 2003 invasion of Iraq. There are still issues that concern the public today such as wars, global warming, homelessness or human rights which are all matters of our collective cognition. However, today in an age of information revolution the public life of people and their collective cognition is being exercised mostly in the virtual spaces of the Internet. Simultaneously, some physical spaces are being abandoned by people. This thesis investigates the possibility of having physical public spaces that are enriched with communication media and not weakened by it. If architects rethink their designs based on a new understanding of the networked society it might be possible to turn this “networked individualism” into a networked collectivism. However, most designed public spaces fail to offer new possibilities that can transform space for the new generation of users. Here, the aim is to understand a new generation of users. Who have they become as a result of new communication media? And how can architects design in a way that responds to this new subject in architecture?

Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Melbourne, Dept. of Information Systems and Faculty of Architecture, Building and Planning 2006. / Typescript. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 261-275).

Thesis (PhD(Visual Studies))--University of Pretoria, 2007. / Includes bibliographical references. Available on the Internet via the World Wide Web.

Thesis (D. Min.)--Catholic Theological Union at Chicago, 2007. / Abstract and vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 197-202).

Thesis (M. Arch.)--Carleton University, 2004. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 100-102). Also available in electronic format on the Internet.