The sustainable growth and development of our cities are amongst the most important issues of the world today. It is estimated that soon up to ninety percent of the world’s population will live in urban centers. How to accommodate such growth, while maintaining high quality of life, is one of the most challenging tasks facing society. The design proposal will address the future population growth in the City of Toronto with the intensification of an inner suburban area in central Etobicoke. It is founded on principles that address the communities growing needs while working to cultivate a sense of place and improve the livability of the surrounding neighbourhood. Within this area through the design of a mixed-use development with significant forms of public space and amenities, the neighbourhood would experience increased connectivity with the surrounding environment and improved sense of community. It will draw together the residents of the area and cultivate a new public realm from its now disparate elements, this would raise the areas ability to meet future housing needs and mitigate congestion. The design for the Etobicoke Centre is a symptom of – and a drive toward – the evolution of a mature suburb to a place aspiring for urbanity. The story of suburban transformation is relevant to metropolitan areas around the continent, and the clarity of the architectural design demonstrates how good public space design can set standards of sophistication, craft, and structure for other developments to follow. New growth in the area has the potential to act as a catalyst for change, demonstrating how existing inner suburbs have the ability to evolve into more urban, sustainable places.

The sustainable growth and development of our cities are amongst the most important issues of the world today. It is estimated that soon up to ninety percent of the world’s population will live in urban centers. How to accommodate such growth, while maintaining high quality of life, is one of the most challenging tasks facing society. The design proposal will address the future population growth in the City of Toronto with the intensification of an inner suburban area in central Etobicoke. It is founded on principles that address the communities growing needs while working to cultivate a sense of place and improve the livability of the surrounding neighbourhood. Within this area through the design of a mixed-use development with significant forms of public space and amenities, the neighbourhood would experience increased connectivity with the surrounding environment and improved sense of community. It will draw together the residents of the area and cultivate a new public realm from its now disparate elements, this would raise the areas ability to meet future housing needs and mitigate congestion. The design for the Etobicoke Centre is a symptom of – and a drive toward – the evolution of a mature suburb to a place aspiring for urbanity. The story of suburban transformation is relevant to metropolitan areas around the continent, and the clarity of the architectural design demonstrates how good public space design can set standards of sophistication, craft, and structure for other developments to follow. New growth in the area has the potential to act as a catalyst for change, demonstrating how existing inner suburbs have the ability to evolve into more urban, sustainable places.

In the 80s and 90s in America, residential developers believed that the best way to make money was to build a golf course community. Premiums of homes on golf courses ranged from 30% to 100% more than the price of a similar home not adjacent to a course. Today, the bottom has fallen out of the golf market leaving over 2,400 courses closed in America. Residential homes bordering a closed golf course experience an 11.7% loss of value. Many owners and potential developers want these large parcels of land to be up-zoned so they can build higher density residential and make a profit. Neighbors do not want to lose their greenspace and public officials do not want to be seen as harming single-family residential. This thesis argues that to retrofit a closed golf course, developers, community members and other stakeholders must first understand the morphological and environmental implications of the different types of golf courses, the context surrounding closed courses and the location of these courses in a greater regional area. By understanding closed golf courses in this way, a framework can be established that results from negotiation among golf course residents, neighbors, developers and public officials.

These collected stories are a narrative exploration of a collective life in middle‐class suburbia. Here the reader is introduced to a troop of characters who share a community but yet they are adrift in the atmosphere between identity and memory. At times, as in “When to Lie” and “Afraid of the Question” we see conflict arise when the suburban religious dogma alters character identity, leaving behind haunting memories and scar tissue. Memory and identification play an important roll when, as in “Rx” the protagonist is faced with the sudden loss of his family as he struggles to keep their memories alive—without their memory he is no longer a father or a husband. Whether the characters are looking to re‐engage in society after being done wrong, as is the case in “Playing the Game” or coming to terms with sudden loss, afflicting memories play an important role in each narrative.

This dissertation interprets the images and archival records of Project Documerica, the Environmental Protection Agency's photography project that ran from 1971 to 1977. Directed by Gifford Hampshire, a former National Geographic editor, Documerica was modeled on 1930s Farm Security Administration photography, which had helped establish the documentary genre through iconic images of Depression-era America. Whereas the FSA had shown the human costs of the Dust Bowl, Documerica aimed to reveal the natural and social costs of the environmental crisis. Vocal public environmental concern made Documerica appealing to EPA officials, and this new agency's still-forming bureaucracy enabled Hampshire's ambitious plan to remount an FSA-style initiative. Documerica's mission included: creating a “visual baseline” of the U.S. environment from which future progress could be measured; documenting the EPA's successes in ameliorating the crisis; chronicling the environmental movement, including non-activist Americans in relationship to their environment, broadly defined; and compiling a visual encyclopedia of American life in the 1970s, as the FSA had done in the 1930s. The urge to revive a national, FSA-style undertaking expressed widespread nostalgia for a mythic American past in the 1970s, an era fraught with social upheaval over Civil Rights and Vietnam. In its time, Documerica failed to achieve recognition comparable to the FSA's, and folded prematurely. Yet its 22,000 images, housed at the National Archives, nonetheless provide a complex portrait of the U.S. during a moment of significant cultural transition. This dissertation interprets Documerica's photographs, its bureaucratic struggles, and its nostalgia in the context of the massive social, political, and economic shifts of the 1970s. In particular, it examines Documerica's focus on the post-industrial landscape, exploring why the project emphasized the changing aesthetics of the built environment as much as threats to the natural environment. The dissertation centers on visual conceptions of American small towns, cities and suburbs in six specific series by photographers Ken Heyman, Danny Lyon, Yoichi Okamoto, Kenneth Paik, Suzanne Szasz, and Arthur Tress. Encapsulating Documerica's central preoccupation with preservation, these images of architectural and social environments evince the era's deep-seated anxieties about fragmentation, degradation, suburban sprawl, urban decline, and proliferating car culture.

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Housing shortages have plagued many large North American cities and urban areas over the last several decades. In many such regions, less affluent areas are rapidly redeveloped and densified to keep up with housing demand. This frenetic development displaces lower income residents and tears apart community networks. Meanwhile, affluent areas resist development, maintaining low densities despite their relative proximities to jobs, schools, transportation networks, and other resources. Consequently, patterns of inequality which have persisted in American Cities for decades, if not centuries, remain in-tact. Furthermore, these low-density areas contribute to sprawl, car culture, habitat destruction, and other harmful social and environmental phenomena. Additionally, many of the low density urban and suburban residential neighborhoods which were developed en masse over the last century–so-called 'cookie-cutter' neighborhoods–fail to readily accommodate the diverse and ever-changing needs and circumstances of the people who currently inhabit them, having been built with outdated and inflexible notions of the 20th century ideal family in mind. This thesis explores the redevelopment of a single family residential neighborhood in Washington, D.C. By exploring the densification of the neighborhood and the addition of new programs to the suburban landscape, the thesis seeks to identify strategies by which we might one day convert massive and sprawling cookie-cutter suburbs into denser, more sustainable, and more diverse neighborhoods which serve a wider array of residents better while contributing additional housing and other resources to the broader population. / Master of Architecture / The American obsession with single-family homeownership in the name of the 'American Dream' has led to the development of an unsustainable landscape characterized by the extreme stratification of land uses, widespread overdependence on the personal vehicle, and the continued issue of equal access to community assets and services, among many other issues. Furthermore, many extant suburban landscapes were designed with outdated and inflexible notions of the ideal family in mind, and thus they fail to meet the needs of families and individuals who don't conform to the typical family model of the 20th century. The thesis takes the stance that the 'American Dream' is an outdated ideal, and that the American suburb is, by extension, an outdated model of living in the 21st century. The thesis investigates the reprogramming of an affluent single family residential neighborhood in Washington, D.C, proposing the densification of the housing stock and exploring new urban forms which aim to build density, diversity, sustainability, and community in an existing suburban-type neighborhood.