The absolute polarization of contextual and tabula rasa urban models has long been advanced, even blatantly promoted, within the discipline. Taken for granted as foils, the exclusive championing and application of context or tabula rasa has only served to undermine the agency of the contemporary city. Producing an ineffectual and one-dimensional duality, cities have been reduced to futilely choose between the old and the new. A city of contradictory extremes, the clash between these concepts is embodied in the urbanism of Shanghai. With the impetus of China’s “Economic Miracle,” a previously unheard of scale and speed of urbanization has been achieved throughout the country with the creation of “instant cities.” Embraced as testing grounds for contemporary urbanism, the characteristics and conditions of the instant cities have been enthusiastically and almost universally adopted, leading to a primacy of tabula rasa and vertical development. Partially transformed by this model of erasure, Shanghai’s urbanism is defined by confrontation as the urban models of the past and present collide. The duality manifest by this conflict compels an examination of the seemingly agonistic roles of context and erasure in the city. The ambition of this thesis is to eliminate such distinctions; the choice between contextual and tabula rasa approaches does not work. This false choice produces either a conservative preservationist tourist attraction or a generic and totalizing vertical city. The shallow tendencies of both approaches threaten the city as a multiple and collective space of possibility. By adopting a broader view of context and collapsing present dualities, this project seeks to create complexity and new confrontations through an urban morphology shaped by architecture. Moving beyond contextual preservation and tabula rasa, this thesis seeks to engage and create another reality using that juxtaposition to open new relationships within the city.

This project deals with the relationship between Stockholm and the water, investigating its history and searching for a definition of its future. As a city, Stockholm is defined by water; it creates physical distance in the city, but at the same time visually ties it together. Looking specifically at Söder Mälarstrand, an undefined waterfront with great potential, this project seeks to understand the current state of this site and propose a new use for it. How can this urban landscape be defined to accommodate a contemporary use of the waterfront? What should such a development look like architecturally? As a research method, this project looks beyond the physical extension of the site to the images of it constantly reproduced. Without romanticizing the past, the research searches for the character of the site to find a potential for its future use. The project proposes a new use of the waterfront. The quay is widened, and the new space that is created is anchored by the addition of three new volumes programmatically linked to the existing activity on the site, while also allowing new uses in the future. This approach aims to create a more defined public space, making the site permeable.

The purpose of this thesis was to design and evaluate The ContexTable, a context-aware system built into a kitchen table. After establishing the current status of the field of context-aware systems and the hurdles and problems being faced, a functioning prototype system was designed and built. The prototype makes it possible to explore established, untested theory and novel solutions to problems faced in the field.