Master of Landscape Architecture / Department of Landscape Architecture/Regional and Community Planning / Mary C. Kingery-Page / Chester I. Lewis Reflection Square Park in Downtown Wichita, Kansas commemorates the life of Chester I. Lewis, president of the Wichita Chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in 1958 and leader of the Dockum Drugstore Sit-In of 1958, the first successful sit-in of the Civil Rights Movement in the United States. In its current condition, the reflection park is underutilized and often subject to vandalism. As a historically significant park, it is important to the community of Wichita to maintain the integrity of the meaning of the site while simultaneously improving the physical design. The purpose of this project is to provide a redesign of the historically significant Chester I. Lewis Reflection Square Park which reflects the implication of the reflection park as a culturally inclusive and historically significant downtown space. Access to culturally and socially inclusive outdoor spaces is imperative to providing opportunity for people of all different backgrounds to personally connect to the space. While the goal of this project is to design inclusive spaces, the author recognizes inclusiveness in a space is interpreted by and culturally dependent on the user of the space (Kemmis, S., & McTaggart, R. 2000). The author conducted research through a cyclical process of engagement meetings with stakeholders, one-on-one interviews with Wichita community members, and design proposals for Lewis Park. Content analysis was performed on data from meetings and interviews to inform a set of guidelines to redesign Lewis Park. Theories of cultural interpretation were also explored to recognize how to integrate different audiences into one culturally inclusive outdoor space (Ulrich 1986). Findings include guidelines guided by community input for designing Lewis Park as a culturally inclusive outdoor space and a theoretical design proposal for stakeholders and the City of Wichita to consider. The redesign of the reflection park was driven by the aspiration to reflect the cultures of Wichita’s ethnically and racially diverse communities in the contemporary context of dialogue on race and memorials in public space.

The thesis is structured into the theoretical part, which deals with the needs of children in relation to the pre - school facility garden. Large part is aimed to movement and play. Thesis also deals with natural gardens and a list of natural game elements. The practical part describes in detail the current state and equipment of the school garden belonging to the faculty pre - school facility called Sluníčko pod střechou which is connected to Faculty of Education of Charles University. The analysis of the conditions of this garden is based on research methods of direct observation, questionnaire survey with teachers, and then method of interview with the school head. Furthermore, this part of the thesis is also devoted to research aimed at finding out what children's ideas about the equipment of this garden are. The research was based on the work of children with a pre - prepared research tool. Research has shown that the teachers are happy with the current look of the garden. They would only add to it some small gaming elements. Children like elements that are part of the current garden design. They prefer them to the new modern ones. From the point of view of small toys and aids, the conditions of the kindergarten are less suitable. Children mainly mentioned things that are not a regular part...

Although development organizations agree that reliable access to energy and energy services-one of the 17 Sustainable Development Goals-is likely to have profound and perhaps disproportionate impacts on women, few studies have directly empirically estimated the impact of energy access on women's empowerment. This is a result of both a relative dearth of energy access evaluations in general and a lack of clarity on how to quantify gender impacts of development projects. Here we present an evaluation of the impacts of the Solar Market Garden-a distributed photovoltaic irrigation project-on the level and structure of women's empowerment in Benin, West Africa. We use a quasi-experimental design (matched-pair villages) to estimate changes in empowerment for project beneficiaries after one year of Solar Market Garden production relative to non-beneficiaries in both treatment and comparison villages (n=771). To create an empowerment metric, we constructed a set of general questions based on existing theories of empowerment, and then used latent variable analysis to understand the underlying structure of empowerment locally. We repeated this analysis at follow-up to understand whether the structure of empowerment had changed over time, and then measured changes in both the levels and likelihood of empowerment over time. We show that the Solar Market Garden significantly positively impacted women's empowerment, particularly through the domain of economic independence. In addition to providing rigorous evidence for the impact of a rural renewable energy project on women's empowerment, our work lays out a methodology that can be used in the future to benchmark the gender impacts of energy projects.

I have decided to include into my diploma thesis the history overview of the Botanical Garden. A number of major events and pitfalls accompanied the history of the garden. The chapter about the general characteristics of the Botanical Garden of Charles University Science Faculty is also comprised Inside my thesis. There are also mentions about the exposition distinction to greenhouse and outside part and also the significant geopark which offers the additional opportunities for education. I am presenting here the offered programs of Botanical Garden for schools and the public without omitting the sample material offered to the visitors. I have also included the description of the innovative manner of interactive education of biology using the information boards and QR codes placed on these boards. Considering the didactic usage of Botanical garden I have created the worksheets which complement the excursion plan. So I have comprised the excursion planning, creation of worksheets, assembling the questions and the pitfalls during their creation in the next chapters. Afterwards I have described the excursion execution itself, its evaluation and the possible modifications of worksheets. The next chapters deal with the questionnaire designed for teachers of biology. I have concentrated in my teaching...

Doctor of Philosophy / Department of Architecture, Planning & Design / John W. Keller / Some parts of rural America are experiencing unprecedented demographic and cultural changes as immigrant settlement patterns shift from traditional gateway cities to rural regions that have enticing economic opportunities. In particular, southwest Kansas has become a magnet for immigrant workers and their families. Between 2007 and 2008, Finney County became a majority-minority county (Callebs, 2009). However, lack of affordable housing and limited housing stock has strained communities and become an obstacle for newly settling immigrants (Stull, 2011). This study aims to redress the limited research on immigrants in rural regions and focuses specifically on the cultural experiences of Finney County Hispanic immigrants regarding integration into the local housing community. This qualitative case study is designed using the housing career framework (Murdie, 2002) to capture the factors that influence the housing experience of Hispanic immigrants. The 25 participants were recruited using snowball sampling and convenience sampling techniques. Based on the participant’s language preference, the in-depth interviews were conducted in English or Spanish. This study has found that the mission of community planning has to be a multifaceted process to address the varied needs of immigrant families. Community planners and policy makers can use the information this study provides to better serve the immigrant Hispanic community, which is expected to grow over the coming years.

Masters of Art / West-End Primary is one of more than 100 public schools in South Africa, which since 1994, has greened large parts of its school grounds with a water-wise indigenous and vegetable garden. The South African National Botanical Institute-Environmental Education Unit (SANBI-EEU) is a government agency that has undertaken responsibility for implementing greening projects in partnership with public schools such as West-End Primary. SANBI-EEU encourages and supports the establishment of indigenous and vegetable gardens to facilitate teaching, to support school nutrition programmes and to make possible the employment of unemployed community members.Anecdotal evidence points to local cases where the “caretaker inherits” the greening project because other stakeholders (educators, learners) no longer participate in garden maintenance or because projects are started but cannot be sustained. The review of theory suggests that project sustainability is achieved and ensured through adopting a people-centred, participatory and sustainable approach to development.Hence, participation, capacity and capacity building is important to ensure this.Incorporating these development approaches into programme, project and operations management strengthens the process for achieving and ensuring project sustainability. This study was exploratory and used an empirical research design which combined qualitative and quantitative methods to investigate sustainability factors. The research population comprised Grade 5, 6 and 7 learners, staff and parents/community members at the West-End Primary School.In general the research findings demonstrated that West-End Primary achieved a degree of sustainability after project implementation. The study found that developmental factors such as participation, capacity, capacity building did in part contribute to achieving and ensuring this degree of sustainability. However a year and several months after project implementation, the degree of sustainability achieved was in a fragile state. This fragility was the result of a mix of weakness and strengths in the factors that have contributed to sustaining the greening project.

The Diploma Thesis deals with the marketing activities of the Garden Food Festival Olomouc. The objective of the thesis is to design specific marketing activities for the forthcoming year of this festival on the basis of the comparison with the foreign festival and the festival´s marketing, especially the marketing mix and communication. The theoretical part is dedicated to the history and significance of food festivals in the Czech Republic; furthermore, it introduces the areas of the marketing of services where the marketing mix and communication play a leading role. The subsequent practical part presents the comparison of a domestic food festival with a foreign one. To fulfil the objectives of the thesis, analysis of the marketing mix and communication as well as SWOT analysis is selected. The conclusions drawn are supported by a questionnaire survey about the awareness of the festival and its marketing. On the basis of the analyses performed and the data collection in the questionnaire survey, the concluding part of the thesis proposes specific features that the food festival could include in its marketing activities in the future.

Garden of Eden imagery is ubiquitous in contemporary print advertising in North America, especially in advertisements directed at women. Three telling characteristics emerge in characterizations of Eve in these advertising reconstructions. In the first place, Eve is consistently hypersexualized and over-eroticized. Secondly, such Garden of Eden images often conflate the Eve figure with that of the Serpent. Thirdly, the highly eroticized Eve-Serpent figures also commonly suffer further conflation with the Garden of Eden itself. Like Eve, nature becomes eroticized. In the Eve-Serpent-Eden conflation, woman becomes nature, nature becomes woman, and both perform a single narrative plot function, in tandem with the Serpent. The erotic and tempting Eve-Serpent-Eden character is both protagonist and antagonist, seducer and seduced. In this dissertation, I engage in an ecofeminist narratological analysis of the Genesis/Fall myth, as it is retold in contemporary fashion magazine advertisements. My analysis examines how reconstructions of this myth in advertisements construct the reader, the narrator, and the primary characters of the story (Eve, Adam, the Serpent, and Eden). I then further explore the ways in which these characterizations inform our perceptions of woman, nature, and environmentalism. Using a narratological methodology, and through a poststructuralist ecofeminist lens, I examine which plot and character elements have been kept, which have been discarded, and how certain erasures impact the narrative characterizations of the story. In addition to what is being told, I further analyze how and where it is told. How is the basic plot being storied in these reconstructions, and what are the effects of this version on the archetypal characterizations of Eve and the Garden of Eden? What are the cultural and literary contexts of the reconstructed narrative and the characters within it? How do these contexts inform how we read the characters within the story? Finally, I examine the cultural effects of these narrative reconstructions, exploring their influence on our gendered relationships with each other and with the natural world around us.

La recherche a pour point de départ les problèmes environnementaux que rencontrent actuellement les architectes. Les changements de priorités au profit de l'environnement peut être bien observé dans l'architecture récente de Paris, arène où se rencontrent les tendances les plus novatrices et les plus caractéristiques de leur temps. Le travail se propose de suivre cette évolution en prenant pour objet d'analyse deux jardins apparus récemment à Paris : le parc de La Villette de Bernard Tschumi et le Jardin en mouvement du parc André-Citroën conçu par Gilles Clément. Ces deux réalisations avec le même programme (parc urbain) ont l'avantage de résulter des approches diamétralement opposées et d'être en même temps très représentatives de l'architecture de leur décennie. Les enjeux de la recherche sont les suivants :– Montrer qu'un changement considérable s'est produit dans l'architecture européenne des années 90, à savoir le changement des priorités au profit de l'environnement. Il s'agit de montrer que l'architecture contemporaine est entrée dans une nouvelle phase de son évolution, tout en insistant sur l'importance du « tournant écologique ». Le mouvement écologique en architecture n'est pas une mode passagère, introduite par quelques personnalités influentes. Ce n'est pas non plus un « style » parmi d'autres ni un « courant » au sein de l'architecture contemporaine. Au fond, il s'agit d'un mouvement qui apparaît en réponse aux besoins réels de la société occidentale. L'un des objectifs de la recherche est de montrer la nouveauté de l'architecture écologique non seulement par rapport à l'architecture de la période précédente mais aussi par rapport à l'architecture traditionnelle.– Dégager les moteurs de cette évolution de l'architecture. Les changements dont il s'agit sont dus à plusieurs facteurs : économiques (énergétiques), environnementaux, politiques. Le travail de thèse a pour but de montrer comment ces facteurs ont contribué, directement ou indirectement, au passage vers l'architecture écologique. Il ne s'agit pas d'établir un simple rapport de dépendance mais d'analyser les processus dans toute leur complexité. Les processus dont il s'agit ne sont pas toujours linéaires, et l'apparition de cette nouvelle architecture résulte de la superposition de plusieurs tendances.– Analyser le contexte esthétique de l'apparition de l'architecture écologique. La recherche situe les objets d'analyse dans leur contexte culturel français et international, en montrant que l'apparition de l'architecture écologique va de pair avec une certaine crise du paradigme moderniste, qui a épuisé son potentiel théorique. La recherche se propose d'établir des parallèles entre l'architecture contemporaine et des phénomènes appartenant à la littérature, à la philosophie, à l'art contemporain.– Analyser le tournant environnemental (qui n'est pas encore achevé) dans une perspective « futurologique », c'est-à-dire évaluer ses conséquences à long terme / The point of departure of this thesis research is the environment worries which are currently faced by the architects. The shift in priorities to the environment may be followed in the modern architecture of Paris, in the city where there are the most innovative, the most typical tendencies of the current time. The task of the research is to follow this evolution and two parks recently appeared in Paris: Park de la Villette by Bernard Tschumi and the park of André Citroën created by Gilles Clément are taken as the object of this analysis. The choice of the object is explained as follows: these two objects are derived from the diametrically opposed architectural approaches and at the same time they are very revealing for the architecture of its decade. Being focused on the architecture, the research has also interdisciplinary element. This work puts the objects of the analysis in their French and international cultural context. The research sets up parallels between the modern architecture and phenomenon from literature (fragmentary method of writing), philosophy (theory of fragments) and modern art

The primary goal of my thesis is an analysis of czech accounting regulations in the area of evaluation, accounting and reporting of an animals that is followed by survey of solutions used in particular zoological gardens of the Czech Republic. My thesis also contains basic informations of history, legislation and funding of zoological gardens in the Czech Republic.