This research considers the likelihood of adoption of and the effectiveness of growth management policy. First, I consider the likelihood that states adopt growth management policies. To conduct this research, I employ the policy diffusion model and add to the economic competition component of this model. I argue that the relative severity of a policy problem influences policy adoption among competing governments. In other words, states remain competitive with other states by adopting a policy when its policy problems are worse or similar to competitor states. This expectation is supported. I find that the higher the relative policy severity the higher the likelihood of policy adoption. Secondly. I examine how institutional structure influences policy outcomes. Here I consider the role of two institutional components: decision-making autonomy and policy-making costs of metropolitan governments. First, I expect that more autonomy at the metropolitan level will result in more effective policy outcomes. Second! I expect that metropolitan areas that receive more state aid will have more effective policy outcomes. Finally, I suggest that a conditional relationship exists between autonomy and transaction costs. More specifically, I contend that transaction costs increase, as a result of increasing autonomy. Metropolitan areas with more autonomy will likely receive less financial assistance, thereby increasing the metropolitan area's cost of implementing a policy. I find that, separately, state aid and autonomy have a significant affect on growth management outcomes. Metropolitan areas that receive state aid have more effective policy outcomes and less autonomous metropolitan areas have less effective policy outcomes. I do not find a conditional relationship between transaction costs and autonomy.

Throughout the history of New Orleans the paradigms of mechanical and fluid were projected as opposing modes of thought in the attempts to render the inhospitable dynamic site suitable for urbanization. The city's devastation in hurricane Katrina is a reminder that the top-down infrastructural practices have failed to freeze the unstable ground and may have increased the city's vulnerability by encouraging unlimited growth. A reconstruction strategy that perpetuates a mode of occupation irreverent of the fragile geographical reality will inevitably lay the groundwork for future disasters. This thesis seeks to develop an alternative vision by surrendering a high-risk area in the city to the fluvial landscape. As a system of passive water management controls interspersed with islands of resilient program, the new territory will be a catalyst for the city's recovery between major catastrophic events by alleviating seasonal flooding and operating as a bio-remediation filter for toxic runoff.

The image of our metropolis is the product of our economy. Commercial vernacular architecture in the United States since 1950 has become increasingly generic and anonymous. This is the direct result of a shift in proprietorship from individual to joint ventures in ownership of built form. Joint ventures in ownership, in turn, allow for an increase in the scale of built form, or 'bigness,' which dislodges or shifts the fundamental architectural volume or unit. This new unit appears on frontage roads across the nation, and Houston's own 'feeder' roads are a prime example of this changing space of American cities.

Hard Core Urbanism is the tendency to produce corporate enclaves within the fluid city. The garrison mentality denies the complex and interwoven processes exemplified by the history of Potsdamer Platz. Breaking the completeness of the corporate plan, the project initiates the process of diversification; enabling a reoccupation by the city.

When U. S. Highway 59 was constructed through Houston, Texas in the 1950's a trench was dug. One neighborhood became two, as a third community of automobile commuters filled the gap. The proposition of the design thesis is to heal this "wound" by physically and conceptually expanding an existing public park currently sited on the north side of Highway 59 into the right-of-way on both sides of it and onto the bridges that cross it. The new "park" facilitates the development of different relationships between people on the highway and people off it, and between people on one side of the highway and those on the other. The thesis is an exploration of issues of scale, speed, "place-ness" and of architecture's role in the facilitation of human interaction. I come to the project as one who participates in the place both as a highway driver and a neighbor-hood resident, as a traveler and a dweller. I also come to the project as an outsider trying to observe the energy that makes up the system (the machinic assemblage, if you will) so that I might effect it with minimal means. My objective is to engage architecture and the process used to create it to facilitate the development of community among people.

This thesis proposes an alternative development for the Odaiba reclamation site. This alternative consists of terrain manipulation and modified infrastructure, as well as procedural guidelines. By forgrounding the artificiality of the landfill site, and providing spaces for occupation outside those typical for consumption, these alterations will allow the citizens of Tokyo to experience the site as a unique territory outside of the traditional systems of Tokyo. It is a new system, that will continue to exist---and be transformed---as the site is inexorably assimilated into Tokyo itself.

The floodplain development strategy of "soft zoning" seeks to leverage the forces of unregulated development and flood disaster potential in order to incite the formation of a high performance urban landscape that accommodates both the natural process of flooding and the urban processes of rapid population growth and development. The testing ground of this landscape technique is an intensive FEMA Buyout zone near the convergence of White Oak Bayou and Vogel Creek, a heavily flood-prone area of White Oak Bayou Watershed in Houston, Texas.

I trace the transformation of two inner-city districts in London from semi-derelict industrial areas to emerging showcases of cultural enterprise, King's Cross, the site of the Channel Tunnel Rail Link terminus and Spitalfields, east of the financial district. By using a methodological melange that includes a host of interviews, first-hand observation and volunteer work at a community planning group over a year and a half, I explain how various efforts at historic preservation, community planning, economic development and, increasingly, promoting cultural activities have produced this transformation. Rather than focusing on gentrification or working-class displacement, I look at how these efforts have mobilized 'urbanist agency,' that is, of people such as architects, architectural historians, community activists, non-profit developers, planners and cultural entrepreneurs, who have become actively engaged in the production, preservation, and revitalization of inner-city spaces. Such agency not only recasts the popular image of the inner city. It also repositions it in a service economy led by explosive growth in the financial and cultural sectors. In fact, it is in repackaged inner city areas such as King's Cross and Spitalfields where we can most clearly discern the spatial effects of this increasingly global economy.

The dissertation is an ethnographic study of the conventions and practices of the actors of the US middle-class housing market concerning housing and neighborhood architectural change and management and its perceived relation to the protection of real estate investments. The ethnography takes as its starting point the widespread concern of the middle-class sector of American society with the preservation of residential "property values" and attempts to understand the interaction between more traditional (sociocultural) middle-class landscape "conservatism"---as reflected in a restrictive attitude towards neighborhood change---and the symbolic demands of large-scale housing markets with which homeowners engage for purposes of wealth accumulation and social mobility. The research explores the ways in which middle-class neighborhoods are managed, improved and controlled with the purposes of protecting and improving home values and explores the large-scale urban impacts of these behaviors and ideas. The research also includes a critique of this model of city management insofar as it entails housing discrimination, urban segregation and spatial exclusion for the urban poor. An informal comparison with Latin American urban growth patterns is made. The research takes place in the City of Houston, Texas and involves interviews and participant-observation fieldwork.

The incredible density and the ever-moving round-the clock public transport constitute the vibrant character of Hong Kong. In this totally consumptive city where the turnover rate is unbelievably fast, people have no time and no room to think. Compactness is no longer a function of lack of space but has become a system of its own. Static representation is no longer sufficient to document a city like HK in which every single parameter is animatable. Various computer animation techniques were explored to spatialize the raw footage of the city. These exercises sought to capture the ambiance rather than the physical constructs of the city. "Studios" generated in computer were stacked to form a tower in which the experiences and events of the city were encapsulated. The fixity and objectness of the tower (architecture) is effaced through visually animating the surfaces. Tower was also the metaphor of the compactness of the city.