California is headed into its fifth consecutive year of drought, and climate change is expected to bring more frequent and severe droughts to the state. The state’s water supply is susceptible to drought as seen from the effects of the current dry period. Besides the clear impacts of drought, there are less obvious environmental, economic, and social costs, such as land subsidence from groundwater overdraft, and the consequences of urban tree and green space loss. As a uniquely climate-independent source, desalinated water can stabilize California’s water supply and lessen some of these drought-related impacts. Although seawater desalination is touted as the most costly and energy-intensive method for augmenting water supply, if implemented in a feasible manner, the technology provides a range of positive benefits for drought-prone California in the long term. This thesis analyzes the economic and environmental costs of using desalination to mitigate the effects of drought in California. The thesis explores both Australian and Californian desalination facilities as case studies for evaluating the benefits and impacts of using different methods of desalination, in an effort to determine which method would be the most beneficial for securing California’s water supply. It concludes that lower-capacity, flexible desalination facilities would be useful along California’s coast, under some conditions. By generating a supply of desalinated water for coastal communities, more water from the state and federal water projects could be redirected to agricultural regions and inland communities that suffer the most from dry spells, and thereby lessen a number of drought-related environmental, economic, and social consequences.

As interior designers, we strive to design everything for our clients, from complex environments to the joinery of a chair. We rarely consider inviting our clients or the users to join us in finishing the space. Read-In workshop is not a school, but a kind of home, a home belonging to children, which provides the possibilities for children to play, to learn, to occupy, to personalize, and to share. An emotional space that will not limit the user, but keep inspiring them. It helps children notice, think, and grow. Half of the interior space will be a fixed design, designed and fabricated during the first construction phase. The other Half will be designed as a flexible and changeable “framework” space, which allow the users to reorganize, repaint, and refinish, depending on their evolving educational needs and aesthetic tastes. Therefore, this “incomplete” workshop will share control with children. The contents of the framework will be continuously updated by the children who participate in the Read-In arts programs.

This thesis highlights the role of urban planners in the revitalization of historic seafronts as creative and attractive places for people and a key factor in the regeneration of the urban economy in the historic seafront areas. The Saudi Arabia historic seafront areas along the North Red Sea have been neglected and are suffering because of slow development and changes to industrial uses. This thesis will focus on the urban design principles that make historic seafronts more attractive and successful, and will use a case study approach of several American waterfront cities such as Baltimore, Maryland; San Francisco, California; and Charleston, South Carolina. These American cities and the urban design principles applied for their successful revitalization were selected for analysis because of their similarities with the Yanbu Al-Bahr's historic seafront. The results of this analysis will enable planners to apply the best of these urban waterfront design models to assist in the revitalization of historic seafronts along the North Red Sea in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA).

This thesis examines the ways in which Frank Gehry’s architectural contributions to Los Angeles’ social and built environment have shaped the region’s “postmodern geographies” throughout the 20th and 21st century. Through a focused exploration of three of Gehry’s postmodernist structures in Greater Los Angeles—a house, a library, and a concert hall—this thesis analyses how Gehry and his designs reflected and affected the artistic and socio-spatial development of Los Angeles’ “decidedly postmodern landscape.”

Transit-Oriented Development (TOD) in downtown areas is a distinct form of new development, creating walkable districts and 24-hour neighborhoods. A new streetcar on Loyola Avenue in the New Orleans Central Business District was planned to encourage new development in the area. By analyzing the current land uses and values, projections of future change predict over $500 million in added value. For this development to become a successful TOD, policies must encourage uses that generate ridership and increase walkability. Although the Loyola corridor has many historic attributes of a transit-oriented downtown, it currently lacks neighborhood identity. The new development associated with the Loyola streetcar has the potential to become a downtown TOD.

In the beginning of the 2000s, Israeli policies in the West Bank shifted from policies of control to policies of separation, which in turn led to the Transformation of West Bank communities into isolated urban islands. Current plans prepared for Palestinian localities by Palestinian planning institutions most often address these isolated islands without taking into account the Israeli-controlled areas surrounding these localities. Palestinians envision the entire West Bank as a contiguous area that will eventually form part of the Palestinian national state. However, most Palestinian plans take the boundaries imposed by Israel as a given and plan only for areas within the Israeli-controlled areas. This dissertation is about the Palestinian planning processes in the West Bank in an attempt to assess whether these processes are or could counteract Israeli plans of separation. Upon extensive research, it was found that Palestinian planning institutions have a very limited impact in countering Israeli plans. The only counter-planning activity that can be observed is the Palestinian National Authority’s latest orientation to plan in Palestinian areas classified as Area C (found in areas under complete Israeli Control). The aforementioned lack of counter-planning activities can be attributed to the inefficiency of a legal framework, lack of vision, lack of coordination, and deficiencies within Palestinian planning institutions.

The transit shelter, the space where riders make the transition from open space to more controlled buses and trains, is in many cases the site of a public-private transaction. Here, government agencies contract private companies to build and maintain shelters in exchange for governmental allowance of advertising in these locations. This dual purpose—the shelter serves concurrently as protection for transit users and as a moneymaker—means the space is contested, with economic and social needs often at odds. Bus shelter advertising contracts (BSACs), increasingly operated by large corporations, have resulted in widespread networks of bus shelters; observing these renders processes of globalization—generally not visible at the street level—more legible. Drawing from case studies of Lyon, France, and Los Angeles and New Orleans, United States, this thesis describes successes and failures both in the implementation of bus shelter contracts and in the provision of public amenities via shelters.

The research, presented here, is about the collaborative governance and adaptive management in coastal planning efforts of Louisiana. Fundamental conflict, between the idea of environmental conservation and developmental growth, has always existed in the coastal regions. The presence of the large number of environmental laws, at various levels of government and their different management objectives for utilization of coastal resources, requires study of intergovernmental relationship. Taking Plaquemines Parish as a case in point, this thesis will, therefore, review the critical restoration plans for intergovernmental coordination and conflicts. It will also provide recommendations, for elected representatives and policy makers, with an aim to promote collaborative governance and improve adaptive management of coastal resources.

The extant literature on the play behavior of youth normalizes adolescent behavior in public space as transgressional, resistant, and in need of social control. The dissertation counters this trend by looking to see if physical qualities, peer effects, and neighborhood context of settings play a deeper role in youth behavior. The study documented urban context, peer effects, physical features, and play behavior across 21 urban settings in New Orleans. Unobtrusive observations employed a highly innovative technique based on YouTube videos and analyzed using hierarchical linear modeling. Coded observations of risk-taking and prosocial behavior demonstrated some stability in behavior amongst adolescents—“youth” ages 12-19—within each site, suggesting that site-specific factors can constrain youth behavior. Yet, more interesting, teens appropriated sites. Specifically, the study found that (a) adolescents consistently adapt play behavior due to settings and (b) that adolescents adapt sites to support play behavior. The latter finding is novel and diverges from normative theory on adolescent behavior by suggesting that teens exercise interdependence when engaging in urban environments away from home and school. Interdependence is a term derived from economics that means mutual dependence upon others for some needs. That adolescents display increased risk-taking behavior in environments with low appropriation and increased prosocial behavior in environments with high appropriation advocates for cities to support adolescent appropriation of urban space.

Transportation availability and land use intensity demonstrate a strong relationship, with intense development concentrated near significant transportation investment. Transportation networks evolved in response to emergent transportation technologies and changing urban land uses. The irregular distribution of transportation systems reinforced patterns of land use development, shaping urban form. Understanding the relationships between transportation and the intensity of land uses allows urban geographers and city planners to explain the urbanization processes, as well as to identify areas historically susceptible to future development. The goal of this research is to develop a quantitative framework for the analysis of the development of urban form and its relationship to urban transportation systems. This research focuses on transportation accessibility, building density, and the structural massing as the basic metrics in the categorization of urban form. Portland, Oregon serves as the case study environment, while the research methodology examines the spatial and statistical relationship between these metrics for much of the city's urban area. Applying geographic information systems (GIS) and k-means cluster analysis, urban form metrics are compared within the ADaM (Accessibility, Density, and Massing) cube, a model demonstrating comparative relationships, as well as the geographic distribution and patterns of urban form in Portland, Oregon's neighborhoods. A finalized urban form catalog describes existing urban environments, but also indicates areas of impending transition, places having the strong potential for reorganization with respect to higher levels of transportation accessibility. The ADaM Cube is a tool for characterizing Portland's existing urban form, and describing the vulnerabilities of urban neighborhoods to the pressure of redevelopment.