This thesis problematizes the infrastructural and social boundaries of informal settlements established in anomalous depressed tissues within the gridded city. It does so by proposing a new urban strategy that intends to dissolve the edge condition as well as reconnect extracted points of the settlement as a means to pulsate the activity of the slum dwellers and to incorporate the informal settlement to the city. This new urban approach weaves the inverted topography of the barranco with two pieces of urban fabric that are interrupted. It explores La Limonada, one of Guatemala City's densest and most dangerous asentamientos situated in a barranco. The thesis grows out of three constants of this informal city: informal economies, steep grounds and lack of connectivity and proposes an acupunctural construction of exchange promenades that act as connective infrastructures, exchange platforms, and new public grounds. This Mobilizer engenders a new tectonic paradigm that serves a mediator in this gradient of exchanges between the consolidated city and the asentamiento.

'Offshore Concourse' is an urban proposal for a response to changing ecological, economic and political conditions in Alaska and the Arctic. Since 2007, the Northwest Passage has been navigable without need of an icebreaker. As climate change rapidly redraws the world's coastlines, it poses both opportunities and challenges for global trade: melting ice caps yield new trade routes, markets and resources, but thawing permafrost renders the land an unstable ground upon which to build emerging economies. Sited on the open ocean near the Bering Strait, the Offshore Concourse presents a new model of flexible, dynamic urbanism. The port is re-envisioned as a reconfigurable platform for both trade and occupation: an aggregation of floating modules that can move, expand and submerge in response to economic demands and climatic conditions. Operating as a point of exchange, the Concourse stages a unique confluence of goods, users and natural phenomena.

A case study of Mysore city

Planning and design of new towns

Perceptions of compatibility of residential structures in Tucson's natural landscape were evaluated. Designers and non-designers, architecture and psychology students, respectively, rated 25 digital images of houses. Computer image processing techniques were used to vary color on the houses to test for contrast effects. The two groups' perceptions of compatibility were congruent while their judgments differed for color and style compatibility.

In this dissertation I explore how globalization and ethnic regionalism collide in the planning of the contemporary European city. Political-economic restructuring is making Europe simultaneously more integrated and regionalized. An emerging literature approaches such restructuring as a matter of geographic 'scale,' refraining globalization as 'rescaling' or 'reterritorialization,' often contested through a 'politics of scale.' These innovative approaches, however, need to be elaborated through case study. More, they fail to account for how globalization is not merely resisted, but is negotiated locally, particularly in the politics and landscapes of European cities where ethnic regionalism is resurgent. I ask: How may local politician and planners balance the external imperatives of globalization with the internal politics of regionalism, particularly in the cultural landscapes upon which a rescaled Europe must necessarily be constructed? I approach this question through case study of the city of Valencia, capital of the autonomous region the Comunitat Valenciana, emblematic of the European regionalization at which Spain is at the vanguard. Analyzing secondary literature, archival research of planning documents and newspapers, semi-structured interviews, and participant observation, I show politics in Spain to have long been defined by the politics of scale, revolving around issues of regional, cultural difference. Planning in capital cities like Valencia is thus central to efforts to consolidate regional territory, but the rescaling of urban space usually implies the transformation of traditional, cultural landscapes, like the irrigated croplands of the Horta that surround the city of Valencia. The politics of scale are both more contested and 'cultural' than the existing literature suggests, and they unfold in and through the cultural landscape. Globalization must necessarily be negotiated through what I call the cultural politics of scale, which are struggles to define the meaning of economic restructuring in political discourse and the material landscape. In Valencia, political leaders attempt to strike a balance between entrepreneurialism and regionalism in an ideology of entrepreneurial regionalism, which is manifest in both political discourses and new landscapes of economic development meant to materialize them. In the process, the cultural politics of scale remake local places and the global political economy simultaneously.

While urbanization in Mexico's northern border region is long-standing, the pace of urbanization has increased significantly in recent years. Many observers acknowledge the rise in urbanization, but few have examined how it is affecting Mexico's northern border cities. This dissertation fills the void by investigating the effects of rapid urbanization in Ciudad Juarez, Chihuahua, Mexico. I focus on Ciudad Juarez because; (1) it is the fastest growing border city, and; (2) processes fueling growth in Ciudad Juarez are shared by many other Mexican border cities. The dissertation focuses on two principal aspects of urbanization in Ciudad Juarez: urban morphology (i.e., land use) and the changing socio-spatial complexion of the city. In the first instance, I investigate whether population growth and expansion of the maquiladora (maquila) economy "distorted" the development of residential and commercial land use during the period 1988-1993. The analysis builds on the comparison of land use change in Ciudad Juarez versus three cities located in Mexico's interior. In the second instance, I develop a socio-spatial deprivation index to investigate whether population growth and industrialization (the maquila economy) have affected social conditions in the city's neighborhoods. The deprivation index incorporates many types of data (variables) that are organized within a GIS platform. The analysis is dynamic, and uses the deprivation index to monitor socio-spatial change during the period 1990-1995. The results demonstrate how rapid urbanization has affected Ciudad Juarez. In terms of morphology, the analysis shows that residential land has developed more quickly than expected, given rates of growth in non-border cities. In contrast, the development of commercial land use lags well behind non-border cities. In effect, proximity to the border has distorted development of both residential and commercial land uses. My analysis provides specific measures of these distortions. In the second case, population growth and industrialization have changed the social complexion of the city's neighborhoods. While it is difficult to discern whether these factors improved or worsened conditions at the neighborhood scale, the deprivation index shows clearly that neighborhood change is extensive and, as such, warrants closer inspection in subsequent research.

This dissertation provides a grounded examination of an evolving geographic information systems (GIS) discourse to examine how it affects decision-making processes in the context of resource management and urban planning issues, and whether the use of GIS is empowering or marginalizing for social groups involved in these processes. By using Foucault's genealogical and critical approaches to study discourse, GIS discourse is reconstructed. From the genealogy approach four discontinuities, the role of positivism, the social construction of GIS technology, the role of GIS manufacturers and vendors, and the institutionalization of GIS are examined to show how they have shaped the discourse. The critical approach uncovers how GIS discourse limits participation in decision-making processes through three systems of exclusions: prohibition, rejection and will to truth. These systems of exclusion legitimate particular knowledge, values and views that can be readily incorporated into a GIS. Typically it is the knowledge, values and views held by more dominant social groups that are privileged by GIS discourse, since they can be expressed in terms that are readily digitizable with no distortion in meaning. Hence, decisions based on the use of GIS tend to empower these groups because outcomes are in line with their interests. Using the Riparian Habitat Protection Ordinance and the Comprehensive Plan from Pima County, Arizona as case studies, this dissertation shows that GIS discourse systematically marginalizes weaker social groups. GIS discourse establishes the boundaries of the debates by shaping the way in which these issues were framed, dictating the data to use and the criteria to evaluate the data, and legitimating the participation of certain social groups. In both case studies social groups who argued from outside these boundaries were marginalized. An examination of power relations among actors reveals which actors can exercise power through decision-making, and that GIS discourse attempts to conceal moments when conscious decisions are made regarding the use of GIS. These moments are opportunities for contestations to occur, but since GIS discourse attempts to hide them, the use of GIS appears to be natural. GIS discourse is also articulated and reinforced through its intersection with local political and economic discourses.

Traditional explanations of suburbanization in the United States focus on spatial mobility, consumer demand, federal policies, and deteriorating quality of life in central cities. Other, more recent, explanations associate suburbanization with market failures. These two paths of explanation, however, fail to acknowledge the role of growth control and management as factors fueling the outward extension of metropolitan regions. Growth control and management emerged in the 1970s as a way of tackling the costs of suburbanization, but they were not applied consistently across metropolitan regions. Instead, their use was determined locally in most cases, which led to a patch-work pattern of growth control in metropolitan regions. This pattern, in turn, fueled "spillovers," where the imposition of growth control measures in suburban communities led homebuilders and residents to seek other suburban communities with no, or less stringent, growth controls. Although several scholars acknowledge the presence of spillovers, few have studied them directly. This dissertation investigates the spillovers generated by the price effects of local growth controls, as a mechanism underlying U.S. suburbanization. Using spatial econometric modeling as well as statistical and GIS map-based analyses, the dissertation targets the State of California and, specifically, the state's major metropolitan regions--Los Angeles and San Francisco--from the mid-1970s to the early 1990s. First, the study analyzes the price effects of growth controls in California, focusing on their impacts on local housing construction. The analysis finds that restrictive residential zoning, as a control suppressing permitted residential densities, has the effect of restricting housing construction. However, in contrast to expectation, urban growth boundaries accommodate homebuilding rather than constraining it, and population growth or housing permit caps and adequate public facility ordinances have no significant effects. Second, the study develops an index of spillovers, and categorizes localities of California as spillover origins or destinations with the index values. The index is based on a quasi-experimental approach that uses a temporal control and a model of local homebuilding. Third, I discuss the outward progression of spillovers given diffusion of growth controls in the politically fragmented metropolitan regions of California. For this, my dissertation explores the spatial distribution of spillover origins and destinations and investigates the relationship to local growth controls, especially at the metropolitan scale. The discussion provides a likely picture of suburbanization: in metropolitan regions growth controls spread to produce clusters of spillover origins at core areas, and this diffusion promotes spillovers to progress beyond the clusters towards outlying areas, thereby reinforcing suburbanization.

As our southwestern cities continue to grow in essentially uncontrolled and sprawling patterns it becomes increasingly apparent that new planning approaches and design guidelines must be generated to rectify past and combat future problems. Today, many community developments focus decision making principles on purely economic gain at the expense of addressing the socio-cultural, aesthetic, functional, economic, and environmental issues. In an attempt to address these issues, we employed both qualitative and quantitative methods of research. The qualitative methods included: a case study analysis of past, present and future communities; a literature review of past communities and new theoretical movements; structured interviews with real estate developers in the southwest; and participant observation encompassing peer dialogue and design reviews. The quantitative methods included statistical analysis of questionnaires given to designers and developers practicing in the southwest. A series of design and planning guidelines were distilled from this research. They were then tested by applying them to the design of a new community in the southwestern United States.