In recent decades, the role of port cities has changed dramatically. In many cases, the port function has been removed from the urban waterfront altogether. For this practicum, the subject is not the post-industrial, but rather an investigation into the role of landscape architecture in a place where industry persists on the shoreline. Halifax, Nova Scotia is the principle location for this exploration wherein the existing port-city interface is re-evaluated. This study includes an examination of the course of worldwide port development and the resulting impacts on port-city interrelationships and a historical comparison of the Port of Halifax to the general evolution. Mapping is the core of the analysis and is the primary means of assessing current conditions and future considerations. The work concludes with a final design proposal. Design drawings demonstrate the conceivability of the working port environment as a place to reconnect citizens with their harbour and the activities that occur within.

A case study of Vancouver’s West End neighbourhood examines the cultural, structural, economic and political impacts of a glbtt (gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, and two-spirited) community and a gay urban village on its city. This work also queries the role of municipal government in the regulation and maintenance of the social composition and identity of a neighbourhood. Finally, the future of gay urban villages is discussed as their role in promoting solidarity and safety transitions toward a commercial and nodal one. This research involved three local key informant interviews and nine community residents who participated as photographers in a community visual analysis. Results unveiled a neighbourhood intrinsically well suited to serving a transient gay male community with an increasing dispersion of the identifying demographic. For the foreseeable future the significance of the Davie Village in the socio-sexual landscape of Vancouver appears secure through the nodal nature of gay retail, bars and services, reinforced by business interests. As an urban typology supporting a comparatively young glbtt culture, the gay urban village plays a unique role in the city, providing spaces of experimentation and invention — a stage for new systems of cultural (ex)change to emerge.

A map is a context. This project is about contextualization. This process has helped me understand where landscape architecture currently sits as a discipline and offers hints as to where it might go in the future. The function of this mapping is as much about re-shaping an understanding of landscape architecture as it is about understanding landscape urbanism. Like architecture and city planning, landscape architecture is a discipline in constant flux, redefining its role with and relationship to parallel fields of thought and within broader disciplinary contexts. Over the last few decades it has become apparent that landscape architecture has emerged as a discipline strongly capable of reshaping urban space. Ideas regarding landscapes as active, dynamic, operational systems have paralleled the discipline’s growing relevance within an urban context. In this time landscape urbanism has emerged as a reaction to landscape architecture’s role within our changing world. For landscape urbanism to contribute anything of value to the future of urbanism, or to the design disciplines, it needs to be contextualized within the larger framework of which it is part, without this context landscape urbanism has no relevance. Where it has come from must be critically assessed as a way to understand its intentions and potential future. Landscape urbanism may expand architecture’s boundaries to include elements of landscape thinking, but it does not expand the boundaries of landscape design. Its attempt to generate a new approach for urbanism is innovative as architecture, in its effort to expand the discipline’s understanding of site, but as a design discipline, or a strategic approach to thinking, landscape urbanism is not innovative.

In recent decades, the role of port cities has changed dramatically. In many cases, the port function has been removed from the urban waterfront altogether. For this practicum, the subject is not the post-industrial, but rather an investigation into the role of landscape architecture in a place where industry persists on the shoreline. Halifax, Nova Scotia is the principle location for this exploration wherein the existing port-city interface is re-evaluated. This study includes an examination of the course of worldwide port development and the resulting impacts on port-city interrelationships and a historical comparison of the Port of Halifax to the general evolution. Mapping is the core of the analysis and is the primary means of assessing current conditions and future considerations. The work concludes with a final design proposal. Design drawings demonstrate the conceivability of the working port environment as a place to reconnect citizens with their harbour and the activities that occur within.

Focusing on the relationship between individuals with dementia and their environments, this research explores how to improve quality of life for those with dementia by increasing the capacity of existing urban public spaces. A content analysis of municipal planning documents (N =51) contextualized interviews, conducted with municipal urban planners (N =13) in the province of British Columbia, exploring their perspectives on designing dementia-friendly public spaces. Seven themes were identified from the findings. Furthermore, planners did not know much about planning for dementia, either suggesting they were perhaps already addressing dementia through other disability guidelines, or saying they did not know what could be done in the urban environment regarding dementia. They were open to learning more about dementia-friendly approaches. Incorporating the key dementia-friendly principles of familiarity, comfort, distinctiveness, accessibility, safety, inclusiveness and independence into age-friendly policy or Official Community Plans would promote designs that benefit persons with dementia, as well as many others with mental and physical impairments. / Graduate / 0573 / 0999 / mprzy@uvic.ca

The thesis considers the changing concepts of local open space in relation to the demand, supply and standards of open space. The development of parks in Britain first are contrasted with the development of parks in the United States, noting the legacies in both nations. After the historical resume, the changing attitudes to leisure and recreation in Britain and the United States which have occurred in the last fifteen years are considered. The numerous studies, both in Britain and in the United States, detailing the demand for open space are followed by supply studies of open space, which expose the deficiencies of open space and express people's desires for open space. A comparison of the ideal open space standards to the actual supply and deficiencies of open space are analysed in further local studies. Both private and public organisations in Britain and the United States have carefully fostered ideal standards, which have been unattainable by any of the major cities in Britain or in the United States. The need for new standards and new approaches to local open space designs in inner urban areas is discussed in the chapter on current policies on open space. Different design concepts and methods are suggested for solving the present problems. The concepts particularly emphasised are small parks, greenways and adventure playgrounds, but other suggestions are made. An appraisal of the financial, legal and administrative difficulties is followed by a study of the availability of urban wasteland for public open space. New methods of assessing the multi-purpose use of existing open space and discovering potential new open space sites on a case-study basis are suggested. The concluding chapter summarises the need, character and problems of local open space.

Suburban Centres were established in the Toronto region as the population dispersed beyond the city’s borders. Intended as a set of delivery points for municipal services and concentrations of commercial and social program serving local suburban residents, government policy and market forces are now encouraging these centres to accumulate a greater range of program, and absorb a significant share of population growth. They have a mandate to orient new residents toward improved public transit routes as a relief for overburdened road infrastructure, but their fundamental role as a suburban downtown requires continued accessibility by car. The structure of the suburbs is fixed, dominated by the car as the primary element of an extensive mobility system that has generated its own spatial protocols and building typologies. The morphology of older urban areas was developed in response to the parameters of streetcar service and human abilities, and also shows a resistance to change. The two mobility systems co-exist, each with their own associated territories, creating an intermodal metropolis. In suburban centres, the intensive urban mobility extends into the reach of the suburban territory, creating a threshold condition that requires a hybrid morphology to serve both. The design adopts Scarborough Centre as a test site, proposing a morphology that accommodates urban and suburban mobility by embracing the suburban planning paradigm that separates vehicle traffic from public space. The interaction between the two networks is managed to create variations in accessibility characteristics that determine programmatic distribution. The public realm is compartmentalized into differentiated spaces that support a highly permeable pedestrian network integrated with the central transit station. The proposal allows Scarborough Centre to expand its public space network without compromising its function as a highly accessible suburban downtown.

Macro-scale planning and design as a product of modernism have been abandoned to a high degree, as a result of the reactionary post-modern approaches since the 1960&amp / #65533 / s. Intensifying with the rise of neo-liberal approaches in the 1970&amp / #65533 / s, these reactions advocated merely incremental decision-making and design in the making of cities. These developments lived in the western countries showed their reflections in Turkey with the 1980&amp / #65533 / s, resulting in fragmented planning practices. However it is the hypothesis of the study that macro-scale urban design: thus designing the form and the structural elements of the city is the statement of the development policy of the city. Thus structural elements that make up a certain city form is a major area of concern for urban design. Within this frame firstly the debate between the modern and post-modern approaches about the scope of intervening in the development of the city will be evaluated. Then the Turkish planning approach will be analyzed with regard to its success in development control. Basic city forms and their growth characteristics will be examined in the next part. Finally the planning practices of Ankara and the form and the structural elements proposed will be evaluated accordingly.

This research applies an archaeological lens to an inner-city master planned development in order to investigate the tension between the design of space and the use of space. The chosen case study for this thesis is Kelvin Grove Urban Village (KGUV), located in inner city Brisbane, Australia. The site of this urban village has strong links to the past. KGUV draws on both the history of the place in particular along with more general mythologies of village life in its design and subsequent marketing approaches. The design and marketing approach depends upon notions of an imagined past where life in a place shaped like a traditional village was better and more socially sustainable than modern urban spaces. The appropriation of this urban village concept has been criticised as a shallow marketing ploy. The translation and applicability of the urban village model across time and space is therefore contentious. KGUV was considered both in terms of its design and marketing and in terms of a reading of the actual use of this master planned place. Central to this analysis is the figure of the boundary and related themes of social heterogeneity, inclusion and exclusion. The refraction of history in the site is also an important theme. An interpretive archaeological approach was used overall as a novel method to derive this analysis.

Architecture and urban design are often powerful expressions of political desires to support and legitimise specific regimes. In many postcolonial cities, architecture and urban design are set out to construct national identity and affirm a political power that departs from the former colonial rule. Architecture and urban design may be used by successive postcolonial regimes to compete with each other to legitimise authority and symbolise power. While such concepts of national identity are established through a constellation of urban forms, national identity is always contested. Places may be used and interpreted in ways that differ from what is intended. Attempts to control the meaning of architecture and built form may conflict with the ways in which spatial practices undermine intended meanings.