Over the past two decades, the Atlanta metropolitan region has seen a large increase in its immigrant population, particularly in the city's northern suburbs situated in Gwinnett County around the famously multi-ethnic Buford Highway corridor. The suburbs of Norcross and Duluth have experienced a particularly large influx of immigrants from Asia and Central and South America. Once predominantly white bedroom communities, the cities' racial and ethnic make-up are now heavily defined by their Asian and Hispanic populations. Many residents and business owners are foreign-born or second-generation immigrants, and the number is growing. Despite this significant demographic shift, little attention has been paid to how multiculturalism fits into the planning process and how they are affected by local planning procedures and priorities. The cultural and linguistic divides found in Atlanta's continuously-diversifying social landscape remain largely unexplored and unaddressed in conventional planning practices. This research looks at demographic data and planning initiatives in Gwinnett County, and the cities of Duluth and Norcross in particular, to determine the extent that Asian and Hispanic populations are represented and involved in the planning process. An examination of public participation and community involvement in issues relating to land use, housing, and transportation is used to assess the degree of inclusion in planning and measure the extent to which increased cultural diversity is addressed in the region and in the two cities. I will argue that if the Asian and Hispanic populations are not engaged in planning processes and if their needs are not accounted for in city plans, there could be a resulting negative impact on those populations and the city in which they live.

Since 1960s, the scope of urban design broadened in a way that to control the formation process of urban space as a whole. In this respect urban coding became a distinct branch in urban planning as an integrating mechanism of planning and design processes. Thus, design control has become a crucial part of the development control systems especially in the western countries. Although the development legislation in Turkey as an urban coding system has various weaknesses about urban design and design control, it provides important tools to control urban form from macro scale to micro scale. Aim of this study is to analyze the capabilities and deficiencies of the development legislation in Turkey as a design control system. The mostly stated complaint about the planned areas in the cities of Turkey is the loss of diversity and peculiar character of settlements as a result of the homogenization of their spatial pattern, namely apartmentalization. This problem is basically related with the exclusion of urban design from the planning process. The planning approach in Turkey merely oriented to readjustment of property appropriate to small-scale development, ignoring the concerns in regard to urban design. Therefore, beyond a technical fault resulting from the legislation, this is an outcome iv of the way legal tools are used that does not realize the value of potentia l possibilities in the legislation. However, if the legal tools are used efficiently in an approach that bring the considerations of urban design into fore, it might be possible to come out with more satisfactory environments in terms of diversity and richness of urban space. This is the basic hypothesis examined in this study. In this context, firstly the relation between urban coding and design is investigated in its historical development and a hierarchical model for design control is defined. Then the development legislation in Turkey is evaluated in the frame of this model. Finally, territorial hierarchy of space is taken up as a design criterion and the capacity of legal tools in control of the transitional zones, which are critical elements of territorial hierarchy, is examined.

Urban places, besides their physical characteristics, are regarded as grounds where personal or communal meanings are created and accumulated. An individual can capture the meaning of a place, or create a new meaning by relying on his/her own feelings and experiences. This substantial role of urban places makes them the core concepts of environmental perception and urban design studies. This research, by discussing the idea of togetherness of meaning and design in urban spaces, presents trees both as place making and meaning generating features, and raises the term tree-places. The reason behind this is the capability of trees in terms of place formation, and their meanings for people which are shaped throughout the history. However, the attention of urban planners and designers towards working with trees in urban spaces is inadequate. They tend to focus solely on aesthetic appearances and biological contributions of trees. Moreover, trees are mostly thought afterwards, outside design processes. This attitude can be overcome through the identification of design principles with trees in urban exterior spaces. In this respect, this research presents a two-fold study, one of which is the meaning and the other is the design. Trees, in this context, are seen as the bridge connecting these two phenomena. While answering the question why trees have been chosen to relate meaning and design, an investigation is made on the deeply-rooted relationship between man and trees, and its traces on urban place. In order to strengthen the argument of the place making characteristics of trees, the existing urban places defined by trees are discussed under the term of tree-places. The study concludes with inferences from the theoretical discussions and case research that provide guidelines for urban design with trees. Trees are the essentials of people and cities, and the silent witnesses of history. For this reason, they are presented as valuable beings and design elements that create distinct urban places while supporting the concept of meaning.

Thesis aims to elaborate the urbanism ideology developed in the early republican period of Turkey and its reflection on the development of factory campuses. In Turkey after the Ottoman Empire, new state with its own ideology has impact on shaping urban space, politics of urban forms development, urban morphology and urban metamorphosis. This thesis examines various factory campuses designed and built after the establishment of the Turkish Republic, and focuses on a later campus development / namely Iskenderun Iron and Steel Factory Campus. The study notes the dissolution of factory-housing togetherness, and points to the design values in the case study presented.

Transportation safety is a highly contentious issue in the design of cities and communities. To enhance community livability, urban designers, architects and city planners often encourage the placement of street trees, aesthetic street lights, and other roadside features in a buffer zone between the pedestrian realm and the vehicle travelway. While such designs clearly enhance the aesthetic quality of a roadway, conventional geometric design practice regards roadside features located in the clear zone as fixed-object hazards, and strongly discourages their use. This study examines roadside safety in urban environments to better understand the nature of urban fixed-object crashes, as well as the safety impacts of livable streetscape treatments. While the prevailing assumption is that livable street treatments have a negative impact on a roadways safety performance, the existing empirical evidence indicates that such designs are much safer than more conventional roadside designs. Current safety objections to the use of livable street treatments are not based on empirical evidence, but are instead the result of a design philosophy that systematically overlooks the real-world operating behavior of road users. This study details the origin and evolution of this philosophy, termed passive safety, and subjects it to an empirical test to evaluate its applicability to urban arterial roadways. It finds that passive safety assumptions do not meaningfully explain empirical observations of crash frequency and severity. To enhance contemporary geometric design practice, this study then proceeds to more thoroughly examine the nature and characteristics of urban roadside crashes, and proposes a new design approach, termed positive design that better addresses the twin goals of safety and livability.

Design brief is the descriptive and connective medium of design competitions. The main aim (design problem) of the design competition is explained by means of design brief which is setting up all needs and requirements or design program (specification) which is explaining the requirement list. The definition of design problem should be formulated to make clear statements in order to avoid misapprehensions by forming creative environment to enable creation of new ideas. The communication processes are composed between the participants of the competition, which are the client, competitors, jury and the public, by means of the formulation of design problem by the design brief. This thesis aims to understand the role of design brief as different from design program (specification) in the process and result of the urban design competitions by studying the nature and effects of design brief as the main communication tool in the design and evaluation processes in design competitions. Three urban design competitions are chosen as the main study areas of the thesis because of their different processes and results.

It is being observed that there has been an increase in the number of urban design competitions in the last decade in Turkey. Competitions are crucial methods of enriching theoretical and practical frameworks of the disciplines by creating a platform for discursive attitudes. That reveals the importance of the notion of competition as a process covering from the decision for organizing a competition to the decision of the jury for the winner and also post-competition events such as colloquium. Due to these facts, competition process as a whole can be considered as a discursive practice where diverse discursive approaches are represented via design brief, submitted projects and colloquiums that enrich and develop both theory and practice of urban design. There is not a single definition for urban design rather there are some approaches to the field mostly pointing to its interdisciplinary features. This fact makes urban design field vulnerable and open to critiques but at the same time enables contributions from diverse disciplines. It reveals the importance of competitions which forms a platform for new ideas and perspectives. Competition, with its definite structure of rules, definite role players from diverse disciplines who are involved in the process, documents produced throughout the process by different discourses, can be conceptualized as a dimension in space-time that makes it possible to observe different discourses in the same place and at the same time, sometimes in conflict with each other, sometimes overlapped onto each other and sometimes juxtaposed. Therefore competition is a platform where different discursive formations, with their objects, enunciative modalities, concepts and strategies, are exercised and practiced by human subject. When considered from that point of view, instead of focusing on the inception of urban design in Turkey, when the term is conceptualized, how and when competitions were utilized and instrumentalized in spreading the term, as a consequence how this struggle enabled positions for the field can be diagnosed more explicitly. The aim of this dissertation is to analyze urban design competition processes via design briefs, questions-answers, winning projects, jury reports and if available evaluation articles and colloquium reports with the adoption of archaeological methodology of Michel Foucault, discursive formation. His methodological approach in his book Archaeology of Knowledge(1972), has been adopted to construct a conceptual framework within that context, the study has focused on national, open, single phase competitions containing the term &ldquo / urban design&rdquo / in its announced title and it has been found that there are 35 cases starting from the year 1980. Design briefs, questions-answers, prize-winning projects and jury reports were analyzed, in addition survey and interview methods are utilized to reveal the discursive formations within the competition process. It is found that this is an ongoing process of forming a discursive formation when urban design is concerned and competitions play a significant role in framing such attitudes. Such a discursive analysis made within the context of competitions will help us to draw a general framework to reveal the discursive formations in the field that will help us to understand its position, grasp the underlying facts behind these processes of Urban Design Competitions in Turkey and this will give us the chance to rethink and define new frameworks and discursive formations to establish new perspectives and understandings of urban design in Turkey in the context of competitions.

Fires, with their sudden appearance and destructive character, cause property losses beside much more death and injury especially in cities. Providing fire safety is a multi-faceted context that is related with staff, vehicle, equipment, function, organization, technology, education and consciousness. These are related, indirectly, with spatial organization that is the other side of the issue: they affect space or they are affected from space. In research context, the fire stations are evaluated as a unit of emergency and land use element of urban space. By associating the concepts related to emergency management and to urban scale, the space-time relation is examined in urban areas. This research bases on the spatial deficiencies of fire stations in urban areas which are reasons of the fire losses. Level of laws and regulations in Turkey for spatial requirements are examined. Site selection and design criteria of fire stations are evaluated with available information about implications in Ankara case study. As a result of the interviews that have been made to top executive of fire station, it is found that process of site selection and design of fire stations is going on with subjective experiences in urban space. In conclusion of the research, it is displayed that the decisions about the site selection and design of the fire stations are related to not only population criterion, but also many issues in macro-meso-micro scales. It is considered that the set of multi-criteria that are reached in this regard will provide contribution in legal organization and developing the standards.

This dissertation resituates C. A. Doxiadis in Post-War urban design history with a detailed examination of how urban growth and change was addressed by urban design strategies as applied in the master plan for Riyadh Saudi Arabia, undertaken between 1968 and 1972. The Riyadh master plan commission is important within Doxiadis' career, occurring in the midst of his prolific writing projects and approximately eight years after he completed the Islamabad master plan, his most renowned project. Most Post-War architects focused on the socio-spatial components of urban life, elaborating architectural projects that intertwined transportation, infrastructure, and concentrated on mass housing strategies. This dissertation argues that Doxiadis' contribution to urban design theory and practice during the Post-War period was to define a rational scientific methodology for urban design that would restructure settlements to enable urban expansion and change while addressing issues of community building, governance and processes of development. The applied urban design for Riyadh Saudi Arabia strongly exemplifies Doxiadis' rational strategy and methodology as outlined in Ekistics theory and the conceptual model of Dynapolis. The comparative analysis examines how Doxiadis applies the Dynapolis model in the urban spatial planning of Riyadh to organize urban territory at the macro and local urban scales, define neighborhood communities, and connect the new master plan to the existing spatial territory of the city. The longitudinal analysis contrasts the Doxiadis master plan, Riyadh's first urban development strategy, to the most recent comprehensive approach MEDSTAR to understand how the Doxaidis' urban design has sustained its spatial continuity over time. This dissertation makes two significant contributions. The first is to broaden knowledge of Post-War urban design specific to the spatial problem of urban expansion and change, and second to resituate Doxiadis within the Post-War history of urban design specifically revealing his previously unrecognized project of the Riyadh master plan undertaken from 1968-1972.

Disertacijoje nagrinėjama miesto funkcinės ir kompozicinės struktūrų sąryšio problema, pasireiškianti esamų bei suplanuotų funkcijų, įtraukiant galimybes susisiekti, išsidėstymo ir urbanistinės kompozicijos darna (t. y. derinimusi, neprieštaringumu) arba neatitikimu. Tiriamoji problema atskleidžiama ir nagrinėjama pasitelkiant matematinio ir grafinio modeliavimo priemones. Darbo tikslas yra sudaryti miesto funkcinės ir kompozicinės struktūrų sąveikos tyrimo modelį, paremtą esamų lokalių didmiesčio centrų pavyzdžių analize, ir išnagrinėti jo taikymo galimybes, nustatant veiksmingos, efektyvios urbanistinės struktūros formavimo principus. Pristatomas Vilniaus miesto lokalių centrų urbanistinės struktūros tyrimas: išsamiai išnagrinėti trys lokalūs centrai, esantys Vilniaus miesto šiaurės vakarų dalyje. Nustatoma urbanistinės erdvės savybių svarba ir įtaka lokalių centrų formavimosi procesui bei sujungiami funkciniai ir kompoziciniai urbanistinės struktūros analizės aspektai. Nagrinėjamos modelio naudojimo galimybės bei pateikiamos rekomendacijos, nustatant lokalių centrų urbanistinės struktūros formavimo principus, kurie taikomi rengiant urbanistinius projektus: priimant strateginius sprendimus dėl užstatymo struktūros ir viešųjų erdvių tinklo plėtojimo bei nuo urbanistinio konteksto priklausančius detalius sprendimus. / The dissertation discusses the problem of coherence between functional and compositional structures of the city based on evidence that the existing and planned functions, including the possibilities of moving within the street network, and urban composition have corresponding or non-corresponding relation. The investigated problem has been revealed and analysed regarding the integration of mathematical and graphical modelling tools. The dissertation is aimed at developing a model for investigating interdependence between functional and compositional structures of the city and is based on the analysis of the existing local centres. The thesis explores the possibilities of its application for defining formation principles of an effective urban structure. A study on three local centres situated in the north-west part of Vilnius has been carried out. The task of the thesis is to investigate the importance and role of key spatial features on the formation of local centres and combine the functional and compositional aspects of the analysis of urban structure. The dissertation gives recommendations for defining the principles of urban structure formation of local centres applied in urban projects: developing strategic solutions to the formation of the built-up structure and street network, investigating each component in detail and making context sensitive decisions.