The question of the size and configuration of urban blocks and building footprints are vital to making a livable and sustainable city, with a sense of scale but also a sense of dialogue between elements. This dissertation documents the interface of public and private realms at the edge of the block and proposes a typology of block-faces. The block-faces respond to buildings (the internal load of blocks) and street structure (the external load of blocks). It is argued that the block-face and not the block should be the basis for thinking of city form. The City of Atlanta is used as a case study because of the spectrum of conditions and possibilities that it illustrates. The quantitative approach of this work builds upon a research tradition of analytical and quantitative urban and building morphology. A method is proposed for assessing the potential of the existing city prior to design intervention and for evaluating alternative scenarios for future developments. The ultimate goal is to provide tools to design more sustainable communities by bridging differences of scales and by better understanding how urban design parameters influence the development of built form and architecture.

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Over the past few decades, the issue of downtown revitalization has been a priority for planners and civic leaders. One strategy of attracting people, jobs and investment to the downtown is by constructing a catalytic facility that facilitates further growth, of which the sports stadium is ???by far??? the most prevalent example (Coates and Humphreys, 2011; p.5). However, the outcome of downtown stadium development has been inconsistent in cities across North America. The purpose of this thesis is to determine whether the built urban form impacts the outcome of downtown sports arenas and whether it contributes to civic image. An urban morphological analysis is conducted in order to evaluate the outcome of two multi-purpose sports arenas: Budweiser Gardens in London, ON and Copps Coliseum in Hamilton, ON. The analysis traces the evolution of both cities??? downtown urban form over time, identifying patterns to development by categorizing the townscape into three elements: the town plan unit (consisting of the street pattern, lot pattern and building pattern), the building fabric and land use. The urban morphological analysis was undertaken utilizing fire insurance maps, tax assessments and planning documents. In addition, a questionnaire was distributed to 200 residents of both case cities in order to gauge each facility's contribution to civic image. The results show that Budweiser Gardens has emerged as the more successful facility, namely due to two factors: (a) the arena is sited close to the central business district, in an area where the historical townscape has been preserved to a greater extent; and (b) because the unique design of the facility (which incorporates a replica of a historic building into the contemporary development) contributes to a higher degree of civic image than Copps Coliseum, which lacks both historic and current place references. The ultimate conclusion of this thesis is that urban morphological analyses should be incorporated into urban plans, so that the siting of future projects can be improved in order for cities to accrue the maximum benefits and return-on-investment.

This study was conducted to identify how daily use rituals affect function, values, and symbolic meanings residents attach to the town center of Biñan Laguna, Philippines. If values and meanings affect the transformations of the built environment, how are social and cultural values related to the temporal and spatial use of the town center? Furthermore, what are the symbolic meanings that the residents attach to the town center? This exploratory study attempts to investigate the morphological changes of the physical and social aspects of the town center's built form. The physical aspect focuses on the function or use and morphological changes of the town center. The social aspect focuses on the symbolic value and associational meaning of the town center to town residents. Other studies on plazas and town centers have only concentrated on site observations, personal interviews, surveys, and urban morphological studies respectively. While these methods show significant results, the focus becomes isolated either only on the users or the built environment or users and the built environment in a confined synchonic analysis. This exploratory study will bridge the gap between the users and the built environment by employing the diachronic analysis using the following methods: personal interviews, site observations, behavioral mapping, and urban morphological analysis. The first three methods deal with the present, and the last method deals with the past, all of which would provide a basis of understanding for future decisions on the built environment. The results show that a hierarchy of religious, economic, and political values is related to daily use rituals of the town center. Likewise, the spatial use of the town center shows its relevance to these rituals. While the results of values show that religion is on top of the hierarchy, the results of symbolic associations reveal that the town center is synonymous to the public market, hence, placing economic activity on top of the hierarchy. This research can provide a model for further investigation and stimulate more comprehensive studies of users' values, meanings, and use of other plazas and town centers since data on Philippine plazas and town centers are so limited. This study could also serve as a model for inventory and collection of data resources for similar towns in the Philippines on which information is extremely deficient. Designers and urban planners can utilize this research project as a source of information and understanding for future design and planning initiatives that focus on social morphology of town centers undergoing suburbanization. / Master of Landscape Architecture

Urban conservation and development practices are often in conflict. This thesis examines this general claim in the context of rapid urban development in East Asia through an analysis of the postcolonial historic city of Tainan, in Southern Taiwan. Following a particular line of urban conservation scholarship (Ashworth, Larkham, Conzen) this thesis argues that urban conservation is best conceived as the management of urban change, and that change should be considered as part of urban conservation policy. The aim of such urban conservation practice would be not only to maintain the historic traditions of a place, but also to promote the development of new possibilities of place. In this sense, the treatment of historical urban fabric should aim to preserve memory and tradition as much as serving as an ‘incubator’ for new senses of place. To this end, the thesis seeks to combine morphological and everyday life approaches to urban scholarship. A sense of place is not only derived from the emotional feelings, orientation or identity attached to an existing environment, but also relies on the practices of everyday life. These practices are significant aspects of urban places, but they are often difficult to map, measure and analyse. Thus, the thesis argues, mapping the morphological changes of a city is not enough for a rounded study of the everyday life dimensions of urban space. As a result, this thesis proposes that empirical approaches to everyday life are as important as morphological studies when exploring issues of urban change. The thesis builds on a number of existing approaches to this wider issue of the interrelationship between urban morphology and everyday life. In particular, it examines the Versailles School’s approach to typomorphological study. This approach to urban analysis emphasizes morphological change and its grounding in existing typological rules of everyday space, so as to continue the everyday life culture that it supports. This thesis develops methodologies based on these principles. In addition, it draws on the concepts of time-geography and heterotopic spaces as a means of specifying the representational approaches to everyday life narratives and an understanding of postcolonial complex urbanism, respectively. Following this approach, this thesis presents a series of case studies on the historic city centre of Tainan, the ancient capital of Taiwan. As a result of its colonial past, the urban blocks in that city can be understood as heterotopias in the contemporary city. Drawing on the case studies, this thesis argues that the everyday life-style in Tainan city centre is inseparable from the existing block typology and the functional conditions that reside in the coexistence of the historical and the modern urban structures. Thus, when considering urban conservation policies, the relationship between this social spatial condition and the everyday life that it supports must be carefully considered.

While Jane Jacobs' frontal assault on "modern planning" is now over forty years old, communities around the United States are still struggling to deal with the legacy of modernist interventions that dramatically altered the historic urban form and culture of their downtowns. In the worst cases, whole zones were transformed into nearly unusable space. Reintegrating these lost spaces into the urban fabric is one of the most significant challenges of urban planners and designers today. Despite the ubiquity of lost spaces in American cities, comparatively little research has been done on the specific historic urban forms that were altered. This dissertation seeks to explore the processes of landscape change through a case study of Louis Armstrong's downtown neighborhood in New Orleans. It employs an urban morphological framework to uncover the specific landscape changes that occurred in the neighborhood over time. This micro-level view is broadened through an examination of the political economic forces that helped to transform the once vibrant neighborhood into the lost space of today. This study concludes that while it is tempting to identify the twentieth century modern interventions as the cause of lost space in New Orleans, such a reading unnecessarily isolates the modern development era from the historical continuum of land use that helped define the city. When the scope of inquiry into the causes of lost space is widened to include the historic formation of landscape remnants, long-standing patterns of lost space development begin to appear that stretch back to the founding of the city. Modern development, seen in this light, exacerbated existing negative landscape features more than created them.

As ruas e o papel que elas representam para a cidade e para a vivência urbana são abordados nesse trabalho através de seus aspectos materiais e imateriais: suas características ísicas, sua concretude e as relações, os usos e os conteúdos que abrigam. Tal distinção importa para entender a relação dialética que se instala; a morfologia ísica resulta da coniguração social, ao mesmo tempo que essa é conformada pelo ambiente ísico. A partir dessa constatação, pretende-se estudar diferentes e representativos peris de ruas na história da cidade e do urbanismo. A modernidade assistiu a intensas transformações do espaço urbano com o advento das grandes cidades, bem como da experiência urbana proporcionada em tais ambientes, criando uma inédita cena urbana que tinha na rua sua principal representante. O caos que essas cidades apresentavam, fontes simultaneamente de prazer e angústia, de excitação e desorientação, foi estreitado de seus sentidos nos ordenados espaços planejados pelo racionalismo moderno e pelo urbanismo funcionalista. O mal estar sentido por uma vida urbana que não conseguia se desenvolver em sua plenitude em tais espaços resultou em um movimento de crítica e resistência que tomou corpo na década de 1960 reivindicando o retorno, a volta da conexão entre a vida cotidiana e o espaço urbano, e que tem na rua o palco e o motor de suas ações, destacando o seu potencial de transformação da paisagem e da experiência urbana. / The streets and the role they represent for the city and the urban life will be approached through its material and immaterial aspects: its physical characteristics, its concreteness and the relations, uses and contents that they shelter. Such distinction matters to understand the dialectical relationship that sets in; the physical morphology results from the social coniguration, at the same time that it is conformed by the physical environment. From this conirmation, we intend to study different and representative street proiles in the citys history and urbanism. Modernity witnessed intense transformations of urban space with the advent of large cities, as well as the urban experience provided in such environments, creating an unprecedented urban scene that had on the street its main representative. The chaos that these cities presented, sources simultaneously of pleasure and anguish, of excitement and disorientation, was narrowed of their senses in the orderly spaces planned by modern rationalism and functionalist urbanism. The malaise felt by an urban life that could not develop in its fullness in such spaces resulted in a movement of criticism and resistance that took shape in the 1960s demanding the return of the connection between daily life and urban space, and that has in the street the stage and the motor of its actions, highlighting its potential of landscape transformation of the landscape and the urban experience.

As ruas e o papel que elas representam para a cidade e para a vivência urbana são abordados nesse trabalho através de seus aspectos materiais e imateriais: suas características ísicas, sua concretude e as relações, os usos e os conteúdos que abrigam. Tal distinção importa para entender a relação dialética que se instala; a morfologia ísica resulta da coniguração social, ao mesmo tempo que essa é conformada pelo ambiente ísico. A partir dessa constatação, pretende-se estudar diferentes e representativos peris de ruas na história da cidade e do urbanismo. A modernidade assistiu a intensas transformações do espaço urbano com o advento das grandes cidades, bem como da experiência urbana proporcionada em tais ambientes, criando uma inédita cena urbana que tinha na rua sua principal representante. O caos que essas cidades apresentavam, fontes simultaneamente de prazer e angústia, de excitação e desorientação, foi estreitado de seus sentidos nos ordenados espaços planejados pelo racionalismo moderno e pelo urbanismo funcionalista. O mal estar sentido por uma vida urbana que não conseguia se desenvolver em sua plenitude em tais espaços resultou em um movimento de crítica e resistência que tomou corpo na década de 1960 reivindicando o retorno, a volta da conexão entre a vida cotidiana e o espaço urbano, e que tem na rua o palco e o motor de suas ações, destacando o seu potencial de transformação da paisagem e da experiência urbana. / The streets and the role they represent for the city and the urban life will be approached through its material and immaterial aspects: its physical characteristics, its concreteness and the relations, uses and contents that they shelter. Such distinction matters to understand the dialectical relationship that sets in; the physical morphology results from the social coniguration, at the same time that it is conformed by the physical environment. From this conirmation, we intend to study different and representative street proiles in the citys history and urbanism. Modernity witnessed intense transformations of urban space with the advent of large cities, as well as the urban experience provided in such environments, creating an unprecedented urban scene that had on the street its main representative. The chaos that these cities presented, sources simultaneously of pleasure and anguish, of excitement and disorientation, was narrowed of their senses in the orderly spaces planned by modern rationalism and functionalist urbanism. The malaise felt by an urban life that could not develop in its fullness in such spaces resulted in a movement of criticism and resistance that took shape in the 1960s demanding the return of the connection between daily life and urban space, and that has in the street the stage and the motor of its actions, highlighting its potential of landscape transformation of the landscape and the urban experience.

The motivation for this research is a perceived gap in knowledge regarding the complex relationships between the physical form of the urban environment; its environmental performance as expressed through stocks and flows of materials and energy (urban metabolism); and its experienced physical and psychological qualities (urban ambience). The objective is to develop a practical methodological structure which, through investigating the relationships between these domains, may help inform the evaluation, design and development of more sustainable human settlements. One expression of this apparent knowledge gap is the ambiguity around the classification of urban form and identification of a suitable taxonomic framework to support analysis. Urban morphological research and practice is critically reviewed to derive a rigorous definition of the 'urban structural unit' (USU) to facilitate the subdivision and description of urban form across spatial scales. Application of this construct to a study site in Sydney, Australia provides the basis for subsequent exploration. Investigation of theoretical and applied perspectives on urban ecology, metabolism and design enables distillation of a utilitarian set of structural, functional and ambience properties of the USU. A variety of quantitative methods pertinent to evaluation of these properties is systematically examined to derive a streamlined analytical methodology, integrating hemispherical image analysis, space syntax, isovist and material accounting methods within the USU framework. The efficacy of this methodological 'toolkit' is tested in the final, empirical stage of the research, focussing mainly on the campus of the University of New South Wales. Determination of a range of material, microclimatic, ecosystemic, fractal, syntactic and isovist metrics provides a preliminary quantitative description of the campus USU in terms of its interrelated metabolic and ambience properties. This is further explained and interpreted through multivariate statistical analysis. The results suggest that the USU represents a robust framework for urban evaluation, and application of a relatively parsimonious suite of analytical methods enables a useful initial examination of the relations between significant aspects of urban form, metabolism and ambience. The outcomes of such an evaluation can directly inform built environment practice from a sustainability perspective, and also highlight areas for more detailed investigation.

This research describes a methodology for measuring built form patterns using spatial data and GIS that is amenable to the study of large geographical areas. This methodology was used to investigate the capability of municipal planning to influence residential development. In the early 1990s, the Town of Markham, Ontario, Canada adopted a residential development philosophy inspired by New Urbanism. An adjacent municipality, the City of Vaughan, has employed a conventional development approach. By calculating several built form measures derived from the design prescriptions associated with New Urbanism, this study seeks to discern if Markham's adoption of an unconventional development philosophy has resulted in a residential built form distinct from that in Vaughan. <br /><br /> Built form measures are calculated for both municipalities for two eras. Development from 1981 to 1995 represents the "before" or baseline configuration, while development from 1996 to 2003 is used to characterize built form created when Markham's New Urbanist-inspired approach was in force. Period over period comparisons are carried out for each municipality, as are within-period comparisons between municipalities. <br /><br /> Findings indicate that development patterns are distinct in the two study periods. From the early period to the more recent, street networks take on a more grid-like organization while building lots and blocks become smaller. These changes are accompanied by an overall decline in accessibility to amenities. However, development patterns were found to be quite similar in both municipalities in the recent study period, exhibiting differences in degree, not in kind. The findings appear to indicate that planning's influence over residential built form is limited to moderately accelerating positive trends, and moderately retarding negative trends.