Positioning itself as an investigation into the affective capacity of transport, this thesis argues that the potential of a city is both composed and revealed through its systems of movement, contending that the sensorial and expressive qualities of a city’s transit govern how its citizens perceive and access the scope of experiences available to them. Essays on movement and identity, the limits of the city, immobility, adaptation, and eccentricities, move in parallel with meditations on departures, arrivals, and the time of transit toward a mandate for an amplification of motion and energy. The thesis traces a route from Ontario through London, Rome, and northern Europe before returning to Toronto only to founder in the region’s gridlock. To free the city’s constricted potential, a new passenger rail line running from Pearson Airport, through Toronto on the Canadian Pacific Rail corridor north of Dupont Road, to the site of Pickering’s future international airport is proposed. The key interchange of the new line, Lake Iroquois Station, is developed in detail, feeding on an intense overlap of historic and contemporary infrastructures. Located just south of the historic First Nations trading trail of Davenport Road at Dupont and Spadina, the station gathers the primary midtown electrical corridor, extensions of the Bathurst and Spadina streetcar lines, the existing University/Spadina subway, and expansions of the city’s cycling network, knotting them together with regional passenger rail in order to transport the city and its imagination.

This paper examines peri-urban space existing separate from the urban fabric and often in between urban and rural landscapes. This is a largely neglected area and often considered by each side as belonging to the other. Contemporary studies identify two sides associated with the rural-urban fringe: the expanding built settlements and ebbing countryside, ignoring significance and the circumstance of the spaces. The peri-urban fringe is a planning opportunity, which provides services beyond simple human habitat or wasteland of undesirable function. Through this study I intend to present the peri-urban interface as an intricate element of the urban infrastructure. This paper examines a series of case studies, which display peri-urban land-use planning and design through established areas, boundaries, and buffers spanning North America, Western Europe and Australia. Each area is examined to determine scope, program, and ecological and social impacts. The data informs positive and negative impacts within the peri-urban area. The peri-urban fringe spaces take on many forms and functions. Successful sites enrich the associated urban communities, whereas unsuccessful sites, which often exist in conflict with abutting environments, reduce quality of life and essential ecological processes. The peri-urban interface varies with many scales and circumstances, which affect quality of life for the urban population. Planning in the PUI is essential in promoting healthy populations and ecologies. Scale, program and accessibility determine how effectiveness of a peri-urban interface. Through this study, I want to identify significant value of the peri-urban interface as an opportunity and asset for the urban landscape. / Master of Landscape Architecture

Fundação de Amparo a Pesquisa do Estado de Minas Gerais / The aim of this work was to demonstrate the formation process of Shopping Park neighborhood in Uberlândia, Minas Gerais, from 1988 to 2013. To give visibility to the trajectories, experiences, struggles, limits and pressures of migrant workers was essential to understand how these subjects are excluded to further districts from the city center. Dialogue constituted the way to capture forms of surviving and creation of coexistence bonds in the context of exclusions and contradictions embedded in that city. In urban limits, such workers fight for permanence in Uberlândia, where social relations are established both with locals as with government, religious institutions and entrepreneurs. These bonds are perceived as strategies of these residents who therefore battle for their rights. The cited experiments expose the learnings that workers experience in the conviviality of articulations in both Shopping Park as in other districts where they lived. It is noteworthy that the knowledge of rural life brought by the migrants blend with bureaucratic processes and pressures that are struggled to stay in the city limits. / O objetivo desta dissertação foi evidenciar o processo de constituição do bairro Shopping Park em Uberlândia, Minas Gerais, de 1988 a 2013. Dar visibilidade às trajetórias, experiências, vivências, lutas, limites e pressões de trabalhadores migrantes foi fundamental para compreender de que maneira esses sujeitos são excluídos para os bairros mais afastados do Centro da cidade. O diálogo constituiu o meio de captar as formas de sobrevivência e de criação dos laços de convivência na conjuntura de exclusões e contradições inseridas na referida cidade. Nos limites urbanos, tais trabalhadores lutam pela permanência em Uberlândia, em que as relações sociais são estabelecidas tanto entre os moradores quanto com o Poder Público, as instituições religiosas e os empresários. Esses laços são percebidos como estratégias de tais moradores que, por conseguinte, batalham por seus direitos. As experiências citadas expõem os aprendizados que os trabalhadores vivenciam no convívio das articulações, tanto no Shopping Park como em outros bairros onde moraram. Vale ressaltar que os conhecimentos da vida rural trazidos pelos migrantes mesclam com os processos burocráticos e pressões que sofrem para permanecer nos limites urbanos. / Mestre em História