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Thesis (M. Arch.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Architecture, 1981. / MICROFICHE COPY AVAILABLE IN ARCHIVES AND ROTCH. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 91). / The thesis argues that a sense of place is one of the most fundamentally important quality of architecture and cities and attempts to show that legibility and latency are the aspects of the environment which contribute most to creating sense of place. Further it discusses various design tools which can contribute to the creation of legibility and latency. / by Blain Brown. / M.Arch.

Thesis (M. Arch.) Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Architecture, 1979. / MICROFICHE COPY AVAILABLE IN ARCHIVES AND ROTCH. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 147-149). / by Lynne Pollard Converse. / M.Arch.

During the Cold War, the State Department sent architects, engineers, and legislation specialists to almost every Latin American and Caribbean nation to develop housing along US lines. These International Housing efforts were part of larger development aid programs in the region and were implemented to secure alliances, suppress radicalism, and promote the American way of life abroad. The dissertation focuses on three case studies--in the Caribbean, Guatemala, and Peru--to examine the influence the United States had on Latin America's built environment and show how architecture has functioned as an important component of US foreign policy. The dissertation demonstrates how Cold War housing aid introduced new materials and construction techniques, encouraged homeownership by promoting mortgage financing, and helped supplant local, Latin American urban forms with US architectural types and city plans in order to create the image of a modernizing, capitalist, and western-oriented nation.

Since antiquity the term polis has captured both the idea of city as physical settlement and that of city as community/state. In early modern France, this constituent ambivalence was embodied in the notion of police. The object of this dissertation is to trace the contours of the ville policée, or well-ordered city--an idea of the city that underpinned the work of police officers and government administrators during the seventeenth and eighteenth century. The research explores the practices developed by the Paris police to control, discipline, and manage the city, and the discourse that informed and authorized those practices. The focus is on two critical passages: the creation, in 1667, of the Lieutenance de Police, an institution that reconfigured the political dynamic of city government and changed the way Paris was to be managed and built for more than a century; and the publication, between 1705 and 1738, of Nicolas Delamare's Traité de la police, the first and most important formulation of the scope and principles of the police. The theorists of the ville policée turned the city into a new, complex object of knowledge; they developed a new `rationality' of the city, an understanding of the multiple, interconnected factors essential to city life (public safety and order, public health, food supply, labor relations, urban infrastructure, etc.) and an awareness that, in order to manage the city effectively, that entire spectrum of factors was to be confronted holistically and inscribed within a coherent planning and governmental strategy. In exploring the attempt of Delamare and his fellow police officers to produce an impossibly comprehensive science of the city, I argue that the project of police marks the first sustained effort to understand and come to terms with the modern urban condition.

The ongoing debate within the Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) community over the relative importance of 'appropriate' design standards, the 'right' institutional setup and 'political will' to the success of projects obscures the larger importance of the planning process. Political leadership, institutions and design are important conditions that must be considered in the context of one another, but they are also conditions that will change and be influenced by the planning process. Drawing on case studies of the Janmarg BRT in Ahmedabad, and the Delhi BRT in India, I demonstrate the indirect and direct role of the planning process in influencing the outcome of BRT projects. My dissertation argues that planners too often treat the planning process as a one-dimensional sequence of steps in which design, institutions and leadership provide an unchanging framework in which planning proceeds. Planners however, can assert more influence over outcomes by re-framing the process as a three dimensional activity that considers not just the content and sequencing of the steps, but also requires decisions concerning approach (i.e. strategy and tactics) and timing (i.e. both moment of action and duration). This broader three-dimensional understanding of the planning process can be used to reshape design, institutions and leadership. A well-designed planning process has the potential to overcome institutional and design weaknesses and build political support leading to more viable and sustainable BRT systems.

This dissertation examines the history of housing and domesticity in Singapore by proposing public housing as the prime mover in the formulation of a national identity. In so doing, it traces the network of relations and spatial practices in the decades that span the Second World War and the country's Independence (1959), reaching back to the 1930s and the implementation of the first block of low-cost public housing by the colonial Improvement Trust in 1936, to the inception of the Island Concept Plan and the consolidation of Singapore as a Garden City by the late 1970s. On the one hand, this dissertation attends to the architecture, planning, and propaganda of housing as instruments in the making of a public body that extends beyond the inhabitants of housing estates to the entire citizenry in post-colonial Singapore, particularly in those spaces designated for the public. On the other, it examines the aesthetic and technological extension and adaptation of the colonial apparatus, in which the intersection of architecture, planning, housing design, media and politics transformed the postwar landscapes of the city-state. This argument demonstrates, in particular, how the Modernist concern with social and urban planning, which entered British policy and propaganda and led to the incremental termination of the Empire, was employed by Singapore's incumbent government to construct housing as a national project. The circulation of technologies, methodologies, and mindsets within the Empire - between the Colony and the hinterland prior to 1959, and later between the postcolonial Nation-state and other territories (such as other Southeast Asian nations and Australia) - constitute a complex of power relations, knowledges, and institutions that were reproduced even after the demise of the British Empire, during the nation-building phase. This encompasses the policy relationships within the various national authorities and the industrial sector, such as the state sponsorship of research, development, production, maintenance, and support for the education and training of professionals (architects, planners, surveyors, and estate managers) and administrators, as well as the deployment of equipment and facilities within the national development policy. In conjunction with resettlement and town planning projects, educating the populace on the spaces and objects in the modern home, and the appropriate conduct of modern living, was also integral to the project of nationalism. This dissertation also considers how developments in the sphere of public housing provision realigned the social relations and collective identity of a largely immigrant population. The argument advanced here proposes that the advocacy of aesthetic and societal change within the various constituencies of the Modern Movement not only affected the gathering momentum for colonial devolution in between the wars but also underpinned the policies of the socialist government in early post-independent Singapore. Specifically, the Modernist critique of social hierarchy was adopted to replace the traditional, historical-based approach, which in Singapore's case was mainly the spatial segregation of races set in place by Raffles and the colonial planners in the nineteenth century - between the colonists and colonials, and between the Chinese, Malays, Indians, and other minorities. The Second World War had also exposed the limitations of British Imperial power already on the decline. In this respect, Modernism can be read as a disruption of those systems and networks, though they were in fact closely associated with British colonialism. This dissertation contains four main chapters, plus a prologue and an epilogue. The first two chapters attempt to map public housing built upon the tropes of crisis and public improvement for which the garden city became the ultimate national project of improvement. The third and fourth chapters examine the forms and spaces of housing in conjunction with the urban renewal program and how they in turn led to in a totally planned environment in which public spaces, public discourses, and identities are subsumed. The epilogue returns to the deployment of the garden city as instrumental to the domestication of the disparate voices and identities within the public by providing a specific aesthetic for urban habitation; as well, it reiterates the crucial role of the press in disseminating and sanctioning the project.

The dissertation investigates the effect of the new bus rapid transit lines on school choice at the high school level in Mexico City. Since 1996 all public high schools in the Mexico City metropolitan area have an open enrollment policy based on the result of a common test and the stated preferences of students on what school they wish to attend. I raise four questions: 1) Are students applying to public high schools that are in line with their academic potential? 2) Is the time required to commute to school a determinant factor in the students’ choice of high school? 3) Can improving access to public transit modify the set of schools to which students apply in their senior high school application process? And 4) What effects do the transit improvements have on students’ allocated school? The time difference in the introduction of four new bus rapid transit lines is used as source of variation to mass transit availability. A difference in difference technique is used to compare these groups across time. I find that about one of every five students in Mexico City in the last 12 years was allocated to a school below her academic capability potentially damaging her future performance (under-matching). This is most prevalent among students from low income areas where academic attainment is low. Transit improvements led students living in areas that previously had little access to transit to apply to schools that were farther from home. The greater benefits are for students in the middle and lower part of the academic distribution. Transit improvements decrease the level of under-matching for these students. Students in wealthier areas see the quality of their school peers decrease after transit lines start operations. The same happens for high achievement students from low to middle income areas. I carefully document with maps how transit modified the location of schools to which the students applied and also to which school they were allocated. The findings highlight an equity dimension of transit availability as a mean to access quality education and a fundamental element to exercise school choice.

This study of the West Side Urban Renewal Area (WSURA) in New York City examines the motives, preferences, and values of a selected group of householders residing in the WSURA. The findings should benefit social work and other planners in decision-making roles. The study identified a group of householders who had the option of choosing to move into urban integrated housing during a period when many of their counterparts were choosing the suburbs in order to escape urban problems such as deteriorating neighborhoods, the high cost of living, poor schools, a rising crime rate, and integrated neighborhoods. In order to better appreciate the householders' decision-making, the study explored the householders' reasons for moving from their previous homes to the WSURA, their expectations concerning life in the WSURA, some of their living experiences in the area, and their satisfaction with the decision to move into the WSURA. In order to effectively answer these questions, the variables of age, income, occupation, family cycle, and race and socioeconomic status were analyzed. The population from which the selected sample was drawn consisted of 774 black and white households located in the Stage I area of the WSURA project. The area was conducive to investigation because it had the physical and socioeconomic characteristics envisioned by the WSURA planners. A research instrument, the questionnaire, was prepared to conduct the study. A total of 173 householders were interviewed: 82 white and 91 black. The items in the questionnaire were coded, edited, and rechecked. Open-ended questions were coded according to a scheme developed from a content analysis of the first fifty questionnaires. The coded data were then keypunched and processed on an IBM 360 computer. The findings of the study demonstrated that the variables of age, income, occupation, family cycle, and race and socioeconomic status did define certain preferences and values of the respondents. The WSURA project was fortunate in its location in an area where highly valued amenities such as theaters, shopping facilities, and restaurants were already located. But the respondents were dissatisfied with schools, health and medical services, and police protection. Differences by race were distinguishable. Less racial tension was perceived in the WSURA than is evident nationally. But the respondents reported a lack of interracial contact on other than a superficial level. An additional survey of key informants. eight people who had been involved professionally in the WSURA project, revealed that the planners hoped to remove the stigma of urban renewal. They revealed also that because of citizen participation the planners and planning recipients had common areas of agreement. It was found that consideration of economics and social attitudes resulted in tradeoffs by the respondents in terms of their moving into the WSURA project. Detailed planning is viewed as a significant component of effective housing policy. No recipient group should be taken for granted. The most visible planning flaw is seen as a lack of sensitivity toward the poor. Limited income, poor education, and inequality in opportunity constituted a cycle that is not fully appreciated by planners. Past methods used by planners should be viewed skeptically. Plans for future housing and neighborhoods should reflect a more realistic view of the needs and preferences of all groups and a greater appreciation of the quality of life.