During the 1960s large trenched expressways were introduced into our urban centres to accommodate the booming vehicular traffic. These expressways were built on an enormous scale, often traversing entire cities. Unfortunately, some neighbourhoods have been divided and now share a noxious physical boundary. The Vine Street Expressway in Philadelphia, the Cross Bronx Expressway in New York and the Décarie Expressway in Montreal are examples of such thoroughfares. They are noisy, polluted and uninspiring spaces. The auto-centric mindset with which these expressways were designed with is being challenged. A desire to make cities more sustainable, healthy and accessible for their citizens is emerging. Given the decreased mobility issues that would arise if these structures were to be completely eliminated, it is necessary to explore architectural solutions to remedy the destructive effects these massive artefacts have on the urban fabric. Through surgical interventions along the Décarie Expressway in Montreal, I will investigate realistic if slightly optimistic solutions in which we can foster a symbiotic relationship between these massive trenched urban vehicular infrastructures and the surrounding urban space. The large scale of interventions allows for the exploration of the inherent possibilities for expressive structural bridging solutions over the expressway, new configurations of urban public space by utilizing the captured space over the infrastructural thoroughfare and a productive urban fabric which begins to address the potential of a hybrid urbanism of the twenty first century.

The post-war development of reunified Germany has resulted in many physical, economic, social and cultural changes. Despite the end of many restrictions imposed upon its populace during the Cold War, change would become an unexpected challenge to the people of a new Germany. With their residual memories from an extinct authoritative system, the general populace hinder redevelopment, and ultimately leave neighboring communities in a state of continued separation. The following thesis investigates the physical, social and cultural characteristics of site in attempts at generating, as an architectural methodology, infrastructural and programmatic strategies capable of informing the redevelopment of derelict post-industrial sites. In addressing the latent characteristics of site, historical, physical and programmatic, the resulting infrastructural and architectural framework assumes a programmatic classification that emphasizes its current dynamic uses and temporary programmes, enables changeability, and maintains memory of place by way of uninhibited openness for its users and surrounding communities.

The Leslie Street Spit is a five kilometre rubble breakwater on the eastern waterfront of Toronto. Built during the mid-twentieth-century as an infrastructural add-on to the existing Port Lands Industrial District, the artificial peninsula was a lakefilling project made to realize the city???s ambitious desire for economic prosperity and world-class prestige by expanding its existing harbour facilities. With the decline of Toronto???s shipping industry, the Leslie Spit remained an active dump site for urban clean fill until it was unexpectedly colonized by flora and fauna during the 1970s. The site is now recognized as an important local and international environmental resource. Visitors to the Leslie Spit experience a diverse landscape of ecosystems and industrial rubble helded by the city as a symbol of environmental revival within a former industrial region undergoing another phase of urbanization. While the local aesthetic experience of the headland is pleasurable and aligns with the reinvention of Toronto as am environmentally conscious and sustainable city, human visitors remain psychologically and physically removed from the inhabiting non-human life. Occasionally, the desire to conserve and preserve the natural world requires a separation between humans and non-humans. This relationship is carried out in varying degrees on the Leslie Spit. This thesis documents events at the headland where the human/non-human divide is rigidly enforced or left ambiguous. The purpose of the thesis is not to treat the headland as an eccentric spectacle, but to investigate the unexpected coexistence between humans and non-humans.

No description available.

In the past few years, the study of critical infrastructures and the interdependencies amongst them in the context of an emergency situation has become a priority for many countries, including Canada. Governments, universities, and private companies all over the world are spending vast amounts of money and effort trying to better understand how infrastructures and humans react in the time stages before, during, and after a disruptive event. Analyzing complex systems such as those formed by infrastructure networks and decision makers is not a simple task and requires a multidisciplinary holistic approach. The field of research in infrastructure interdependencies is fairly new, and lies in the intersection of areas of knowledge such as emergency management, geography, simulation modeling, planning, and safety engineering. Analyzing interdependencies between infrastructure networks is not only a complex problem in terms of its formalization, but also in terms of the intricacy required to test and validate that formalization. Furthermore, identifying and having access to the data necessary to validate the formal system is probably an even more complicated issue to resolve. It is, however, only through the study of these interdependencies that certain failures or weaknesses in the systems can be discovered; weaknesses that could not be studied through the analysis of a single isolated system. Not only is it a challenging task to analyze the interconnections between infrastructure systems, but studying these at moments of stress, when the interdependencies become dynamic, is even more difficult. In this thesis I explore the intersection between three main themes: Critical infrastructure interdependencies, Emergency Management, and Geographical Information Systems (GIS). Furthermore, I analyze the different types of interdependencies between infrastructure systems, I describe some of the challenges that have to be dealt with when modeling interdependencies, and I explore the possibility of modeling and visualizing some of these interdependencies by constructing an Infrastructure Geographical Information System of the UBC campus.

The main objective of the dissertation is to build the theoretical basis of classifying infrastructure and identifying investment focus of governmental funds with the help of the classification theory of urban infrastructure, thus to attract more private investment into infrastructure construction in Shanghai.

Thesis (Ph.D.(Environmental Economics)) -- University of Pretoria, 2007. / Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (doctoral)--Göteborg Universitet, 2006. / Added t.p. with thesis statement inserted. Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (M.B.A.)--University of Hong Kong, 1997. / Includes bibliographical references (leaf 92-94).

Thesis (M.A.)--University of Hong Kong, 1999. / Includes bibliographical references.