The human plays a vital role in the city and the city a vital role in the sustainability and resiliency of the future. It is imperative to explore all avenues for improvement and longevity. Now is the time to explore methods to strengthen the cities we have and the people who live there. This is especially true for coastal cities facing sea level rise and climate change. It is important now not to dwell on what we have lost but to seek methods for using the memory of a place to restore and build for the future. Recognizing there is a problem only means we have to seek solutions. Explored herein are the methods and rationale for categorizing the struggles of a city, in the case Miami, and using this new three-part exploration to find solutions. Developed within these pages is a three-part system focused on the street, shifts in scale and the patching of ecologies. The knowledge and theory for successful development exists and is collected here; the problems in the city and professional fields are clear and also collected here. The solutions then can be inferred. Because the knowledge and tools already exist introspection is the way to develop. Learning from the self, the city and humanity strengthens the urban core and ultimately strengthens our ability to ensure a promising future.

This project explores the site-specific design of an urban landscape as a focal point and social hub within a disparate community context. This research investigates the social, economic, and environmental context in the historic neighbourhoods of West Alexander and Centennial in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada. This area has witnessed a prolonged period of degradation and provides a challenging community interface. Many government and grassroot initiatives are active within the area, addressing cultural, educational, and economic issues. This project explores the potential of an urban landscape design in developing a more cohesive physical environment and facilitating interaction and collaboration between dissonant community factions. The intentions of this research are to provide a pragmatic design that is tailored to the current community.

The canals of Bangkok were a vital form of infrastructure from when the city was founded in 1782 until the 1850s, when the road system was introduced. Built for agricultural irrigation, the canals served as the primary means of transportation and significantly influenced the form and orientation of Bangkoks early settlements and public institutions. With the implementation of roads, new buildings were constructed to be oriented towards the streets and away from the canals. The canals and their communities subsequently decreased in visibility. Today, most of the land along the waterways is publically owned. As a result, the land adjacent to the canals has come to house squatter communities, and the canals themselves have become dumping sites. In northern Bangkok, the Bang Bua Canal Community consists of 12 informal settlements that lie on the banks of the 13-kilometer long Bang Bua Canal. Baan Man Kong, a national slum upgrading program established by the Community Organizations Development Institute (CODI), has continuously worked in the Bang Bua Canal Community since 2004. The programs general approach has been to provide government funds in the form of housing loans and infrastructure subsidies. A component of the development program has implemented the use of organic materials and water plants for regular canal cleaning. The CODI has also funded household grease-trap installation programs that provide wastewater filters to help limit the flow of wastewater directly to the canal. Despite these efforts, as of 2014, the canal is still polluted and the 3,400 families of this settlement still lack access to the water as an open space amenity. Most importantly, this illustrates that appropriate urban water management systems have not been utilized in this area. Using the Bang Bua Canal Community as a case study, this design thesis focuses on developing strategies to upgrade these informal settlements along Bangkoks waterways with a holistic approach to reconnect these communities to the city. The proposal aims to develop systems for a dynamic landscape that will transform the waters edge into a healthier urban environment. The study will illustrate how the built environment impacts society. In a broader sense, this proposal provides a vision for the use of urban water management techniques and landscape treatment systems in order to improve the water quality and the use of the waters edge as public spaces in highly dense areas.

Landscape architectural research of green infrastructural practices has increased dramatically over the last decade. Due to this research, many designers are suggesting some form of green infrastructure within their projects. Much of the present-day research focuses on function and not long term impacts of individual materials. The current rate of implementation of green infrastructures might not produce a drastic impact upon the environment, but with installations being realized at an ever-increasing and larger scales, even minute elements within the construction of these structures begin to influence the overall ecological footprint produced by our designs. Designers must re-evaluate the materiality of construction and select components based on a series of conditions including the life-cycle assessment associated with specifying individual products. This paper examines the current ecological footprint of one standard green infrastructure, a green roof, and investigates what substitutions might be made to lessen the environmental impacts, over time, of green roof components.

Preventing the loss of New Orleans occupies the minds of many designers in Louisiana. Great efforts to preserve the city are targeting the slow return to naturalization of the engineered river to find a new balance determined by plan formulators of the Federal government. Throughout history, many experimental movements have been born from the landscape architecture practice, and may be key to the future of New Orleans. Separate chapters are devoted towards the movements created by William Kent, Fletcher Steele, and Jens Jensen to explore as inspiration to be applied to coastal living. Finally, the future of New Orleans is considered within its own experimental landscape and how it may supersede the current plan.

Landscape Architects currently do not have an efficient method for including stormwater quantities in early stages of their design process. With stormwater control infrastructure and theory rapidly shifting in favor of stormwater management with Green Infrastructure or Low Impact Development technologies (LIDs), landscape architects and planners are increasingly making layout and sizing decisions for stormwater design. Due to the development of modeling tools, it is now possible to rapidly produce quantifiable stormwater values for complex site designs at a range of scales. This paper proposes a methodology for the utilization of the EPA Stormwater Management Model (SWMM), in conjunction with hand sketching, AutoCAD measured layouts and spreadsheet calculators, to quickly optimize stormwater detention based on spatial arrangements, sizing, and construction costs. Unlike available calculator-based methods, this model-centered methodology successfully simulates water quantity benefits of LIDs used in series. A twelve-acre development in Southeast Louisiana, broken into a 1.4-acre commercial site and 10.9-acre multi-family residential site, was designed using this multidisciplinary methodology. A total of fifty iterations were simulated, forty-one of which involved LIDs and twenty-nine of which included LIDs in sequence. Iterations were compared with pre-development flow rates and runoff volumes, and with each other in terms of stormwater performance and capital costs. The cumulative time required to set up and alter this thirty-eight subcatchment based model, run the almost instantaneous simulations, and track and cost the fifty iterations was less than 20 hours. Schematic and measured plan, section and perspective sketches, as well as quick context analysis, were employed before modeling to determine appropriate type, sizing and layout of LIDs and after modeling to decide between the top quantifiably optimized designs. This integrated methodology provides the basis for more collaborative and quantitatively supported LID stormwater landscape designs by introducing efficient multidisciplinary modeling techniques at the beginning of the design process.

The current state of Lake Winnipeg is a direct result of ninety years of human abuse. Today, this body of water is the most eutrophic lake in the world (Partners for the Saskatchewan River Basin Board, 2009, p. 142). The pollution of Lake Winnipeg has resulted from excessive nutrient loading in the watercourses. Three major contributors to this eutrophic condition include intensive farming, large sewage treatment facilities within the Lake Winnipeg watershed and the inverted drainage pattern of the lake caused by hydroelectric dams. Intensive farming is increasing the nutrient loading into the lake due to the intensified drainage and the methods in which fertilizer is applied to fields. There is potential to mitigate these effects. This design practicum is about water and water management and how cattails can play a key role within it. The primary goal is to explore the possible capacities of landscape design to combine the functional aspects of filtration and energy generation. The outcome of the practicum will be to distill a site within the Lake Winnipeg’s watershed to carry out a physical design. The selected site with all of its facets functions as a test area for the effectiveness and applicability of ecological, economical and aesthetic dimensions through landscape architecture.

<p> Urbanization is one of the biggest threats to biodiversity. To address this problem, landscape planners have increasingly adopted landscape ecology as a theoretical basis for planning. They use spatial concepts that express principles of landscape ecology in diagrammatic form to create frameworks for planning. This dissertation presents a quantitative approach to evaluate the application of spatial concepts developed to create an armature of open space in areas subject to urbanization. It focuses on the predicted urban expansion of Damascus, Oregon, as a case study. An alternative futures study was used to test three open space spatial concepts for patches, corridors and networks in combination with compact and dispersed urban development patterns. The resulting eight scenarios of land use and land cover were then modeled for the year 2060 to evaluate their effects on habitat quantity, quality and configuration and to identify tradeoffs between urban development and conservation for three focal wildlife species: Red-legged frog, Western meadowlark, and Douglas squirrel. Open space spatial concepts strongly influenced habitat quantity and quality differences among future scenarios. Development patterns showed less influence on those variables. Scenarios with no landscape ecological spatial concept provided the most land for urban development but reduced habitat quantity and quality. Greenway scenarios showed habitat increases but failed to provide sufficient habitat for Western meadowlark. Park system scenarios showed habitat increases, but high-quality habitats for Western meadowlark and Red-legged frog decreased. Network scenarios presented the best overall amount of habitats and high-quality habitats for the three species but constrained urban development options. </p><p> Next, I used an individual-based wildlife model, HexSim, to simulate the effects of habitat configuration and to compare and contrast resulting wildlife population sizes among the eight future scenarios with the ca. 2010 baseline landscape. Network scenarios supported the largest number of Red-legged frog breeders. Park scenarios performed best for meadowlarks, while greenway scenarios showed the largest populations of squirrels. Four of the eight scenarios sustained viable populations of Western meadowlarks. Compact development scenarios performed best for most indicators, but dispersed development scenarios performed better for Western meadowlarks. </p><p> This dissertation includes both previously published and unpublished material.</p>

The purpose of this practicum is about an exploration of a new idea of nature and how well design landscapes can help facilitate healing and well-being for people in the urban context and healthcare institution. We live in a time where the city is expanding again and again beyond its limits, slowly taking over the natural landscape that exists beyond its boundaries. As the city continues to grow outwards into the landscape, it also continues to grow inwards, slowly becoming denser; filling the void spaces that exist with additional buildings. Natural landscapes and pockets of green space that have claimed land in the city are always in danger of being taken over by development. The landscape has the potential to create an extension of the hospital through a space for people to pause and connect with nature, while improving quality of life and providing a positive experience for a patient during their time of healing.

Inaug.--diss.--Breslau. / Lebenslauf. "Literaturverzeichnis": p. [111]-113.