This thesis is an ethnographic study of place-making in a war-altered landscape. It describes over a decade of resettlement efforts in a village in northwest Cambodia. As war drew to a close in the late 1990s, land on the former frontlines was allotted to those willing to risk occupancy on possibly mined terrain. Area resettlement was driven by need, forged by hope, and fraught with physical risk and material dangers. Food security and the prospect of acquiring land rights required settlers’ physical presence in and active engagement with the materialities of a forested landscape strewn with the remnants of war and the ruins of earlier settlements. Residents' conceptual and corporeal engagements with place were influenced by longstanding Khmer depictions of the srok, the ordered and cultivated landscape of agriculture and human dwelling, and the prai, the wild and fecund landscape of the forest, replete with powerful but often malevolent spirits. The srok was the landscape that the inhabitants of Handsome village longed to dwell within and struggled to create. The area’s pre-war reputation as a famously fertile agricultural zone had drawn many of its residents to risk the hazards of resettlement. The dream of the srok drove residents' actions in the actively dangerous, ever fluctuating terrain. In addition to being envisioned, the place was intimately known and directly experienced through the corporeal bodies of its inhabitants and their engagements with its material assemblages. Making the srok involved arduous physical effort in a constantly shifting material environment along with concentrated social and conceptual work. Resettlement did not merely entail hewing fields out of forests and removing mines and ordnance, but also encompassed attempts to transition into peacetime—to move from soldiering to farming, to come to rest after years of mobility and displacement, and to recreate social and moral order. This study analyzes successes and failures in place-making processes, illustrating how different aspects of landscape posed both affordances and constraints to these processes. Particular attention is paid to the ways in which material assemblages contributed to uncertainty in place-making efforts, illustrating that the material dimensions of landscape may resist as much as they acquiesce to human alteration. On a material level, place-making was a struggle that pitted human agency and will against an active and agentive landscape. Village residents were interacting with material environs in a constant state of change and becoming. The unsettling material traces of the past and the continuing threat some remnants posed in the present contributed to the ongoing indeterminacy residents experienced about the state and contents of the once famous ground. The landscape that residents sought to form and fix was always in danger of undoing its formation and categorization and revealing itself to be something else. Yet despite their failures at establishing and fixing the srok in the constantly shifting landscape of Handsome village, residents maintained their quest to transform the present configuration of place into the landscape and the future that they desired.

This study inspects how an urban place is made in HafenCity, Hamburg, currently one of Europe’s largest urban development projects. This process is illustrated as a co-production of residential initiative and planners' facilitation in developing a nascent urban district into a self-sustained community. The qualitative approach draws on interviews with 55 residents, interviews with planning agents and participant observation. Planners' agendas and policies are set in relation to residents' local activities, to display how physical engineering and social appropriation are moments conjoined in urban place-making. Newly-built riverside developments have commonly been characterised as enclaves of private affluence with weak attachments of their residents to the local area. Middle class professionals enjoy a ready-made lifestyle marked by private consumption and domestic services that enable them to socially disengage from their surrounding neighbourhood. HafenCity bucks this trend in regard to its dynamic neighbourhood life unfolding among its residents. It is argued that the situation of first-time occupation of a neighbourhood spurs the development of residential relationships and their intensification more readily than in established neighbourhoods. An initial merely aesthetic identification of incoming residents with the lures of their chosen destination is a precondition for the generation of farther reaching identifications, epitomised in engagements with place as something valorised in its own right. The facilitation of such associations is grounded in the intersection of two important factors. As a residential site, HafenCity selectively attracts educated middle class cohorts, implying that cultural capital concentrates within a very confined geographical setting that characterised HafenCity at its earliest stage. The personal identification of many incomers with HafenCity as a place of desire and their resulting optimism after arrival translates into a shared positive sense of place among individuals feeling similarly. This 'community in the mind' facilitates familiarisation among residents and the transition of neighbourly interactions into more meaningful voluntary associations serving needs of sociability, cultural indulgence, economic wellbeing, and most prominently, political engagement seeking to make HafenCity's official planning policy more foreseeable and accountable. In essence, the abundance of cultural capital at the neighbourhood scale acts as a favourable condition for its conversion into social capital for the advancement of a new area into a community of strong residential ties marked by attentiveness to one another's needs. The spatial situation of 'under-construction' encourages residents to voluntary engagement in HafenCity’s development policy. While the planning authority itself stimulates such participative mechanisms, they are at the same time concessions made to legitimise and reinforce the power held by this authority. As a consequence, participation in the development process becomes an ambiguous amalgam of volunteering and institutional intervention. While participation facilitates dialogical structures between residents and planners, it does not increase residents’ actual influence in urban policy making. Through their facilitation of residents' place-making, planners can credit themselves with treating the issue of planning in a foresighted way that refutes notions of technocratic blindness to human needs. Such active promotion of residents' attachments to their place however has its limits. While planners have a vested interest in an active residential community they can showcase as a testimonial to the reasonability of their agenda, they are unable to resolve conflicts of interests among residents that thwart the project of joint place-making. The scope of planners in collaborative place-making is circumscribed by the competencies of an authority that de-legitimises the actual engineering of interpersonal relationships at the neighbourhood level.

The Frog Bay site (47BA60) has been excavated for three field seasons. Excavations in 1979 located the site and continued in 2018 – 2019 by the Geté Anishinaabe Izhichigéwin community archaeological field school. This program commenced from a sovereignty initiative surrounding the creation of the Frog Bay Tribal National Park directed by the Red Cliff Band of Lake Superior Chippewa. Within the park, the Frog Bay site represents a multicomponent shorebased camp that was occupied numerous times during the Archaic and Woodland stages (ca. 3000 BC – AD 900). Structured through a community-based Indigenous theoretical framework, lithic analysis and community input are used to research long-term practices of mobility, land use, and place-making associated with the Frog Bay site. These methods offer a “braided interpretation” of the activities and occupation trends at Frog Bay and explore the intrinsic value that the site continues to hold for the present-day Red Cliff community.

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vi ABSTRACT Rebuilding Urban Place: Negotiating Individuality and Belonging New London, CT September 2013 PETER R. WEBSTER B.S.,TUFTS UNIVERSITY M.ARCH, UNIVERSITY OF MASSACHUSETTS, AMHERST Directed by: Professor Kathleen Lugosch The aim of this thesis is to test an approach for reconnecting ourselves with the urban fabric. By recognising the damage of urban renewal as more than simple blight but rather one that undermines our sense of place, we begin to appreciate the depth of the wound. It is not a matter of reconstructing what was taken away, but rather a process of rehabilitation. Re-establishing a viable sense of place requires the intertwining of both spatial form and social engagement. The project makes use of a parking lot located between the main street and a disruptive artery that forms a rift in the urban fabric. A spatial reorganization mediates the automotive scale of the rift and re-establishes a human one. A local organization, Hygienic Art, is poised to engage the rift with a new performing art center. Interactivity between the site and the client is reflected outward across the block and inward through the building. The center’s performance and service areas are designed to facilitate participatory events, which support the social interactions of the organisation and the extended community. This thesis examines how scale and materiality can nurture the individual and group experience, and how this might be tested at the scale of the city, street, organisation, event, parcel, and building.

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Bridging is considered as a formal, spatial, referential, and tectonic articulation of connectedness between architecture and context. The question is probed through a mixed architectural program situated in the interstice of an urban downtown and residential neighborhood. The architecture originates from singular or hybridized combinations of these characteristics: whereas formal defines the compositional relationships through, for example, orientation, grids, scales, proportions, and contrast or balance among the parts; whereas spatial indicates a gradient of boundaries established through anchoring, intersecting, overlapping, projecting, interlocking, and parallel elements; whereas referential draws connections through an interpretation of distinct characteristics from the present, past, and future environmental context; and whereas tectonic consists of the underlying structure, frame or mass, and materiality without which the formal, spatial, and referential concepts cannot become physical. / Master of Architecture / Bridging is considered as a formal, spatial, referential, and tectonic articulation of connectedness between architecture and context. The question is probed through a mixed architectural program situated in the interstice of an urban downtown and residential neighborhood.