The impact of natural disasters is often exacerbated by a disparity between resources for relief and recovery. When the barrio of Punta Santiago in Puerto Rico was devastated by Hurricane Maria in September of 2017, many of its residents lived in the remains of their homes for over a year while they rebuilt from wind damage and flood waters that rose over 6 feet. As climate change leads to an even more constrained timeline for response with increasingly frequent and intense storms, the future of Punta Santiago and other coastal communities worldwide will necessitate strategies ranging from nature-based shore protection systems, coastal setbacks, and managed retreat. This thesis investigates the time disparate processes of disaster relief, recovery, and climate adaptation through the lens of their impact upon the interdependent identities of people and place as informed by theorists and designers including J.B. Jackson and Patrick Geddes. My approach works from the scale of the Antón Ruíz watershed to the delta to uncover the historical and contemporary processes that knit people in the region to the land. I identify commonalities in the immediate recovery needs and long-term resiliency of the community and ecosystems, and seek to support ongoing globally significant research of the rare coastal systems surrounding Punta Santiago. The proposed design, a causeway linking the coast to the hills, dovetails disaster relief and recovery with climate adaptation by providing a persistent connection that restores and reveals the dynamic coastal landscape. / Master of Landscape Architecture / Global warming is correlated with an increase in sea level rise, atmospheric moisture (water content in the air), and surface sea temperatures. The body of research around the complex interaction of these factors is growing, but current projections are that warmer seas will cause more intense hurricanes. Coastal communities, particularly those with fewer economic resources, bear the brunt of this trend and recovery is more difficult with each passing storm. After Hurricane Maria struck in September 2017, many residents of the barrio of Punta Santiago in Puerto Rico lived in the remains of their homes for over a year with little resources to rebuild from the severe wind damage and flood waters that rose over 6 feet. Recovery is still underway almost two years later. A sustainable way forward for Punta Santiago and other coastal communities worldwide necessitates strategies ranging from natural shore stabilization techniques like mangrove buffers and living reefs to restrictions on coastal development, and even the relocation of communities. This thesis investigates the time disparate processes of disaster relief, recovery, and climate adaptation through the lens of their impact upon the interdependent identities of people and place as informed by theorists and designers including J.B. Jackson and Patrick Geddes. My approach works from the scale of the Antón Ruíz watershed to the delta to uncover the historical and contemporary land use that knit people in the region to the land. I identify commonalities in the immediate recovery needs and long-term resiliency of the community and ecosystems, and seek to support ongoing globally significant research of the rare coastal systems surrounding Punta Santiago. The proposed design, a causeway linking the coast to the hills, dovetails disaster relief and recovery with climate adaptation by providing a persistent connection that restores and reveals the dynamic coastal landscape.

Architecture in its primitive form enacted a relationship of making between intentions and outcome. Post- industrialized modernization has created a multiplication of complexities, resulting in a profession that has disengaged theory and practice through the specialization of the architect and the craftsman. Design-build has the ability to be an educational process that re-engages a direct dialog and collaboration of the roles of designer and maker, reinforcing the resilience of culture and place through joining intentions and built reality. Design-build projects have the ability to be an integral part of design education because of their ability to engage in physical manifestation that is fundamentally different than formal education of designing through drawing or design at a distance. Exploring the Washington Alexandria Architecture Center's Design-Build ethos as a primary case study, I intend to support this claim by providing evidence of how a Design-Build process can engage the designer, tools, methods, and materials, with the cultural, social, and environmental context that is sensible to place. By utilizing creativity and ingenuity of available resources as an opportunity for adaptation, an organic sense of place is perceptible, the place is created. Representation beyond drawing encourages one to be proactive in connecting the qualities and characteristics of existing space; this leads to a sustainable practice of continued investment in object, materiality, time, and place. Hybrid approaches to design, or the assembly of both design and building as an academic practice, are no longer insular, but are encouraged as a way to interrelate and connect the built environment with its unbuilt opportunities and impressions. / Master of Architecture

This thesis examines the shifting relationship between the state and its subjects with regard to responsibility for and entitlement to care. Using Malaysia as a case study the research engages with international medical travel (IMT) as an outcome of the neoliberal retrenchment of the welfare state. I offer a critical reading of postcolonial development strategies that negotiate the benefits and challenges of extending care to non-national subjects. The research draws from relevant media, private-sector and governmental documents and 49 semi-structured, in-depth interviews with IMT proponents and critics representing federal, state and urban governmental authorities, professional associations, civil society, private medical facilities and medical travel agencies in Malaysia’s principal IMT regions (Klang Valley, Penang and Malacca). Across four empirical chapters, the thesis demonstrates how ‘Malaysia’ gets positioned as a destination within a range of imagined geographies of care through a strategic-relational logic of care and hospitality. I argue that this positioning places ‘Malaysian’ subjects and spaces into lucrative global networks in ways that underscore particular narratives of postcolonial hybridity that draw from Malaysia’s ‘developing country’, ‘progressive, moderate Islamic’ and ‘multiethnic’ credentials. In considering the political logics of care-giving, I explore how the extension of care can serve as a place-making technology to re-imagine the state as a provider and protector within a globalising marketplace in which care, increasingly commodified, is tied to the production of new political, social, cultural and economic geographies.

This dissertation discusses the rebuilding of cities after war in the context of the changing character of warfare and the increased expectations for societies to deal with difficult pasts. Departing from studies that approach post-war reconstruction focusing on the functional dimension of infrastructural repair and housing relief or on debates about architectural form, this dissertation examines reconstruction through the lens of the process of 'coming to terms with the past'. It explores how understandings of victimhood and responsibility influence the rebuilding of urban space. Conversely, it argues that cities and architecture, through the meanings ascribed to them by various actors, play an important role in dealing with the past. Building on the moral philosophy of Theodor Adorno and Hannah Arendt, it discusses the potential of reconstruction for societies to work through the past, then it engages with frictions highlighted by three situations of rebuilding after different types of war. First, it examines the rebuilding of Belgrade as the capital of socialist Yugoslavia after the aerial bombings typical of the Second World War. Second, it analyses reconstruction debates in the same city after the 1999 NATO bombings, a high-tech operation, framed by NATO as a preventative, humanitarian intervention against a 'perpetrator' state. Third, it discusses rebuilding processes in Sarajevo, where destruction was inflicted between 1992 and 1995 by actors internal to the country, albeit with international ramifications, exemplary of Mary Kaldor's 'new wars'. Based on thirteen months of fieldwork conducted in Belgrade and Sarajevo between 2012 and 2015, it analyses intentions and consequences of reconstruction acts. It suggests the potential and the challenges of a reflective reconstruction, which engages critically with the past, and of a syncretic place-making reconstruction, which focuses on place and its agonistic promise. Its main contribution is to highlight the essential relationship between reconstruction and coming to terms with the past, arguing for an understanding of reconstruction with regards to conflict itself.

The outport is in the midst of great change. Twenty years since the moratorium on cod fishing, the province of Newfoundland and Labrador is experiencing rapid economic development in another industrial resource boom. While some outports are growing, others continue to decline. This development is based on wealth gained through exploitation of non-renewable resources, and as such, is not sustainable. Investing a portion of these short-term gains into the development of sustainable alternates will improve opportunities and resources for future generations. Pilot Project proposes that latent outport phenomena may act as supporting structures for sustainable development. The project suggests methods of identifying and expanding sustainable outport phenomena. This analysis can be distilled into five strategic tools for testing, designing and implementing sustainable rural development. 1. Territorial Networks defines a diverse region, increasing individual community capacity and developing resilience by examining existing micro-regional community connections and designing new ones. 2. Community Stewardship encourages a re-organization of local social structures and informal governance initiatives by defining communication pathways and aligning stakeholder interests. 3. Temporal Alignment co-ordinates the events, services and opportunities over time, between communities, by creating flexible infrastructure for supporting temporary and seasonal outport needs. 4. Informal Economies develops new modes of production by blending traditional trade and barter markets with industrial production frameworks, providing economic sustenance in the outport. 5. Place-making constructs new institutions and landmarks with available resources, reorganizing the rural web of social, economic and ecological activity in the region. Newfoundland operates at the extremes. On one hand, rural folk culture has established small-scale, informal community structures; on the other, industrial mega-projects develop according to strict legislation, market pricing, and resource extraction. The proposed strategies find new links between these extremes. Tried and true vernacular development methods are paired with newly emerging technologies and ideas about the future. Rural areas in Newfoundland have historically been used as testing grounds for heavy-handed development ideas, often with severely adverse effects on communities. This project proposes a series of micro developments: the mobilization of existing resources with small capital investment, little risk, and immediate opportunities for implementation. Sustainable rural development is conceived as a practice, an aggregative change from within the community.

The outport is in the midst of great change. Twenty years since the moratorium on cod fishing, the province of Newfoundland and Labrador is experiencing rapid economic development in another industrial resource boom. While some outports are growing, others continue to decline. This development is based on wealth gained through exploitation of non-renewable resources, and as such, is not sustainable. Investing a portion of these short-term gains into the development of sustainable alternates will improve opportunities and resources for future generations. Pilot Project proposes that latent outport phenomena may act as supporting structures for sustainable development. The project suggests methods of identifying and expanding sustainable outport phenomena. This analysis can be distilled into five strategic tools for testing, designing and implementing sustainable rural development. 1. Territorial Networks defines a diverse region, increasing individual community capacity and developing resilience by examining existing micro-regional community connections and designing new ones. 2. Community Stewardship encourages a re-organization of local social structures and informal governance initiatives by defining communication pathways and aligning stakeholder interests. 3. Temporal Alignment co-ordinates the events, services and opportunities over time, between communities, by creating flexible infrastructure for supporting temporary and seasonal outport needs. 4. Informal Economies develops new modes of production by blending traditional trade and barter markets with industrial production frameworks, providing economic sustenance in the outport. 5. Place-making constructs new institutions and landmarks with available resources, reorganizing the rural web of social, economic and ecological activity in the region. Newfoundland operates at the extremes. On one hand, rural folk culture has established small-scale, informal community structures; on the other, industrial mega-projects develop according to strict legislation, market pricing, and resource extraction. The proposed strategies find new links between these extremes. Tried and true vernacular development methods are paired with newly emerging technologies and ideas about the future. Rural areas in Newfoundland have historically been used as testing grounds for heavy-handed development ideas, often with severely adverse effects on communities. This project proposes a series of micro developments: the mobilization of existing resources with small capital investment, little risk, and immediate opportunities for implementation. Sustainable rural development is conceived as a practice, an aggregative change from within the community.

This PhD responds to a two fold problem with the philosophy of design and the practice of design. The philosophical problem is stated as the discrepancy between a dominant philosophical framework that orders the world according to eternal essences and the actual conditions of the world in which we exist: the conditions of becoming and of flux. Commencing with a critique of the western metaphysical tradition of statics this research project proposes that we need to find a way of describing an evolutionary model of practice, and by so doing to provide a revitalised narration of process. Consequently, the PhD explores the meanings of process through a critical examination of an ensemble of projects created by the author. Within this framework, a number of questions are posed in order to explore the proposition of a process practice. These questions are: What is process? How does one think process? Indeed, how do we get to grasp change? What are the consequences of process thinking on the practices of design, their fields of operation, and their productions? And, how can the thematising of process contribute to the design of the constructed environment, as well as reconfigure the practices of design? This thematising of process is argued to involve a necessary address to the constitutive and interrelated characteristics of process: space/time, movement, change, form and matter. Such an address is also seen to problematise the status of the object, the paradigms of representation, the modes of creation, the economies of exchange, and the structures of community, and to offer a modality of practice which would re-imagine the forms of social exchange to offer an ethical alternative to the tyranny of supply and demand, and thereby reconfigure the potential for dwelling. Making an overview of the discourses and practices engaging with theories of becoming, this thesis argues that almost all of these re-inscribe statics and that consequently the practice of design seems to drag behind our understanding of the world. Through a meditation on dis/appearance, in which the dynamics of being and becoming and the restless ambiguity of the gap are examined, the work establishes a process vocabulary, and makes clear through a material practice, the domains of process thinking, its inclinations, and the kinds of operations and procedures that flourish there. Foregrounding the fertile character of process practice, the PhD then proceeds to introduce notions of the movement-form, the duration-form, the transformational-form, the geometry of encounter, and to argue for physical form as an in-movement poise. Advocating new modes of approach and of attentiveness, and demonstrating new generative methods, this PhD argues that process thinking is not simply an operational stance, but an ethical position that identifies a field of care, and that consequently the design practices be expanded by taking seriously the relationship between process thinking and place making. Thus, this thesis concludes by advocating a mode of place making which, rather than reproduce planned environments as systems of control, configures place as the discursive contested place of encounter and exchange.

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The aim of the urban – architectural study is to connect the historic city centre with the so far problematic and neglected areas along to the viaduct via rehabilitation and conversion of industrial buildings and filling up the city structure with new volumes in order to integrate the area within the organism of the city. Creative efforts are supported by analysis of post-industrial cityscape generally and its problems. The focus will be on sustainable principles, connectivity, eco-friendly transport and creating quality public spaces.