There has been a notable interest in landscape design in the recent years. Growing environmental consciousness and the deindustrialization process in cities have resulted in the new park design projects which have been created through recovery of waste lands. The thesis examines a number of selected park projects with two frameworks which are the reclamation methods and the design strategies. The reclamation methods constitute the ways of recovering wastelands / while, the design strategies constitute the design approaches and methods used in these projects at urban scale. The contemporary approaches to park design are studied in the thesis, in three parts which are &#039 / &#039 / the strategic design&#039 / &#039 / , &#039 / &#039 / the place-based design&#039 / &#039 / and &#039 / &#039 / the ecological design&#039 / &#039 / . Two proposals of the Parc de la Villette competition, Parc Andr&eacute / Citro&euml / n, Bercy, Invaliden, Downsview, Fresh Kills and High Line parks are the cases studied. A categorization of the approaches was done according to the design concepts of the projects. Strategic design comprises the projects conceived in a way that would adapt to future conditions / place-based design covers the projects designed by referring to the meanings derived from their sites with the aim to maintain or create a sense of place / and finally ecological design cover projects which were designed to sustain and diversify the ecological values of their sites. The examination of three types of park design approaches does not propose a strict categorization / but rather it displays continuities in the evolution of park designs. The design concepts, strategies and tools, besides the working principles and innovative aspects of these approaches are studied in a comparative way. The thesis is concluded with an evaluation of the new significances of landscape design.

Over 80-percent of the U.S. population lives in urban areas that occupy a mere 3-percent of the country's total area. Development problems and infrastructural stress caused by urban overpopulation can already be seen in the nation's largest cities. Scattered across North America are small towns that, at one time, were largely sustained by agriculture or industry, but have watched as farming and manufacturing operations leave them behind. Rooted in these economic conditions is the growing gap between metropolitan and nonmetropolitan areas. The high concentration of rural lands and high poverty rates in the South makes this region particularly vulnerable to the effects of rural economic distress, and put it in desperate need of solutions. For many small towns in Georgia, the last two decades have brought either rapid population growth, as seen in the areas surrounding Atlanta, or great population decline, most clearly depicted in the southeastern region of the state. Each condition produces a host of different challenges for these small communities, illustrating no simple solutions. It is the focus of this research to determine what proximities, economic assets, and formal characteristics are necessary for small towns in Georgia to successfully revitalize and grow. Furthermore, it is the aim of this research to present a means of analyzing the assets of small towns in order to determine where outside investment is most likely to make a difference, and how resources can best be utilized.

In an age of increased environmental awareness, environmental education in schools has become progressively valued and supported. With this in mind, the purpose of this study was to investigate the significance of art education within the context of environmental schools and other sites of environmental education. Specifically, this research aimed to identify ways art education is being used as a means to strengthen outdoor learning. Through qualitative research involving multiple case studies of the art programs of three environmental charter schools and one nature center in Pennsylvania, data was gathered by means of on-site observations and interviews with staff and students of the aforementioned sites. Although the findings of this study indicated that each of the sites incorporated some degree of art in their environmental curricula, the results demonstrated a significant deficiency in the presence and support of art education in the environmental education programs within each site. Based on the findings of this study, suggestions were made concerning ways art may be used as a means through which students might more closely examine and experience the natural environment. / text

This project expands the traditional definition of ethos from perceived character in written texts and the study of the ethical to ethos as connected to the habits, places, and objects of everyday life, offering contributions to the subfields of material and place rhetorics. It is argued here that our surroundings (material, natural, cultural) help construct and inform a living ethos. This project addresses how this living ethos can be paramount in processes of identification between the subject/object—whether considering the other as person, material, or environment. I forward that when an author practices a generative ethos, a threshold (Heidegger) is created that invites others into the world of the author, and the crossing of the threshold can be thought of as a type of fold (Delueze). The folding of the self and other, I argue, serves as a central metaphor for rhetorical identifications. I demonstrate how the fold is enacted discursively through stylistic means and additionally show its relevance as a visual metaphor to describe our engagements with material objects and our wanderings through places. This dissertation thus contributes to the growing field of material rhetorics because I identify, define, and synthesize six principles for material scholarship and then apply them to an analysis of writings from materialists. This project also adds to scholarship on place-based writing as I forward the idea of wandering as a rhetorical practice of dwelling, and I ask scholars to consider movement's important role in our experience of place and its contribution to character development. I also apply the idea of wandering as rhetorical practice to classroom pedagogy and examine student place-based compositions. I draw upon the works of rhetoric and composition scholar Jim W. Corder, published and unpublished, as a case study in my dissertation. Corder shows readers how a writer can understand the term "ethos" beyond a stylistic interpretation. He values bringing the personal—discussion of his sacred objects and places in West Texas—into his writing because he believes communicating identity is a part of ethos. My use of Corder clarifies and complicates important elements of rhetorical theory—material and place-based studies—rather than treating him as an historical figure in rhetoric and composition, which is how he has traditionally been discussed in scholarly work.

Indigenous worldviews are essential to successful language education, yet it remains a challenge to integrate them into current frameworks dominated by Western paradigms and pedagogies. This research addresses one aspect of the maintenance of cultural integrity for Indigenous languages as they are taught in a contemporary context. The purpose of this research is twofold: to explore the connections between Indigenous languages and the land, and to see how these connections are reflected in current language education practices. In particular, the study looks at the use of websites for Indigenous language education, with the goal of better understanding the potential for such placeless, global media to represent the inherently place-based nature of Indigenous languages. The study is based on an Indigenist research paradigm and employs the qualitative principles of Constructivist Grounded Theory. It incorporates a synthesis of current literature regarding connections between language and land, personal interviews with Indigenous language and culture experts, and a survey of 14 language education websites from Canada and the United States. Essential ties between land and language are revealed in the words of Indigenous and other writers, and in the thoughts and practices of Indigenous thinkers actively engaged with both land and language. These ties represent an intimate relationship to land that weaves together Indigenous knowledge, spirituality, history and identity. This study contributes to our understanding of the significance of land for Indigenous languages, and the importance of Indigenous worldviews for Indigenous education. / Graduate

Having experienced climatic warming before, First Nations people of the Albany River basin in sub-arctic, Canada, have already shown the ability to be adaptable to external influences. However, societal changes and the current accelerated rate of environmental change have reduced First Nations people ability to adapt. In addition, young people are no longer going out on the land as much. Fort Albany First Nation community members have commented on the lack of connection that some youth have with the land. A disconnect with the environment by youth can threaten the adaptive capacity of sub-arctic First Nations. As identified by Fort Albany First Nation community members, one potential tool that could influence the youth to become more aware of their land, is the collaborative geomatics tool. The collaborative geomatics tool is based on the WIDE (Web Informatics Development Environment) software toolkit. The toolkit was developed by The Computer Systems Group of the University of Waterloo to construct, design, deploy and maintain complex web-based systems. The collaborative geomatics tool supports a common reference map, based on high-resolution imagery. Three environmental outreach camps were held from 2011-2012, programming utilized place-based education as the platform to engage youth in their environment and community and begin using the associated mapping technology. All camps utilized the newly developed collaborative-geomatics tool and a camera ready handheld Global Positioning System (GPS) while participating in various activities that engaged them in their community and environment. The outreach program worked well in connecting youth with knowledgeable community members allowing for the direct transfer of traditional knowledge in a culturally appropriate manner, that is, learning through observation and doing, as well as other culturally-appropriate educational strategies. In addition, the informatics tool supported the archiving of this knowledge through the uploading of geospatially tagged pictures taken by the youth.

This thesis investigates the relationship between access to public gathering spaces and self-reported health with indicators of community life as the intervening variables. This study was undertaken to investigate the relationship between the access to public space and self-rated health status in multicultural communities. A survey of 785 randomly-selected households was conducted across four low-income Toronto neighbourhoods. The investigation is framed by the 'production of healthy public space' model, which conceptualizes the pathways between the lived experience of space and health as impacting an individual’s likelihood of establishing place attachment. The results support the hypothesis that there is a relationship between the lived dimension of space and health. Mental health appears to be the outcome most affected by indicators of place attachment. Several of the aforementioned relationships were found more commonly in the densest of the four neighbourhoods and variations were found between foreign- and Canadian-born subpopulations.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Texas Christian University, 2008. / Title from dissertation title page (viewed May 12, 2008). Includes abstract. Includes bibliographical references.

abstract: This dissertation examines people's place experiences more fully than has been done by others in the field of education, and in doing so, it opens new ways of thinking about place in place-based education. Place-based education, in its effort to connect educational processes with the local places in which students and teachers carry out their daily lives, has become an increasingly popular reform movement that challenges assumptions about the purpose and meaning of education in a rapidly globalizing world. Though the scholarship on place-based education describes, justifies, and advocates for turning the educational focus toward local places, it does not necessarily bring forth an explicit understanding of how people experience place. Grounded in phenomenology, this qualitative study explores the place experiences of five individuals who were born and raised in the White Mountains of eastern Arizona. Experiential descriptions were gathered through three, in-depth, iterative interviews with each participant. Documents considered for this study included interview transcriptions as well as photographs, observations, and descriptions of places in the White Mountains that were deemed significant to the individuals. A phenomenological framework, specifically Edward Relph's explications of place and insideness and outsideness, structured the methodological processes, contextualized participant narratives, and facilitated and informed an understanding of participants' place experiences. Through the coding and analyzing of interviews for common themes and subthemes, as well as through the crafting of individual profiles, participant place experiences emerged as a dialectical relationship between insideness and outsideness and consisted of Part-of-Place (play-and-exploration, cultivation-of-place, stories-of-place, dangerous-endeavors, and care-of-place), Place-Sensations (remarkable-moments, sensory-triggers, and features-marked-in-time), and Ruptures-in-the-Place-World (pivotal-moments, barriers-borders-boundaries, drastic-changes, and injuries). While the research was exploratory and only investigated a limited number of place experiences, the findings, coupled with theoretical and conceptual understandings of place anchored in phenomenological perspectives, strengthen a discussion in place-based education of place, how place is experienced, and how these experiences matter in people's lives. Furthermore, the findings of this dissertation support a proposed pedagogical method that blends place-based education and culturally relevant practices into a place-responsive pedagogy. / Dissertation/Thesis / Doctoral Dissertation Educational Leadership and Policy Studies 2015

In this research, I investigate multiple entry points for understanding and developing art and visual culture curriculum to respond to the Anthropocene. Informed by posthuman, feminist, and ecological theories, I ask what practices and theory art educators might take up to cultivate emergent artistic practices with students toward responding to the geological, social, and present moment. Organized around integrating visual art into school and community garden sites, this writing includes curriculum theory, a unit design and reflections on implementation and the writing process. Using autoethnographic and visual art methodologies, I attempt to engage the subjective relational space between myself, my psyche, and the phenomenon of teaching, writing, and embodying this curriculum. Through this research, I wanted to know whether co-facilitating with human and non-human members of school gardens would stabilize affective and relational containers of care and stewardship as part of the learning environment. To this end, I found that co-facilitating with place, including the garden, is a stabilizing environment for myself as a teacher, but can also be conducive to perpetuating Western and white narratives of place. Another central theme and finding from this data was the lived experiences of grief. Employing autoethnography (Ellis & Bochner, 2000), I reflected on my teaching through my psyche, body, and emotions. I found and analyzed this data through present moment awareness of my embodied response to the experience of writing and facilitating a four-week art curriculum with middle school girls in their school garden. As an emergent response to this grief, I have therefore organized my writing around the notion of mending posthuman heartache in the Anthropocene. This is a call I believe educators should take seriously. The Anthropocene moment is in so many ways the result of deep disconnection and separation, years of violence against the planet, and against humanity in the forms of colonization, patriarchy, white-supremacy, and capitalism. I hope for this research to contribute to animating art and visual culture education toward affective and critical ecological solutions to the moment we are living in. The implications of this research are not empirical in nature, but rather take up poetic, artistic, and enigmatic qualities of the present to tease out ways of being with, working against, and creatively responding to these times in which we live. To conclude, I believe any practices that cultivate care and affective relationship to place, self, and the other members of our human/non-human communities, such as visual art and gardening practices, can serve as containers and resources for living in the Anthropocene.