This thesis seeks to offer strategies for the densification of various American cities developing its hypothesis through the use of biomimicry and the analysis of indigenous ecosystems. Solutions will be devised and tested based on methodologies of negotiation between man-made and natural systems and infrastructures. Metropolises to be studied will include New Orleans, Denver, Portland, New York and Phoenix. These cities were selected based on their locations within specific ecosystems (Wetlands, Prairie/Tundra, Evergreen, Broadleaf, Desert---respectively), their large populations, and expansive suburbs. Coherent research material on relevant issues will be presented (land use, population, pollution, transportation, etc.) and compared among the cities. Following, a comprehensive investigation of indigenous plants for each of these regions will be carried out, whereby strategies and hypothesis will be developed for interventions in each city/ecosystem variation. Physical planning strategies can be gleaned from these varying micro and macro ecosystems that have already existed, grown and adapted long before our cities were founded. Current localized systems of each city will be studied and alterations proposed to take advantage of unique indigenous conditions while allowing for farmland and natural area preservation, inclusion, and support of and within the system. (Abstract shortened by UMI.)

This thesis will preserve and exploit the inimitable urban condition of the High Line by suggesting that its current alien presence in the city can be reclaimed and experienced while simultaneously maintaining the integrity of the historic structure. The High Line is an artifact; it represents a time in history when New York was bustling in a transportation fueled economy. History has constructed its current segregation and its 20 years of isolation from the city has allowed for ecology to self-seed a native prairie. Its integration back into the urban fabric via a series of public and private access nodes will serve to bracket between the artifact and the city as well as provide access to an elevated territory of much needed green space in Manhattan. Moving people sectionally through the city along these nodes is essential to the cultural and historical experience of the city. Its exploitation will in turn embed the artifact so deeply as a support system into the urban fabric that it will be able to sustain itself through the life cycles of the city.

A new strategy is needed in the housing industry. With a flux of unconventional residents moving back into the city an entire industry of "urban" housing has emerged. The products of this production housing are advertised as an alternative to suburban housing, but perhaps the only alternative it has is the vicinity to downtown. Construction techniques and design strategies deployed by the "urban" housing industry are no different than their counterparts working on Houston's periphery, producing a homogenized and compartmental housing as found in conventional suburban housing. Hybrid Housing is an alternative strategy for production housing. It uses industrialized techniques to produce a range of units that serve a variety of lifestyles. Assembled as a whole, these units react and grow into a complex body that nests private, public and communal territories within a mat of housing. By crossing social and physical relations, hybrid housing presents an alternative urban living.

EWB is a direct attempt to deal with numerous uncontrolled urban emergences in Beijing; instead of the current stratifying process, it offers strategies for intensifying the dynamic density through enabling the massive subversive forces. In turn, EWB exposes the city's future of unprecedented three-dimensional congestion---a hyper-dense city. EWB respond to the all-encompassing wildness with an approach that merges two opposing concepts of urbanity into one: the top-down plan that treats developments as lockdown enclaves; the unregulated activities that flood the urban ground. It propagates a new urban process by using the vast developments as a framework to proliferate street commerce---instead of being parasitical, unregulated activities can weave into the rigid structure of existing residential blocks and disturb it like a virus infection. Once they reach the critical masses, the city will reinvent itself as an uninterrupted hyper-dense urban landscape capable of accommodating all manners of street life.

from afar Gaia inspires us to see in her the design possibilities... ...the fractal becomes the unit for understanding the macros... ...within this macros the cities dwell... ...from the city we extract urban behaviors with similar intelligible natural patterns... ...within the parking systems, natural qualities are hidden... ...qualities that find their way through the concrete... through the lines... through the shadows... ...and in the end...nature finds it's way through the structure...

This thesis is an investigation of a rapid deployment housing system inspired by the El Paso/Juarez border shanty towns and their proximity to manufacturing plants in a global market transition zone. It is about developing co-operative relationships between architects, engineers, and fabricators, as well as developing new integrative methods of production, deployment and construction. The program typology is organized around a hybrid spine/duct that integrates structural, mechanical and circulatory functions into a single performative architectural device. Building systems are no longer conceptually exclusive and separately deployed, but synthesized into a fluid interior/exterior definition of space. This process instrumentalizes a hands-on/in-the-field form-finding strategy using a primary material (polystyrene foam packaging) as ductwork/spine that twists up to become wall and structural supports in key locations and twists flat to become roof, floor, ramps or bridges. This thesis is an interface connecting multiple disciplines while making available to home-seekers a form to adapt to their own culture and needs while also participating in a new form of urbanism.

If the Montrose district's most salient character is cultural diversity, then the restrictions set forth by the City of Houston Planning Department's 'Chapter 42' have proven insufficient, in fact counterproductive to achieving the first publicly stated goal of those amendments: maintainence of neighborhood character.1 Ironically, what allowed the recent climax in diversity to accidentally emerge was the deterioration and subsequent inconsistent levels of maintainence/restoration of what began in the 1920's as a pristine monoculture of middle class bungalows. But as the low-density, single family home has become an inadequate response to Montrose's recent increase in market desireability, Chapter 42 and its resultant "townhouse" model threaten the district with yet a new promise of economic/cultural singularity. However, while embracing Houston's strategy of dwelling-type-as-market-product, it appears possible to write in to the code the previously-accidental ingredient for neigborhoods like Montrose: community emergence through propagation of difference. Thus, Houston's near-town neigborhoods could incrementally densify through means sensitive to local conditions, and simultaneously subvert the ever-present gentrification-oriented threat of monotony. 1Marlene Gaffrick of City of Houston Planning Dept. Goals of Chapter 42 as stated in telephone interview.

In this era of "experience economy," urban areas face increasing pressure to distinguish themselves in a world dominated by globalization. At the same time these same metropolitan areas struggle to cope with the imbalance of urban and natural systems that have resulted in the degradation of natural resources and an increase in pollution. The metropolitan area of Houston covers 8,778 square miles, an area slightly smaller than the state of Massachusetts. Within the same area, eight different ecosystems converge in one of the most ecologically diverse landscapes in North America. The rises in pollution and destructive flooding within Houston are some of the many indicators of the imbalances within the urban ecology. A new interrelationship between both organizational systems must be addressed. Eco-metropolis is the touristic investigation of strategies using both urban and natural systems of organization to create a unique territory of cohesive balance within the urban ecology of Houston.

Detroit has steadily declined as a city since the height of its greatness in the 1950s. Deindustrialization, suburbanization, divisive racism, and disenfranchisement have taken a toll on a city that once stood for the American Dream. Democracy and urbanization have been marginalized in favor of a pursuit that is no longer possible. Any plan for Detroit must address its vacancies, both political (and communal), and physical. These aspects deserve their own attentions, under the dire circumstances they face. However, any solution to the problems facing Detroit must also adhere to a larger vision - history tells us this is Detroit's way. Detroit has lost more than money and housing - It has lost people, optimism, and will. Once built on an idea. Detroit must present itself once again as more than just a city. It must reassert its symbolism as a promised land for a new version of the American Dream.

Phenomenal readings are used to identify the distance between the apprehension of place and place as a repository of design intents, to test a thesis that modern urban developments manifest meaning as a built language containing all the processes of understanding integral with an orchestration of perceptive sense. The usage of the phenomenal reading as a method in operation should place facets of the positivistic model of architecture into question.