This thesis addresses contextual design in the city, particularly the design of contemporary architecture in historic places. The research focuses on an analysis of Old Havana's urban architecture, particularly the spatial qualities of colonial Cuban houses as well as visual, social, and functional qualities of their urban façades. Additionally, I analyze specific mid-twentieth century houses that reinterpret Cuba’s colonial architecture in order to derive architectural principles that are tested in my design process. The design project is a mixed-use cultural center at the Plaza Vieja in Old Havana, Cuba. As a cultural destination currently under going restoration, the Plaza Vieja is an appropriate place to propose a contemporary project that reinterprets Havana’s historic context. The cultural center embodies a synthesis between old and new ideas.

Urban planners continue to explore various ways of influencing the type, rate, location, quality and timing of urban development. The need for such influence is evidenced by the compounding of urban environmentmental and energy concerns with local government fiscal difficulties. This study examines two of the tools frequently identified as being useful in efforts to effectively manage urban development: consolidated urban government and the controlled extension of certan urban services, especially water service, sewage service, fire protection and police protection. These two tools are explored through a case study of the urban and general services district concept as it has evolved in Metropolitan Nashville-Davidson County, Tennessee. The decision, with the establishment of consolidated government in 1963, to divide Metropolitan Nashville-Davidson County into two service districts provides a setting for the examination of past, present and potential impact of these service arrangements upon Nashville's urban development. The following four research questions provide the focus of the study: Was the creation of the service districts based upon a planning concern for the coordination of service provision with development objectives? Has the existence of these districts permitted their use as vehicles for coordinatied service delivery consistent with development objectives? Given the history of these districts, do they appear to have potential in assisting Metro Nashville in meeting its future development objectives? Does the Nashville experience with consolidated government and the service district concept provide planners with evidence of the validity of such arrangements for the implementation of development objectives in metropolitan areas? Organized around these central questions, the study employs interviews with past and present planning officials, reviews of planning documents, and searches of literature on Metro Nashville to find its answers. The principal findings of the study are: A continuing group of professional planners and Nashville citizens were instrumental in the design and implementation of consolidated government in Nashville and Davidson County. The creation of the Urban Services District and General Services District concept was a response to service delivery, poltical, fiscal and legal problems in Nashville; developmental concerns were secondary. Since 1963, the continuing need to provide urban services to already-urbanized areas has precluded active consideration of using service policies to guide development; this fact has been reinforced by the general Metro political environment which supports the view that public planning for development should be limited to the maintainance of "minimum standards" of public health, safety and welfare. The potential for use of Urban Services District expansion policies as developmental tools has been moderated by the erosion of the distinction between the Urban Services District and the General Services District. Although Metro is currently reviewing three "general plan" alternatives, there is little evidence to suggest that a political climate is emerging which will support the use of service policies to influence urban development beyond the "minimum standard" level. The expansion of the Nashville metropolitan area beyond the boundaries of Davidson County, the dominance of state and federal decision-makers in transportation decision-making, and the lack of consistent coordination between Metro agencies and departments seriously inhibits any effort to use Urban Services District extension to influence urban development. The conclusions of the study are based upon these findings and are phrased as messages to planners who are interested in the potential impact consolidated government and the management or urban services might have upon urban development. The messages suggest caution in listing the virtures of consolitated government, particularly where such government is not truly metropolitan. It is further suggested that the use of urban service policies to influence development is dependent upon both the political capacity and the political will to effectively achieve development goals. Planner are encouraged to seek the development of each of these.

The history of the ethnic enclave as urban phenomena exhibits innovative use of existing space and infrastructure. Adaptability becomes second nature for survival. In the suburban neighborhood of Alief, a large ethnic population has rendered the neighborhood into a fascinating and dynamic international microcosm. Coined the new Chinatown, this multi-cultural neighborhood is a dynamic place, as one moves through the urban scape they are confronted with street signs in Chinese, Middle Eastern Cafes, Spanish Newspapers, and Buddhist Temples. Signs and graphics label, however they insufficiently capture the energy of the community, and instead create caricature negating the uniqueness and dynamism of the neighborhood. Culture here, is a layered experience of the senses.

A new prototype of subway station with overlaid passenger flow and information flow is suggested to be applied to the newly developed Line 8 in the City of Beijing, both to deal with the crowded passenger flow space and to provide a dynamically continuous city image to the passengers as a feedback of the collection of their route information.

This thesis takes a formal approach to understanding the Israeli-Palestinian conflict by studying mechanisms of control within the West Bank. It is only through the overlapping of two separate political geographies that they are able to inhabit the same landscape. The Oslo Accords have been integral to this process of division. By defining various control regimes, the Accords have created a fragmented landscape of isolated Palestinian enclaves and Israeli settlements. One feature of the Oslo Accords is the bypass road which links Israeli settlements to Israel, bypassing Palestinian areas in the process. These are essential to the freedom of movement for the Israeli settlers within the Occupied Territories. Extrapolating on the bypass, this thesis explores the ramifications of a continuous infrastructural network linking the fragmented landscape of Palestinian enclaves. In the process, a continuous form of urbanization has been developed to allow for the growth and expansion of the Palestinian state. Ultimately, this thesis questions the absurdity of partition strategies within the West Bank and Gaza Strip by attempting to realize them.

The last decades, have seen Mexico's City's urban conditions change, from what many people believe to be a place of untapped possibilities to what now many refer to as a failed state. It's hyperdense conditions coupled with a government unable to control socioeconomic issues have created urban and social disruptions that manifest themselves as severing devices of its infrastructural networks, resulting in a segregated city, "decaying and its core", as crime, social gatherings, and vehicular traffic paralyzes the cities transportation infrastructure, disconnecting one of the largest most vibrant cities of the world. This project explores and manipulates the correlation between the crowd, infrastructure and technology to mitigate these challenges by impacting the city in three scales [local, metropolitan, and virtual] through notions of interstitiality, fluidity and crowd surveillance.

Detroit lays stunned as the product of abusive parenting. The loyal workhorse of the American Dream wallows in the dedicated obsolescence of an economic monoculture and fiends for the opiate of capitalism. Yet despite the neglect, a new vitality is brewing amongst the shadows of post-fordist residue. Within the labeled obsolescence breeds a new existence which emerges out of the deviance from the skeletal remains of modern urbanism. A city branded as devastated is actually the epitome of owning the margin. This thesis amalgamates disenfranchised city islands by accelerating Detroit's underlying and inherent urbanism of transgressive circulation and communication pathways through such techniques as urban scarring, blanketing, disruption, and smoothing. The development does not erase the contemporary attempts at reconciling the norm of the city image but in turn fortifies the inventions spurred by its shortcomings. By reframing a city's legibility, [D]Urbanism engenders a new urban ideology attentive to the local collective.

The current interest in developing mobility alternatives such as high-speed rail and commuter rail systems in our auto dominated American regions poses new possibilities to reimagine our sprawling, disconnected, suburban landscapes. Since the patterns of development that automobile infrastructures have produced over the last century radically differ from the urbanisms that traditional rail systems once served, the integration of new transit systems into this contemporary context has potential for radical innovation. This thesis examines the impact of new modalities within our suburban environments and problematizes the monofunctionality of a ground plane fully dominated by the automobile. Through a multilayered fabric of mobility infrastructures, garden dwellings, retail strips, working units, and public outdoor spaces, this proposal condenses and reorganizes the suburban landscape into a field condition transit development with emerging nodes of connectivity to the ground, rail, and city landscape.

United States is a country of shoppers, leaving hundreds of malls scattered around the country surrounded by fields of parking, waiting for the 30-year lifecycle to run its course. When the economic crisis hit in 2008, it became clear that it wasn't just the economy that was dependent on retailer's success, "public spaces" were also dependent. As malls close, the gathering spaces that offered a privatized version of the so beloved "public sphere" close as well. This thesis argues that the decline and fall of these "public spaces" resides in the mall's monofunctional nature and isolation. This thesis proposes a methodology of mall reanimation that transforms the inherited concept of the mall as a space of consumption into the mall as a place of production. Finally, this thesis aims to offer a capitalistic view on sustainable and profitable development that questions the ultimate form of suburban sprawl and land subdivision.

The continuous interior of endless Junkspace, is, at its best, the compulsive repetition of itself. This architectural condition, which exists worldwide, is characteristic of airports, casinos, malls, urban tunnel/skyway systems and transit linked nodal developments. Constantly expanding due to the elevator, escalator and A.C. Unit, this endless internal condition is completely self-sufficient, operating without formal, programmatic or site constraints. The inside is the extreme of "Bigness"; a seamless, generic, interiority where the relationship between inside and outside no longer exist. By pairing the current endless interior with post-bigness urban strategies, a new urban scenario emerges that problematizes the genericity of the seamless interior while simultaneously disrupting the undifferentiated urban relationship of the block or mega-block to its non-context. The project uses the scale of the endless building as infrastructure to explore the possibility of an After-Bigness, After-Generic moment.