The floodplain development strategy of "soft zoning" seeks to leverage the forces of unregulated development and flood disaster potential in order to incite the formation of a high performance urban landscape that accommodates both the natural process of flooding and the urban processes of rapid population growth and development. The testing ground of this landscape technique is an intensive FEMA Buyout zone near the convergence of White Oak Bayou and Vogel Creek, a heavily flood-prone area of White Oak Bayou Watershed in Houston, Texas.

I trace the transformation of two inner-city districts in London from semi-derelict industrial areas to emerging showcases of cultural enterprise, King's Cross, the site of the Channel Tunnel Rail Link terminus and Spitalfields, east of the financial district. By using a methodological melange that includes a host of interviews, first-hand observation and volunteer work at a community planning group over a year and a half, I explain how various efforts at historic preservation, community planning, economic development and, increasingly, promoting cultural activities have produced this transformation. Rather than focusing on gentrification or working-class displacement, I look at how these efforts have mobilized 'urbanist agency,' that is, of people such as architects, architectural historians, community activists, non-profit developers, planners and cultural entrepreneurs, who have become actively engaged in the production, preservation, and revitalization of inner-city spaces. Such agency not only recasts the popular image of the inner city. It also repositions it in a service economy led by explosive growth in the financial and cultural sectors. In fact, it is in repackaged inner city areas such as King's Cross and Spitalfields where we can most clearly discern the spatial effects of this increasingly global economy.

The dissertation is an ethnographic study of the conventions and practices of the actors of the US middle-class housing market concerning housing and neighborhood architectural change and management and its perceived relation to the protection of real estate investments. The ethnography takes as its starting point the widespread concern of the middle-class sector of American society with the preservation of residential "property values" and attempts to understand the interaction between more traditional (sociocultural) middle-class landscape "conservatism"---as reflected in a restrictive attitude towards neighborhood change---and the symbolic demands of large-scale housing markets with which homeowners engage for purposes of wealth accumulation and social mobility. The research explores the ways in which middle-class neighborhoods are managed, improved and controlled with the purposes of protecting and improving home values and explores the large-scale urban impacts of these behaviors and ideas. The research also includes a critique of this model of city management insofar as it entails housing discrimination, urban segregation and spatial exclusion for the urban poor. An informal comparison with Latin American urban growth patterns is made. The research takes place in the City of Houston, Texas and involves interviews and participant-observation fieldwork.

The incredible density and the ever-moving round-the clock public transport constitute the vibrant character of Hong Kong. In this totally consumptive city where the turnover rate is unbelievably fast, people have no time and no room to think. Compactness is no longer a function of lack of space but has become a system of its own. Static representation is no longer sufficient to document a city like HK in which every single parameter is animatable. Various computer animation techniques were explored to spatialize the raw footage of the city. These exercises sought to capture the ambiance rather than the physical constructs of the city. "Studios" generated in computer were stacked to form a tower in which the experiences and events of the city were encapsulated. The fixity and objectness of the tower (architecture) is effaced through visually animating the surfaces. Tower was also the metaphor of the compactness of the city.

The spatial detritus lying at the dissolving urban edges of the American West are the ultimate free spaces. These stretches of temporarily forgotten lands are where people go to do things disallowed in civil space---let their dogs off their leashes, put their SUVs in four wheel drive, and test their rifle aim. These spaces have always been there, but as of late there has been a move to make them official---to bound and name them---to make them Open Space. The transformation of free space into Open Space involves little physical change. It is rather an operational reprogramming that hardens these loose spaces into defined entities and directs their "wildness" against encroaching development. The result is a spatial antibody applied in strategic doses to fortify an urbanity sick with space. This process of spatial immunization challenges typical modes of form making---urban, architectural, and otherwise.

This thesis is an investigation of U scRBAN M scERIDAN; the structure formed through relations rather than material and stimulation of it by inserting a park into everyday life. H scOUSTON D scOWNTOWN T scUNNEL S scYSTEM has been selected as a site because of its accessibility, controlled climate and slow speed. Although It is not a typical park, its characteristic rhizomatic labyrinth presents the system as a museum-like P scARK which is interwoven among the system of tunnels. The tree may be the same as one found in a typical park, however, this context changes the tree into an object in a cultural exhibition, working as a A scCUPUNCTURE needle to stimulate the relationship between people and the things in their everyday life. Although Urban Meridian has been forgotten, it continues to form the real life of the city. Understanding the city though this invisible structure can give us a clue to acupuncture and healing; because existence is always beyond the object itself.

This thesis searches for a new understanding of domestic space by dividing the house into two concepts---Liquid and Solid. As the Solid House has evolved reluctantly over the past century, the Liquid House has experienced revolution after revolution. Defined by market economies, construction standards, pop culture, etc., the Liquid House is an amorphous, constantly shifting figure that overshadows its Solid counterpart. The rise in prominence of the Liquid House is marked by astonishing statistics: The average single-family house has doubled in size in fifty years as lots have grown 25% smaller and households have decreased 15%. As per capita expenditures have tripled and credit card debt has more than doubled, average closet space has increased seven-fold. This thesis explores the ways in which the Liquid House, perpetuated by these statistics, has come to dominate, giving rise to contradictions and paradoxes that simultaneously define and confuse the very essence of domestic life.

The commute by automobile, as it happens in Houston Texas, is a spatial envelope. This envelope widens and narrows based on a set of variables: position, traffic, speed, and time of day, and it changes from day to day. The project is a study of and an intervention into this spatial envelope of the commute. The intervention takes the form of a gas station located on a feeder road adjacent to a freeway. Video is both a means of study of the commute, and a tool for the design of the station.

The Global Positioning System (GPS) is being used in conjunction with wireless communications and spatially referenced databases (GIS) to form a new telecommunications regime that is radically changing the way we move about and perceive the urban landscape. The increased speed and efficiency of this new regime favors decentralized, real-time decision making at the level of individual actor over centralized, top down planning. If centralized planning is no longer relevant in the decentralized city, how can urban planners, designers and architects engage the new urban frontier? By designing how information generated by the new regime is presented to users, those of us in the design professions can begin to tackle the problem in a decentralized manner, while maintaining our relevance in a world operating outside the bounds of centralized thinking.

The view of surface parking lots as "simple" surfaces has led to a stagnation of articulation and a collective acceptance of banality in parking lot design. The aggregation of these "simple" surfaces is beginning to have a negative effect upon the micro-ecology and infrastructural layout of the city and those systems with the potential to mitigate this effect are being supplanted by the singular nature of the surface. This thesis proposes a design schematic for the surface parking lot population that will promote a more symbiotic integration between the surface parking lot and other environmental systems within the city. Through a better understanding of the networked relations of these systems, we may be able to recode surface parking lots within the city as strategic design interventions, designed in response to and with the ability to react dynamically to specific changes in local and global environmental conditions.* *This dissertation is a compound document (contains both a paper copy and a CD as part of the dissertation).