This thesis critiques the tabula rasa typology of 'slum' redevelopment which utilizes master planning to erase and rebuild slums. It proposes to enact a system based on smaller, contextual intervention within the 13 th Compound in the Dharavi slum of Mumbai. Focusing on the creation of trade based workers' co-operatives; this thesis intends to reinforce the 13th Compound and its symbiotic relationship to Mumbai. The proposal utilizes the context and resources of the neighborhood while focusing on the existing recycling industry as a continued means of livelihood. By enacting smaller scale interventions through erasure and addition, it inserts trade based workers' co-operatives as a means of organization, both spatially and politically. These co-operatives will represent the recycling trader which thrive in the 13th Compound and will integrate infrastructural amenities such as rain-water harvesting and gray water filtration into the existing industrial fabric in order to facilitate continual development.

As the threat of a global energy crisis becomes increasingly apparent, the viability of the current automobile, along with its tailored national infrastructure and the beloved car-culture, is in certain jeopardy. This thesis seeks to develop and analyze a series of possible scenarios that yield distinct architectural movements derived from the current car city as we know it today, cognizant of the past's lingering strengths and mindful of the future's dwindling resource palette. It is to be viewed as a means of by which to identify and map some of the forces at play in the future of the city by describing their connectivity, their volatility, and understanding them through grounded, measured trajectories. It is the hope that through an exercise such as this, we might be able to make more informed decisions for the future by projecting from both the past and present.

MANHATTAN'S ANNEX: the crosstown [of] excess is a proposal that reconsiders what excess means in the contemporary city. Our society now just has glimpses of individual indulgence---from singular buildings to individualized junkie-ism---and does not allow the space for collective, urban experience of excess. Our present times demand for new paradigms that confront once more the sphere of normalcy on a metropolitan scale. This thesis envisions the future metropolitan condition of excess through juxtaposition of endless identification + exhibitionism [the network + the pool]. Manhattan's Annex will create urban conditions of void and identification where each subject will be able to abandon the atomized space of the skyscraper and join the collective space of flow.

Each spectacularly publicized terrorist event strengthens our fascination with death and destruction. Barricaded behind architectures of control, our anxieties and fears escalate. Rather than diminishing our dread, we watch with morbid pleasure as distant events unfold right before us. The terrorist eagerly performs for an attentive audience. For the tourist no longer satisfied with the mediated experience of terrorism, this thesis offers an alternative architectural response. It is the year 2010 and terrorism has popularized the city of Karachi in the international imaginary. Seized amidst the battle between progress and regression---barricaded and torn apart by terror---Karachi becomes the site for a new architectural typology of concentrated targets of terrorism. Understanding the relationship between the tourist and the terrorist as one of supply and demand, Fatal Attractions aims to balance the oscillating equilibrium that ultimately absorbs the fatality of terrorism, replacing the traditional relationship of oppression with one of liberation.

This thesis inserts a new urban typology into the city, shifting spatial, political, and programmatic boundaries by constructing a new extraterritorial ground. Extraterritoriality, the state of exception from local jurisdiction, is not yet formally manifest as an urban architectural problem. The proposed ExtraTerritorial Typology [ETT] is an urban architecture that reconfigures the boundary conditions between territorial grounds and user groups: displaced populations and local citizens. Mediating between global and local scales, the ETT relates to its urban context despite its bigness. The ETT demarcates its non-vertical boundary in relationship to the existing ground by strategically connecting to and detaching from the site topography. The ETT accommodates a spectrum of multiscalar international programs within venues of emplacement and displacement dispersed in topographical bands across the site. As an urban scale site intervention, the project is a megaplane which interacts with the existing ground. Sometimes a surface condition, sometimes as megaobject, it is perceived from the street as a shifting architectural form. It extends from the urban context to accommodate programmatic spaces of individuation and collectivity, from transit to asylum, privatized medical treatment to public athletic stadia.

This thesis problematizes the infrastructural and social boundaries of informal settlements established in anomalous depressed tissues within the gridded city. It does so by proposing a new urban strategy that intends to dissolve the edge condition as well as reconnect extracted points of the settlement as a means to pulsate the activity of the slum dwellers and to incorporate the informal settlement to the city. This new urban approach weaves the inverted topography of the barranco with two pieces of urban fabric that are interrupted. It explores La Limonada, one of Guatemala City's densest and most dangerous asentamientos situated in a barranco. The thesis grows out of three constants of this informal city: informal economies, steep grounds and lack of connectivity and proposes an acupunctural construction of exchange promenades that act as connective infrastructures, exchange platforms, and new public grounds. This Mobilizer engenders a new tectonic paradigm that serves a mediator in this gradient of exchanges between the consolidated city and the asentamiento.

'Offshore Concourse' is an urban proposal for a response to changing ecological, economic and political conditions in Alaska and the Arctic. Since 2007, the Northwest Passage has been navigable without need of an icebreaker. As climate change rapidly redraws the world's coastlines, it poses both opportunities and challenges for global trade: melting ice caps yield new trade routes, markets and resources, but thawing permafrost renders the land an unstable ground upon which to build emerging economies. Sited on the open ocean near the Bering Strait, the Offshore Concourse presents a new model of flexible, dynamic urbanism. The port is re-envisioned as a reconfigurable platform for both trade and occupation: an aggregation of floating modules that can move, expand and submerge in response to economic demands and climatic conditions. Operating as a point of exchange, the Concourse stages a unique confluence of goods, users and natural phenomena.

A case study of Mysore city

Planning and design of new towns

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Texas A & M University, 2003. / "Major Subject: Urban and Regional Science." Title from author supplied metadata. Includes bibliographical references.