The purpose of this study was the development of an architectural methodology capable of re-establishing polycentric civitas in the City of Los Angeles. To establish a new civic design framework for the city of Los Angeles, research and analysis was conducted in many fields using several different methods. A review of literature pertaining to the historic establishment of civitas serves an analysis of the different forms of public space in Western civilization. An analysis of urbanism in Los Angeles was conducted using existing literature related to the topic, while an analysis of the neighborhood chosen as the site for the “execution” of the methodology was performed through first-hand research and field study. This information was then synthesized, producing a building program customized to the Miracle Mile in Los Angeles. The final stage of the study was the design of this new civic core. In the context of the Miracle Mile—defined by the presence of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art—the proposed civic core took the form of an artist commune. The study concludes that the re-establishment of polycentrism in Los Angeles, as a means for (re)discovering civitas, requires the development of several new alternative civic cores, dispersed throughout the urban fabric of the Los Angeles Basin. In order to effectively operate as sites of critical civic engagement, however, each core must be developed independently of the other, responding to specific micro-cultures. This study advocates choosing sites based on the presence of existing civic potentials. In this way, the alienating effects of tabula rasa city planning are avoided. The architectural project presented at the end of this study, should therefore be understood, not as an architectural prototype to be universally replicated across the city, but as a prototype for an architectural research method. In order to (re)discover civitas in Los Angeles, architects and urban planners must recognize the limitations of universal models and accept that the architectural spaces that define the civic realm must reflect the needs of the specific societies who will ultimately activate them.

In a context of rapid urbanization and increasingly standardized built environments, urbanism must find new methods of creating appropriate conditions for the variability of contemporary urban life. The city, understood as a system of interconnected processes in constant change, offers a relational way of thinking about urban design. This thesis explores the concept of Relational Urbanism through a strategic design approach that engages the complexity of the site to create variability in the built environment by relating built form to landscape elements. This relational approach has particular potential in post-industrial sites, where challenging existing conditions and processes of remediation resist conventional methods of redevelopment. The thesis focuses on the Toronto Port Lands as a testing ground for this design approach, drawing on the site's industrial heritage to develop a landscape framework and a set of relational rules that will guide the emergence of a diverse urban environment able to change over time. A series of design strategies—remediation parks, urban delta, adapted industry, and differentiated fabric—rethink the challenges of the site as opportunities for public benefit, creating a variegated landscape for built form to respond to. In contrast to a singular static master plan, this method favours multiple flexible strategies that can be deployed incrementally, breaking down the scale of development and allowing it to be realized by a wide variety of stakeholders. Through this approach the thesis seeks to enable the city to intentionally but subtly guide its urban landscape toward diversity and allow its citizens to participate in its continued adaptation.

The sustainable growth and development of our cities are amongst the most important issues of the world today. It is estimated that soon up to ninety percent of the world’s population will live in urban centers. How to accommodate such growth, while maintaining high quality of life, is one of the most challenging tasks facing society. The design proposal will address the future population growth in the City of Toronto with the intensification of an inner suburban area in central Etobicoke. It is founded on principles that address the communities growing needs while working to cultivate a sense of place and improve the livability of the surrounding neighbourhood. Within this area through the design of a mixed-use development with significant forms of public space and amenities, the neighbourhood would experience increased connectivity with the surrounding environment and improved sense of community. It will draw together the residents of the area and cultivate a new public realm from its now disparate elements, this would raise the areas ability to meet future housing needs and mitigate congestion. The design for the Etobicoke Centre is a symptom of – and a drive toward – the evolution of a mature suburb to a place aspiring for urbanity. The story of suburban transformation is relevant to metropolitan areas around the continent, and the clarity of the architectural design demonstrates how good public space design can set standards of sophistication, craft, and structure for other developments to follow. New growth in the area has the potential to act as a catalyst for change, demonstrating how existing inner suburbs have the ability to evolve into more urban, sustainable places.

Neglected areas are everywhere. They are seen as foreclosed homes, commercial properties, rundown lots and even small spaces like broken signage and over-sized potholes. My investigation, Abandonment ex-plores how graphic design can be used to identify neglected areas and add meaning that challenges exist-ing perceptions of these areas. This becomes a way to suggest revitalization without actually redesigning a specific space. Abandonment matches carefully designed phrases, inspired by first hand research of community members, with neglected urban environments of Atlanta. The camouflaged environmental graphics, created by means of DOT signs, chalk drawings, and blackboards recontextualize environments to softly build curiosity, activate new thinking, and potentially spark reinvention. Perhaps if citizens ques-tion these neglected spaces, they may begin to imagine new purposes for these spaces and reclaim them? The investigation is thoroughly documented and will continue to mature over time. To follow the project online, visit urbanartatlanta.com.

The sustainable growth and development of our cities are amongst the most important issues of the world today. It is estimated that soon up to ninety percent of the world’s population will live in urban centers. How to accommodate such growth, while maintaining high quality of life, is one of the most challenging tasks facing society. The design proposal will address the future population growth in the City of Toronto with the intensification of an inner suburban area in central Etobicoke. It is founded on principles that address the communities growing needs while working to cultivate a sense of place and improve the livability of the surrounding neighbourhood. Within this area through the design of a mixed-use development with significant forms of public space and amenities, the neighbourhood would experience increased connectivity with the surrounding environment and improved sense of community. It will draw together the residents of the area and cultivate a new public realm from its now disparate elements, this would raise the areas ability to meet future housing needs and mitigate congestion. The design for the Etobicoke Centre is a symptom of – and a drive toward – the evolution of a mature suburb to a place aspiring for urbanity. The story of suburban transformation is relevant to metropolitan areas around the continent, and the clarity of the architectural design demonstrates how good public space design can set standards of sophistication, craft, and structure for other developments to follow. New growth in the area has the potential to act as a catalyst for change, demonstrating how existing inner suburbs have the ability to evolve into more urban, sustainable places.

Processes of industry and economic exchange have significantly and continually defined the underlying structure and formal characteristics of the American city. Contemporary ‘distributed’ systems of economy and industry rely on the movement of goods produced in distant locations (often overseas) to their eventual point of consumption. This has created a fundamental spatial disconnect between production, manufacturing, and consumption within the city; where local economies often have no relationship with the production or subsequent economic benefit of the goods they consume. As these contemporary systems of industrial production are often reliant on Just-In-Time operational models, the speed and turnover of consumption have become the dominant metrics of economic success. Productive industrial entities and territory, once ingrained in the inhabited city fabric have gradually disappeared; leaving behind smooth, frictionless surfaces of retail, logistics, and service, lacking a social viscosity, and consideration for the public dimension of the city. This thesis argues that Walmart, the archetypal big-box retailer, forms today’s dominant industrial actor; significantly influencing the socio-economic, cultural, and physical configurations of the American city. First, Walmart’s current distributed operational model is analyzed to better understand and contextualize the connections between industry, production, consumption, and urbanization. The next sections speculate upon the long-term social, economic, and environmental sustainability of Walmart’s strategy; while examining the links between social interaction, idea exchange, innovation, and physical proximity within the city. As a result of many factors, including rising energy costs, this project predicts, and then explores a future where distributed operational models are no longer viable. This thesis predicts a subsequent transformation in manufacturing and consumption within the United States; linked to a resurgence in domestic production, by emerging micro-production formats. This scenario, coupled with a stated goal or mandate by Walmart to reduce overall supply chain energy expenditure, presents a unique opportunity for a speculative, opportunistic architecture within the American city. Walmart 2.0 radically reconsiders Walmart’s existing operational model and related built infrastructures, in the creation of a new industrial system that seeks to re-inject systems of consumption, production, and exchange, back into the urban fabric. Walmart becomes an ‘open’, ‘for-hire’ underlying facilitator for the production, consumption, and movement of goods between local nodes of economy, using their existing expertise in logistical, territorial, and data management. As such, Walmart 2.0 acts as a physical and systemic platform for self-organising production and market exchanges that are facilitated, but not controlled by Walmart. A redevelopment of the generic Walmart Supercenter creates a system of participation; where local communities of Walmart 2.0 users both create and consume the content flowing through the Walmart 2.0 system; allowing these communities to engage in the economies of their own locale. Broadly, Walmart 2.0 seeks to provoke the emergence of an urban fabric with an engrained sensitivity towards human interactions in relation to systems of production, consumption and exchange. Further, the project seeks to illustrate a method of operation, through which architects may gain an increased agency within the powerful industrial systems shaping the underlying structure of the contemporary city; a method based on the analysis of existing industrial actors, and speculating upon their future transformations with a heightened social consideration.

Upon identifying the multifaceted and disparate array of ever-changing environmental informants to architectural discourse, one is confronted with how to unite this dialogue in meaningful ways to current modes of thought and action. The question gains more significance as our knowledge of the greater environmental domain becomes more systemic and complexly heterogenic, while at the same time, approaches to the issues have proved to be progressively more reductivist, disconnected, overtly abstracted or theorized, and universally globalized in regard to multifaceted and content-rich human particularities in situ. This research focuses on the implications and applications of Critical Environmentalism (CE) to propose a corresponding epistemological framework to wide-ranging socio-environmental complexities occurring across architectural endeavors, primarily within urban and community developments as comprising the greatest number of intersections between human constructions and the greater environmental domain. CE addresses environmental issues reciprocally emerging across numerous disciplines and theoretical stances and fosters critical and systemically collective approaches to knowledge integration, amalgamating multiple stakeholder perspectives within an interconnective and operational goal of creative communal development and betterment of the human condition in relation to environmental concerns. Situating the environment (Umwelt) as an interconnecting catalyst between divergent points-of-views, CE promotes a multi-methodological, co-enabling framework intended to foster increased ethical and participatory dynamics, communal vitality, co-invested attention, and productive interchanges of knowledge that cultivate an overall quality of knowing and being within the intricacies of the greater domain. As such, it engages broader definitions for architecture within its social community, significantly embodied and epistemologically co-substantiating within a shared, environmental life-place. Fundamentally a hermeneutic standpoint, this investigation elucidates conceptual connections and mutual grounds, objectives, and modes-of-operation across knowledge domains, initiating an essential, socio-environmentally oriented framework for architectural endeavors. In this, it brings together common threads within critical social theory and environmentalist discourse to subsequently promote distinct interconnective components within a framework of socio-environmental thought for architecture. The research then provides case examples and recommendations toward stimulating progressive environmental initiatives and thus increased capacity to improve existing epistemic conditions for architecture, urban design, and community development within the broader scope of Critical Environmentalism.

Some experts suggest that urban design plans in US cities may lack adequate coverage of the essential design aspects, particularly three-dimensional design aspects of the physical environment. Digital urban models and information technology tools may help designers visualize and interact with design alternatives, large urban data sets, and 3D information more effectively, thus correcting this problem. However, there is a limited understanding of the impact that these models may have on the quality of the design product and consequently hesitation about the appropriate methods of their usage. These suggest a need for research into how the usage of digital models can affect the extent with which urban design plans cover the essential design aspects. This research discusses the role digital models can play in supporting designers in addressing the essential design aspects. The research objective is to understand how the usage of digital models affects the coverage of the essential design aspects. The research applies a novel perspective of examining both the methods of modeling-supported urban design and the design content of urban design to attempt to reveal a correlation or causal relation. Using the mixed method approach, this research includes three phases. The first, literature review, focused on reviewing secondary sources to construct theoretical propositions about the impact of digital modeling on urban design against which empirical observations were compared. Using qualitative content analysis, the second phase involved examining 14 plans to assess their design content and conducting structured interviews with the designers of four selected plans. The third phase involved sending questionnaire forms to designers in the planning departments and firms that developed the examined plans. The analysis results were compared with the theoretical propositions and discussed to derive conclusions. The extent of design aspects coverage was found to be correlated with the usage of digital modeling. Computational plans appear to have achieved a higher level of design aspects coverage and a better translation of design goals and objectives. In those plans, 3D urban-wide design aspects were addressed more effectively than in conventional plans. The effective usage of the model's functions appears to improve the quality of the decision-making process through increasing designers' visualization and analytical capabilities, and providing a platform for communicating design ideas among and across design teams. The results helped suggest a methodological framework for the best practices of modeling usage to improve the design content.

This thesis argues for diversity as an important element for urban neighborhoods. This argument is framed by three questions. First, what are the recent findings from urban design, planning and architecture research and practice about achieving neighborhood diversity? Second, what are the physical ingredients of traditional, diverse urban neighborhoods that enable diverse populations, lifestyles and incomes? Third, what design strategies can be formulated, based on the evidence above, to design and implement diverse neighborhoods? Three neighborhoods in Atlanta are the focus of the detailed analysis of diversity. These are: Inman Park, Ansley Park and Virginia-Highland. These three neighborhoods were chosen because of their similarities. They all appear to be single family detached neighborhoods but are actually diverse in terms of housing type and owner/renter occupancy; they are perceived to have unique identities in architectural styles, but actually have a diversity of styles and ages of buildings. They all are perceived to be fully gentrified but in fact, house diverse populations in terms of age, income, race and lifestyle. The conclusions of this thesis include written recommendations, based on current neighborhood design ideas as supported by the analysis of Atlanta neighborhoods.

The purpose of this study was the development of an architectural methodology capable of re-establishing polycentric civitas in the City of Los Angeles. To establish a new civic design framework for the city of Los Angeles, research and analysis was conducted in many fields using several different methods. A review of literature pertaining to the historic establishment of civitas serves an analysis of the different forms of public space in Western civilization. An analysis of urbanism in Los Angeles was conducted using existing literature related to the topic, while an analysis of the neighborhood chosen as the site for the “execution” of the methodology was performed through first-hand research and field study. This information was then synthesized, producing a building program customized to the Miracle Mile in Los Angeles. The final stage of the study was the design of this new civic core. In the context of the Miracle Mile—defined by the presence of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art—the proposed civic core took the form of an artist commune. The study concludes that the re-establishment of polycentrism in Los Angeles, as a means for (re)discovering civitas, requires the development of several new alternative civic cores, dispersed throughout the urban fabric of the Los Angeles Basin. In order to effectively operate as sites of critical civic engagement, however, each core must be developed independently of the other, responding to specific micro-cultures. This study advocates choosing sites based on the presence of existing civic potentials. In this way, the alienating effects of tabula rasa city planning are avoided. The architectural project presented at the end of this study, should therefore be understood, not as an architectural prototype to be universally replicated across the city, but as a prototype for an architectural research method. In order to (re)discover civitas in Los Angeles, architects and urban planners must recognize the limitations of universal models and accept that the architectural spaces that define the civic realm must reflect the needs of the specific societies who will ultimately activate them.