Urbanmorphology is the evolutionary process where urban centers experience growth or decline due to series of changes and events or changes leading to events. This thesis came about due to an event that has a big impact on an urban environment, a military base on a large swath of land was closed and the property became available for development. Closed military bases provide us with opportunities to accelerate urbanmorphology, to simulate the organic evolution of an urban center and to explore urban and architectural ideas that, otherwise, are very difficult to test. The results could be used as models for adaptation in other, less expansive and more restrictive applications. This opportunity allows us to address today's constituencies using today's technology, attempt to define our era and hopefully help in defining the future exactly as the past helped in defining ours. / Master of Architecture

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Since the beginning of Japan's post-war boom her major cities, notably Tokyo, have developed with remarkable speed but relatively little pre-planning and control. So the consequent economic benefits have been accompanied by a level of visual disorder. Public and governmental opinion has therefore recently begun seeking development-control guidelines for improving the visual quality of the urban scene. Some Japanese researchers, building partly on the work of their us colleagues, have responded by trying to identify the most aesthetically significant aspects of the urban visual landscape. This thesis contributes to this search a particularly quantitative approach. It begins with a review of urban-design aesthetic theory concentrating on more recent "psychometric" investigation. It then describes and discusses the main method of the thesis: representation of urban scenes through video stills, computergenerated images, or photographs and the exposure to these representation of groups of sample subjects, and statistical analysis of the subjects' questionnaires responses. Special attention is paid to the reliability with which the aesthetic qualities of a given urban configuration can be generalised from 2-d "perspective" views of it, and to the relationship in subject responses between physical elements like buildings and trees and abstract characteristics like "openness", "enclosure", "age", or "expectant space". These procedures are applied to questionnaires completed by Japanese subjects regarding representations of various Tokyo street scenes, and by largely British subjects regarding contrasting "old" and "new" landscapes in the Hampstead and Milton Keynes areas. Initial investigations suggest that the elements of predominant subjective significance include the proportion of visible sky, the abundance of foliage. This thesis ends by suggesting aesthetic guidelines drawn from these results, considering spatial elements and roles of foliage, and discussing aesthetic assessment for development-control purposes.

Landscape Architects should not create final products, but rather frameworks through which natural existing phenomenon can coexist, evolve and adapt; while bringing together an evolving final existence. The world is not static; the image which we design on paper will never exist exactly the way in which we imagined and there are certain aspects, which we cannot account for or control in the natural world. Given this belief, this practicum is not intended as a final design; but rather constructed as praxis; an exploration of a parametric modeling software and its use as an integral part of the natural design thinking process; a simulation tool rather than a representational conclusion. / February 2016

This thesis describes research into developing a client/server ar- chitecture for a mobile Augmented Reality (AR) application. Following the earthquakes that have rocked Christchurch the city is now changed forever. CityViewAR is an existing mobile AR application designed to show how the city used to look before the earthquakes. In CityViewAR 3D virtual building models are overlaid onto video captured by a smartphone camera. However the current version of CityViewAR only allows users to browse information stored on the mobile device. In this research the author extends the CityViewAR application to a client-server model so that anyone can upload models and annotations to a server and have this information viewable on any smartphone running the application. In this thesis we describe related work on AR browser architectures, the system we developed, a user evaluation of the prototype system and directions for future work.

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Thesis (M.C.P.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Urban Studies and Planning, 2009. / Author also earned an Urban Design Certificate from the Program in Urban Design; a joint graduate program with the Dept. of Architecture and the Dept. of Urban Studies and Planning. Vita. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 174-179). / As currently conceived, the contemporary city will not advance beyond its present level of achievement. This research frames the city within three root values upon which all decisions made in the city are based. The three root values are continuity, connection and openness. Under the present priorities of city making, the contemporary city is heavily biased toward continuity. A paradigm shift is required in the way cities are conceived and developed to rebalance the three root values with the intention of creating cities that are better places for humans to inhabit. This shift is a call for a more human city. This research investigates a collection of urban design principles that are intended to humanize the city and improve them as settings for human use and occupation. The research utilizes the festival as a temporal moment in the city of uniquely human-centered use. It is a moment in which the human becomes the dominant priority in the organization and occupation of space, while other systems of the city are temporarily interrupted. Through a series of six festival case studies a number of consistent adaptations of space emerge in which the festive events highlight strategies for humanizing space in the city. The urban design principles highlighted by this research include adapting spatial containment, restructuring movement, exposing meaning and commonality, attracting density of people, removing separation of uses, increasing overlapping activities, and spatially and temporally scripting and choreographing all of these strategies. / (cont.) These principles are then examined through a design test that shows their applicability in making humanizing adaptations of space and ultimately creating more human cities. / by Joshua Charles Fiala. / M.C.P.

Thesis (M.C.P.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Urban Studies and Planning, 2009. / Author also earned an Urban Design Certificate from the Program in Urban Design; a joint graduate program with the Dept. of Architecture and the Dept. of Urban Studies and Planning. / Includes bibliographical references. / Modern streetcars are making a comeback in the United States after their disappearance in the mid twentieth century. They resemble their distant relative, also known as the trolley, in many ways but express a contemporary, provide modern conveniences, and act as a magnet for redevelopment within the city. Modern streetcars build on the theory behind the European tram systems and provide desirable transportation options to support a range of densities in urban living. Currently in the United States, Portland, OR and Seattle,WA operate one modern streetcar line and have plans to expand their singular line into a network. Using these two routes, the plans for system expansion, and the individual cities that support them as case studies, this thesis analyzes the potential for streetcars to return to Denver, CO.The analysis for the Mile High City was conducted using my knowledge of and research on Denver and the surrounding metropolitan region, its historical skeleton that developed around the streetcar, and the City's current trends in public transportation and planning processes. Based on a multifaceted analysis that includes studying the relationship of potential streetcar route length, multi-modal connections, major destinations, high bus ridership routes, projected residential density, projected employment density, and redevelopment potential based on use and zoning, Denver is in fact an appropriate city for the return of streetcars. / (cont.) Not only would one streetcar be successful, but an integrated system could serve the City and its surrounding urban neighborhoods well. Taking the analysis one step further, the research attempts to compare a potential modern streetcar system for Denver with the historic streetcar routes that operated until 1949. Many observations arise, including the obvious difference in the limited number of modern lines versus the vast number of historic routes. Modern streetcars typically occur on primarily mixed-use corridors rather than pass through strictly residential neighborhoods as they once did. It is also evident that modern streetcars in Denver would direct redevelopment within the city whereas historic streetcars directed development to the edge of the city.This ability to direct development and redevelopment within the city's boundaries in addition to providing transportation fit in line with Denver's goals for growth management, multi-modal transportation options, and neighborhood revitalization. / by Sarah E. Snider. / M.C.P.

This thesis investigates the part-to-whole relationship in architectural and urban design, and the dialectic that exists between the conceptual and the perceptual in the built environment. Working with Gestalt principles and traditional architectural conventions, this projects seeks a greater understanding of how basic graphic relationships enhance our perception of the built environment, in order to find new ways in which architecture can respond to the contemporary city. This project is located in Seoul, Korea, a city currently lacking a contemporary architectural identity. It is a city of multiplicity but no coherence, and this thesis seeks to understand how the dynamic relationship between parts in the built environment can encourage greater unity at the scale of architecture and the city.

Future challenges for human civilization, especially in the developing world, will increasingly be characterized by both an urban and global condition. What will be the response by design in the face of the implications of this unprecedented scale of development? The thesis is a speculative analysis of the essential nature of the phenomenon of the global mega-city, and is a necessary first step in creating a framework to answer this question. The Brazilian city of São Paulo is chosen as this thesis case study because it is a 'matured' version of this Modern urban phenomenon. Underlying and guiding the creation of this picture of the mega-city is the assertion that the fundamantal nature of the phenomenon of São Paulo is essentially an ecological one. Like any other ecological analysis, the first stage of the inquiry is to identify the motivating force that orders the system and propels the change of the urban ecology. In the case of São Paulo, the thesis develope a picture of an urban agglomeration that has been driven by the unrestrained forces of the aspirations of global Modernism and the exploitation of growing urban multitudes by the personal avarice of capitalism. São Paulo is seen as an urban experiment that rests in the tacit gamble that the economic aspirations underlying São Paulo are limitless in the face of the obvious limits of the city' and globe's biosphere. This relationship between urban organism and host ecology is characterized as parasitic and like the economic and social propelling forces of Modernity, forms the fundamental underlying relationships of the ecology of São Paulo. These relationships in juxtaposition with the propellant force of Modernism, form the sketch of a framework that the thesis proposes for a responsible position for design in the mega-city. In light of this ecological sketch of São Paulo, the underlying perpective for design in the mega-city seeks to strike a balance between economy, ecology and should be founded on a view of the city as an investment that can be evaluated for its performance in providing the context for human flourishing in relations to its use of natural resources.