This master thesis is intended as a contribution to the understanding of the influence urban form has on urban life and by extension social structures in society, by focusing on gender relations and their reflections on the use of public space. In addition, the aim of the study is to do so in relation to a comparison between two different types of urban environments; one slum area that can be regarded as formally unplanned with an irregular gradually grown street network and one slum area of more deliberately planned character with a more regular street grid. With the use of quantitative methods, such as space syntax, structured observations and correlations studies, differences in co-presence between women and men, in the form of staying in public space, and between the areas are discovered. With the addition of qualitative methods, such as interviews and unstructured observations, as well as a review of the context in which the study is set and a theoretical discourse the reasons behind the differences is discussed. It is suggested that the blurred distinctions between private and public space often found in slum areas and the division of responsibilities and activities between women and men in the given context results in a certain degree of gender segregation in public space. Women are often restricted to the space in proximity of their homes, why it becomes an extension of their homes as well as a space for interaction which creates semi-public spaces. As men more often socialise further away from home in spaces of more public function, this creates a certain degree of segregation between women and men in public space. The most significant physical difference between the study areas proved to be the hierarchal properties of the street network. The clearer hierarchy in the unplanned area implicates that the spaces where women stays generally is of a lower degree of public function. The regular street grid of the planned area resulted in a more even distribution of public function, why men more often also stays in the semi-public spaces in residential alleys. In this way the built environment in the unplanned area reflects and reproduces gender relations in the use of public space. An implication is that since the correspondence between social structures in society and the use of public space is something that can assumed be effected by design, the urban designer has continuously in the context of development of slum areas in the developing world, and in general, an important role to play.

Segregation in urban areas is a universal phenomenon. A combination of factors include but are not limited to: city form, planning policies, policies relating to the settlement of immigrants, economic policies, building of infrastructure and chronological events in the growth of a city. Through this thesis work, I would like to examine how urban form is different in areas of the city where racial/ economic segregation is prevalent in Stockholm city. The hypothesis which I would like to examine through study is : The development and maintenance of urban form(which stands to denote all elements relating to the urban area: roads, pavements, lighting fixtures, buildings, public services etc) is influenced by segregation in the city, and it reflects and in turn reinforces the prevalent segregation.

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The middle landscape, more commonly referred to as Suburbia, has become spatially discontinuous, lacking the cohesive union, open spaces and city centers that once defined community. Presently, the middle landscape's community spaces do not offer the opportunity for familiar and chance encounters or ritual activity. Large-scale housing development in Northern Virginia and in the mid-Atlantic region is continually segregating and ultimately destroying community and all links to the area's history. Located in Southern Fairfax County, the newly abandoned Lorton Central and Maximum Security Prison Facility provides an opportunity to serve as a catalyst for community in this area. This thesis investigates the historic precedence for creating successful community centers. The author's personal investigation is focused upon using form and function to accomplish this vision. By adaptively reusing the existing architecture alongside new construction, the intent is to create a dense urban town center at the abandoned historic site. / Master of Landscape Architecture

The commercial deployment of automated vehicles (AVs) is around the corner. With the development of automation technology, automobile and IT companies have started to test automated vehicles. Waymo, an automated driving technology development company, has recently opened the self-driving service to the public. The advancement in this emerging mobility option also drives transportation reasearchers and urban planners to conduct automated vehicle-related research, especially to gain insights on the impact of automated vehicles (AVs) in order to inform policymaking. However, the variation with urban form, the heterogeneity of mode choice, and the impacts at disaggregated levels lead to the dynamics of the impacts of AVs, which not comprehensively understood yet. Therefore, this dissertation extends existing knowledge base by understanding the dynamics of the impacts from three perspectives: (1) examining the role of urban form in the performance of SAV systems; (2) exploring the heterogeneity of AV mode choices across regions; and (3) investigating the distribution of energy consumption in the era of AVs. To examine the first aspect, Shared AV (SAV) systems are simulated for 286 cities and the simulation outcomes are regressed on urban form variables that measure density, diversity, and design. It is suggested that the compact development, a multi-core city pattern, high level of diversity, as well as more pedestrian-oriented networks can promote the performance of SAVs measured using service efficiency, trip pooling success rate, and extra VMT generation. The AV mode choice behaviors of private conventional vehicle (PCV) users in Seattle and Knasas City metropolitan areas are examined using an interpretable machine learning framework based on an AV mode choice survey. It is suggested that attitudes and trip and mode-specific attributes are the most predictive. Positive attitudes can promote the adoption of PAVs. Longer PAV in-vehicle time encourages the residents to keep the PCVs. Longer walking distance promotes the usage of SAVs. In addition, the effects of in-vehicle time and walking distance vary across the two examined regions due to distinct urban form, transportation infrustructure and cultural backgrounds. Kansas City residents can tolerate shorter walking distance before switching to SAV choices due to the car-oriented environment while Seattle residents are more sensitive to in-vehicle travel time because of the local congestion levels. The final part of the dissertation examines the demand for energy of AVs at disaggregated levels incorporating heterogeneity of AV mode choices. A three-step framework is employed including the prediction of mode choice, the determination of vehicle trajectories, and the estimation of the demand for energy. It is suggested that the AV scenario can generate -0.36% to 2.91% extra emissions and consume 2.9% more energy if gasoline is used. The revealed distribution of traffic volume suggests that the demand for charging is concentrated around the downtown areas and on highways if AVs consume electricity. In summary, the dissertation demonstrates that there is a dynamics with regard to the impacts and performance of AVs across regions due to various urban form, infrastructure and cultural environment, and the spatial heterogeneity within cities. / Doctor of Philosophy / Automated vehicles (AVs) have been a hot topic in recent years especially after various IT and automobile companies announced their plans for making AVs. Waymo, an automated driving technology development company, has recently opened the self-driving service to the public. Automated vehicles, which are defined as being able to self-drive, self-park, and automate routing, provide potentials for new business models such as privately owned automated vehicles (PAVs) that serve trips within households, shared AVs (SAVs) that offer door-to-door service to the public who request service using app-based platforms, and SAVs with pool where multiple passengers may be pooled together when the vehicles do not detour much if sequentially picking up and dropping off passengers. Therefore, AVs can transform the transportation system especially by reducing vehicle ownership and increasing travel distance. To plan for a sustainable future, it is important to gain an understanding of the impacts of AVs under various scenarios. Thus, a wealth of case studies explore the system performance of SAVs such as served trips per SAV per day. However, the impacts of AVs are not static and tend to vary across cities, depend on heterogeneous mode choices within regions, and may not be evenly distributed within a city. Therefore, this dissertation fills the research gaps by (1) investigating how urban features such as density may influence the system performance of SAVs; (2) exploring heterogeneity of key factors that influence the decisions about using AVs across regions; and (3) examining the distribution of the demand for energy in the era of AVs. The first study in the dissertation simulates the SAVs that serve trips within 286 cities and examines the relationship between the system performance of SAVs and city features such as density, diversity, and design. The system performance of SAVs is evaluated using served trips per SAV per day, percent of pooled trips that allow ridesharing, and percent of extra Vehicle Miles Traveled (VMT) compared to the VMT requested by the served trips. The results suggest that compact diverse development patterns and pedestrian-oriented networks can promote the performance of SAVs. The second study uses an interpretable machine learning framework to understand the heterogeneous mode choice behaviors of private car users in the era of AVs in two regions. The framework uses an AV mode choice survey, where respondents are asked to take mode choice experiments given attributes about the trips, to train machine learning models. Accumulated Local Effects (ALE) plots are used to analyze the model results. ALE outputs the accumulated change of the probability of choosing specific modes within small intervals across the range of the variable of interest. It is suggested that attitudes and trip-specific attributes such as in-vehicle time are the most important determinants. Positive attitudes, longer trips, and longer walking distance can promote the adoption of AV modes. In addition, the effects of in-vehicle time and walking distance vary across the two examined regions due to distinct urban form, transportation infrastructure, and cultural backgrounds. Kansas City residents can tolerate shorter walking distance before switching to SAV choices due to the car-oriented environment while Seattle residents are more sensitive to in-vehicle travel time because of the local congestion levels. The final part of the dissertation examines the demand for energy of AVs at disaggregated levels incorporating heterogeneity of AV mode choices. A three-step framework is employed including the prediction of mode choice, the determination of vehicle trajectories, and the estimation of the demand for energy. It is suggested that the AV scenario can generate -0.36% to 2.91% of extra emissions and consume 2.9% more energy compared to a business as usual (BAU) scenario if gasoline is used. The revealed distribution of traffic volume suggests that the demand for charging is concentrated around the downtown areas and on highways if AVs consume electricity. In summary, the dissertation demonstrates that there is a dynamics with regard to the impacts and performance of AVs across regions due to various urban form, infrastructure and cultural environment, and the spatial heterogeneity within cities.

Tehran, the capital of Iran has undergone major urbanization in the last century, which has caused uncontrollable urban growth. Poor regulation and control of this growth has given rise to environmental problems including high air and water pollution. In turn, this has led to urban growth towards the mountains in the north, where the environment is better. However, this pressure to develop in the north has increased segregation of the city and created a clear social division of class between the northern and southern parts of the City. In light of this, and in the context of Tehran as an extremely dense city with limited green space, the City sees a possibility in transforming an unused military airport in the southern districts of the city into a new urban park. This master thesis explores how to reclaim the 270Ha former airfield and develop it as an urban park with strengthened links to surrounding neighbourhoods. The work aims to gain an understanding of how large vacant areas can become successful public areas and green places in the community. The work is based on urban theory and site analysis and brings forward design proposals for the park. Analysis work is divided into an investigative and exploratory stage. The investigative part includes literature studies, data collection and mapping of the city’s urban morphological development, taking into account physical and socio-economic processes. The exploratory part consisted of inventories, site studies and interviews in Tehran, as well as integration analysis with space syntax to explore accessibility and connections in the new park. Throughout the study shows how and why the city has evolved and highlights a connection between living in the southern districts, which are low-income areas, with also having poor access to public and recreation areas. This analysis forms the foundations for the design proposal, visualizations and programs presented about how the area can be designed as a new urban city park. In conclusion, the study highlights that in order to be able to develop new places or renew existing area’s, consideration must be given to urban morphological development. This includes the socio-economic and socio-ecological process. It further concludes, that a ecological viewpoint together with a understanding of the physical environment, the urban landscape identity and the need of people in the context needs to be brought together to plan and create parks and urban spaces

Building codes are socio-technical regulations that govern the manner in which the built world is designed, constructed, and maintained. Instituted in order to protect the health, safety, and welfare of humans in the built world, codes also serve as an index of always changing societal values. If codes do not co-evolve with social values, however, they often perpetuate standards that no longer reflect the priorities of mainstream society. As crises arise and as cultural practices change, regulatory institutions are charged with creating new or amend old codes to reflect these societal shifts. Emergent social values are often dismissed by the general public, misrepresented by their political representatives, or abstracted by the louder voices of the market and the state. In a few critical moments in modern history, however, society successfully adopted and institutionalized previously underrepresented values into urban form. Social movements provide a primary venue for such paradigmatic change. They do this through the production of new knowledge that aims to alter the cognitive praxis of its citizenry and to generate the momentum required to codify grassroots ideals into the built world. Exploring how this confluence of socio-technical innovation functions within the built world, this dissertation addresses the primary research question: What is the relationship between urban social movements, the values they espouse, the building codes they construct, and the liberative function of the spaces produced? In this dissertation, I investigate three established and one emerging social movement to discern the characteristics of democratic code formation that lead to civic urban form. These four case studies are analyzed in terms of their origins, the claims made, strategies employed, and outcomes achieved. Patterns are then extrapolated from this analysis to identify qualities of collective action that contribute to the codification of civic urban form. The research discussed herein was conducted in two phases to develop a historical base from which to evaluate contemporary efforts to codify civic urban form. The first phase of this exploratory investigation tells the story of three intrinsically valuable, but also comparable case studies of social change in the United States: the community development strategy pursued by the civil rights movement, the architectural accessibility platform advocated by the disability rights movement, and efforts to institutionalize new building practices through voluntary building assessment systems by the environmental movement. The second phase extrapolates patterns from the established cases to inform the investigation of proto-movements currently coalescing around issues of spatial justice. Both phases are then reflected upon in order to propose a theory of civic urban form that recognizes the dialectic between social movements, emergent social values, building codes, and the physical spaces they inform. The thesis statement underlying this dissertation is that urban social movements in the U.S. require a myriad of different activist organizations— radical and mainstream, professional and grassroots— to simultaneously employ diverse strategies through an integrated frame of collective action in order to institutionalize new types of civic urban form. Based on the theoretical framework developed to conceptualize the production of civic urban form, I go on to argue in the concluding chapters that urban social movements currently seeking various means to codify the tenets of sustainable development in the United States might benefit from couching their collective actions within an integrated action frame of spatial justice. / text

<p>As the world population continues to grow past seven billion people and global challenges continue to persist including resource availability, biodiversity loss, climate change and human well-being, a new science is required that can address the integrated nature of these challenges and the multiple scales on which they are manifest. Sustainability science has emerged to fill this role. In the fifteen years since it was first called for in the pages of Science, it has rapidly matured, however its place in the history of science and the way it is practiced today must be continually evaluated. In Part I, two chapters address this theoretical and practical grounding. Part II transitions to the applied practice of sustainability science in addressing the urban heat island (UHI) challenge wherein the climate of urban areas are warmer than their surrounding rural environs. The UHI has become increasingly important within the study of earth sciences given the increased focus on climate change and as the balance of humans now live in urban areas. </p><p>In Chapter 2 a novel contribution to the historical context of sustainability is argued. Sustainability as a concept characterizing the relationship between humans and nature emerged in the mid to late 20th century as a response to findings used to also characterize the Anthropocene. Emerging from the human-nature relationships that came before it, evidence is provided that suggests Sustainability was enabled by technology and a reorientation of world-view and is unique in its global boundary, systematic approach and ambition for both well being and the continued availability of resources and Earth system function. Sustainability is further an ambition that has wide appeal, making it one of the first normative concepts of the Anthropocene. </p><p>Despite its widespread emergence and adoption, sustainability science continues to suffer from definitional ambiguity within the academe. In Chapter 3, a review of efforts to provide direction and structure to the science reveals a continuum of approaches anchored at either end by differing visions of how the science interfaces with practice (solutions). At one end, basic science of societally defined problems informs decisions about possible solutions and their application. At the other end, applied research directly affects the options available to decision makers. While clear from the literature, survey data further suggests that the dichotomy does not appear to be as apparent in the minds of practitioners. </p><p>In Chapter 4, the UHI is first addressed at the synoptic, mesoscale. Urban climate is the most immediate manifestation of the warming global climate for the majority of people on earth. Nearly half of those people live in small to medium sized cities, an understudied scale in urban climate research. Widespread characterization would be useful to decision makers in planning and design. Using a multi-method approach, the mesoscale UHI in the study region is characterized and the secular trend over the last sixty years evaluated. Under isolated ideal conditions the findings indicate a UHI of 5.3 ± 0.97 °C to be present in the study area, the magnitude of which is growing over time. </p><p>Although urban heat islands (UHI) are well studied, there remain no panaceas for local scale mitigation and adaptation methods, therefore continued attention to characterization of the phenomenon in urban centers of different scales around the globe is required. In Chapter 5, a local scale analysis of the canopy layer and surface UHI in a medium sized city in North Carolina, USA is conducted using multiple methods including stationary urban sensors, mobile transects and remote sensing. Focusing on the ideal conditions for UHI development during an anticyclonic summer heat event, the study observes a range of UHI intensity depending on the method of observation: 8.7 °C from the stationary urban sensors; 6.9 °C from mobile transects; and, 2.2 °C from remote sensing. Additional attention is paid to the diurnal dynamics of the UHI and its correlation with vegetation indices, dewpoint and albedo. Evapotranspiration is shown to drive dynamics in the study region.</p><p>Finally, recognizing that a bridge must be established between the physical science community studying the Urban Heat Island (UHI) effect, and the planning community and decision makers implementing urban form and development policies, Chapter 6 evaluates multiple urban form characterization methods. Methods evaluated include local climate zones (LCZ), national land cover database (NCLD) classes and urban cluster analysis (UCA) to determine their utility in describing the distribution of the UHI based on three standard observation types 1) fixed urban temperature sensors, 2) mobile transects and, 3) remote sensing. Bivariate, regression and ANOVA tests are used to conduct the analyses. Findings indicate that the NLCD classes are best correlated to the UHI intensity and distribution in the study area. Further, while the UCA method is not useful directly, the variables included in the method are predictive based on regression analysis so the potential for better model design exists. Land cover variables including albedo, impervious surface fraction and pervious surface fraction are found to dominate the distribution of the UHI in the study area regardless of observation method. </p><p>Chapter 7 provides a summary of findings, and offers a brief analysis of their implications for both the scientific discourse generally, and the study area specifically. In general, the work undertaken does not achieve the full ambition of sustainability science, additional work is required to translate findings to practice and more fully evaluate adoption. The implications for planning and development in the local region are addressed in the context of a major light-rail infrastructure project including several systems level considerations like human health and development. Finally, several avenues for future work are outlined. Within the theoretical development of sustainability science, these pathways include more robust evaluations of the theoretical and actual practice. Within the UHI context, these include development of an integrated urban form characterization model, application of study methodology in other geographic areas and at different scales, and use of novel experimental methods including distributed sensor networks and citizen science.</p> / Dissertation

Nesta tese, investigam-se os centros urbanos e o fenômeno das centralidades na atualidade, tendo Palmas, capital do Tocantins, como objeto empírico. Palmas foi estabelecida a partir de um plano urbanístico, de 1989, para uma população ainda inexistente. Seus preceitos de racionalidade projetual são transgredidos já em seus primeiros anos, quando adentra efetivamente na lógica capitalista de produção do espaço urbano, tendo a gestão pública como participante fundamental desse processo. Como decorrência, desencadeia o fenômeno da multicentralidade prematuramente. Seus centros urbanos surgem deflagrando as contradições sociais e estampam os conflitos de seu processo de urbanização. Enquanto seu centro principal evoca simbolicamente o poder e está alinhado aos interesses hegemônicos, seus subcentros populares revelam uma construção coletiva do espaço e ricas apropriações de seus espaços livres públicos, abrindo maiores possibilidades para a vivência urbana e contribuindo para a formação da cidadania. / In this thesis, the urban centers and the phenomena of centralities are investigated today, with Palmas, the capital of Tocantins, as an empirical object. Palmas was established from an urban plan, from 1989, for a still non-existent population. Its precepts of design rationality are already transgressed in its early years, when it effectively penetrates into the capitalist logic of urban space production, with public management as a fundamental participant in this process. As a result, it triggers the phenomenon of multicentrality prematurely. Its urban centers emerge deflagrating the social contradictions and stamping the conflicts of its process of urbanization. While its main center symbolically evokes power and is aligned with hegemonic interests, its popular subcentres reveal a collective construction of space and rich appropriations of its public spaces, opening up greater possibilities for urban living and contributing to the formation of citizenship.