abstract: This dissertation focuses on thermal comfort and walking as an experiential phenomenon in outdoor urban environments. The goal of the study is to provide a better understanding of the impact of psychological adaptation factors on thermal comfort. The main research questions included the impact of psychological factors on outdoor thermal comfort as well as the impact of long-term thermal perception on momentary thermal sensation. My research follows a concurrent triangulation strategy as a mixed-method approach, which consisted of a simultaneous collection and analysis of qualitative and quantitative data. Research consisted of five rounds of data collection in different locations beginning February 2018 and continuing through December 2019. During the qualitative phase, I gathered data in the form of an open-ended questionnaire but importantly, self-walking interviews where participants narrated their experience of the environment while recording one-minute long videos. The visual and audible information was first processed using thematic analysis and then further analyzed via Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA). During the quantitative phase, I gathered information from participants in the form of three-step survey questionnaires, that data was analyzed using T-Test regression analysis in STATA. The quantitative data helped explore and address the initial research questions, while the qualitative data helped in addressing and explaining the trends and the experiential aspects of thermal environment. Results revealed that spatial familiarity (as a psychological adaptation factor) has a significant relationship for both overall comfort and thermal comfort within outdoor environments. Moreover, long term thermal memory influences momentary thermal sensation. The results of qualitative and quantitative data were combined, compared, and contrasted to generate new insights in the design of outdoor urban environments. The depth and breadth of the qualitative data set consisting of more than a thousand minute-long of narrated video segments along with hundreds of pages of transcribed text, demonstrated the subjective aspects of thermal comfort. This research highlights the importance of context-based and human-centric design in any evidence-based design approach for outdoor environments. The implications of the study can provide new insights not only for architects and urban designers, but also for city planners, stakeholders, public officials, and policymakers. / Dissertation/Thesis / Doctoral Dissertation Design, Environment and the Arts 2020

Includes bibliographical references / The past few decades have seen a 'cultural turn' in urban planning, and public art has become an important component within urban design strategies. Accordingly, public art is most commonly encountered in the urban literature as commissioned public sculptures. Simultaneously operating are a range of critical, subversive, and experimental practices that interact with the public space of cities in a myriad of ways. Although these other types of public art projects may have been engaged in the fields of Fine Art and Cultural Studies, this has been predominantly in the global North and they have yet to enter Urban Studies in the global South in any comprehensive way. Through an analysis of three examples from the Visual Arts Network South Africa's 'Two Thousand and Ten Reasons to Live in a Small Town', this thesis argues that experimental, inclusionary and less object-oriented forms of public art offers useful lessons for Urban Studies. The research presented in this thesis involved a qualitative study of: The Domino Effect which followed a participatory process to develop a domino tournament in the Western Cape town of Hermon; Living within History, a performative collage project which explored the local museum archive in the town of Dundee in KwaZulu-Natal; and Dlala Indima which was a graffiti-led Hip-hop project in the rural township of Phakamisa in the Eastern Cape. Each involved affective engagements with the vastly unequal contexts typical of South African public spaces. Although there is an increasing recognition that affect plays an important role in understanding and designing the urban, it is still largely assumed that citizenship is enacted according to rational criteria. The public art of 'Two Thousand and Ten Reason s to Live in a Small Town' demonstrated that affect impacts on how people can access complex spatial issues and perform citizenship. Furthermore, as part of a larger epistemological project of 'southerning' urban theory, this thesis therefore argues that intersecting conceptual threads from three bodies of literature: public space, public art and public pedagogy, is important. More specifically, it demonstrates that public art can harness an affective rationality that may foster alternative ways of knowing and acting in/on the urban, thereby offering public art as a unique pedagogy for exploring and deepening cityness .

Within the U.S. in recent decades a renewed interest in downtown and city living has become known as the “back-to-the-city movement” and contributed to the stabilization and regrowth of cities that were previously losing population. This trend, however, is not occurring equally and many cities within the U.S. that have been losing population for decades are still continuing to lose population (“shrinking city”). This study seeks to understand what sociodemographic and socioeconomic characteristics are contributing the greatest to the back-to-the-city movement and develop a composite index that can be used to identify if similar trends are beginning to emerge in shrinking cities. Variables identified through various literature for their association with back-to-the-city movement were analyzed through a proportion composition analysis comparing changes in growing versus non-growing census tracts at the city-wide and downtown level of 86 cities within this study. The analysis was conducted for the time periods of 1970 to 2017 and 1990 to 2017. The results justified variables for inclusion in back-to-the-city movement composite index, however, the analysis found some trends differed at the city-wide versus downtown geographic levels resulting in three potential index combinations. The three indices were calculated on census tracts for the 86 cities within this study and the results were decomposed to assess performance of individual variables. The results conclude that areas within some shrinking cities are exhibiting back-to-the-city movement trends, however, additional recommendations are provided for refining the index and methodology. / Includes bibliography. / Dissertation (Ph.D.)--Florida Atlantic University, 2020. / FAU Electronic Theses and Dissertations Collection

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