Architecture, Building and Planning - Theses
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ItemMaking Civic Space: A Comparative Study of Civic Space Design in the Contemporary Settler Societies of Australia and New Zealand( 2019)Designers in settler colonial cities around the world are being asked to respond to the demands of decolonisation as nations increasingly acknowledge their ethical obligations to redress colonialism. This thesis explores the state of decolonising practice in design through the lens of civic space in Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand, as compared through two exemplary projects - Adelaide’s Victoria Square/Tarndanyangga and Wellington’s Waterfront. The politics of settler nations are intrinsically spatial, as legislative and symbolic processes of sovereignty negotiate territory. Traversing conflicting layers of history in the spatial present is very complex, as physical ecologies and topographies both disrupt and support the legacy of colonialism. This research examines the textual, conceptual, spatial and architectural modes of practice which together collectively ‘make’ civic space. Civic space offers the opportunity to explore shared histories, experiences and practices, between indigenous and settler subjectivities However, the very notion of ‘civic’ is problematic within the settler context, where space and politics are inherently ‘unsettled’. The study considers the approaches to the design of civic space from placemaking and planning through to the scales of landscape architecture and architecture. This study found that despite progress and good-will on the part of design practitioners and stakeholders, the position of designers in Australia continues to be compromised by the arrested development of reconciliation in terms of legislation, governance and the redress of history. In the absence of meaningful change, designers are reliant on creative placemaking practices of acknowledgment, applied through techniques of interpretation and curation. When viewed in contrast, the constructs established by the legislative and policy redress of New Zealand have provided designers with a stronger footing from which to explore finer grade spatial design responses to decolonisation. When viewed together these two spaces offer a revealing collision of design, policy and indigenous reconciliation.
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ItemThe protection of wilderness and aesthetic values in Antarctica( 2013)The protection of wilderness and aesthetic values in Antarctica was mandated by the Protocol on Environmental Protection to the Antarctic Treaty, the “Madrid Protocol”, which came into force in January 1998. Implementation of protection has, however, been delayed by problems of definition and assessment. A survey of the history of Antarctic exploration shows that from almost the earliest days of exploration visitors to Antarctica have been struck by the vast, awe-inspiring and beautiful landscapes and those attitudes have persisted to the present. The history of the development of the Madrid Protocol demonstrates that the desire to protect these values can be traced to guidelines for managing human impacts dating from the mid-1980s. Human impacts in Antarctica derive mainly from the operations of national Antarctic programs (NAPs) and although tourists now outnumber staff in NAPs, to date their impact has been confined to ten or twenty favourite landing sites and a small number of sites where tourism companies have established land-based facilities. NAP facilities, by contrast, are widespread, especially in coastal ice-free areas and are characterised by the establishment of permanent infrastructure. It was hypothesised that it is the establishment of infrastructure that detracts from wilderness and aesthetic values more than transient activity. A strong case can be made that all Antarctica is wilderness unless it has been degraded by human activity, i.e. the construction of infrastructure. In terms of wilderness degradation, therefore, the area which has been degraded is that from which infrastructure is visible. In order to test this hypothesis, a series of surveys were carried out, the final survey being established on the Internet and based on the use of digital images of Antarctic landscapes. The images in the survey were also categorised by landscape type, derived from the Environmental Domains of Antarctica (EDA) regionalisation. The survey comprised three components: a) perceptions of wilderness, in which respondents were asked to decide whether or not the scene in the image constituted wilderness; b) to give an aesthetic preference rating on a seven-point scale; and c) to assess the suitability of a number of adjectives for each scene. Some demographic information was also collected. The survey was made available in four languages: English, Japanese, French and Spanish. Over 500 respondents from 24 countries contributed to the surveys. The results of the Internet survey, in particular, show that human presence was found to make images significantly less likely to be considered as wilderness and also reduced their aesthetic rating; people therefore preferred natural landscapes. Coastal ice-free areas were less valued aesthetically than mountainous and ice-covered terrains. Human presence was consistently detected in responses to questions on perception of wilderness, aesthetic preference and in the semantic responses. The results were extended by terrain modelling to analyse the areas degraded by visibility of infrastructure. The results of this research show, inter alia, that wilderness and aesthetic values and human impacts on these values are measureable and therefore amenable to the development of policies to protect them.
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ItemCultural adaptation to climate change and the 1997-2010 drought in the suburban landscape of Melbourne, Australia( 2013)The period of drought from 1997 to 2010 in Melbourne, Australia saw significantly below average inflows into Melbourne’s reservoirs due to persistent high temperatures and low rainfall, conditions that climate change modelling suggest will occur more frequently in the future. In response to a dwindling water supply, water restrictions were enacted by the Victorian government to reduce water demand at the same time as infrastructure projects were commissioned to increase the water supply. These water restrictions limited the use of water outdoors, and had negative impacts on the suburban vegetation. A range of technical and behavioural adaptations could be made to mitigate these negative impacts by reducing the need for the use of potable mains water in the landscape, and this research explored the hypothesis that, over the course of the drought, changing attitudes towards climate change and water use in the suburban landscape resulted in behavioural adaptations by suburban dwellers in Melbourne that led to observable changes to the suburban landscape of Melbourne. Three research methods were used to investigate relationships between changes in Melbourne’s suburban landscapes and people’s attitudes towards water conservation in the context of drought and climate change, namely: (1) a content analysis of newspaper articles related to water restrictions in Melbourne to look at the ways in which the topics of drought and climate change had been addressed within the public discourse; (2) an observation of the suburban landscape of Melbourne using Google Street View and aerial photographs to identify the observable adaptations that have taken place in a sample of 530 front yards; and, (3) a questionnaire survey of households in Melbourne to assess their attitudes towards their own private landscapes, water conservation and restrictions, drought, and climate change and its impacts. It was found that, both in the newspapers and from analysis of the questionnaire data, people generally agreed with the need to conserve water, especially during times of drought. Belief in climate change, and the need for people to personally take action to adapt to it, was also generally high. Observable drought adaptations in Melbourne front yards were rare, but in the questionnaire many respondents indicated that they had taken steps to conserve water, and some of the sampled front yards had changed between 2004 and 2008 to better adapt to drought conditions. However, the content analysis found that two of the four newspapers studied perpetuated expressions of unscientific climate change scepticism and uncertainty, consistent with the politicisation of the climate change issue. The questionnaire, which employed visual stimuli of front yard scenarios, found that water use requirements did not correlate with overall desirability, which was most strongly correlated with rated visual attractiveness. Despite the general agreement by respondents with regard to the need to conserve water, and their stated willingness to take concrete steps to do so, obstacles remain for successful drought and climate change adaptation, both in the responses of the public to change and the physical transformations of the landscape.