Architecture, Building and Planning - Theses
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ItemNational identity, Australian plants, and the natural garden in post-WWII Australia, 1945 to 1986(University of Melbourne, 2015)
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ItemComparison of measured and perceived fundamental characteristics to identify strategies for increasing the rate of daily walking in suburban areas( 2020-07)Future cities will increasingly face health, socio-economic and environmental problems, including disease, social isolation, economic breakdown, excessive carbon dioxide emissions, climate change, and fossil fuel depletion. The planning and design of neighbourhoods which provide high levels of pedestrian accessibility to daily needs destinations such as schools, grocery shops, greenspaces and public transport could contribute to solutions to these problems by the reduction of car-based travel. Future cities need to be walkable based on solutions that can be achieved through better planning and design which takes into consideration accessibility as well as Key Urban Place Characteristics (KUPCs). The author considers walkability to be formed by two factors: the first, accessibility, is the distance to daily needs destinations, and the second is KUPCs, the safety and security, comfort, and attractiveness of the walk to those daily needs’ destinations. Although many suburban neighbourhoods in Melbourne have good access to daily needs, people who live in these areas often choose to drive to their destinations rather than walk. This may be due to negative perceptions of the place and the lack of fundamental place characteristics. The aim of this research is to identify strategies to increase rates of daily walking based on an understanding of the relationship between urban place characteristics and accessibility in suburban neighbourhoods. Therefore, the author has chosen four case studies; two international best practice case studies to validate a theoretical framework obtained from the best practice literature, and an in-depth examination of two local case studies in Melbourne using the validated theoretical framework to assess the scale of walkability in the most accessible areas in selected suburban samples. Both quantitative and qualitative methods are used in this study, in keeping with a sequential explanatory design mixed-method approach. Data collection was conducted using mapping, urban informatics, desktop analysis, field observations of KUPCs, and face-to-face interviews with residents. The analysis of walking-related values using key research studies provided opportunities to reveal the most important characteristics needed for walking to daily needs in the case studies. These results were used to identify strategies for increasing the rate of daily walking in suburban areas.
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ItemEncountering Architecture Architecture, Audience, Communication and the Public Realm( 2021)What new forms of communication can be developed to communicate architecture, city making and city shaping to public audiences? This thesis advocates for the urban spatial encounter as a communicative strategy that uses the medium of the public realm to engage audiences with architecture, the city and the built environment. Situated at the intersection of architecture, urbanism and public art, the urban spatial encounters are creative works that take the form of installations and events. They are designed to catalyse active conversations between architectural practitioners and public audiences; conversations that engage people with architecture and the built environment and the issues that shape them. The encounters traverse a broad range of sites and scales—from small-scale guerrilla spatial interventions into public space to a grassroots community activist campaign that took on one of the world’s largest corporations, Apple. Drawing on the fields of public art and play scholarship, this thesis argues that the urban spatial encounter is an effective medium for communicating architectural and spatial knowledge and practices, for increasing city-making literacy in public audiences and a means for affording citizens a place in shaping the urban environment. Through practice based research, this thesis aims to raise public awareness and catalyse discussion within the architectural profession on the value of scholarship and research into the public communication of architecture and the built environment.
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ItemParadoxes and Paradigm Shifts in the Utopic Desire for High-rise Housing in Melbourne and Surfers Paradise, in Australia between 1945-2005.( 2021)This study is about paradoxes and paradigm shifts in the utopic desire for high-rise housing in Australia between 1945-2005. Three different contexts that occasioned desires for high-rise housing were selected as case-studies for investigation: The Housing Commission of Victoria; Surfers Paradise, and Melbourne Docklands. The time-span is from 1945, tracing the post WW2 desire for public high-rise housing till 2005: a long enough period to examine paradigm shifts in the utopic desire for high-rise housing. The study adapted Thomas Kuhn’s paradigm theory to investigate paradigm shifts in the utopic desire for high-rise housing in the three case-studies. Three trends were drawn out in the analysis. Firstly, that utopic-desires for high-rise housing were paradoxical at a number of levels. Secondly, utopic-desires for high-rise housing were nomadic as they changed in relation to emerging problems and paradoxes. Thirdly, utopic paradigms were an expression of the political ideologies of stakeholders. The study established that by situating utopic-desires for high-rise housing within the political ideologies of stakeholders, utopic-desires became focused on addressing the needs of one group in society, overlooking other social groups’ needs. Furthermore, the study’s findings show that utopic desires don't lead to utopic solutions, and concludes that deconstructing contradicting utopic-desires may reduce the magnitude of paradoxical and heterotopic outcomes. This can be achieved by questioning whose needs are addressed, and by investigating how utopic solutions in housing may affect different groups in society and the larger context.
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ItemTowards a comprehensive framework for integrating embodied environmental flow assessment into the structural design of tall buildings( 2021)Urgent changes are needed in the construction industry to meet short term mitigation goals for climate change. Traditionally, operational environmental flows have been the primary focus of regulations and current attempts to improve the environmental performance of buildings. However, studies have revealed that embodied environmental flows are often underestimated and rarely considered. Embodied environmental flows are particularly significant in the structural systems of tall buildings due to the substantial influence of wind and earthquake loads on structural material requirements. This thesis presents a framework for integrating embodied environmental flow assessment into the structural design of tall buildings using comprehensive hybrid methods for life cycle inventory analysis and advanced structural design and finite element modelling techniques. An advanced software tool was developed to formalise the framework and automate the structural design, modelling, analysis, optimisation and embodied energy and embodied greenhouse gas emissions assessment of more than 1,000 structural systems. Through regression analyses, predictive models were constructed for the embodied energy and embodied greenhouse gas emissions per net floor area of 12 unique combinations of structural typologies and structural materials. These models were integrated into a purpose-made online dashboard, which enables engineers and designers to compare alternative structural materials (i.e. 32/40/50 MPa reinforced concrete and steel), structural typologies (i.e. shear wall, outrigger and belt and braced tube) and geometries (i.e. rectangular floor plan geometries) according to the embodied energy and embodied greenhouse gas emissions per net floor area of structural systems. Two case studies were used to illustrate the potential of the framework and software tool in reducing the embodied environmental flows of structural systems for tall buildings of varying heights. Results show that all considered building parameters are significant and cannot be neglected in assessing alternative structural systems for tall buildings based on their embodied environmental flows. The developed framework and software tool have been shown to provide the most precise and sophisticated integration of embodied environmental assessment into the parametric structural design of tall buildings as of yet. Through a simple and user-friendly interface, they enable tall building designers to utilise environmental assessment as a design-assisting tool, rather than as an appraisal method to evaluate a completed building. This will potentially lead to reductions in the environmental effects associated with the construction of tall buildings.
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ItemNo Preview AvailableHuman-built-forms’ coevolution via temporal-occupied spaces in Tmor-Da, an evolving settlement, Phnom Penh, Cambodia.( 2021)This thesis discovers a plausible association of human-built-forms' coevolution via temporal-occupied spaces [TOS] in Tmor-Da, an evolving settlement in Phnom Penh, Cambodia. The evidence affirms that the key finding is a human-scaled microstructure of an internal agent-of-change with an occurrence of atypical TOS that abuts built forms. The specific relationship found is between a female dweller and her home, where she adapts the TOS area in front of her home for domestic activities such as chores. Over time, this type of TOS domestic area has a higher probability of being built over as an extension of her home. Consequently, her adaptive behaviour influences and affects her home, and together with other female dwellers who share the same adaptive behaviour, they collectively affect built-form changes in Tmor-Da. Embedded in this human-scaled microstructure is a hidden order composed of rules that adhere to the prescribed modalities; porosity in built-forms, human-scaled connectivity and flexibility of changing built-forms in their immediate setting. These co-adaptive rules allow the freedom or autonomy for dwellers to change the public/private state of space and adapt to human behaviour patterns in a place. Innovations are allowed to start at this human-scaled microstructure level. The allowance for these co-adaptive relations enabled by the complex duality of top-down and bottom-up rules, with interchanging roles between individual and collective people, negotiating between freedom and control activates a reciprocal relationship between humans and built forms. The occurrence of TOS is visible as a signal of this hidden order. The TOS serves as the adaptive mechanism that supports the coevolutionary and evolving human-built-forms' relationship that cultivate resilience and recursively self-generates the settlements over time. The human-scaled microstructure also links, creates and inculcates networks that increase the social capital among neighbours to evolve and thrive in their immediate setting first, then collectively influencing their settlement. This discovery enforces the argument that allowance for TOS can harness human adaptive nature to respond to unpredictable changes in this evolving human settlement. The activation of public/ private interfaces on TOS support the human-built-forms' coevolution relationship. The insights gained from this research lead to plausible strategies to design flexible (void) areas with the prescribed modalities and propose policies that allow rules for the occurrence of TOS. New explorations are open to ways that complement the nature of human adaptive behaviour, which activate communities to invent and reinvent their neighbourhoods to thrive against city fragmentation. Therefore, some rigid human-control factors embedded in the designed spatial layout of urban rules that may contribute to stagnated growth in cities can be loosened. This thesis demonstrated the benefit of critically integrating scientific knowledge with testing fieldwork findings before concluding. An overarching human-environmental adaptation theory guides the research with a system thinking approach. An analytical framework composed of Mehaffy's critical themes from `The New Science of Cities' investigated the rules and prescribed modalities of the hidden order. As a whole, this thesis provides some evidence, including statistics, to support Jacobs' assumptions via her observations of public/private interfaces study, which inculcates social capital of neighbourhoods to flourish. The discovery also extends De Landa's philosophical discourse of the centralised and self-organising coexisting processes, which sustain the complex dynamics of cities at the macro scale, to occur at the human-scaled microstructure level.
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ItemDesiring Karail: Morphogenesis of an informal settlement in Dhaka( 2021)Informal settlements currently house more than a billion people and will house a billion more by 2030. They are pervasive, expanding and persistent. Some of them have slum conditions while others do not. Often described as ‘spontaneous’ or ‘autonomous’, they are produced without the explicit urban design mechanism of the state. The changes in urban form in these places suggest the existence of particular processes of design and production. Understanding such processes underlying the morphogenesis—the development of urban form—is the central inquiry of this research. Moreover, the research aims to articulate the dynamic forces that enable or constrain the production processes. To do so, the thesis investigates Karail, which has emerged as the largest informal settlement in Dhaka over the last 40 years. Spread over an area of about 35 hectares, it is a dense agglomeration with a population of more than 250,000. Even without state planning and maintenance, functioning neighbourhoods with a characteristic urban form has emerged. The question is how. Employing a mixed-method research framework, which included multi-scalar mapping, in-depth observation and oral histories of placemaking, the thesis has interrogated the morphogenesis by tracing morphological change, informal rules used and the agents involved. It analysed the underlying forces—the desires—shaping the urban processes. Assemblage thinking, derived from the work of Deleuze and Guattari has been used to produce narratives of Karail’s informal morphogenesis in terms of the urban form, its uses and the control of the urban production. Beyond the notion of ‘self-organization’, the concluding analysis pointed towards heterogeneous formative processes—a mix of individualised, collectivised and syndicated forms of organization. The concomitant entanglements of power between the State, NGOs, the surrounding formal neighbourhoods and the residents were of different orientations as well, often in alignment and in contradiction with each other. The thesis shows how the urban morphogenesis under investigation in Karail works as a sociospatial assembling held together by different desires, themselves appearing from within a landscape of narratives, capacities and imaginaries. It ends with a speculative impact of the findings on policy-making, upgrading and management of existing informal settlements and the episteme of urban design for future cities.
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ItemSpaces of Belonging: Indian women migrants' everyday spatial practices in Hyderabad, India and Melbourne, Australia( 2021)Contemporary migration patterns are complex and diverse; the reasons for migration are multiple. Further, the relationships migrants share with different locales extend beyond places of origin and reception. In the context of globalisation, the social location of individuals within local and global networks, constrains and enables their spatial mobility and their level of inclusion and exclusion (Massey 1994). Against this backdrop, this thesis analyses migrant women’s sense of belonging experienced through their everyday spatial practices. The specific focus is on women of Indian origin in two contexts: as internal migrants within multilingual, multicultural India, and as international migrants to Australia. The spatial routines of these women are analysed using Hagerstrand’s time-geography notational diagrams to arrive at different migrant typologies of belonging. The emphasis is on movement (particularly habitual time-space routines) and the affective dimensions attributed to everyday spaces to arrive at a conceptualisation of place-belonging. Further, an intersectional lens is overlaid to understand the variation in these experiences of belonging with time and context, based on the migrant women’s complex identities. Place-belonging is shaped continually by both external structures and individual subjectivities during the women’s life course, which determine their spatial activities and patterns at a given context and time. Maintaining kinship ties is considered an integral part of Indian culture; thus, Indian women migrants often navigate patriarchy and other socio-cultural practices in old and new contexts. Agency is, therefore, an important aspect of understanding how gender is articulated in different places through migration. The findings of this thesis aim to offer new insights into the relationships between migrant women and cities and contribute to the literature on everyday experiences of place-belonging for women of Indian origin. This thesis also proposes a replicable methodology for analysing the everyday life of an individual, particularly to identify spaces of belonging from a gendered perspective.
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ItemBending the rules: Socio-spatial possibilities and constraints in financing urban renewable energy transitions( 2021)This thesis examines the role of finance in sociotechnical systems change towards sustainable modes of production and consumption in cities. With a focus on renewable energy as a substitute for fossil fuels, the thesis draws on geographical critiques of mainstream sustainability transitions theory, which fail to account for the role of place and space in explaining how transitions unfold, and critical geographical studies of finance articulating how contemporary capitalist orthodoxies contribute to uneven urban development. To better explain spatial difference in the diffusion of low-carbon innovations, the thesis documents how finance – comprising actors, institutions, and instruments – provides differentiated opportunities for, and geographical constraints around, renewable energy in cities. The thesis employs a novel conceptual framework outlining orthodox financial conditions across time, scale, and space to qualitatively analyse four urban experiments in procurement, lending, and ownership in Melbourne, Australia, Bristol, UK, and Helsingborg, Sweden. This thesis demonstrates that 1) novel financing mechanisms for renewable energy in cities can maintain, adapt, or reconfigure incumbent, orthodox financial systems. The thesis conceptualises innovation within financial regimes – processes through which incumbent financial systems are maintained or expanded despite their novelty – and innovation of financial regimes – adaptations and radical reconfigurations that extend the parameters and geographies of economic feasibility for more inclusive urban infrastructure outcomes. The temporal boundaries of finance associated with future investment risk and return are fundamental to understanding the institutionalisation of orthodox financial rationalities and the extent to which capitalist orthodoxies are transformed. 2) Experimenting through new financial roles that de-risk private investment, urban actors (re)localise energy governance and pursue non-economic value propositions of care and energy citizenship. In doing so, the cases represent institutional innovations in the business of local government and community organisation. 3) Direct investment in renewable energy developments by local government and community organisations enables localised redistribution of financial benefits and expands the spatial parameters of renewable energy access, guided by social objectives. While participation and distribution are still limited by financial thresholds, seeds of socio-economic transformation are identified in inclusive loan terms and profit distribution through local charitable grants. Altogether, the thesis argues that 4) multiscalar finance capital exchange embeds financial calculations of risk and return into the form and spatiality of renewable energy developments in cities and beyond and thus has a fundamental causal bearing on the geographical unevenness of sustainability transitions. Financial obligations, expectations, and calculative thresholds influence inclusions and exclusions as sustainability transitions unfold. In this context, local government and community organisations can play both niche and regime financial roles in driving increased renewable energy generation and use in the city – working within and in opposition to capitalist orthodoxies. Sustainability practitioners, policymakers, and advocates must attend to the qualities of city climate finance flows as much as their volume to meaningfully engagement with the possibilities for transformative, socially just low-carbon urban futures.
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ItemTransformative processes for architectural design: a heuristic study of regenerative practices( 2020)This research investigates the role of design processes in nurturing initiatives and outcomes beyond the provision of physical infrastructure. Intertwining theory and practice, the research approach combines Heuristic Inquiry, Case Study and Design Research methods. Building on the literature and two case studies in Australia and Colombia, this thesis proposes the Enabling Design Process approach (EDP). The EDP recognises the ‘regenerative’ and ‘transformational’ capacity of design processes to nurturing collective and individual actions towards more inclusive, resilient and beneficial interactions in the creation of a project. The thesis starts by exploring literature that provides a planetary context to design processes, such as the concept of Transitions, the Ecological Worldview and the Social-Ecological System. Then it examines existing and emerging approaches in design, including literature that argues for the need to expand both the accessibility and agency of architectural design practice. The case studies provide demonstrations about how the different concepts in the literature work in practice allowing the emergence of the creative synthesis - The Enabling Design Process approach. The creative synthesis brings literature and case studies together to propose principles, capabilities and activities to apply to the design process of projects. The design process to rebuild a school project in Nepal offered a learning opportunity to put the creative synthesis into practice, providing insights into the potential and challenges of its application. The thesis concludes by discussing the possibilities of applying Enabling Design Processes in future projects and the ability of these processes to enable agency (individual and collective), support communities through significant change and to increase living systems awareness while designing built environments. This thesis offers four main contributions. The first is linking different theories through practice and, by doing so, contributing to various bodies of literature. The second is a methodological contribution to research in design and creative practices. The third is highlighting close connections between design and the social context, making design a process of ongoing dialogue able to raise levels of mutual understanding. The fourth is a design approach that enables designers and stakeholders of built environments to nurture social, ecological and personal development. By providing an intersection between different bodies of literature through practice, the thesis contributes to Transition theory, Regenerative Design and Development and Agency in design practice literature.