Architecture, Building and Planning - Theses
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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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ItemThe instruments of transitional urbanism: The mobilisation of temporary-use projects in state- and market-led urban development( 2020)Research in “temporary-use” urbanism — the interim use of vacant land and buildings — has identified a shift from a citizen-driven process to one enabled and managed by the state and the market. Amid this colossal pantomime of actors, projects, plans and capital, however, the field lacks studies of the value in co-opting this short-term activity for larger-scale urban development. These values, or useful benefits of temporary-use projects, impact a range of areas including urban design, architecture, planning, policy and property development. This dissertation argues that the longer-term value of temporary-use projects for urban development are embedded in knowledge hidden within organisations and actors. Through a comparative research framework, this dissertation examines how specific value can be transferred to larger-scale urban development via people and projects.
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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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ItemRenaturing the nature strip: Spatial, environmental and social drivers of road verge extent, composition and resident gardening behaviour( 2019)In this thesis I ask What spatial, environmental and social drivers underpin road verge extent, distribution and vegetation? I investigated road verges across 47 neighbourhoods in Melbourne, Australia, quantifying their extent and distribution and the extent and distribution of the verge gardening undertaken by residents, and I surveyed residents on their beliefs regarding the road verge and verge gardening, and characterised the flora of the road verge understorey. Road easement green space constituted 7.0% of land cover and a high 36.7% of all public green space. The percentage of the road easement that was green space was positively correlated with date of neighbourhood development, footpath absence, social disadvantage and parcel size. Streets with a greater percentage of road easement green space were associated with residential parcels that had a greater percentage of yard (i.e. garden). Verge gardening was common, occurring in almost a quarter (22.1%) of verges and in almost every block in every neighbourhood. I investigated two types of verge gardening, resident-planting of understorey and resident-planting of street trees. The absence of footpaths was a major driver of both. Properties with no adjacent footpath were 5.27 times more likely to have understorey verge gardening, and 2.06 times more likely to have resident-planted streets trees, than those with a footpath. Tree cut-outs (also called tree pits) were a second major driver of understorey verge gardening, 1.75 times more likely to be gardened than standard verges. Local roads were 3.74 times more likely to have understorey verge gardening than major roads. Age of street was negatively correlated with understorey verge gardening. Verges without the presence of street trees planted by local government were 1.33 times more likely to have understorey verge gardening than those with local government street trees. Social contagion was also present, with the presence of verge gardening in a neighbouring property increasing the likelihood of verge gardening by 9%. By surveying residents, I identified cultural background, gardening enthusiasm, sense of community and level of education as significant factors differentiating respondents who planted verge understorey, who planted street trees and who did not verge garden. Normative beliefs were the main cognitive construct affecting verge gardening behaviour, with verge gardeners less likely, compared to residents who didn’t verge garden, to be constrained by others’ perceived disapproval of verge gardening. In particular, residents were constrained by their perceptions of local government attitudes, much more so than their perceptions of neighbours’ attitudes or housemates’ attitudes. Sense of community, beliefs regarding the benefits of verge gardening, and feelings for nature also had significant, but less direct, effects than normative beliefs. Floral surveys identified 150 species, of which 82.7% were exotic, with native species mostly introduced through verge gardening. Species richness, abundance and composition were mostly driven in part by residents’ verge gardening behaviour, mowing frequency, rainfall, soil compaction and canopy openness, but much variation remained unexplained and was likely to be due to stochastic factors such as degree and frequency of disturbance. Seven vegetation communities were identified, distinguished by the presence of garden plants, rhizomatous turfgrasses, and the relative proportions of three dominant grasses. The extent of the road verge, combined with its often city-wide distribution, makes the road verge a green space component of fundamental importance to our urban ecosystems. Its varying distribution and extent across neighbourhoods means its significance also varies across the urban area. Verge gardening increased the overall species richness of verges, doubled the number of native species, and introduced structural complexity, suggesting that verge gardening can significantly contribute to quality and complexity of urban greening through the summed effect of the many small acts of citizen greening. Verge gardening promotes further verge gardening in a positive feedback loop. The influence of footpaths, road type and tree cut-outs shows that urban design can encourage this resident greening of public space. Municipal authorities are well-positioned to lead change, through reframing policy and outreach in order to positively frame verge gardening as an acceptable practice, by increasing plantings in the verges they maintain, and by promoting alternative low-mow practices that reduce the normative position of the well-manicured lawn. Planners, landscape architects, urban foresters, engineers and ecologists should work together to reimagine the ecological and greening roles of existing and future road easements. The potential for road easement green space to provide for the biodiversity, ecosystem function and human amenity now being demanded from urban green spaces is much greater than previously thought.
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ItemThe Authorship of Space: The role of key individuals in the transformation of inner Melbourne from the late 1960’s to the mid-1980s and lessons learnt for today( 2019)The purpose of this thesis is to provide new insights into how Melbourne was transformed between the late 1960s and the mid-1980s and understand how the lessons learnt from this work, along with a contemporary perspective on the urban condition, can assist the future planning and design of a more sustainable Melbourne. Archival research and interviews with politicians, academics and activists involved in Melbourne’s transformation over the research period under consideration, illustrate the important role urban design thinking and community-led activism had on driving the radical social, political and economic agenda that reshaped the city and led to inner Melbourne’s renowned liveability. Through outlining the cultural, socio-economic and political conditions over the study period, the thesis brings to light the planning theory and ideology of the time to provide a theoretical context for Melbourne’s evolution. When cities grow and change, it is not a linear or logical narrative but rather a dynamic story of overlays, interfaces and integration of place, people and politics. It is a story more complex than eclecticism, far removed from a set of procedures or rules. Melbourne’s transformation reflects the work of city planners who built on what was intrinsic to inner Melbourne, while being informed by highly active community activists, local residents, academics, students, politicians and professional bodies. The research outlines that urban change between the late 1960s and mid-1980s emerged with radical social change and there was a close interrelationship of ideology, geography, planning, culture and politics. A large consortium of people decided they were going to change the course of the city, and they did. Melbourne’s liveability is under threat of continuing decline as the city grows. There remains a tension between the rate of growth and the development models to accommodate this growth. The appropriate role and degree of government and community intervention in planning, and the role of the development market driving urban change, are in contention. Government is pushed by the development industry to make planning processes more efficient, faster and more streamlined. This pressure is compounded by the state government’s reliance on income generated from growth. While it is acknowledged that in this urban age, cities are increasingly important to drive economic development and create wealth, growth for growth’s sake will not sustain a great city. As championed by the city planners, politicians, academics and activists involved in Melbourne’s transformation over the research period, Melbourne’s growth must be in the best interests of all its citizens, driven by planning policies and strategies that enable those interests to be realised. The ‘radicals’ at the time of transformation sought a socially just society where urban planning was based on humanistic and ecological principles, informed by the daily experience of people who lived in the place. These ideals empowered a new breed of politicians at state and local government levels who believed in the importance of community engagement and oversight of integrated, design-led urban planning. This thesis concludes that Melbourne is in urgent need of planning reform and highlights the importance of greater understanding of the trade-offs that result from different models of city growth. Far greater attention, research and collaboration must occur across all sectors to plan and develop future Melbourne with academic institutions, city planning professionals and all tiers of government leading the way.
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ItemA computational design approach for enhancing precinct walkability: informing design processes via agent-based modelling( 2019)This thesis aims to investigate how to inform concept design iterations by integrating walkability evaluation with pedestrian agent-based modelling (ABM) via developing and implementing accessible CAD tools. While we have entered the post-digital era by the end of the last century, computer-aided design (CAD) has become a crucial and globally ubiquitous component of design practice. Many functions and new ways of working, including BIM and virtual simulation, would not have been conceived as possible in the architectural industry before the advent of digital practice, yet they are now regarded as indispensable within the profession. Meanwhile, the emergent design topic of walkability has been increasingly recognised as a pivotal component of urban liveability and sustainability over the past twenty years. As a result, facilitating pedestrian-friendly environments is now becoming an urgent need for many urban design and planning projects, and computer-aided design has played a significant role in prompting this agenda. As there is no universally agreed upon measurement of walkability, and both objective and subjective evaluation methods coexist in the current urban design scheme, this thesis suggests that using ABM can be advantageous and beneficial for both methods through different implementation. Therefore, the interest of this research is to develop a computational design strategy for different speculations by applying flexible and user-friendly ABM applications. This argument has been tested and discussed with the following four tasks: The first includes an in-depth study of computational design strategy, complexity issues and emergence phenomena involved in urban design. The second is to understand different walkability evaluation criteria and how agent-based modelling can be useful under different circumstances. Then, the third task examines existing ABM technologies by identifying their potential adaptations and proposes new digital prototypes that are succinctly focused on precinct walkability issues. Last, the prototypes will be further optimised and validated in two case studies in Arden-Macaulay, Melbourne, Australia and Ecocity, Tianjin, China, with multiple degrees of design speculations. The two ABM prototypes I developed have been shown to be feasible for pedestrian simulation at the precinct level and are accessible with considerably less cost than other commercial platforms. The Modular Scripting prototype offers a new interactive simulation approach for integrating walkability considerations in the urban design process with a ‘reactive scripting’ function that enables designers to calibrate during the loop. The Game Engine prototype, on the other hand, recognises that the schematic design loop is not merely an engineering endeavour and suggests a synthesis simulation method, which makes subjective evaluation possible; here, an architect or urban designer can gain a more intimate sense of their occupant's experience through ABM and let that enrich their design decisions. The main contributions of this research can be summarised in four ways: 1) It examined existing ABM methods and toolboxes and investigate how ABM could integrate with walkability evaluation ; 2) It developed two accessible and flexible ABM prototypes for graduate architects and small design firms; 3) It discovered how to properly set up pedestrian simulation in walkability-prioritised and precinct scale projects; and 4) It investigated how to use ABM tools to inform design decisions in different conceptual proposals and how this could accommodate ever-changing design iterations. This thesis concludes that the proposed computer-aided design approach can demonstrably synergise both pedestrian ABM and walkability indexing into the schematic design process. The inherently flexible design approaches and accessible ABM tools can be adopted by different design practitioners and academics, as well as potentially other disciplines. The integration between advanced digital techniques and speculative design thinking can expand the realm of the design communities and offer them new possibilities to embrace a design agenda for healthier and more sustainable cities.
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ItemParticipation in architecture: agonism in practice( 2018)Literature about participation in architecture promised architecture the restoration of a moral dimension, arguing that participation would offer opportunities for empowerment and deliver broad benefits. To its disservice, the field of participation has been dominated by a rational ideology, and a focus on agreement and decision-making – incorporated in the term ‘consensus’. The dominant approach to participation has been at the expense of difference, passions, arguments, resistances and tensions present in the participatory process – incorporated here in the term ‘agonism’. Exacerbating this gap between consensus and agonism, a lack of real-world examples and analysis of everyday participation, has led to a quite limited practical language about participation or descriptions of the concrete process of participation in action, and arguably an avoidance to design and critique participatory processes in architecture and urban design. This Doctor of Philosophy attempts to do participation in architecture through a series of Creative Works in practice, by carefully considering approach, and, designing for difference and bottom-up empowerment of others with social, physical, emotional and psychological benefits specific to each project. The methodology exposed the realities of participation in architectural design practice with communities, highlighting social themes for exploration and multiple modes for practice. This research project demonstrates that agonism is an action-orientated way forward for participation, arguing that the tension between architecture and participation is actually productive. It concludes that difference rather than consensus is crucial to participation, suggesting for architectural and urban design practice that the philosophical role of an architect is to consciously create and maintain opportunities to keep alive the participatory process in the world, by critically designing participation.
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ItemTransit and urbanity in Tehran( 2017)A key response to the challenges of car-dependency and urban sprawl has been to build dense, functionally mixed and walkable urban areas around existing and new transit stations – broadly defined as Transit-oriented development (TOD). While the concept of TOD has been extensively researched in Western cities, less formal and more congested cities lack empirical investigation, particularly in the ways TODs work in relation to micro-scale morphology, urbanity, informality and gender issues. This research explores the case study of Tehran to investigate synergies between urban morphology, transport modes and streetlife around five major transit nodes. It examines the ways that different modes of transport variously mesh or compete for the same networks and spaces. The study explores the relations of informal to formal transport and discusses on the prospects for formalisation. It documents the advantages that motorcycles have within this urban assemblage - capacities to slip through congested traffic and narrow streets and between different spatial networks. It also explores the ways that gender-based rules both constrain women's use of public transport and keep the system informal. Using comparative mappings of urban density, functional mix, streetlife, transport access and interfaces, the thesis explores both existing synergies between such properties and possibilities for urban design transformation.
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ItemResilience versus formalisation in the informal city: case study, the city of Golestan( 2015)This thesis is a study of the formalisation of informal settlements within a framework of resilience thinking with a focus on urban design scales and outcomes. Resilience is a framework for dealing with uncertainty and adaptation in complex developments. The thesis studies the effects of the urban formalizing processes in relation to resilience and adaptation capacities. It traces the transformations imposed by urban upgrading regulations by comparing three neighbourhoods in different phases of formalisation in Golestan, Tehran. Informal settlements have become an important part of urbanity due to rapid urbanization, lack of access to affordable housing, disasters, civil wars and climate change. These settlements have taken shape since the 1960s in Iran. Socio-political events as well the modernization process has exacerbated their formation ever since. This research is an urban design study on the effects of formalisation of informal settlements in Tehran, Iran. It will trace the process of change imposed by upgrading urban regulations and how it has affected their adaptation capacities. Resilience and complex adaptive systems as well as assemblage theories and their related concepts will be used as toolkits to conduct this research. The study will be conducted as a multiple case study inquiry on informal settlements in Tehran conurbation. Three case studies are chosen for this study: Soltanabad, where formalisation pricess is recently initiated, Feshargavi, where fast changes are in progression and New Golestan, which is a formally planned area. Drawing on methodological concepts, different techniques will be applied to collect and analyse qualitative data. Archival research, mapping, observation, and interview as well as document analysis are the main methods will employ in this research. This research will contribute to present new perspectives on effects of formalisation process as an agent of change on resilience of these areas.
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ItemNegotiating a people’s space: a historical, spatial and social analysis of the People’s Square of Shanghai from the colonial to Mao to post-Mao era( 2014)This research investigates spatial formations of the People's Square of Shanghai from the 1840s to the 2000s against a shifting history of political and ideological backdrops. The research explores how the Square was formed and reformed, how it was used, how it facilitated and restricted certain social uses, and how it both reflected and subverted, to an extent, a predominant political and ideological control. The thesis reveals new layers of spatial politics of the Square and adds new dimensions to our reading of the meaning of the city centre of the Chinese metropolis.