Architecture, Building and Planning - Theses

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    Transformation of Jalan Malioboro, Yogyakarta : the morphology and dynamics of a Javanese street
    Wibisono, Bambang Hari ( 2001)
    Streets are an important element of urban form and function. For their future development it is essential to understand the processes of transformation they have undergone in the past. This thesis is specifically concerned with Jalan Malioboro, the principal street of Yogyakarta, Indonesia, which has had many historic roles and has undergone many transformations since its establishment in 1756. The various plans and regulations put forward in the past for the development of this street have proved to be inadequate to manage its invaluable but fragile local character. The aim of this research project is to understand and define the prevailing processes and forces that have brought about the transformation of Jalan Malioboro's streetscape since its establishment up to the present. Two approaches were used: morphological analysis for the physical-spatial characteristics of the streetscape through graphical representations and their qualitative descriptions; and socio-cultural analysis of the functions, meanings and activities taking place on the street, also done descriptively and qualitatively. A retrospective method was applied to reveal the processes that had occurred in the past and a prospective method to analyse the current condition and envisage its prospects. The overall process of transformation shows both continuities and changes of both the morphology and functions and meanings of Jalan Malioboro. The only true continuity is that of the very original axis. Everything else was and is in constant flux depending upon the contemporary forces. Although Jalan Malioboro forms a prominent linear space that provides a vista from Kraton to Tugu as part of a cosmological axis, it has grown spontaneously and incrementally. Socioculturally, the most striking transformation has been from its royal ceremonial function to its current predominant commercial function. The processes of transformation also demonstrate the dialectic between the form and function of the spaces along Jalan Malioboro, which has produced a hybridised and lively street. Its linearity, an orderly form derived from its function as a cosmological axis, has had superimposed on it different forms and activities, thus producing an ambiguous and chaotic streetscape. There are five key forces that have brought about the transformation: (a) the religious syncretism of the Javanese culture; (b) the political subversion, (c) lack of planning control, (d) modernisation, commercialisation and commodification of space; and (e) the 1997 economic downturn. Any development efforts for Jalan Malioboro arising from an examination of its process of transformation should attempt to ensure that its cultural significance, including its complexity and the dynamism of the street environment, is maintained.
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    The retreat from public planning in Melbourne 1972-1999
    Moloney, Susie ( 2001)
    This thesis investigates the shift towards market-led urban policy and planning practice in Melbourne over recent decades with a particular focus on the 1990s when the Liberal-National Coalition were in office in Victoria. In the context of inter-city competition and the emergence of neo-liberalism there has been a retreat from public planning and the pursuit of social and environmental goals in shaping the city. The choices and strategies adopted in other cities reveal that the purpose and process of planning does not necessarily require the exclusion of social and environmental goals despite the pressure for governments to become more entrepreneurial. Public sector planning has experienced a number of challenges to the extent that its meaning or purpose has become uncertain. In its modernist guise, planning was a state-led technocratic activity largely concerned with the physical dimensions of urban development. During the 1960s and 1970s planning was criticised from both the right and the left, for attempting to impose a static order on a complex and changing world and for not accounting for difference and the needs of the community in its decision making process. As the focus of western politics shifted sharply to the right during the 1980s and 1990s, planning became one of the many casualties of the trend towards reducing the size and scope of government, privatisation and using economic efficiency criteria to determine public policy. As a result, the social and environmental dimensions of planning have become sidelined in favour of economic growth goals and market principles. This study shows how planning in Melbourne has been particularly shaped by the ideology of the right or neo-liberalism during the 1990s as well as the shift toward urban entrepreneurialism and place-marketing practices. A selection of choices and strategies adopted by the State Government and Melbourne City Council are examined and contrasted with similar metropolitan and central city planning initiatives in two comparable cities, Vancouver and Copenhagen. While Melbourne has chosen a narrow economic growth model for developing urban policy and planning practice, Vancouver and Copenhagen have maintained a more balanced agenda in determining the shape of their cities. The research shows that public participation, inter-governmental and inter-agency co-ordination and the pursuit of social justice and environmental sustainability are critically important in `revaluing' urban policy and planning in the future for the purpose of creating the `just-city'.
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    Selling the city : retail planning and Central Melbourne
    Goodman, Robin ( 2001)
    This thesis investigates the effects that recent economic and political changes in Melbourne have had on the practice of strategic urban planning. In particular, it focuses on the multiple challenges of inter-city competition, academic critique and neo-liberalism have had on the practice of planning, through a case study, that of planning for retailing within the central city. Public sector planning has been subject to many pressures and challenges in recent years. The notion that cities are competing with each other for the attraction of mobile capital has led to pressure on planning to remove regulatory requirements. The urban agenda of many cities has become dominated by entrepreneurial strategies focusing on large scale projects and events, around which city marketing campaigns are run. The adoption of neo-liberal economic policies reached its height in Victoria under the Kennett Government, during the years 1992 to 1999. Neo-liberal styles of governance are essentially at odds with public planning, concerned as it is with directing investment and shaping development in the urban environment in pursuit of some conception of the collective good. This study shows how the adoption of the neo-liberal agenda in Melbourne has affected both the ability of planners to plan, and the range of policy choices available to them. The current climate of inter-city competition and urban entrepreneurialism focuses particularly on the promotion of central cities as the sites for both investment and consumption. Within this city retailing has a critical role to play both as a symbol of economic success and desirable lifestyle. Yet there has been a persistent discourse within Melbourne that the metropolitan area will develop an urban form similar to that seen in many cities within the US. In this scenario retailing within the CBD will inevitably decline under competition from suburban shopping malls, which will ultimately result in a doughnut-shaped city with an empty centre. Without an economically viable retail sector the central city would be reduced merely to its business function threatening its cultural, social and symbolic place in the life of metropolitan Melbourne. There are strong environmental grounds for supporting the retention of retailing within the CBD, as the Melbourne city centre is at the hub of the radial public transport network, and achieves by far the highest public transport usage rates. A close examination of available data shows that whilst central city retailing in Melbourne declined in significance during the 1960s and 1970s, the decline has all but halted. The way the threat of decline has been both conceived and responded to, provides insight into the current state of public sector planning. An analysis of planning strategies for the central city of Melbourne since the 1950s demonstrates a steady move away from the interventionist, relying increasingly on marketing and promotion as tools to assist economic development. The cities of Toronto, Copenhagen and Manchester are investigated here as three different models of more positive and interventionist planning. These examples show that there is room to move within the constraints of the competitive global economy. These cities provide alternative possibilities for strategic planning in the future, and the knowledge that alternative strategies can be successfully followed without compromising economic competitiveness.
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    Organising the low-wage service sector : labour, community and urban politics in the United States
    Walsh, Jessica Cecille ( 2001)
    This thesis examines the spatial strategies developed by unions in the United States (US) to recruit, represent and bargain for low-wage service workers. To do this, the thesis develops a two-part conceptual framework and uses it to interpret case studies of labour campaigns. In the first case study, a church group and a large public sector union united to win a `living wage' for contract cleaners and other low-wage service workers in Baltimore, and developed a city-wide union to represent these workers. In the second, a union organised 74,000 homecare workers dispersed across 100,000 establishments in Los Angeles, after a twelve-year struggle. While the Baltimore and Los Angeles campaigns were waged by different unions and targeted different low-wage service industries, they share important elements of an emerging `labour market approach' to low-wage service unionism. First, the campaigns sought to create city-wide, rather than workplace-specific, unions of low-wage service workers, and aimed to provide some degree of security for members in the local labour market, but not in particular workplaces. Second, each campaign actively made the local state an object of its demands, using the local state as a lever to achieve some degree of wage regulation in the industries. Understanding the emergence of these non-worksite, labour market-wide spatial strategies requires an extension to dominant geographical analysis of economic restructuring, labour unions and urban (or `local') politics. These approaches have often proceeded from a common starting point, that of an asymmetrical relationship between mobile capital and immobile labour. From this underpinning, geographers have provided important analysis of the implications for regions and workers of spatial competition under conditions of heightened capital mobility, and made prescriptions for oppositional struggle to `scale up'. In so doing, the different patterns of restructuring in low-wage services, where spatial competition may be absent or localised, have received less attention. The differently-scaled responses that are emerging to build unions and regulate wages in these industries have also remained largely unexamined. To provide an understanding of the emergence of union spatial strategies in low-wage services, the analytical framework developed in the thesis first calls attention to the geography of low-wage service industries, identifying two forms of fragmentation characteristic of this work. Such fragmentation flows on from the in situ restructuring practices of firms and the state, producing intrametropolitan scale employment geographies that are largely outside the purview of dominant geographical approaches to economic restructuring. The second part of the framework highlights the ways in which unions develop spatial strategies to respond to the fragmented geographies of low-wage services. Drawing on approaches in labour geography and urban political analysis, the framework indicates the importance of organising traditions, and of opportunities and constraints in the strategic fields of unions and their community allies, in shaping these spatial strategies. By bringing together analysis of work organisation, organising traditions, and the strategic fields confronting unions, the framework allows for the emergence of an urban labour politics. In such labour politics, unions act in various ways at the scale of the local labour market, and make the local state an object of labour claims.
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    Play in urban public spaces
    Stevens, Quentin ( 2001)
    Play has always been part of the social life of urban public spaces. This thesis is a focused examination of the ways in which urban public spaces both stimulate and facilitate play. The hypothesis underpinning the research is that play arises out of the tensions and contradictions of urban social space. The research aims to broaden our understanding of what social behaviours and values might be considered when siting and designing public spaces. Practices of play can be recognised by their dialectical tension with predetermined social goals and productive functions. Practices of play have use value, as pleasurable, escapist ends in themselves. Yet at the same time play can be seen as a critique of instrumentally rational action, and as a means of discovering new needs, exploring identities and developing new forms of practice. By playing, people find temporary escape from social demands and restrictions, and test the boundaries of their existence, living more intensely. The research is guided by Caillois' articulation of four basic forms which play takes: competition, chance, simulation and vertigo. This framework highlights a variety of ways that play transgresses social norms. Urban public space structures opportunities for playful acts because it frames unfamiliar, stimulating perceptions and unplanned, non-instrumental encounters between strangers. The research centres on observation and discursive analysis of playful behaviour in public spaces in central Melbourne, Australia. The analysis draws upon Lefebvre's theoretical insights into urbanism, everyday life, and the production of space, to explore the complex interrelations between social experience and the physical properties and meanings of urban form. The analysis examines five types of urban spaces where play occurs: paths, intersections, thresholds, edges and props. It explores how these spaces nurture practices of play, both because of the social activities which typically occur there, and by the ways they frame certain perceptions, meanings, relations between bodies and possibilities for action. The conclusion of the thesis highlights three dimensions of urban social life where the design of space has a critical influence: performance, representation and control. These dimensions highlight how meanings, desires, behaviours, and even the built forms of urban public spaces do not arise directly from the intentions of designers, but through a constant dialectical interplay between instrumentality, normativity and play.
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    The order of housing things : public housing policy discourse in New Zealand and Australia, 1983-1999
    Dodson, Jago Robert ( 2001)
    The purpose of this thesis is to examine discourses of housing assistance to understand how empirical knowledge came to be effected in the state housing assistance arrangements of New Zealand and Australia. To achieve this purpose a discursive methodology was crafted to account for both the constitution of empirical knowledge, and the bureaucratic apparatus by which housing assistance is administered. By pursuing the theoretical insights of US pragmatist thinkers, and recent French post-structuralist authors, empirical knowledge in the thesis was understood as a series of regular relations between abstract categories of 'things' or 'statements', as enunciated in the utterances of housing assistance policy actors and agents. Similarly the state was viewed as a discursive apparatus, which operates to constitute reality through the enunciation of this empirical order of things. The results of the methodological strategy were to be found in the empirical case studies of housing assistance in New Zealand and Australia during the period 1983 to 1999. In New Zealand a regular arrangement of housing policy discourse operated. until 1990. This 'order of housing things' constituted its subjects as unable to operate effectively in the housing market, thus requiring direct intervention via the housing assistance apparatus to ensure their needs were met. After 1990, this arrangement was replaced by an order in which the market was constituted as able to efficiently allocate housing to those in need, with maintenance of an adequate income becoming the sole basis for state action. In Australia, the order of housing things has consistently been one in which the directly provided subsidised state housing is the enunciated and practiced 'truth' of housing assistance. While alternative orders have been enunciated, such as the provision of assistance solely through an income payment, none of these alternatives obtained the status of the incumbent order during the study period. The thesis contributes to social scientific understanding through the careful and extensive empirical analysis of public housing policy in the two countries under consideration. Added to this understanding are the detailed theoretical explorations, which tease out recent post-structural approaches to discourse and the state, and which provide methodological solutions to questions of the nexus between empirical reality, language, practice, subjects and government policy.
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    The practice of citizenship: place, identity and the politics of participation in neighbourhood houses
    Permezel, Melissa ( 2001)
    How people enact citizenship and participate as active and engaged citizens in the communities and society in which they live is a vexed question in the 2lst Century. As Australian cities such as Melbourne become increasingly socially, culturally and economically diverse and polarised, how people fulfil their personal needs and aspirations whilst at the same time, feel part of and contribute to community becomes more complex. This dissertation takes up the themes of engendering participation in urban environments through a focussed study on how people enact citizenship in Neighbourhood Houses of Melbourne. The role of citizenship is gaining increasing attention as both a juridical and moral tenet through which the dilemmas of participation and notions of inclusivity are waged. A major problem with juridical citizenship, however, is its inability to relate to people's everyday experiences of participation. As a result, there is a substantial gap between the formal and informal enactment of citizenship. This undermines its political and everyday application as well as its capacity to be a mechanism through which formal improvements to the participatory experience can be made. Rather than abandoning citizenship, however, this dissertation argues that it is better re-conceptualised as practice and informed by people's everyday experiences. This could be achieved by understanding the informal machinations of participation including how and where people negotiate their identities and gain the necessary skills and knowledge to participate. To explore the practice of citizenship, the dissertation examines the role Neighbourhood Houses in urban localities of Melbourne play in enabling a range of people to achieve the endeavours of citizenship: that is, to be active and engaged individuals who feel part of community and society. Neighbourhood Houses are non-government community initiated organisations located in urban streets throughout Australia. Through a range of formal and informal activities, they attempt to respond to the educational and social support needs of local residents within a geographical area. By examining the role of Neighbourhood Houses, this dissertation makes a theoretical and practical contribution to understanding the functionalities of enacting citizenship. In particular, it brings new light to the role of geography by exploring the relationship between place and identity at the local scale. The socio-spatial relations brought to bear in the neighbourhood house context shows that the presence of informal, low-cost forums in urban streets are critical mechanisms that ameliorate certain barriers to participation and in doing so, facilitate a positive citizenship experience for a range of individuals and groups. People begin to regard themselves as active and engaged citizens who are also part of a community. Importantly, however, whilst supportive social networks are established in the neighbourhood house context, the range of people passing through their doors also facilitates the establishment of communities of difference. In doing so, the understanding of citizenship is broadened to include those who are often excluded but who form part of the heterogeneous public of Australian cities.
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    Transformation of Jalan Malioboro, Yogyakarta: the morphology and dynamics of a Javanese street
    Wibisono, Bambang Hari ( 2001)
    Streets are an important element of urban form and function. For their future development it is essential to understand the processes of transformation they have undergone in the past. This thesis is specifically concerned with Jalan Malioboro, the principal street of Yogyakarta, Indonesia, which has had many historic roles and has undergone many transformations since its establishment in 1756. The various plans and regulations put forward in the past for the development of this street have proved to be inadequate to manage its invaluable but fragile local character. The aim of this research project is to understand and define the prevailing processes and forces that have brought about the transformation of Jalan Malioboro’s streetscape since its establishment up to the present. Two approaches were used: morphological analysis for the physical-spatial characteristics of the streetscape through graphical representations and their qualitative descriptions; and socio-cultural analysis of the functions, meanings and activities taking place on the street, also done descriptively and qualitatively. A retrospective method was applied to reveal the processes that had occurred in the past and a prospective method to analyse the current condition and envisage its prospects. The overall process of transformation shows both continuities and changes of both the morphology and functions and meanings of Jalan Malioboro. The only true continuity is that of the very original axis. Everything else was and is in constant flux depending upon the contemporary forces. Although Jalan Malioboro forms a prominent linear space that provides a vista from Kraton to Tugu as part of a cosmological axis, it has grown spontaneously and incrementally. Socio-culturally, the most striking transformation has been from its royal ceremonial function to its current predominant commercial function. The processes of transformation also demonstrate the dialectic between the form and function of the spaces along Jalan Malioboro, which has produced a hybridised and lively street. Its linearity, an orderly form derived from its function as a cosmological axis, has had superimposed on it different forms and activities, thus producing an ambiguous and chaotic streetscape. There are five key forces that have brought about the transformation: (a) the religious syncretism of the Javanese culture; (b) the political subversion, (c) lack of planning control, (d) modernisation, commercialisation and commodification of space; and (e) the 1997 economic downturn. Any development efforts for Jalan Malioboro arising from an examination of its process of transformation should attempt to ensure that its cultural significance, including its complexity and the dynamism of the street environment, is maintained.
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    Illuminating nature: the art and design of E.L. Bateman (1816-1897)
    Neale, Anne ( 2001)
    Edward La Trobe Bateman [1816-1897] was an English artist and designer who lived and worked in Victoria from 1852 to 1869. He came from an extraordinary family that included the head of the Moravian Church in England [Christian Ignatius La Trobe, 1758-1836]; the founder of the architectural profession in the United States [Benjamin Henry Latrobe, 1764-1820]; the Lieutenant-Governor of the colony of Victoria [Charles Joseph La Trobe, 1801-1875]; and the leading hydraulic engineer in Victorian Britain [John Frederic Bateman, 1810-1889]. In England in the late 1840s and early 1850s, Bateman was a close associate of the young artists of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, and worked with the influential design reformer, Owen Jones. Bateman's talents in art and design were applied across a wide range of media. His work in Australia and Britain is examined under the headings of Illumination, Chromolithography & Book Design; Drawing & Painting; Landscape Design; and Decorative Art & Architecture, including interior design, textile design and pattern design. In each field his work is identified, described and analysed, often for the first time, and an attempt is made to evaluate the significance of Bateman's contribution to 19th century developments in that area. The consistent theme uniting Bateman's work in disparate fields is that of 'illuminating Nature'. This applies both literally and metaphorically. In his art and design Bateman shed light upon the exquisite beauties of Nature, not simply for its own sake, but with an awareness that a heightened perception of such subjects might also be a path to spiritual enlightenment. Bateman's sensitivity to 'illuminating Nature', and his exceptional capacity to illuminate Nature for the benefit of others, resulted in a unique body of work, the extent and significance of which has not previously been recognised.