Architecture, Building and Planning - Theses
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ItemUnderstanding the relationship between urban design and walking to inform sustainable urban development: a case study of Hanoi( 2022)Background Walking is increasingly seen as a crucial instrument in promoting sustainability all over the world due to its various benefits to the health and well-being of urban citizens as well as the environment and the economy of the cities. A growing body of evidence in the literature, mostly from Western countries, shows that urban design largely influences the prevalence of walking in urban environments. However, there is a limited number of studies on the relationship between walking and urban design from low- and middle-income countries in Asia, where urban forms are traditionally more compact, complex and with multiple layers and varied urban typologies. Due to the advent of rapid motorisation and urbanisation, Asian cities are now losing their traditional walking lifestyle and instead, embracing urban development that prefers access via private motor vehicles rather than active transport modes such as walking. Aim and objective Choosing Hanoi as the case study, the present thesis explores the relationships between walking and urban design by investigating the prevalence, variation, and characteristics of walking across the city, and at the same time, evaluating urban design across the varying urban typologies. Methods. Using a multidimensional approach, four studies were conducted simultaneously across Hanoi including a travel survey focusing on walking, an urban design qualities audit, a perceived urban design survey and a study on environmental factors such as weather and pollution. The obtained data are analysed together to explore the relationship between them. Results The results highlighted that walking still plays an important role in Hanoi’s urban transport with a high share in both the number of trips and travel time. Urban typologies and their characteristics have been found to have particular impacts on urban design and walking. Old, high-density and mixed-use urban typologies like Ancient Quarter tended to report better urban design and higher walking rates than modern but low-mix typologies like New Urban Areas. The likelihood and the prevalence of walking were also significantly associated with different factors of demographic, perceived urban design and urban design qualities. Land use mix was found to be positively associated with both walking rates and time, suggesting it is the most important urban design feature in promoting walking. Environmental factors such as temperature, humidity, air and noise pollution did not significantly influence the prevalence of walking. Conclusion Overall, the study contributes to our understanding of the prevalence of walking and urban design in Hanoi, providing policymakers, planners, urban designers and architects with important insights for sustainable urban design policies, strategies and interventions.
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ItemSAPE : some architectural publications and ethics which requires the positing of a meta-ethics of Architecture( 2008)The scholarly journals of architecture are a likely rich source to mine for matters of ethical concern pertinent to architecture. The thesis launches from this premise and develops a research tool, grounded in corpus linguistics and content analysis, to identify words in the essays of four important scholarly journals that are placeholders for matters of ethical concern. The result of this word-mining is the Ethical Universal Scholar of Architecture (Eusa). She is invited into the text of the thesis to make her own commentary on matters in general, and specifically on her four most important matters of ethical concern. Her commentary is interesting enough but if left here the thesis would leave itself open to the criticism that its findings are only constituted by the author's common sense, and Eusa's limited universe, which shows no knowledges of contemporary ethical discourse. For an informed discourse to continue an intellectual framework is required and this ought to be a Meta-ethics of architecture. From the literature it is readily apparent that this does not exist and, encouraged by a call from a few authors for such a construct, the thesis temporarily sets Eusa aside, and goes about to design and construct this Meta-ethics. The thesis, on sound historic grounds, defines the necessary and sufficient conditions for an entity to be named architecture to be that it must be both practical shelter and art. It now appropriates Rorty's propositions on liberal society and axiomatically names the Meta-ethics of architecture as the structure that, in the first place, separates practical shelter and art and deems them incommensurable. It names them the Creative Ethics and the Practical Ethics of architecture. Having done this it observes that architecture, because of its means of production, the material of its medium, and the immutability of the completed concrete artefact, is unlike other art forms and demands that decisions be made in the face of the self created incommensurables of the Practical and Creative Ethics. To effect this, the thesis turns to the affective valuing of Elizabeth Anderson, whilst not ignoring the limited usefulness of consequentualist ethics, makes the central claim that it is not irrational to make decisions and then act on them on the basis of the way we feel, provided we open them up for inter-subjective agreement. Eusa's is returned to, and her utterances, her fragments of texts, her four most important matters of ethical concern are re-interrogated to enable them to be located in the meta-ethics of architecture. This is done and the matrix is cross tabulated with the way she deploys, most probably in ignorance, affective valuing to adequately express her feelings towards the things that matter. The contents of the matrix are considered closely to identify where incommensurability, exists and then to deploy the affective reading of Eusa's utterances to ascertain if it does, or could, effect reconciliation. This is the test of the Meta-ethics in praxis, enabled by affective valuing.
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ItemPlanning as a democratic practice : antinomy and mediatisation( 2004)The thesis seeks to reconcile planning with its role as an aspect of democratic governance in liberal societies. Planning is directly considered as an instrument through which people seek to govern themselves. Planning problems are seen as analogous to the problems of democracy, using the idea of antinomy - that democracy contains internal contradictions between its various desirable precepts which tend to 'pull' against each other as irreducible dilemmas, requiring trade-offs to be made. Focusing upon democratic antinomy allows the essential qualities of a given democratic system, including planning, to be revealed. However, an assessment of the traditions of urban planning indicates that in practice and theory, planning has not dealt with the antinomy of democracy in any comprehensive fashion, leaving it impoverished in terms of its role and meaning in liberal democracy. The body of work loosely described as communicative planning, however, provides the basis for a reappraisal of planning as a democratic practice, based on the work of Jurgen Habermas, to account for the antinomy of democracy. Two central concepts of Habermas's work are focussed upon. Firstly, the idea of democracy as knowing and steering is used as an overall ideal. To know itself, a people must understand the challenges and opportunities it faces, and inclusively determine what outcome they wish to achieve. To steer, a people must have the capacity to act in the knowledge they inclusively developed. Secondly, however, Habermas suggests that the central impediment to democracy is mediatisation - the increasing influence of instrumental logics, such as law or money, upon the manner in which we manage collective affairs. The planning systems of The Netherlands and Singapore are used to ground the theoretical basis of the research, establishing that distinct planning systems can be characterised as particular resolutions of democratic antinomy. Further, these planning systems are used to establish that certain media do appear to be deployed in distinct ways in each system, and that this influences the 'communicativeness' of these systems. Building upon this grounding, the planning system of Victoria, Australia is subsequently examined in detail to demonstrate the manner in which media influence knowledge and steering in the chronically repeated processes of Victorian planning. This analysis, focussing on local planning, suggests that certain resolutions of democratic dilemmas are better, tested against the ideal of knowing and steering, and that the deployment of media in a planning system is integral to these resolutions of democratic dilemmas. It is concluded that communicative planning could be modified to include understandings of mediatisation, allowing it to address the practical difficulties of planning as an aspect of democratic governance.
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ItemDesiring docklands : Deleuze and urban planning discourse( 2003)This thesis is about urban planning processes associated with the Melbourne Docklands area, some 220 hectares of public land and water adjacent to the central city of Melbourne. More specifically, it is about how these processes make sense of the world and how this `making of sense' has worked to order the Docklands' landscape. More specifically still, it is about fundamental changes in the form and content of Melbourne Docklands planning discourse, between 1989 and 1999, which would seem to represent a radical departure from planning's `normal paradigm', the rational comprehensive model. The thesis draws on the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze to provide an account of these changes, considering how Deleuze's concepts provide a certain `orientation' for thinking about urban planning practice, one which directs thought towards immanent engagement with the virtual forces (of desire, of movement, of time, amongst others) underpinning the production of space. It examines how these forces are expressed in Melbourne Docklands planning discourse, with a view to understanding how the discourse `works' to support processes of social desiring-production and the exercise of control power under capitalism. In the analysis of this discourse, the thesis outlines an account of urban planning practice as flows of desire and capital. It will show how such discourse moved from a grounding in site, history and community, through an unbounded, ungrounded and dream-like phase of deterritorialization, to a process of reterritorialization with the production of new identities and desires. The thesis concludes with an examination of what this analysis entails for understandings of; urban planning practice; urban planning's relationship to capital; the exercise of power in urban planning; the 'discursive turn' in urban studies; the relationship between theories of space-time and urban planning; and the relevance to urban planning of certain key Deleuzean concepts.
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ItemDecentralization and spatial planning in Indonesia( 2003)Because of Indonesia's geography and history, centralisation and decentralisation policies have always played a dominant role in government policies. During President Soeharto's New Order regime, there was a blind faith that only the central government was capable of controlling the distribution of resources among the regions. However, this created an authoritarian attitude that led to the abuse of power and to acute corruption, collusion and nepotism (KEN), and to erratic and unsustainable land development. These problems eventually led to economic and political collapse and the resignation of President Soeharto. The new Habibie government could not resist a strong demand from the regions to have wider autonomy, which led to the issuance of new decentralisation laws in 1999 under the euphoria of demokmsi and reformasi. These laws aimed to devolve certain powers to the regions, including powers over land-use planning and development, and to boost their economic performance by making more fiscal resources available. The laws, which effectively came into force in January 2001 during the Abdurrahman Wahid government, resulted in controversies that have led to proposals for their amendment by the current Megawati government. This thesis investigates the implications of these various changes in decentralisation policy on spatial/land-use planning in Indonesia during the New Order era, the period of reform that immediately followed the fall of Soeharto, and the current era. While many aspects of spatial/land-use planning have been differently affected over this period of great change, nevertheless the present focus is on the phenomenon of chaotic and allegedly unsustainable land development to which the term desakota is commonly attached. The focus will further be on this process in the case of the Soreang corridor, Tatar Bandung, West Java. The rapid changes to the laws have had some unfavourable consequences. First, with their newly established powers, the rich regions have tended to embark on grandiose projects without considering the real needs and feasibilities of their regions, while the poor regions have attempted to boost their local tax base through the imposition of novel and destabilising local taxes and charges. Second, decentralisation of power has contributed to the emergence of 'decentralised' corruption. Third, the debate on whether the new decentralisation laws should be amended has focused more on the transfer of power rather than improved delivery of public services and empowerment of civil society. All these issues have been manifested on the ground in a more uncontrolled spatial and land-use structure - of which desakota is one manifestation-than in the previous era. The most important finding of this study is that spatial/land-use planning in Indonesia is the outcome of political decisions made by a combination of elite politicians and businessmen, strongly undermined by an acute KEN attitude, which has been embedded in the whole system of governance, as well as in society at large. This phenomenon developed, during the New Order centralisation era and still holds in the current decentralisation era. After a long history of centralistic and authoritarian government, it would be naive to think that a transformation towards democracy and reform could be achieved by simply issuing new laws. However, if all elements of Indonesian society, particularly the government, can learn from what has happened, the current proposal to amend the new laws could be a start towards a better system of governance for Indonesia in the future, with more systematic and sustainable development of Indonesia's resources, including its land resources. It is concluded that there is a need to amend these laws to give a clear delineation of authority not only between provinces and districts, but also between districts and villages. This process should not be separated from the empowerment of local communities in the villages to improve their political participation in the decision-making process, because they are the ones who will be affected by all decisions made on the ground. It should be recognised that KEN will not be overcome quickly, since it is now intricately interwoven with political and economic conditions in Indonesia. Increased transparency and the involvement of civil society in decision-making processes will provide a good start towards the effort to eradicate this attitude as well as in exercising demokrnsi and reformasi in Indonesia.
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ItemStrategic client briefing : a model for building project inception( 2002)The pre-design phase of the building process, which involves client briefing at project inception, provides the foundation for a successful project. Indeed, a clear client statement of a project's strategic direction, with a definition of its performance requirements, is essential to guide the design team in its preliminary work of establishing the nature of the project. Moreover, an essential requirement in the project inception stage is the need to gain the views, ideas, knowledge and needs of stake-holders who can play a key role in the description and definition of the proposed project. But, sadly, past practice has tended to ignore or limit the role of these key participants. As a result many completed buildings have not satisfied the needs of this important group. Therefore, future practice aimed at gaining the best value buildings cannot afford to exclude them from the process. Yet, despite the acknowledged importance of this phase it has generally been neglected in terms of research and practice. Accordingly, an innovative method for the project inception stage called, Strategic Needs Analysis (SNA) has been developed here. This approach uses a seminar and workshops to formalise the project inception stage into a series of activities to encourage stake-holders: information sharing, options development and decision-making. The outcome of the process is a defined and documented strategic direction and a statement of desirable functional requirements expressed within an agreed, performance brief. The Strategic Needs Analysis process aims to be inclusive and formal yet flexible. Strategic Needs Analysis also adopts the use of the decision-making software, Strategizer, into its workshops to assist the participants in the workshops to arrive at an agreed decision on the project. This research describes project inception along with potential models for this stage and then proposes Strategic Needs Analysis as an improved model. The author describes how Strategic Needs Analysis was designed, piloted, analysed and tested in six case studies concerned with the activities and decisions made at the project inception stage. That is, this research follows an action research methodology using organisation-based case studies. All the case studies are based on actual projects in several different organisations with participants using Strategic Needs Analysis to guide them and to assist them in making a strategic project choice. The case studies are described in detail and they are consistently analysed using participant surveys and process attribute measures. This allows the strengths and weaknesses of Strategic Needs Analysis, using the participants survey data to be identified and discussed. Finally, recommendations regarding managerial commitment to this, or any project inception process, are stressed together with the need to ensure representative and solid stake-holder representation at all times are proposed for improving future processes and practice at this important stage in the development of a project. An idealised model of the project inception process is recommended.
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ItemPlay in urban public spaces( 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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ItemEnvironmentalism and land-use planning( 1985)This dissertation considers the research question: Can land-use planning attain the goals of environmentalism? The research question instigates the development of models for environmentalism and land-use planning, test of their congruence, analysis of institutional means to join them, case study of the specific method of lifestyle zoning for Nature conservation, international comparisons, and suggestions for the implementation of the ideology of environmentalism by the techniques of land-use planning. An applied planning orientation guides methods from political science, sociology, anthropology and geography to structure the theoretical and empirical studies. Comparison among the industrially advanced anglophone countries of Australia, Canada, Great Britain and the United States of America enable cross-cultural insight into environmentalism, land-use planning, and measures for the protection of dedicated areas. The evaluation of the fit between the environmentalism and land-use planning, considers their origins, values, operating principals, programs and problems. This social-policy analysis reveals substantial concurrence, particularly regarding concern for the unintended consequences of technical and social policies, human interaction with the physical environment, care in resource use, urban and Nature conservation, the importance of open space, rational forethought, the long-term, regional view, environmental diversity, government intervention, need for co-ordination in government, use of experts, citizen participation, self-actualization, equity, and generic as well as substantive definition of the fields by their supporters. The ideological outline of contemporary environmental planning provides a framework for detailed analysis of the case study of an "Environmental Living Zone" on the fringe of urban Melbourne, Australia. Historical research, interpretation of planning schemes, maps and aerial photographs, interviews, and observation provided insight into the social and environmental factors in residential conservation. From the empirical and theoretical analyses, the work suggests implications for practitioners- and directions for further research.