GSD Theses and Dissertations

Provincial borders and metropolitan theories are insufficient to explain the scale and dynamics of İstanbul’s contemporary urban development. The mega projects of the Justice and Development Party (JDP) such as the İzmit Bay Bridge, the Northern Projects, the Marmaray Project and the İstanbul-Ankara High Speed Train point to a scalar shift. Triggered by mega projects, these emerging spatio-temporal relations transcend İstanbul’s administrative borders.

In the light of these developments, this study will use the term “region” to explain the emerging scale in and around İstanbul; and therefore will propose a new terminology and method to represent this new scale. The study will begin with an introduction to urban theories and concepts that explain contemporary “planetary urbanization” (Lefebvre, 2003; Brenner 2014) beyond fixed-monocentric models and constructed dichotomies such as urban-rural or built environment-nature. This theoretical framework will be followed by a discussion on the method and will then continue with a summary of the urban governance structure in Turkey and the urban planning history of the Marmara Region. Subsequently, the land-use-based analyses which enabled the researcher to demonstrate the transformation of the Marmara Region between 1990 and 2015 from different angles will be discussed. The dissertation will conclude with an overall evaluation of the findings.

The formation of ‘Urban Networks’ has become a wide-spread phenomenon around the world. In the study of metropolitan regions, there are competing or diverging views about management and control of environmental and land-use factors. Especially in China, these matters, regulatory aspects, infrastructure applications, and resource allocations, are important due to population concentrations and the overlapping of urban areas with other land resources. On the other hand, the increasing sophistication of models operating on iterative computational power and widely-available spatial information and techniques make it possible to investigate the spatial distribution of urban territories at a regional scale.

This thesis applies a Scenario Cellular Automata (SCA) model to the case study of the Changjiang Delta Region, which produces useful and predictive scenario-based projections within the region, using quantitative methods and baseline conditions that address issues of regional urban development. The contribution of the research includes the improvement of computer simulation of urban growth, the application of urban form and other indices to evaluate complex urban conditions, and a heightened understanding of the performance of an urban network in the Changjiang Delta Region composed of big, medium, and small-sized cities and towns.

This dissertation investigates the principles, processes, and strategies to develop multiscale material systems for buildings that interact with heat in novel ways. The overall theoretical framework consists of (1) utilizing the multiscale configuration of biological material systems as the principle for the design of building element; (2) using the shape and size of heat flow as the key parameter for the design and optimization of the building elements; and (3) applying the principles of materials and material processes for selecting and configuring the material systems. This framework is examined in Part I through literature review and case studies; and implemented in Part II through a series of experiments for the designing, prototyping and testing a thermally augmented building envelope system. The results of the analytical model and the physical testing show strong correlations which validate the usage of the analytical model in the thermal optimization of building elements at a wide range of geometric and temperature variations. To evaluate the performance of the system standards including the recommended U-value for building envelopes and the targeted ventilation and heat recovery rate per occupant is used. The overall dissertation can provide architects with the essential knowledge and strategies for developing thermally augmented building elements. Similarly, the research can also inform the scientists and engineers on the thermal design constraints and opportunities relating to building applications. Although this research is focused on heat as the key environmental factor, the theoretical framework can be extended to other factors such as light and sound.

This thesis presents a theoretical and practical research conducted for the last 4 years on interactive fabrication.

Interactive fabrication is an emerging field and takes as a starting point with the numerical control of digital fabrication machines, modulated with parameters of interactivity. 

I approach digital fabrication as an ambiguous technology in the ways it articulates the digital with the material, the shapeless with the finite, the abstract with the concrete. As the realm of digital fabrication expands into mainstream culture and maverick machines rise again, there is an opportunity to tamper with expectations of precision and proficiency.

Interactivity is the modus operandi for such experimentation: embracing time, latency, distance and the “decor of everyday life” as conditions. Personal data such as emails, text messages or sleeping data can turn into parameters of control of a CNC-machine, supplanting the typical predetermined file. This is the premise for a human-machine companionship or ‘embodied fabrication’.

3 art projects, Twipology, Rabota and Streamline have been prototyped to enact these possibilities. The fabricated outcomes move beyond functional or ornamental categories, inspiring a mutating and odd materiality, one of intimacy. These objects are objects of a third kind, “born witness” of a moment of interaction with the material world.

This thesis is an ‘undisciplinary’ endeavor, proposing a research method involving art, design, ontology and HCI considerations.

Things are getting smaller. Energy use is getting bigger. These statements roughly summarize the current state of the material sciences and climate control in buildings, respectively. This thesis presents a novel opportunity to translate micro-scale technologies into environmental building design. This work looks to the fabrication, design, and thermodynamic principles of micro- and milli-scale flow systems from a broad range of industries and scientific applications. The thesis asks how and where these technologies may benefit building design. Strategies for building heating and cooling that prioritize low-temperature lift heat exchangers and increased connectivity to freely available energy in the building environment are identified. From this, a series of experimentally intensive studies are conducted that ask: How do we design and size vascular flow systems? Where do we apply these systems? And how do we make them? The resulting work contributes novel design methods for the vascularization of buildings. The novel contributions of this research include the following: (1) Experimentally derived design rules and a numerical modeling method for optimizing the design and element sizing of a thin film micro-channel device that can provide cooling fluxes suitable for thermal regulation in buildings using modest flow of room temperature water; (2) Fabrication strategies, prediction models, and experimental data for a novel vascularized chilled ceiling prototype that achieves increased heat transfer and cooling performance through the design of laminate micro-channel water-circuits embedded in origami-inspired surface geometries; (3) Prediction models, numerical models, and experimental data for the design of heat-exchanging vascular-porous materials that pre-heat incoming air that is pulled across a building's envelope by a fan or chimney.

My dissertation aims to design a proposed solution by studying and better understanding the specific cultural related issues of water conservation. Water, a valuable element of life, has had and continues to have a significant impact on communities; culturally, socially, ecologically, politically, and on places globally. Conserving water is today’s imperative need, and can more likely be implemented with a more specific culturally thoughtful policy design to help change the societal behavior, attitude, feeling, and awareness toward the water crisis. Specifically, for this dissertation, I use the Azraq Oasis in Jordan as a case study. I define and investigate the cultural component of water scarcity and its role in implementing effective water conservation practices using Laureano’s four cultural dimensions – cognitive (knowledge), attitude, active (behavior) and effective (feeling) parameters. I accomplished this by observing daily practices of the five sub cultural groups, the Druze, Chechens, Refugees, Minority, and Bedouins residing in Azraq. These parameters were collected through surveys, quantified and statistical models were created in order to help design a better resolution for this specific population. The results indicated that the knowledge and behavior models are more significant than the attitude and feeling models. Survey results for daily practices for conserving water had variations in terms of awareness (knowledge) of water conservation. All of the five sub cultural groups display positive behavior and attitudes towards willingness to conserve water. However, the one disparity is that the refugees, as much as they agreed that water conservation is needed, disagree that it is their responsibility to conserve water, but indicated that they save water wherever they can. In sum, all five cultural groups share similar feelings about water shortage and water quality seems to be their primary concern. This dissertation makes a contribution in the water use and conservation literature and provides quantifiable data of the role of the culture on water conservation for policy designers. The policy designers can then potentially implement or learn from this dissertation in their own country to design culturally sensitive policies that would potentially help eradicate water scarcity.

While a lack of design decision-making support for natural ventilation evaluation in the early stage is noticeable, the interest in high performance naturally ventilated buildings has been rapidly growing in recent years. As a response, the target of this dissertation was to develop a design decision-making support system, including a new index and a calculation procedure, to help designers make better informed decisions in the early stage by taking natural ventilation into account.

To achieve this goal, the objective of this research had to be defined first. This meant defining the index to be used when evaluating natural ventilation in the early design stage. The study began by reviewing current practices of natural ventilation evaluation in the literature and identifying the problems of current indices. Considering the precision criterion was special for this stage and the available design information was limited, a new index had to be developed. A Design-Based Natural Ventilation Potential was proposed as the evaluation index of natural ventilation, especially for the early design stage.

After defining the objective, a procedure for calculating the natural ventilation evaluation index was developed. The calculation procedure study consisted of two main parts, outdoor wind environment simulation and indoor natural ventilation calculation. For the outdoor wind environment simulation, an automatic process of computational fluid dynamic (CFD) simulation was suggested to provide a wind pressure coefficient database on the facade, including the influence of weather conditions and the urban context. Results would be used as boundary conditions for the indoor natural ventilation calculation. For the indoor calculation, a simplified calculation method was proposed as the solution to complete a quick natural ventilation evaluation during the early design stage. To achieve the simplified calculation method, similarity analysis was conducted, and then CFD simulation was employed to perform numerical experiments. Simplified calculation equations were built by regression of the numerical experiment results and were validated. The equations provided similar results to CFD simulation, but with much less time. Cross-ventilation was used to illustrate development of the simplified calculation method. In the end, a practical way to evaluate the Design-Based Natural Ventilation Potential was found using the automatic outdoor wind environment simulation and the simplified indoor natural ventilation calculation.

Lastly, a case study was employed to illustrate the possibility of this decision-making support system for natural ventilation evaluation in the early design stage. The design decision-making support system was embedded in the architectural modeling software to provide quick feedback on the design. Scripts were developed to carry out the natural ventilation evaluation calculations in Grasshopper. A building form optimization study was conducted based on the potential for natural ventilation evaluation in the early design stage, showing the advantages of this support system for designers.

In conclusion, a comprehensive and practical natural ventilation evaluation to help with decision-making in the early phase of design was developed in this research. This innovation enables better informed design decisions early in the design process.

Green walls are a component of urban green infrastructure and if designed properly, require only moderate human intervention and maintenance during their lifespans (Cameron, Taylor, & Emmett, 2014). The benefits of green walls are numerous for both building and urban scales. Green walls reduce building heat gain by providing shade (Ip, Lam, & Miller, 2010) and increasing surface albedo (Holm, 1989). They offer thermal insulation for buildings by acting as wind screens and cavity walls (Susorova, Azimi, & Stephens, 2014) and improve indoor air quality by trapping airborne pollutants (Ottelé, van Bohemen, & Fraaij, 2010). Furthermore, they negate the urban heat island effect through solar radiation interception and transpiration (McPherson, Nowak, & Rowntree, 1994). Green walls are also an effective solution for storm water management, provide ecosystem services, and improve the quality of human life (Meier, 1990). A literature review from this field highlighted three major problems: (a) lack of an effective method for making research findings useful to practitioners, (b) limited understanding of the morphological and biophysical characteristics of vines, and (c) lack of a standardized research methodology across the field. The objective of this research is to provide practitioners with a series of matrices to easily and quickly evaluate the cooling efficacy of indirect green walls during the early phase of a project. These matrices account for the biophysical traits of the plants used, canopy geometry, and environmental variables for six climatic scenarios. The climate scenarios are based on summer conditions (e.g., ambient temperatures, precipitation, and relative humidity) and are broken down into the following climates: cool and humid, cool and dry, warm and humid, warm and dry, hot and humid, and hot and dry. Special attention is given to plant biophysics and performance evaluation methods used in fields such as biophysical ecology and agronomy. The cooling effect of green walls is broken down into two major components: transpiration (W/m^2) and solar radiation interception, or shading (W/m^2). A modified version of the FAO 56 method was used to evaluate the cooling power produced. FAO 56 is a method developed by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations to estimate the transpiration rate of crop fields. Additionally, a library of stomatal resistances for 97 vine species expanding through 13 countries was created from measurements from existing field studies. Variables impacting the transpiration rate were reviewed and possible green wall designs corresponding with the maximum cooling power for each climate condition were investigated. The results show that canopies with a resistance of lower than 100 s/m, a height of 3 to 6 m, and Leaf Area Index (LAI) of 3 or larger produce the maximum possible cooling power. Taking into account the aforementioned design considerations (LAI and height), and average stomatal resistance, it is estimated that the largest cooling power (300 W/m^2) corresponds with the hot and dry climate. The smallest cooling power (50 W/m^2) corresponds with the cool and dry climate. Similarly, variables impacting the shading effect of indirect green walls are reviewed. A technique for estimating the extinction coefficient of a canopy by combing empirical and statistical methods is introduced. The predicted solar interception calculations show good agreement with field study measurements, with only ±10% margins of error. Three sets of matrices for designers are introduced. The first two sets provide designers with the cooling power values (W/m^2) of various green wall designs in six climatic scenarios through transpiration and solar radiation reduction. These values show good agreement with the findings of other studies. The results show an average summer cooling power of 42 W/m^2 for the cool and dry climate and 176 W/m^2 for the hot and dry climate. These two sets of matrices are intended to provide designers with back-of-the-envelope estimations of the cooling power of green walls during the early design phase of a project. The last set of matrices provides designers with the cooling effects of green walls through transpiration and solar radiation interception as a percentage of total incident solar radiation received by the canopy in each climatic scenario. The cooling power from transpiration accounts for 20% to 30% of the cooling effect of green walls for cool and dry, cool and humid, and warm and humid climates. The contribution from transpiration increases to 48% for warm and dry climates, and 52% for hot and humid climates. The largest contribution from transpiration occurs in hot and dry climates (99%) due to the oasis effect. For almost all climates, the cooling effect of solar radiation interception was approximately 70%, 80%, and 90% for Leaf Area Indices of 3, 4, and 5, respectively. The results show that the total cooling power of green walls exceeds 100% for all climates. The canopy not only provides shading, but also acts as a heat sink by storing solar radiation energy in water and releasing it to the environment as vapor via latent heat transfer. The largest cooling power values correspond with the hot climate, followed by the warm and cool climates. The percentage of cooling power from transpiration in dry climates is larger than that in humid climates. The exception is the cool and dry climate. This exception is due to the high canopy resistance associated with the cool and dry climate.

This dissertation explores the dynamic relationship between material formations of data and the processes of data-driven urbanization within an increasingly planetary context. In this pursuit the project articulates the deeply territorial operations of tech corporations such as Google and frames their spatial footprints and urban projects within an inherently expansionist logic. In developing a contextual-spatial understanding of the landscape of data, this work addresses the grounded materiality and geographic specificity of data infrastructures on one hand, and the influence of the centralizing logic of “the cloud” on practices and processes of spatial production on the other hand. This work is enacted through three main lines of investigation: First, deconstruction of the ideologies, concepts, and politics underlying the sociotechnical construction of “the cloud,” as an emerging global organizational model that operates through platforms of data extraction and mediation. Second, clarification of the role of accidents, errors, and disruptions in unearthing the hidden forms and agendas of global infrastructures of data, as well as a historical contextualization of this hidden form within the long process of under-grounding urban infrastructure since the turn of the 20th century. And third, tracing the inherently global geography of data that materially, socially, and territorially grounds the forms and processes of data extraction and monetization of urban data within processes of advanced capitalism. These investigations bring together perspectives and methods from media studies, communication geography, critical urban studies, cartography, urbanism, and architecture to bear upon some of the most pressing issues facing cities and their citizens as they transition towards emerging paradigms of cloud-driven urbanism.

Given the importance of sunlight on human health and how the built environment influences human interaction with sunlight, does the design of public housing in Chile address the country’s large geographic variation in order to incorporate sunlight more robustly into its design? To answer this question I look at the last thirty years of Chilean public housing development. Chile's geography spans a North to South length of 4,270 km (2,653 mi) and has an average sunshine variation that more than doubles between the northernmost city of Arica compared to the southernmost city of Punta Arenas. In addition, in the last thirty years Chile has built over 1,250,000 public houses having with these provided homes for close to a third of its total population (27.8%). The first part of this thesis takes a close look at the medical research that studies the consequences of sunlight on health and uses this information, along with existing design recommendations to create an assessment framework through which to evaluate public housing developments in the field. The second part focuses in unraveling the historical precedents that led to the current typology, so prevalent in Chilean public housing projects today.

In 2008, California introduced the first-in-the-nation Green Building Standards Code to encourage sustainable construction practices. While the adoption of the CALGreen Code marked a significant moment in the process of the greening of building regulations, it represents only one moment in the nation's history of code-making, and that of environmental action. Two parallel narratives, and their eventual mergence are the subject of this study. The first one is a story of the agendas that shaped the American house, and the regulations that govern it; the second an account of the rise of environmental awareness as gradually standardized by law-makers and normalized by economists. The goal is to evaluate the wide-ranging consequences of their convergence - not just the isolated green building standards. Essentially, while environmentalists criticize the devastating global effects of consumerism, free trade, and fossil fuels; governments and local authorities focus on fine-tuning of individual standards, and diffusion of efficient technologies at the scale of households. It remains to be seen whether these measures will minimize the environmental impact of American houses, or simply perpetuate the market-driven image of sustainability, and further complicate the multi-layered building code that they try to mend. This research is ultimately concerned with an apparatus which uses the house, and green technologies as a vehicle for economic growth. For this reason, it would remain incomplete if it exclusively focused on ecological ideas and legislative programs, disregarding economic forces, market instruments, and technology. The first part of this study provides an account of ecological ideas, economic agendas, and regulatory programs as they emerged, influenced each other, and informed the character of environmental action and American households, specifically those built in California, and the City of Los Angeles. The second part investigates the mechanics of the regulations used to standardize building practices, and financial incentives used to promote green technologies. As Bateson observed, ideas and programs interact and survive in circuits. It would then be a fallacy to assume that by changing ideas and programs, and updating standards and recipes, we can change our environmental awareness. Ideas and standards must be questioned, but the matrix from which they originate needs to be occasionally re-circuited as well.

Forms of Ecology examines the main narratives through which ecology has come to the forefront of landscape architecture during the last two decades, criticizes their reductive implications for design, and proposes a series of alternative narratives of ecology that emphasize ideas of form, by which it fosters new relationships between ecology and landscape architecture as a way to bolster the agency of design as a cultural project.

The dissertation departs from a critique of the emphasis on the operative capacities of landscape brought about by ecology’s move to the foreground of landscape architecture. Indeed, the last decades have witnessed a proliferation of ecologically-grounded landscape architecture discourses and built works that emphasize notions of performance—the capacity to carry out work—and adaptation—the capacity to accommodate change in order to endure. While performance and adaptation, as the revision of several case studies shall show, have been extremely fruitful ideas in expanding the field of landscape architecture and its modes of practice, they also entail limitations for design. Through performance, landscape architecture is often invoked as a problem-solving practice, invested in the production of systems to assist in the ecological project of environmental efficiency, and largely unaware of landscape formal associations, that is, landscape’s possibility of being looked at and deciphered. Adaptation, on the other hand, calls for landscape strategies that privilege ecological complexity and its process-based notions of indeterminacy, unpredictability, and open-endedness, which often restrain landscape architecture’s agency in favor of passive positions that relinquish the specification of design outcomes to external forces.

In order to overcome these limitations, the dissertation investigates the origins of these ecological views and their biased interpretations of system and process. In so doing, it draws a lineage of the core debates in the evolution of ecological theory during the twentieth century. Amply overlooked in contemporary landscape architecture, core to these debates were questions around the fundamental ecological entity—whether it is the biotic community or the individual organism—and the different modes of interaction that exist between them, as well as around the homeostatic and stochastic nature of environmental processes. The research looks back into the nineteenth century embryonic stages of ecological theory, where these ideas were not so neatly delineated but, instead, embedded within metaphysical and epistemological concepts of form.

In seeking to forge new relationships between ecology and landscape architecture, the dissertation applies the conceptual frameworks derived from these debates to the examination of a series of case studies that emphasize the legibility of the different modes of interaction established between designed landscapes and their environment and the different ways by which design deliberately speeds up or slows down the processes through which the environment is formed. In so doing, it contributes to the formulation of new epistemological binds between landscape architecture and ecology. Such an expanded field of reciprocity between design and science allows for a better understanding of the formative processes and interactions of designed landscapes and for an increase in landscape architecture’s potential to articulate new forms of thought that both work on the environment and render it legible as a social construction.

United Parcel Service Inc., universally known as UPS, is the largest shipping company in the world. Holding one of the largest cargo airlines, continental ground networks, and oceanic freight forwarding systems across the globe, UPS is one of the key players in commercial and industrial logistics, globally. Crossing over two hundred countries and territories, and passing through all climate zones, UPS operations navigate terrestrial, oceanic, and fluvial spaces of the earth into a practically seamless and thickened landscape of logistical movements. Through an aggressively integrated process of incorporation and diversification of products, services, operations, and modes of transportation, UPS has become a vastly incorporated spatial system of adaptation, whose primary function is, as the company claims, “synchronizing the world of commerce.” In this sense, this incorporated state of logistics can be understood as a centralized organizational mechanism of contemporary global trade and internalized computational platform of a globalized supply chain of third-party agents, where geospatial arrangements and configurations follow temporal forces of an ever-expanding transnational trade space.

Enabled by and engaged in a range of urban territories, regions, and spaces, UPS not only ships goods according to an ever-growing electronic market place, it actually responds to and shapes processes of urbanization through a calibrated process of mobilization of resources, systems, services, cargo, and labor. Building upon a range of empirical, analytical, and observed sources, this study purposely and necessarily engages multiple fields of expertise at the intersection of geography, landscape, and territorial studies, and the fields of political economy, science and technology. Through text, image, and mapping, this infrastructural ethnography thus depicts, and potentially redefines, the world according to UPS.

Rethinking the conventions of corporate case studies, this dissertation formulates an understanding of urbanization through the infrastructural and ethnographic lens of UPS Inc. drawn by an emerging series of processes, including manifold processes of technological mobilization and the grounds they require for the largest logistics systems company in the world to operate, expand, and adapt. Avoiding the positivism of techno-logistical narratives, this dissertation seeks to establish a much-needed discourse on both the nascent territorial agencies and spatial limits of logistical states of incorporation beyond the flattened fiscal, financial, and legal space of corporate and industrial entities.

Exposing the intensively-material grounds of these logistics systems, this dissertation seeks to untangle the messiness of movements and flows of goods in an otherwise globalized supply chain by revealing the deep and multi-layered organizational intelligence of geographic, spatial, and biophysical interdependencies that is often masked by the simplicity of synchronized, apparently smooth, and so-called seamless systems of commodity circulation. Proposed as a set of large, integrated infrastructural systems, the organizational ecology of UPS can therefore be understood far beyond its economic calculus of balance sheets and minute signals of barcodes, but through its realization and manifestation as territorial agent and political force whose forces are simultaneously planetary as much as they are bodily—a countermap to metropolitanization.

How then can corporate systems be understood as spatial and geographic? How do technical demands invoke new and existing territories? How do market pressures and logistical demands transform urban space?

Adopting an ethnographic approach to studies in industrial planning and scientific management, this dissertation is therefore organized in three case studies to address these questions by analyzing three different dimensions and layers of this complex of logistical incorporations—sites, systems, and standards—through the lens of the world’s largest shipping company. Titled UPS Worldport: from Port to Plot, the first chapter delineates the geospatial and geohistorical extents of UPS logistics bases that originate from its central operating headquarters in Louisville, Kentucky. Beyond and between these sites, the second chapter titled UPS Freight: from Fleet to Fuel traces the geopolitical and biotechnological interdependencies that support and secure its operational fleet and attendant mobile infrastructures in response to market demands, globally. And finally, the third chapter titled UPS Supply Chain Solutions: from Box to Barcode reveals how UPS system of standards—from containerized packaging to controlled spaces to monitored environments—not only regulate environmental conditions of logistical movements but also shape consumer demand through attendant infrastructural imperatives. Taken together, these case studies not only break down the complex footprints of port-hub-outpost that characterize this corporate logistics complex but redraw their territorial imprints that have been adapted and re-adapted over the past century. Seen across time, these case studies delineate and decode the intricate temporalities that are registered, inscribed, and embedded within these ecologies of operational and organizational logistics. Working in between and across the space of nation-states, the lens through which UPS operates can then be understood as an emergent spatial strategy, a state of territorial adaptation, whose sustainability uniquely and exceptionally depends on perpetual techniques, technologies, and methods of adaptive, minute-by-minute management and large scale, systemic synchronization. In other words, UPS not only manages time but it also draws and designs time, as its contingent, operational territories continually transform, move, and change.

This research quantitatively studies how mixed land-use planning impacts the housing prices in Shanghai. To answer the question, I collected data and constructed a database on housing price and land use to measure the impacts of urban amenities and mixed land-use on housing prices in Shanghai. This work makes an important empirical contribution to existing studies in the field of consumer city, mixed land-use, valuation and housing prices, and the on-going debate on land market reform in China. This study provides a key quantitative analysis of the efficiency of current land use structure in Shanghai and the level of willingness-to-pay for mixed land-use. This can shed light on a major policy debate about land efficiency in China, including Shanghai, and the land market reform which has been a key policy under the current administration. Based on the analysis, an oversupply of industrial lands intended to attract foreign investors and an inefficient public land market is found to have attributed to the distortion of land structure in China. This research quantifies the impact of land use pattern on housing prices and proposes improvements in land use planning. In terms of methodology, this research applies multiple regression models in addition to the traditional hedonic models, in the estimation of willingness-to-pay for mixed land-use or amenities. Based on the analysis of first-hand collected land use and housing price data of Shanghai, this study provides estimates for the land use’s impact on housing value and offers policy considerations on efficient land use. The 2013 China’s Third Plenum of the 18th Congressional Conference has highlighted optimizing land use structure and city’s physical structure as a major reform objective; however, so far there has been limited quantitative studies that assess the relationship between land use patterns and housing prices in China, which reflects the lack of and the difficult access to related data. Using a novel dataset, the analysis produces a variety of quantitative results. One estimate is that one percent more land use in greenspace in a 500 by 500 meters grid attributes to an increase of RMB6,600 in property value. Similarly, having one percent more land use in shophouse and shopping center in such a grid also elevates property values, by RMB5,900 and RMB7,900 respectively. The results drawn from Shanghai can serve as a good starting point to understand other cities in Yangtze River Delta economic zone – China’s most vibrant economic agglomeration. The empirical and methodological framework developed in this study can be generalized in future research and applied to other cities.

In dense urban settings, efficient use of land is a crucial issue. Especially, urban parks take a large amount of space in high land value areas. Creating an attractive park environment for current and future visitors has the potential to increase the benefits provided by parks to surrounding communities as well as individual park visitors (Dramstad, Tveit, Fjellstad, & Fry, 2006; Roberts, McEachan, Margary, Conner, & Kellar, 2016; Whyte, 1980). This study provides models to predict the number of annual visitors to parks, and identifies the associations between park visitations and environmental factors in parks with a specific focus on medium sized neighborhood parks. The main research questions that this study addresses include the followings. Are the proportions of specific land covers (tree, water, and building) associated with visitation volumes after removing the effects from park land size and demographic variables? If so, what are the characteristics and magnitudes of the associations? This study uses neighborhood parks in Tokyo, Japan as its samples. Among more than 5,000 official urban parks in the 23 central wards of Tokyo, 185 medium-sized parks between 1ha and 10ha were selected. The annual visitation to parks was estimated through cell-phone GPS records. This GPS processing method effectively estimates visitation to medium sized parks that oftentimes are impossible to acquire. Through this application, this study exemplifies how newly emerging industry scale data can contribute to understanding of everyday activities of people that can aid more efficient planning and design (Calabrese, Diao, Di Lorenzo, Ferreira, & Ratti, 2013; Girardin, Vaccari, Gerber, Biderman, & Ratti, 2009). This study investigates the research questions through both OLS and multi-level models. First, a baseline model with three most probable factors - park size, surrounding population, and building footprint - were carefully established. The associations between land cover variables and visitation volumes were estimated on top of the baseline model. To enable a more robust conclusion, several sensitivity tests were conducted. The final baseline model found to have a very high fit (R2=0.8628), and the estimation remained robust when multi-level modeling was introduced. When several models were tested, the quadratic relationship between visitation and tree cover percentage appeared clearly and consistently. Although less clear than tree cover percentage, there was a positive association between visitation and water cover percentage in an acceptable significance. Also, the magnitude and certainty of the association between visitation and tree cover percentage remained almost same after water cover was added to the model. This study found there is an approximate optimal value of tree cover, which is 45%. When tree cover percentage increases from 10% to 30%, the number of visitors is likely to go up by 21,696 people yearly and 59 people daily. When tree cover percentage increases from 60% to 80%, the number of visitors is likely to decrease by 22,124 people yearly and 61 people daily. As for water cover, 10% increase in water cover percentage is likely to be related with 14,168 more visitors per year and 39 more visitors per day. The magnitudes of these associations are considerable, even when compared to the baseline factors. For example, 1ha increase in park land area is associated with an increase of 15,527 visitors yearly. These results, although not strictly causal, suggest that design or environmental quality variables in parks are important in attracting more people to parks. Careful design of parks with appropriate amount of diverse environmental elements may be more effective than creating large parks in terms of benefitting individuals and community. Furthermore, considering the high land values of large cities such as Tokyo, these findings can help the government with cost-effective park planning.

Industrial robots have been around since the 70s, with massive rates of adoption in the manufacturing industry. Additionally, during the last decade, there has been an increasing interest in the potential of robotic making in non-engineering fields, such as digital fabrication, architecture and art installations, with designers, researchers and artists experimenting with creative applications of these technologies. However, the typical tools used to program and control robots usually fail to address the needs of these groups. Most robots can only be controlled by writing routines through their own graphical user interfaces or vendor-specific programming languages, which often require significant knowledge of spatial transformations, forward and inverse kinematics, mechanical engineering and computer science. These requirements make robots notoriously hard to program, and pose a great entry barrier, especially for novice and non-technical users. Moreover, and similarly to 3D printers, robot programming tools are biased towards the offline control style, one where all the planning and decision making are pre-generated on a digital environment and, upon execution of the compiled instruction file, the programmer becomes completely detached from it. This model is suitable for highly calibrated and predictable environments, but can hardly accommodate more complex forms of control such as responding to feedback from the context, adapting to changing conditions on a construction site or on-the-fly decision making by a controller agent. This research introduces Enactive Robotics, a conceptual model for the design of concurrent control systems for mechanical actuators. The main goal of this model is to blur the distinction between creating and executing a robotic program, integrating them into a process where behavior can be enacted on the machine during the design phase. Drawing inspiration from developmental and cognitive theories, the model is grounded on the capacity of a central decision-making agent to interface in real time with the control system via a set of high-level, universal and platform-agnostic requests named actions. These actions conform the atomic units of cognitive interaction with the robot, and their effect on a particular device is dependent on its nature and state. This paradigm crucially involves considering the large-scale shift between mechanical and computational run times, and proposes the centrality of a state representation as the core mediator between them. The action-state model seeks to break from the unidirectional offline control paradigm, and favor programming styles that are reactive to changes in the dynamic execution of the robot, rather than prescriptive about it. The main thesis in this dissertation is that applications built following the principles of the Enactive Robotics model provide an easier and more immediate entry point to robotics for novel users, since they provide an enactive, rather than symbolic representation of the system, hence aiding the cognitive processes that lead to understanding motion planning and control. Additionally, it provides a framework with greater depth of possibilities for advanced users, in which its real-time nature and immediate feedback facilitates experimentation, flow of thought and creative inquiry. While the work presented in this dissertation focuses mainly on industrial robotic arms, it will be shown how this model can be extended to any programmable machine that performs spatial motion. In this dissertation the general architecture of the model is presented, as well as two sample technical implementations following these principles. The first implementation is a pure .NET library designed for power-users and tech-savvy individuals, while the second is an ecosystem of UI-based applications and utility libraries geared towards novice and entry-level users. A collection of projects built with these implementations is presented as case studies, to showcase the capacity of the model to systematically enable richer interaction paradigms with robotic systems. Furthermore, the results of a controlled user study are presented, in order to evidence the capacity of the model to provide an easier and more accessible entry point to robot programming for novice users.

This study proposes a new method to evaluate natural ventilation performance in the early design phase by introducing dynamic performance metrics of natural ventilation and developing an interactive tool that applies the metrics. The tool will help understand how a given design utilizes natural ventilation and which spatial variances could improve the effectiveness of natural ventilation. It also looks into important design aspects, including materials, thermal mass, aperture configurations, occupancy etc. These factors influence whether or not natural ventilation might be effective for the given design. There are four sub-topics: natural ventilation metrics, thermal mass and window controls, validation, and tool implementation. These sub-topics, in this order, structure the thesis. First, it introduces dynamic metrics that gauge the degree of cooling power that is achieved through natural ventilation. The metrics will be first developed under steady-state conditions, and be demonstrated in a feasibility study using an interactive design platform. Second, once metrics for steady-state are established, the effect of thermal mass and window controls are considered. Thermal mass interacts with its environment through time in a dynamic way which must be explored to refine the natural ventilation metrics. Therefore, this part will analyze the temperature change through time, examine the impact of different window operations, and further suggest efficient ventilation routines. Third, the process of calculating the dynamic metrics is validated with experiments. This ensures that the proposed method works as intended. Lastly, an interactive design procedure that utilizes the dynamic performance metrics is demonstrated in the 3D modeling environment. This study contributes to early-staged building design in three ways. First, quick simulation time and interactivity will provide users with rapid feedback on different design possibilities. Second, natural ventilation performance is estimated for a customized building design, albeit with some limitations, as opposed to a general box model. The tool may yield different results for buildings with different sizes, features, and construction conditions. By yielding metrics for a specific design, it will help users to alter the design to enhance performance. Third, the tool helps designers understand that the thermal environment is influenced by important factors including window operation, thermal mass, and internal heat gains. Users will be able to learn the sensitivity of the thermal environment to various construction materials and thermal masses, which is pedagogically important.

This research examines the economic impact of climate change adaptation measures on the housing markets of two representative coastal cities in the United States located along the Atlantic Ocean. The results shed light on how adaptation measures and investments influence housing values and local economies with respect to their place-based and local forms of implementation. Numerous quantitative approaches, including multiple sets of geospatial modeling and panel-data hedonic regression analyses, are used to examine changes in property values associated with climate adaptation measures and the dynamics of risk perception. The results also signal how risk perception and hurricane characteristics are reflected in housing markets, thereby shedding light on the effects of anticipatory and reactive adaptation strategies in the reclassified categories of hard infrastructure, green infrastructure, adaptive capacity, and private adaptation on property values in these coastal communities. Collectively, the study suggests which adaptation strategies, characteristics, and attributes can contribute to maximizing both community resilience and economic benefits against the weather extremes caused by climate change. This study highlights that natural green infrastructure as a climate adaptation measure is associated with a housing price appreciation of 9.6% in Miami-Dade County and 2.7% in New York City. Structural elevation achieved by raising foundations provides 6.6% and 13.8% in housing price increases in Miami-Dade County and New York City, respectively. Adaptation measures for storm surges provide the largest positive impact on housing prices at 15.4% in Miami-Dade County. The study further suggests that implementation of climate adaptation should be based on local-specific information, rather than relying upon national or state-level data, due to local idiosyncrasies, location-specific storm characteristics, and the subjective nature of risk perception. Together, this study helps to provide a clearer understanding of how different types of climate adaptation measures interacting with storm characteristics and risk perception are contributing to reinforcing a coastal community resiliency.

Natural ventilation (NV) is a sustainable building strategy that improves building energy efficiency, indoor thermal environment, and air quality. The successful implementation of natural ventilation relies on various factors, such as local climate, ambient air quality, floorplan, adjacent urban environment, window configuration, and urban noise. Among these factors, climate is the most influential one that determines the potential for natural ventilation, whereas the control of the heating, ventilation, and air conditioning (HVAC) system along with the window system becomes the most critical element for the successful natural ventilation in a given case, when only a few features are feasible to change. This dissertation investigates global natural ventilation potential through NV hours and cooling energy saving percentage and estimates China’s natural ventilation potential by taking into account the additional factor of ambient air pollution. The aggregated energy savings and carbon reductions were estimated at the city level across 35 major Chinese cities. This dissertation then focuses on developing optimal NV control strategies to coordinate window operations with HVAC systems, aiming for an optimized synergy to achieve minimal energy consumption and maximum thermal comfort. A reinforcement learning control strategy is proposed, which demonstrates better performance compared to the rule-based heuristic control in accommodating stochastic internal heat gain, maintaining steady indoor thermal comfort, and reducing HVAC system operation. Finally, the effectiveness of different levels of automation in NV control is tested in a variety of distinct climates. Specifically, spontaneous occupant manual control, informed occupant manual control, and fully automatic control (including rule-based heuristic control and model predictive control [MPC]) are evaluated. The results demonstrated the superiority of fully automatic control with MPC, which significantly enhances building energy efficiency and thermal performance. The findings from this dissertation provide information for architects, building owners, and policymakers to realize the potential for natural ventilation in buildings.

In recent years, child advocates, international organizations, and foundations have seen a move toward child-friendly cities (UNICEF, 2004). This movement advocates for urban interventions that reflect children's rights, policies, and programs, all designed to enhance child health and wellbeing (Woolcock, G., Gleeson, B., & Randolph, B., 2010). Children's environments can either provide the conditions for biological systems to produce positive health outcomes, or enable toxic environmental experiences in the early stages of life. Negative environments can affect the brain architecture of a child, and lead to negative developmental and mental health outcomes later in adulthood. (Shonkoff, J.P. & Phillips, D.A. (Eds.), 2000; Center on the Developing Child at Harvard University, 2010). Spatial constraints of young people's lives today in cities direct our attention to the necessity of creating cities where children can successfully develop rather than constraining them to particular play spaces (Freeman, 2006). Despite this need, policy makers still struggle to adopt the mindsets and behavioral changes needed to create child-friendly cities (Moore-Cherry, 2014). If cities aren't child-friendly, then how can we make them so? In order to answer this, we need to understand the following:

• What are child-friendly cities, and what is preventing them from being created?
• How are local actors working on the ground toward building positive environments for children in cities?
• How can we understand, define, develop, and implement a new approach for child-friendly cities that takes into account differences across cities and nations? This dissertation argues that it’s not only a priority to invest in building child-friendly cities based on other than European models, but also to design local specific approaches where every child within every neighborhood is reached in a more effective, just, and equitable way. Building on a conceptual framework through literature review and on a comparative analysis using interviews, this study has sought to understand how local actors are working on the ground to implement different processes of child friendliness in Brazilian cities. This research has aimed to identify barriers that are preventing such cities from becoming child-friendly. Further, its interpretations bring a contribution to the field by advancing new possibilities and perspectives that promote social inclusion, equity, and justice for all children when envisioning and implementing child friendliness in cities worldwide.