Browsing by Subject "Urban planning"

In this dissertation, I present the ways in which architecture was used to perform citizenship in post-colonial Singapore from 1965-2015. During the first fifty years of independence, architects, alongside other artists and activists, contested the restrictions and exclusions of de facto and de iure citizenship through alternative proposals for the urban built environment. I make the case for an alternative architectural history based on those buildings which are excluded from the canon by virtue of their being unbuilt and rejected projects. Through archival research and interviews, I provide an historical narrative and visual analysis of these alternative proposals for architecture and politics. I argue for an understanding of both citizenship and architecture’s agency as performative. I begin with the Singapore Planning and Urban Research (SPUR) Group’s proposals and continue with examples its co-leaders’—Tay Kheng Soon and William Lim—alternative unbuilt projects. The rejection of these architectural projects by the state reveals the rejection of the postcolonial social democratic politics on which they were based. This evidence demonstrates the continuity between British colonial control and one-party planning. I conclude that these architects were the forefront of envisioning and advocating for an alternative democratic ideal. Their contributions paved the way for visual and performing artists as well as civil society organizations to continue contesting the state’s oppressive politics.

This dissertation examines the relationship between architecture and democratic politics in late-modernity. It identifies the refusal of architects to consider the political dimensions of their work following the failures of 20th century High Modernism and the scant attention that the intersection between architecture and politics has received from political theorists as a problem. In order to address these deficiencies, the dissertation argues for the continued impact of architecture and urban planning on modern subject formation, ethics, and politics under the conditions of de-centralized sovereignty that characterize late-modernity. Following an opening chapter which establishes the mutual relation architectural design and political culture in the founding text of political science, Aristotle's Politics, the dissertation offers a genealogical critique of modern architectural design and urban planning practices. It concludes that modern architecture shapes individual and collective political possibilities and a recursive relationship exists between the spaces "we" inhabit and the people that "we" are. In particular, it finds that there is a strong link between practices of external circulation and the interior circulation of thoughts about the self and others. The dissertation concludes by proposing a new understanding of architecture that dynamically relates the design of material structures and the forms of political practices that those designs facilitate. This new definition of architecture combines political theorist Hannah Arendt's concept of "world-building action" with the concept of the "threshold" developed and refined by Dutch architects Aldo van Eyck and Herman Hertzberger.

This dissertation is a theoretical and art/archival practice-based exploration of aesthetic-affective resistance to neoliberal recuperation of urban space that not only constitutes a physical manifestation of capitalist accumulation by dispossession, but also serves to aesthetically valorize affluent middle-class normativity. Through archival research, I discuss the rise of aesthetic-political dissidence against the rent-seeking displacement of the minoritized in Istanbul, and follow its trajectory from the mid-1990s to the mid-2000s. Using visual analyses, I theorize the aesthetic strategies of cultural-political dis-identification from the presiding logics and affectations of neoliberalism. These aesthetic strategies include satire, valorization of the obsolete, discarded, devalued and superfluous, and the fragmental provocation of memory to keep the lived history of Istanbul active against neoliberal erasure without monumentalizing a particular historical narrative. The art practice component of this dissertation provides self-reflection on my art works that draws upon aesthetic-political developments in Istanbul. In my discussion, I also put my art practice in conversation with queer temporality, utopian realism, and a queer-feminist ethic-erotic that orient us to social practices of production, reproduction, and subjectivization based on relational principles driven from sensuous reciprocity that go beyond the familial and the naturalized, and that the dominant political-economic order renders unfeasible.

The goal of this study is to understand how residents may benefit from living in a mixed income, HOPE VI development in the South. This analysis focuses on a former housing project and its immediate neighborhood in the aftermath of HOPE VI revitalization. I conducted a case study by utilizing original data collected from in-depth, semi-structured interviews and unstructured interviews, along with administrative records, evaluation data, media accounts, observation, and casual encounters. A unique contribution of this study of a HOPE VI development is that it also addresses the surrounding neighborhood. Furthermore, this case study offers a unique lens for examining contemporary black gentrification in a publicly constructed space.

A major finding of this study is that complex intra-racial social dynamics among African American community members may stem from HOPE VI intervention. Specifically, there may be limited positive interaction among residents in the development, and between them and residents of the proximate exterior neighborhood. Further, the nature of constrained interaction manufactures divisive processes for claiming space and community identity that may potentially have negative consequences for renters.

These consequences stem from a reproduction of space and community, which shapes social control, policing, and exclusion contests, among other tensions. Overall, this study brings to bear some unimagined consequences of HOPE VI that potentially neutralize anticipated benefits of mixed income living for the poor, based on real and perceived alterations of class, mobility, and shared identity in and around the development site.

Critical race scholarship of the past 20 years offers a robust foundation for interrogating connections between race, place, and environment, and their constitutive impacts on the lived experiences of people of color, particularly black and brown peoples. Less explored are the intersections of race and legal jurisdiction in the production of place inequities. Current scholarship from local government law, geography, environmental justice, and related disciplines suggests understanding the structure and process of municipalities may clarify how local jurisdiction shapes racial inequities in the built environment. This dissertation assesses the efficacy of the municipality as a political institution for equitable, community-sustaining, local development, particularly for black communities. Focused primarily in North Carolina, I assess three interrelated questions: First, I ask whether black and Latinx communities receive the same built environmental benefits from municipal incorporation as white communities. Second, I turn to two black towns in North Carolina to assess the extent to which black communities can rely on independent municipal incorporation to fulfill their aspirations for autonomy and resilient placemaking, focusing specifically on the development of the towns’ local water systems. Third, I consider the efficacy of black community-based institutions in North Carolina and Alabama to provide alternative forms of governance to address structural underdevelopment of black communities, perpetuated by often hostile, white-controlled governments.

“Political Postmodernisms” argues that postmodern architecture can be radically rethought by examining its manifestations in Chile and Poland in the 1970s and 1980s. Postmodern architecture tends to be understood as politically indifferent and devoid of the progressive agenda embedded in modernist architecture – a view typically rooted in the analyses of North America and Western Europe. By investigating the cases of Chile during the neoliberal dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet and Poland during the late socialist Polish People’s Republic, my project unfolds a less acknowledged narrative—one in which postmodernism is profoundly entangled with the political. Drawing from interviews I conducted with a range of Chilean and Polish architects, as well as analyses of physical buildings, urban development plans, and architectural journals from Santiago and Warsaw, I show how these South American and Eastern European sites reveal an altogether different dynamic between capitalism, democracy, and architecture.

The dissertation is composed of an introduction, four chapters, and a conclusion. The Introduction discusses the current revivalism of postmodernism and its critique, tracing the roots of this criticism in foundational scholarship on postmodern architecture, and analyzing how postmodernism is defined in architectural scholarship. It also discusses why Chile and Poland are chosen as case studies. The first chapter, “Postmodernism and the State: Chile,” discusses propagandistic uses of postmodern architecture by Pinochet’s regime in Chile, using two case studies – the Plaza de la Constitución in Santiago de Chile (1980) and the Congreso de Chile in Valparaíso (1987). The second chapter, “Postmodernism Against the State: Chile,” examines the practices of architects who were members of CEDLA, an independent collective of Chilean architects established in 1977 in Santiago, who promoted a version of politically and socially engaged postmodernism that could counter Pinochet’s neoliberal agenda. Chapter Three, “Postmodernism and the State: Poland,” analyzes how the Polish Socialist Party first appropriated postmodernism as a Soviet invention and then used it as a means to appease social tensions in times of increasing unrest. It focuses specifically on state-sanctioned architectural discourse and the Na Skarpie housing estate in Kraków (1985). The final chapter, “Postmodernism Against the State: Poland,” discusses Polish architects organized under the Dom i Miasto group (1980–1984), which united postmodern inspirations with agendas that opposed the vision of society imposed by the Polish People’s Republic. It also discusses the work of Marek Budzyński, for whom postmodernism created a “third way” beyond socialism and capitalism.

Across these chapters, I argue that Chilean and Polish architecture between 1970 and 1990 complicate the generally accepted view of postmodern architecture as politically disengaged and as an exclusively neoliberal phenomenon, disinterested in any progressive social agenda. In both countries, postmodern currents were appropriated by the regimes for propagandistic purposes and used to oppose the agendas of the State.

This dissertation considers the role of Afro-Brazilians in the urban formation of Vila Rica—a Brazilian mining town in Minas Gerais—from its creation in 1711 to the solidification of its urban form around 1750. During this period, Afro-Brazilians comprised more than two-thirds of the population, gained unprecedented independence, and bought their freedom in large numbers. Yet they rarely appear in either colonial records or the scholarly literature on urban development. How can two-thirds of Vila Rica’s population leave no trace of their presence in the urban fabric? This is the question this dissertation seeks to answer by exploring the role of Rosary confraternities—Afro-Brazilian Catholic brotherhoods—in the creation of urban space. Some of the earliest and most widespread organizations to intervene in the urban fabric, Rosary confraternities changed the course of urban development in Vila Rica by stimulating the production of what I call invisible spaces—borrowed, hidden, temporary and mobile spaces (all largely undocumented) that formed an independent spatial network populated almost exclusively by Afro-Brazilians. In constant intersection with spaces registered and mapped by colonial authorities, invisible spaces filled the voids on the colonial map and, simultaneously, reshaped the mapped spaces. Eventually, the invisible spaces would come to the attention of Vila Rica’s colonial government, which claimed that their Afro-Brazilian inhabitants propagated disorder. As colonial officials began to suppress the invisible spaces, one Rosary confraternity responded by building new, visible and ordered spaces for its members. Moving from passive to active influence on the urban fabric, this confraternity developed new regions of the city and changed the trajectory of Vila Rica’s urban development. By reconsidering historical events in relation to the Afro-Brazilian urban footprint, this paper seeks to insert Afro-Brazilian voices back into the urban history of Vila Rica.

In 2004, the Shenzhen Municipality announced that Shenzhen would become the first city without rural areas and rural villages in China, a milestone in the process of urbanization. Officially, rural villages in Shenzhen have disappeared. However, they still exist in another form – urban villages. Attending to the processes of urbanization and rampant economic development, the social lives of these urban villages has changed in many ways, except for the patriarchal logics which continue to marginalize and devalue female villagers. To further understand Shenzhen urban villages and female villagers, I conducted fieldwork in a Shenzhen urban village and collected data by participant observations and interviews. In this thesis, I focus on how urban villages use their agency as formerly rural villages and how urban villages are reclaiming female villager’s social status.

Hong Kong has long been ensnared in the problems of limited housing and soaring land prices, which renders its physical space one of the most visible criteria embodying its social inequalities. Regarding space as an overarching concern andframework, this thesis mainly focuses on the representations and portrayals of Hong Kong’s urban space in Fruit Chan and Ann Hui’s films and further examines how the directors engage with social spaces in reality through depicting various cinematic spaces. All of these films explore the grassroots space of the underprivileged and marginalized people, which constitutes the underside of Hong Kong’s glamorous urban space shaped by economic developments and globalization. Fruit Chan’s Handover Trilogy including Made in Hong Kong (1997), The Longest Summer (1998), Little Cheung (1999), as well as the first two installments of his Prostitute Trilogy, Durian Durian (2000) and Hollywood Hong Kong (2000) hence reflect on how economic, political and social conditions are factored into the uncanny mutations and distortions of varying spaces ranging from public housing estates, cemeteries, streets to squatter villages. Ann Hui’s companion films, The Way We Are (2008) and Night and Fog (2009), offer a detailed characterization of public housing estates and discuss the notion of housing in metropolitan contexts. The two directors deploy and recreate these paradigmatic spaces of Hong Kong as a critique of the history and social hierarchy of Hong Kong, which are intimately involved with the complexity of postcoloniality, neoliberalism, and globalization. Based on theories of spatiality, psychoanalysis, and urban sociology, this thesis argues that these cinematic spaces can be viewed as a site to negotiate with urban planning, spatial practices, transregional and transnational movements. On the one hand, space registers the hierarchical division of the society that renders the underprivileged more vulnerable. On the other hand, connections and a sense of community can also emerge from the space appropriated by its inhabitants. Furthermore, by engaging with border-crossing subjects, these films explore social spaces beyond Hong Kong and provide possibilities of investigating the broader social reality of post-socialist China, destabilizing the static binaries between local and global, periphery and center.

“The City and the State: Construction and the Politics of Dictatorship in Haiti (1957-1986)” charts a new history of place-making in the Caribbean. It analyzes construction practices in the Haitian capital of Port-au-Prince—ranging from slum clearance, transportation infrastructure, to the political economy of cement—to reveal the multifaceted relationship between the Duvalier dictatorship and rapid urban transformation in the mid-20th century. It argues that through the patterns and practices of building Port-au-Prince, the social, political and economic dimensions of the Duvalier regime became embedded in material space of the city. At the same time, the nature of these spatial and material changes informed the regime’s tumultuous internal dynamics. This thesis also situates these intertwined themes within a broader context of uneven geographies of power produced through the country’s long transition from slavery to freedom.

This dissertation examines the relationship between city planning and everyday life in Kigali, Rwanda. It focuses on markets, neighborhoods, and streets where Kigali residents encounter emerging technologies of architecture, finance, and expertise. These technologies are aimed at converting Kigali into a global metropolis with world-class tourist facilities, hi-tech service industries, and a “green” urban metabolism. Many city residents, however, experience these processes through mass evictions, market closures, and an ongoing utility crisis in the city. In response, they are going kukikoboyi (literally “to cowboy”), creating rogue markets, housing settlements, and ad-hoc utility networks. While Kigali’s international team of managers and consultants disavow these spaces and practices as informal, illegal, and antithetical to the city’s “world-class” future, they are nevertheless unable to erase them from the city’s surface. My research explores these divergent practices of city-making to show that a new Kigali is being built: a 21st century metropolis that, despite being a rogue version of its planned future, is a cosmopolitan urban center that no single interest, process, or population fully controls. Methodologically, this dissertation places the popular practices and expertise that hold a city together in conversation with global city modeling and design theory. Instead of focusing on a single neighborhood or population, The Kigali Model is an ethnography of an entire city that asks how differently situated social actors share the costs of producing, subverting, and negotiating their urban future. During twenty-seven months of fieldwork in Kigali, I interviewed foreign technocrats who were employed by multinational design and consultancy firms, paid by international finance organizations, and housed in Rwandan government ministries. I spent months following illegal street traders as they produced nomadic market spaces and (often correctly) anticipated that city authorities would be unable to enforce new zoning and tax laws. I participated in community infrastructure building projects and—when the pipes we laid failed to deliver services—became myself incorporated into the city’s hydraulic system by lugging twenty-liter jerry cans of water up forty-degree slopes. I also mapped the social and economic networks that produce and continually re-make Kigali’s largest “slum,” and debated views of urban modernity with second-hand clothing vendors, their hipster clients, and planners who wish to demolish the markets that both populations depend on. I use these ethnographic encounters to theorize Kigali beyond the categories of slum, crisis, and laboratory so often applied to African cities. I show how these seemingly disparate spaces, populations, and practices produce urban ecologies, cultures, and human and material infrastructures that persistently reinvent the city and the people who live there.

The Durham Belt Line, created in the 1800s, has since evolved in the 21st century into an adaptive reuse project. This thesis uses the trail as a model of adaptive reuse to highlight the value of incorporating GIS to understand a community in its historical context. This thesis first reviews and summarizes the evolution of urban redevelopment theory and practice, then presents relevant studies of adaptive reuse including New York City’s High Line and Greensboro’s Downtown Greenway. Following the cases studies, this thesis briefly explores the history of Durham and then discusses a digital trail of the Durham Belt Line Trail that reflects a comprehensive narrative of the past, present, and future of the city with the use of ESRI’s ArcGIS and StoryMap to present qualitative and quantitative socio-cultural information about Durham. This parallel digital trail offers the opportunity to explore the trail online and will assist users in making connections that are not visible when experiencing the physical space of the trail.

The Durham Belt Line Trail is an adaptive reuse project with advantages and disadvantages. Thorough understanding of adaptive reuse as an urban development strategy is necessary to address the threats of abandoning Durham’s history and losing or fragmenting its well-established community in the process of physical transformation. Thus, Durham’s historical ties to tobacco and the present interests of the Durham community are investigated here, and Durham’s future is envisioned as one that can integrate awareness of the past and present communities into a vision for the future. By spatially integrating historical and contemporary narratives spatially, the GIS project of this thesis visualizes Durham’s transition into a digital city.

Introduction: Municipalities often struggle to build and maintain basic infrastructure for informal slums in urban cities for its most vulnerable populations. One impact of inadequate water and sanitation access is the creation of an environment that breeds water borne pathogens that are the agents of infectious disease. Escherichia coli is a common bacteria found in water, often as an indicator of fecal contamination in the water supply. This study looks at one of the most common diseases found in women that results from E. coli growth, urinary tract infection. Specifically, this study aims to examine and describe factors of water, sanitation, and hygiene that are associated with positive E. coli urine results among women. The study took place in Ahmedabad, Gujarat, one of India's wealthier cities, in which heavy investments have been made in improving slum settlements throughout the rapidly expanding city.

Method: This was a cross-sectional study of 250 women recruited from households in urban Ahmedabad from October to December 2017. To determine positive cases of E. coli urinary tract infection, urine samples were collected from each participant. A commercial laboratory performed the urine analyses using a culture method. The threshold for positive cases was 10,000 CFU/mL or greater for E. coli. To obtain information on the water, sanitation, and hygiene practices, each participant completed a structured survey that included questions on demographics, working environment, reproductive health, sanitation access, family relationships, public toilets and social customs.

Results: Of the 250 participants, 23 (9.2%) were above the 100,000 CFU/mL threshold for E. coli, and therefore defined as a positive case. There were 124 (49.6%) participants who attempted a treat method, such as over the counter medicine or home self-treatments, for feminine health in the last three month. There were three factors that significantly correlated with positive cases. The first was the location of the handwashing facility, which could be either inside or outside of the dwelling. The second factor was antibiotic use in the last three weeks. The third factor was a participant living in a home with a child under the age of 5 years old, who experienced diarrhea.

Conclusion: This study identified a higher point prevalence of positive E. coli urine cultures than what we would want or would have expected for a sample population that all had access to piped water and a toilet inside of the dwelling. There is evidence to suggest that hygiene management around water use has an impact on a woman's susceptibility for E. coli causing infections in the urinary tract. Because half of the participants sought a form of treatment over the last three months for feminine health, a longitudinal study that tracks these women over a three month period, could provide relevant information on the incidence of new infections as well as prolonged urinary tract infections, particularly since multi-drug resistant E. coli infections are on the rise.