Browsing by Subject "Urbanism"
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Item A typology of rules : predictability, flexibility, and adaptation in form-based codes(2011-05) Barnett, Bradley Ryan; Paterson, Robert G.; Almy, DeanForm-based codes have been touted as a more flexible approach to zoning that emphasize physical form over land use to create more predictable built results, making sustainable urban form more achievable. However, scholarship to date has focused primarily on the New Urbanist aspects of form-based codes, with limited attention paid to broader issues of urban design and development as they relate to codes themselves. This paper thus proposes a new framework for studying form-based codes: a typology of rules. This proposed framework provides an instrument for evaluating form-based codes by looking at the structural characteristics of codes as they relate to predictability, flexibility, and adaptation to future change. It also separates the study of form-based codes from battles over New Urbanism, instead reframing form-based codes as an autonomous field of inquiry. Use of this typological analysis in a series of case studies indicates that there is a lack of diversity in the rule typologies currently employed in form-based codes. A discussion then highlights how the use of a typology of rules could help create codes that are adaptive and flexible enough to respond to the needs of contemporary urbanism.Item Beyond the dirty war : urban reforms and protest during the last military dictatorship, 1976-1983(2012-05) Hoyt, Jennifer Tamara; Brown, Jonathan C. (Jonathan Charles), 1942-; Garrard-Burnett, Virginia; Twinam, Ann; Dietz, Henry; Lawrence, MarkBeyond the Dirty War is part of the second wave of studies to examine the last military government of Argentina, which controlled the nation from 1976 to 1983. The first generation of histories rightfully focused on state terror and the human rights violations committed by the regime. However, more recent scholarship has started to examine other aspects of the armed forces’ agenda. Through large-scale urban reforms in Buenos Aires, the military government attempted to resolve long-standing issues. The generals in charge sought to curb chaotic urban growth and transform the capital into a modern metropolis, thereby accomplishing a task with which previous administrations had struggled. However, the military quickly encountered vocal public opposition to the reforms. Citizens rebuked efforts to reshape the capital city, condemning the mayor’s unilateral actions and the flaws in the projects. Despite the terror that characterized the period, residents created productive spaces for dissent and demanded that regime be held accountable for its failures. Through the lenses of political participation, urbanization, and environmentalism, this study reveals the vulnerability of the authoritarian government and the limits of its repression.Item Creative financing & strategies for mixed-income transit oriented development in Dallas, Texas(2013-08) Partovi, Lauren Neda; Wilson, Barbara B. (Barbara Brown)This study evaluates the current environment for mixed-income transit oriented development along DART rail within the city limits of Dallas. A close look at income and racial disparity is used as the foundation for advocating for a more proactive and aggressive approach to the development of affordable units proximate to affordable transportation choices. Assembling financing for mixed-income TOD projects is especially challenging, and multiple layers of federal, state, and city funding mechanisms are required for achieving the capital requirements of the development. Both typical affordable housing funding methods and new and nontraditional funding methods for multifamily housing were researched and evaluated with the intention to propose possibilities for catalyzing development in DART station areas within the City of Dallas that have, to this point, experienced underdevelopment.Item Imagining the Modern: An Occidentalist Perception and Representation of Farangi Architecture and Urbanism in 19th-Century Persian Travel Diaries(2014-06-04) Vahdat Zad, VahidThis study explores the inception of modernity in Iran by examining how the built environment was perceived and represented by Iranian travelers visiting Europe in the mid-19th century. Recent scholarship on modernity in non-Western societies unsettles Euro-centric assumptions that depicted the global circulation of architecture as one way transit between the center and the periphery, the original and the copy. Taking part in questioning this uni-directional cultural dissemination, my project reverses the Orientalist gaze of Postcolonial theories. Here, I discuss how the Iranian traveler constructed tajaddod (Iranian experience of modernity) based on an ?Occidentalist? imagery. Many modern institutions and architectural typologies were first introduced to Iran by travelers who visited Europe. These individuals, following a long-standing Persian tradition of travel writing, often kept notes and diaries known as safarnameh. For the purposes of my research, safarnameh serve as non-participant recordings of how Iranians responded to the unfamiliar architectural landscape of the West. To investigate how the message of European modernity was transformed by the travelers, I examine the differences between the descriptions of architecture in each safarnameh and the more prosaic perceptions of those spaces in the Western imagination. I look closely at the literary styles, figures of speech, settings, imagery, symbolism, exaggerations, narrative devices, and tones used by the Iranian writers in their interpretation of European architecture and urban facilities. This study reveals how non-European imaginations, aspirations, fantasies, and agency were a vital part of the transnational dialectic of modernity. By projecting their own Persian/Islamic ideals and imagery onto their observations, these travelers developed a syncretic understanding of modernity. Their encounter with a pre-imagined Western ?Other? became the foundation of tajaddod. When Iran?s experience of modernity is presented as a distorted copy of a Western phenomenon, Iranian architects are alienated from their heritage. They are presented with a false choice between (Persian) tradition and (Western) modernity. My project emphasizes that the Iranian desire towards a modern utopia is not radically alien to Persian/Islamic tradition. This approach advances humanities research by revisiting genealogical notions of a mythical original modernity by unraveling global entanglements.Item Tolerance as a way of life(2008-08) Clark, Jeffrey Nawrocki; Tsai, Yung-Mei; Johnson, PaulThe purpose of this study will be to redefine the nature and source of tolerance through an analysis of the complex patterns of interdependence that develop in urban environments. Some of the most crucial developments in this process include the following: 1) Increased need for interaction among diverse types of people, 2) symbols and other forms of commonality external to the individual, and 3) development of institutions and mechanisms for regulating such interaction and upholding such symbols. First, literatures on urban sociology and research on civil liberties are used to create an urbanism- tolerance paradigm. Short comings of urbanism are discussed through more detailed views of the composition of populations and the potential for subcultural development. I then argue that past efforts to explain tolerance have been biased by attitudinal measures of the extension of civil liberties. Review of the historic context of urbanism and tolerance show that toleration of differences, at the structural level, is quite prevalent and that tolerant behavior is, in fact, a way of life.Item Urban-Architectural Design After Exile: Communities in Search of a Minor Architecture(2012-08-30) Angell, Bradley 1976-This dissertation analogically applies a framework of minor literary analysis to uniquely political units of the built environment. As urbanism is conventionally understood to be executed per the greatest utility of established communal objectives, an underlying politicization is inherent as such forms must adhere to dominant norms of development which potentially marginalize those who practice cultural methods outside normative standards. Employing a uniquely architectural method of environmental justice advocacy, select communities facing disenfranchisement react by self-producing urban-architectural forms ("UAFs") to protect threatened cultural values from marginalization. Installed to subvert the existing power dynamic, such UAFs are potential exhibitions of minor architecture. Adopting the analytical standards established by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari for evaluating Franz Kafka's literature, this paper tests six UAFs to discover if a minor architecture is possible under contemporary globalization. Employing an enumerated framework of minor production characteristics, an interpretive-historical analysis is the primary method of judgment regarding each unit's execution of minor architecture. Two secondary tests are undertaken to validate the primary findings, the first of which is a physio-logical evaluation that characterizes and measures urban resource utility as per collective minority aims. Second, a newspaper correlation test is undertaken so as to judge the enunciative effectiveness of each community per issues of minority politics. Of the six cases examined, two have their source in cinema including "Bartertown" of MAD MAX BEYOND THUNDERDOME (1985) and the "House on Paper Street" of FIGHT CLUB (1999). The four remaining cases include the Tibetan Government-in-Exile of Dharamsala, India; Student Bonfire of Robertson County, Texas; Isla Vista Recreation & Park District of Santa Barbara County, California; and the Emergent Cannabis Community of Arcata, California. Of all the cases studied, only the Tibetan Government-in-Exile met both the conditions of minor architecture and was validated in terms of practiced urban resource use as well as effective representation in mainstream newsprint. Both cinematic cases failed as minor productions of the built environment. Although they did not find full validation, the three remaining real-world UAFs each were found on a course of minor architectural expression at varying stages of execution.Item Visible features : Austin(2014-05) Hart, Jonas Spencer; Reynolds, Ann Morris; Sutherland, Dan, 1966-This report is a summary of my work and research during my three years at The University of Texas at Austin. I engage the city's impressive urban parks and new urbanist developments through my own practice of descriptive and interpretive landscape painting. Through continuous exploration of the city, research into the history of landscape painting and into the strategies of modern landscape architecture, I have learned to see more clearly the role that the visual history of depicted landscape plays in contemporary practices of landscape design and construction. This has reinforced my interest in understanding how painting as a medium plays a role in our cultural understandings of how landscapes should look and act. By experimenting with new formats and materials I continue to adapt my work to articulate a new, dynamic understanding of landscape in flux and inextricable from its human inhabitants.