Blurring the lines between public and private spaces in residential design

This thesis explores the role of public space as an integral part of residential design to promote a sense of community, where neighbors can congregate and children can play in safety. ^ Through research and analysis of successful public spaces, I evaluated relationships between dwellings and public spaces that offer progressive levels of privacy, and between indoor and outdoor spaces. Further research of published studies on child development, human behavior and relationships with nature identified a human preference for natural environments, a need for adequate recreation space for children's development and the potential of open spaces to build a strong sense of community. ^ My project develops multiple transitional spaces between the street and the interior of dwellings that provide varying degrees of privacy closely related to the community's green spaces. The result is a community-oriented pedestrian environment that encourages family and community values and contributes to the healthy living of its residents without depriving them of their privacy. ^

Disease and hygiene in the construction of a nation: The public sphere, public space, and the private domain in Buenos Aires, 1871–1910

The maturation of the public sphere in Argentina during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was a critical element in the nation-building process and the overall development of the modern state. Within the context of this evolution, the discourse of disease generated intense debates that subsequently influenced policies that transformed the public spaces of Buenos Aires and facilitated state intervention within the private domains of the city’s inhabitants. Under the banner of hygiene and public health, municipal officials thus Europeanized the nation’s capital through the construction of parks and plazas and likewise utilized the press to garner support for the initiatives that would remedy the unsanitary conditions and practices of the city. Despite promises to the contrary, the improvements to the public spaces of Buenos Aires primarily benefited the porteño elite while the efforts to root out disease often targeted working-class neighborhoods. The model that reformed the public space of Buenos Aires, including its socially differentiated application of aesthetic order and public health policies, was ultimately employed throughout the Argentine Republic as the consolidated political elite rolled out its national program of material and social development.

Theorizing suburban public space in Kendall

The purpose of this study was to determine whether public space in the suburbs has the same settings as that of a central city or if it has its own characteristics. In order to approach this problem the area of Kendall was thoroughly studied by examining aerial maps, historic images and writings of local historians such as Donna Knowles Born. Heavy emphasis was placed on the transformation of the original one-mile grid characteristic of the city of Miami. As the area of Kendall was being developed, the grid was transformed into an irregular and organic method of laying out a street system that directly affected pedestrian life. It became evident, therefore, that Kendall is primarily geared toward automobile movement, thus affecting the setting of public space. This also restricted social events forcing them to concentrate in specific places like the malls. These findings demonstrated that malls are centers of social interaction concentrating many social activities in one place. In other words, a mall serves as a common meeting place in the otherwise vast spread of the suburbs. This thesis also explains how public spaces in a suburban context can affect the community by working as filtering agents between the immediate context of a particular site and the overall city. The project, a "Wellness Center and Park" for the Kendall area, was an exploration of these filtering agents and the transitions they engendered. The research upon which this project was based recognized the important role of the site's history as well as extrapolating as to its future potential.

Schools and the formation of Black identity during the Civil Rights Movement: Change and resistance in Holly Springs, Mississippi, 1964--1974

Desegregation of social and public spaces was the most visible result of the Civil Rights Movement. After 1960, the integration of schools in Mississippi became a source of conflict. The social change of Civil Rights attacked the social order of White Resistance that supported the state superstructure. The public schools were a place for the discovery of identity for Blacks. The integrated on of the schools caused many Whites to leave rather than be integrated with Blacks. Desegregation of schools was also a slow process because the local and state government could not enforce the decisions of the US Courts, leading Blacks to realize their place in American society could only be secured through individual action. ^ This work explains the role of schooling during the integration of the Holly Springs Separate School System. The process of forging a new identity by local Blacks is examined against the forces of social change and resistance. I addition, this work examines the perils for the Blacks as they faced the uncertainty of change in the crucial Civil Rights years between 1964 and 1974. ^ This work analyzes how the Black community dealt with the problems triggered by the desegregation of the school system in Holly Springs, of a constructed social condition, a psychological state of being, the realities of racism and segregation, and the change and resistance between the individual and the collective. It is based on six months of field work investigation. Although the schools were a crucial aspect of community life for Blacks and Whites, Blacks did form their identity in them. Other institutions, such churches were more crucial. Second, the aspect of politeness and belief in law made the experience in Holly Springs unique to that place, and thus, warrants further study to determine its place within the Civil Rights Movement. Finally, while the political and economic control of Holly Springs remained with Whites, desegregation led to the resegregation of the public schools: as Whites left to private schools. ^

Re-imagining Yerevan in the post-Soviet era: Urban symbolism and narratives of the nation in the landscape of Armenia's capital

The urban landscape of Yerevan has experienced tremendous changes since the collapse of the Soviet Union and Armenia’s independence in 1991. Domestic and foreign investments have poured into Yerevan’s building sector, converting many downtown neighborhoods into sleek modern districts that now cater to foreign investors, tourists, and the newly rich Armenian nationals. Large portions of the city’s green parks and other public spaces have been commercialized for private and exclusive use, creating zones that are accessible only to the affluent. In this dissertation I explore the rapidly transforming landscape of Yerevan and its connections to the development of contemporary Armenian national identity. This research was guided by principles of ethnographic inquiry, and I employed diverse methods, including document and archival research, structured and semi-structured interviews and content analysis of news media. I also used geographic information systems (GIS) and satellite images to represent and visualize the stark transformations of spaces in Yerevan. Informed by and contributing to three literatures—on the relationship between landscape and identity formation, on the construction of national identity, and on Soviet and post-Soviet cities—this dissertation investigates how messages about contemporary Armenian national identity are being expressed via the transforming landscape of Armenia’s national capital. In it I describe the ways in which abrupt transformations have resulted in the physical and symbolic eviction of residents, introducing fierce public debates about belonging and exclusion within the changing urban context. I demonstrate that the new additions to Yerevan’s landscape and the symbolic messages that they carry are hotly contested by many long-time residents, who struggle for inclusion of their opinions and interests in the process of re-imagining their national capital. This dissertation illustrates many of the trends that are apparent in post-Soviet and post-Socialist space, while at the same time exposing some unique characteristics of the Armenian case.

The representation of motherhood in contemporary Catalan fiction

This dissertation analyzes four twenty-first-century Catalan novels which present the complex positions occupied by mothers in the last seven decades. Its conceptual framework posits motherhood as both a changing social construction and a political institution in a constant state of flux. In Inma Monsó´s Todo un carácter (2001), Eva Piquer´s Una victoria diferente (2002), Carme Riera´s La mitad del alma (2004), and Najat El Hachmi´s El último patriarca (2008) motherhood is explored as a metaphorical act, a gender-constructing experience, as well as the locus of expression with regard to gender and power relations. During the dictatorship of Francisco Franco (1939–1975), the majority of women were excluded from public spaces, and forced to stay home to care for their husbands and children. Furthermore, the state criminalized abortion, made contraception and divorce illegal, and promoted an ideal of femininity based on silence, sacrifice, and self-denial. The political changes of the late 1970s allowed women greater personal autonomy, and many women writers began to challenge stereotypical views of women’s social roles. Yet in the 70s and 80s, the narratives of Esther Tusquets, Ana María Moix, and Montserrat Roig represent the mother as a repressive figure whom the daughter must reject in order to liberate herself and regain her voice. It is not until the 90s when the novelists Mercedes Abad, Maruja Torres, Carme Riera, Imma Monsó, Eva Piquer, and María Barbal rehumanize the mother figure, recovering their matrilineal heritage. However, far from suggesting a unified trend in representations of motherhood in Catalan fiction, the diverse points of view of the novels under discussion here reveal that differences in attitudes among women authors about mother-daughter conflict are far from resolved. The theoretical background for this dissertation draws mainly on the work of Adrienne Rich, Nancy Chodorow, and Julia Kristeva. It includes psychoanalytic studies as well as sociologically based essays by Anna López Puig, Amparo Acereda, Jacqueline Cruz, Barbara Zecchi, Ángeles de la Concha, and Raquel Osborne, among others.

Cultural perceptions of space and place in the South Florida *environment

Public opinion polls in the United States reveal that a great majority of Americans are aware and show concern about ecological issues and the need to preserve natural areas. In South Florida, natural resources have been subjected to enormous strain as the pressure to accommodate a growing population has led to rapid development. Suburbs have been built on areas that were once natural wetlands and farmlands, and the impact today shows a landscape where natural places have all but disappeared. This dissertation examines the intersection between the perceptions that individuals living in the South Florida region have with respect to the natural environment and local ecological problems with where their relationship to nature takes place. ^ The research is based upon both quantitative and qualitative data. The principal methodology used in this research is the ethnographic method, which employed the data gathering techniques of in-depth interviewing and participant observation. The objective of the qualitative portion of the study was to determine how people perceive and relate to their immediate environment. The quantitative portion of the study employed telephone survey data from the FIU/Florida Poll 2000. Data collected through this survey provided the basis to statistically test responses to the research questions. ^ The findings show that people in South Florida have a general idea of the relationship between the human population and the environment but very little knowledge of how they individually affect each other. The experience of private places and public spaces in everyday life permits people to compartmentalize cultural values and understandings of the natural world in separate cognitive schemas. The appreciation of the natural world has almost no connection to their personal sense of obligation to preserve the environment. That obligation is only felt in their home space even though the South Florida environment overall struggles desperately with water shortages, land encroachment, and a rapidly expanding human population whose activities continuously aggravate an already delicate natural balance. ^

Law Enforcement Actions in Urban Spaces Governed by Violent Non-State Entities: Lessons from Latin America

In response to a crime epidemic afflicting Latin America since the early 1990s, several countries in the region have resorted to using heavy-force police or military units to physically retake territories de facto controlled by non-State criminal or insurgent groups. After a period of territory control, the heavy forces hand law enforcement functions in the retaken territories to regular police officers, with the hope that the territories and their populations will remain under the control of the state. To a varying degree, intensity, and consistency, Brazil, Colombia, Mexico, and Jamaica have adopted such policies since the mid-1990s. During such operations, governments need to pursue two interrelated objectives: to better establish the state’s physical presence and to realign the allegiance of the population in those areas toward the state and away from the non-State criminal entities. From the perspective of law enforcement, such operations entail several critical decisions and junctions, such as: Whether or not to announce the force insertion in advance. The decision trades off the element of surprise and the ability to capture key leaders of the criminal organizations against the ability to minimize civilian casualties and force levels. The latter, however, may allow criminals to go to ground and escape capture. Governments thus must decide whether they merely seek to displace criminal groups to other areas or maximize their decapitation capacity. Intelligence flows rarely come from the population. Often, rival criminal groups are the best source of intelligence. However, cooperation between the State and such groups that goes beyond using vetted intelligence provided by the groups, such as a State tolerance for militias, compromises the rule-of-law integrity of the State and ultimately can eviscerate even public safety gains. Sustaining security after initial clearing operations is at times even more challenging than conducting the initial operations. Although unlike the heavy forces, traditional police forces, especially if designed as community police, have the capacity to develop trust of the community and ultimately focus on crime prevention, developing such trust often takes a long time. To develop the community’s trust, regular police forces need to conduct frequent on-foot patrols with intensive nonthreatening interactions with the population and minimize the use of force. Moreover, sufficiently robust patrol units need to be placed in designated beats for substantial amount of time, often at least over a year. Establishing oversight mechanisms, including joint police-citizens’ boards, further facilities building trust in the police among the community. After disruption of the established criminal order, street crime often significantly rises and both the heavy-force and community-police units often struggle to contain it. The increase in street crime alienates the population of the retaken territory from the State. Thus developing a capacity to address street crime is critical. Moreover, the community police units tend to be vulnerable (especially initially) to efforts by displaced criminals to reoccupy the cleared territories. Losing a cleared territory back to criminal groups is extremely costly in terms of losing any established trust and being able to recover it. Rather than operating on a priori determined handover schedule, a careful assessment of the relative strength of regular police and criminal groups post-clearing operations is likely to be a better guide for timing the handover from heavy forces to regular police units. Cleared territories often experience not only a peace dividend, but also a peace deficit – in the rise new serious crime (in addition to street crime). Newly – valuable land and other previously-inaccessible resources can lead to land speculation and forced displacement; various other forms of new crime can also significantly rise. Community police forces often struggle to cope with such crime, especially as it is frequently linked to legal business. Such new crime often receives little to no attention in the design of the operations to retake territories from criminal groups. But without developing an effective response to such new crime, the public safety gains of the clearing operations can be altogether lost.

Resistance Performances: (Re)constructing Spaces of Resistance and Contention in the 2010-2011 University of Puerto Rico Student Movement

On the night of April 20, 2010, a group of students from the University of Puerto Rico (UPR), Río Piedras campus, met to organize an indefinite strike that quickly broadened into a defense of accessible public higher education of excellence as a fundamental right and not a privilege. Although the history of student activism in the UPR can be traced back to the early 1900s, the 2010-2011 strike will be remembered for the student activists’ use of new media technologies as resources that rapidly prompted and aided the numerous protests. This activist research entailed a critical ethnography and a critical discourse analysis (CDA) of traditional and alternative media coverage and treatment during the 2010 -2011 UPR student strike. I examined the use of the 2010-2011 UPR student activists’ resistance performances in constructing local, corporeal, and virtual spaces of resistance and contention during their movement. In particular, I analyzed the different tactics and strategies of resistance or repertoire of collective actions that student activists used (e.g. new media technologies) to frame their collective identities via alternative news media’s (re)presentation of the strike, while juxtaposing the university administration’s counter-resistance performances in counter-framing the student activists’ collective identity via traditional news media representations of the strike. I illustrated how both traditional and alternative media (re)presentations of student activism developed, maintained, and/or modified students activists’ collective identities. As such, the UPR student activism’s success should not be measured by the sum of demands granted, but by the sense of community achieved and the establishment of networks that continue to create resistance and change. These networks add to the debate surrounding Internet activism and its impact on student activism. Ultimately, the results of this study highlight the important role student movements have had in challenging different types of government policies and raising awareness of the importance of an accessible public higher education of excellence.

Transitional areas between public and private space

This study analyzes transitional areas between public and private space in order to develop a design that might improve social interaction in the city. Architectural elements in specific pedestrian friendly spaces within the Miami area were identified and analyzed as social spaces in terms developed by Ali Mandanipour. Proximity, visual permeability, intersection, layering, and monumentality are design strategies used in many projects to enhance individual encounters. These strategies typically apply to transitional areas and serve as the direct physical links perceived by individuals moving between public and private areas. This project explores the different approaches to transitional areas in the design of an art gallery and surrounding artists' studios on Lincoln Road.

Resistance performances: (Re)constructing spaces of resistance and contention in the 2010-2011 University of Puerto Rico student movement

On the night of April 20, 2010, a group of students from the University of Puerto Rico (UPR), Río Piedras campus, met to organize an indefinite strike that quickly broadened into a defense of accessible public higher education of excellence as a fundamental right and not a privilege. Although the history of student activism in the UPR can be traced back to the early 1900s, the 2010-2011 strike will be remembered for the student activists’ use of new media technologies as resources that rapidly prompted and aided the numerous protests. ^ This activist research entailed a critical ethnography and a critical discourse analysis (CDA) of traditional and alternative media coverage and treatment during the 2010 -2011 UPR student strike. I examined the use of the 2010-2011 UPR student activists’ resistance performances in constructing local, corporeal, and virtual spaces of resistance and contention during their movement. In particular, I analyzed the different tactics and strategies of resistance or repertoire of collective actions that student activists used (e.g. new media technologies) to frame their collective identities via alternative news media’s (re)presentation of the strike, while juxtaposing the university administration’s counter-resistance performances in counter-framing the student activists’ collective identity via traditional news media representations of the strike. I illustrated how both traditional and alternative media (re)presentations of student activism developed, maintained, and/or modified students activists’ collective identities. ^ As such, the UPR student activism’s success should not be measured by the sum of demands granted, but by the sense of community achieved and the establishment of networks that continue to create resistance and change. These networks add to the debate surrounding Internet activism and its impact on student activism. Ultimately, the results of this study highlight the important role student movements have had in challenging different types of government policies and raising awareness of the importance of an accessible public higher education of excellence.^