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 role of neighborhood organizations in the production of gentrifiable urban space: The case of Wynwood, Miami's Puerto Rican barrio

Partnerships between government and community-based actors and organizations are considered the hallmark of contemporary governance arrangements for the revitalization and gentrification of economically distressed, inner city areas. This dissertation uses historical, narrative analysis and ethnographic methods to examine the formation, evolution and operation of community-based governance partnerships in the production of gentrifiable urban space in the Wynwood neighborhood of Miami, FL between 1970 and 2010. This research is based on more than four years of participant observation, 60 in-depth interviews with respondents recruited through a purposive snowball sample, review of secondary and archival sources, and descriptive, statistical and GIS analysis. This study examines how different organizations formed in the neighborhood since the 1970s have facilitated the recent gentrification of Wynwood. It reveals specifically how partnerships between neighborhood-based government agencies, nonprofit organizations and real estate developers were constructed to be exclusionary and lead to inequitable economic development outcomes for Wynwood residents. The key factors conditioning these inequalities include both the rationalities of action of the organizations involved and the historical contexts in which their leaders’ thinking and actions were shaped. The historical contexts included the ethnic politics of organizational funding in the 1970s and the “entrepreneurial” turn of community-based economic development and Miami urban politics since the 1980s. Over time neighborhood organizations adopted highly pragmatic rationalities and repertoires of action. By the 2000s when Wynwood experienced unprecedented investment and redevelopment, the pragmatism of community-based organizations led them to become junior partners in governance arrangements and neighborhood activists were unable to directly challenge the inequitable processes and outcomes of gentrification.

Sunray etched Visors for the Jamaican Olympic Team in three colours: yellow, green and black

Design for visors for the delegation from Jamaica to the London Olympic Games 2012. This design was commissioned by PUMA 2012 based on McLean's designs featured in the website House of Flora, which functions as a space of display, archive, folio, point of sale and dissemination. The McLean standard design for visors is a component of the avant garde, pret a porter millinery, accessory design collections, and stylistically customised for the Jamaican team. McLean's oeuvre is original in its integration of the experimental traditions of art school workshop culture with the professional demands of fashion manufacture and trade culture. Combining the innovation of the postmodern urban artisan with the exacting demands of industrial production, dissemination and distribution McLean's design work spans the disparate worlds of national art collections such as the Victoria and Albert Museum (A Hat Anthology Exhibition, and catalogue 2009), London Design Museum ( Fifty Hats that Changed the World 2009). Integrating design considerations of multiple and mass production with the stylistic considerations of the studio workshop McLean brings the wit of the avant garde urban artisan to the structures and systems of fashion industry. The designs reach to a global audience as product users, as well as to the international connoisseurship of crafts and design specialists. The rigour of McLean's research and innovation is evident in the specificity of the stylistic references made through her selection of materials, processes, form, colour and symbolism. A range of cultural references cite the rich fusion of early twentieth century modernist culture in which the disparate worlds of popular, proletarian, culture fertilised the stylistic austerity of high modern formalism. McLean here considers the relationship between millinery and coiffure, following from the millinery piece featured in (Marcel bobbed hairpiece hat), and now brings the considerations of ethnic difference to bear on her design. Afro hair brings user group specificity to the milliner, and the visor design is a resolution of function and style for both protection and display. Connoting the sartorial conventions of workwear headgear, rather than the nineteenth century colonial 'cricketer's' cap, or the twentieth century US 'baseball' peaked cap, McLean's 'Jamaican Olympic Visor' brings distinctively postcolonial meaning to the cultural profile of the heterotopic media space. Designing for the popular culture of Olympic sports, televised and broadcast to global audiences, brings new forms of agency to the fashion designer, and McLan's design deploys a style that is widely recognisable from other popular culture's film and TV depictions of workwear to mark the distinctive tradition of supremacy that black athletes bring to the European traditions of cultural heritage. Supplanting the Arcadian 'laurels' with which winners are, traditionally, crowned, McLean's visor design innovation, suggests that it is not impossible to challenge and transform apparently timeless hierarchies of power and supremacy, so that ex-slaves may also become victors. McLean's fashion designs all work within this reach of fashion towards the carnivalesque inversion of social orderliness through play, display and sartorial activism.

Adapting the social-ecological system framework for urban stormwater management: the case of green infrastructure adoption

Stormwater management has long been a critical societal and environmental challenge for communities. An increasing number of municipalities are turning to novel approaches such as green infrastructure to develop more sustainable stormwater management systems. However, there is a need to better understand the technological decision-making processes that lead to specific outcomes within urban stormwater governance systems. We used the social-ecological system (SES) framework to build a classification system for identifying significant variables that influence urban stormwater governance decisions related to green infrastructure adoption. To adapt the framework, we relied on findings from observations at national stormwater meetings in combination with a systematic literature review on influential factors related to green infrastructure adoption. We discuss our revisions to the framework that helped us understand the decision by municipal governments to adopt green infrastructure. Remaining research needs and challenges are discussed regarding the development of an urban stormwater SES framework as a classification tool for knowledge accumulation and synthesis.

Redefining Urban Alleywalls: Urban Design for Active Public Space in Maynard Alley, Chinatown-International District, Seattle

Thesis (Master's)--University of Washington, 2016-06

Consumerism in urban Russia in the 1880s and 90s: Exploring conceptions of time, space, and modernity through bicycle and watch advertisements

This paper discusses the urban consumer culture in Moscow and Petersburg during the 1880s and 1890s and uses the consumption of bicycles and watches as a lens through which to explore changing perceptions of time and space within the experience of modernity at the end of the nineteenth century. Specifically, I argue that the way in which consumers and merchants constructed a dialogue of meaning around particular objects; the way in which objects are consumed by a culture gives insight into the values, morals, and tenure of that culture. The paper preferences newspaper ads and photographs as the mouthpieces of merchants and consumers respectively as they constructed a dialogue in the language of consumerism, and explores the ways in which both parties sought to assign meaning to objects during the experience of modernity. I am particularly interested in the way consumers perform elements of cultural modernity in photographs and how these instances of performance relate to their negotiation of modernity. The paper takes as its focus large section of the urban Russian population, much of whom can traditionally be called “middle class” but whose diversity has led me to the adoption of the term “consumer community,” and whose makeup is described in detail. The paper contributes to the continuing scholarly discourse on the makeup of the middle class in Russia and the social boundaries of late tsarist society. It speaks to the the developing sensibilities and values of a generation struggling to define itself in a rapidly changing world, to the ways in which conceptualizations of public and private space, as well as feminine and masculine space were redefined, and to the developing visual culture of the Russian consumer society, largely predicated on the display of objects to signify socially desirable traits. Whereas other explorations of consumer culture and advertisements have portrayed the relationship between merchants and consumers as a one-sided monologue in which merchants convince consumers that certain objects have cultural value, I emphasis the dialogue between merchants and consumers, and their mutual negotiation of cultural meaning through objects.

Regenerative Stormwater Conveyance: Design Implications of an Urban Case Demonstration in Baltimore, Maryland

This research-design thesis explores the implementation of Regenerative Stormwater Conveyance (RSC) as a retrofit of an existing impervious drainage system in a small catchment in the degraded Jones Falls watershed in Baltimore City. An introduction to RSC is provided, placing its development within a theoretical context of novel ecosystems, biomimicry and Nassauer and Opdam’s (2008) model of landscape innovation. The case site is in Baltimore’s Hampden neighborhood on City-owned land adjacent to rowhomes, open space and an access point to a popular wooded trail along a local stream. The design proposal employs RSC to retrofit an ill-performing stormwater system, simultaneously providing a range of ecological, social and economic services; water quantity, water quality and economic performance of the proposed RSC are quantified. While the proposed design is site-specific the model is adaptable for retrofitting other small-scale impervious drainage systems, providing a strategic tool in addressing Baltimore City’s stormwater challenges.

Living Our Lives on the Edge: Power, Space and Sexual Orientation in Cape Town Townships, South Africa

Much of social science literature about South African cities fails to represent its complex spectrum of sexual practices and associated identities. The unintended effects of such representations are that a compulsory heterosexuality is naturalised in, and reiterative with, dominant constructions of blackness in townships. In this paper, we argue that the assertion of discreet lesbian and gay identities in black townships of a South African city such as Cape Town is influenced by the historical racial and socio-economic divides that have marked urban landscape. In their efforts to recoup a positive sense of gendered personhood, residents have constructed a moral economy anchored in reproductive heterosexuality. We draw upon ethnographic data to show how sexual minorities live their lives vicariously in spaces they have prised open within the extant sex/gender binary. They are able to assert the identities of moffie and man-vrou (mannish woman) without threatening the dominant ideology of heterosexuality.

Complex natural resonances of conducting planar objects buried in a dielectric half-space

A scheme is presented to incorporate a mixed potential integral equation (MPIE) using Michalski's formulation C with the method of moments (MoM) for analyzing the scattering of a plane wave from conducting planar objects buried in a dielectric half-space. The robust complex image method with a two-level approximation is used for the calculation of the Green's functions for the half-space. To further speed up the computation, an interpolation technique for filling the matrix is employed. While the induced current distributions on the object's surface are obtained in the frequency domain, the corresponding time domain responses are calculated via the inverse fast Fourier transform (FFT), The complex natural resonances of targets are then extracted from the late time response using the generalized pencil-of-function (GPOF) method. We investigate the pole trajectories as we vary the distance between strips and the depth and orientation of single, buried strips, The variation from the pole position of a single strip in a homogeneous dielectric medium was only a few percent for most of these parameter variations.

On the fast approximation of Green's functions in MPIE formulations for planar layered media

The numerical implementation of the complex image approach for the Green's function of a mixed-potential integralequation formulation is examined and is found to be limited to low values of k(0) rho (in this context k(0) rho = 2 pirho/ lambda(0), where rho is the distance between the source and the field points of the Green's function and lambda(0) is the free space wavelength). This is a clear limitation for problems of large dimension or high frequency where this limit is easily exceeded. This paper examines the various strategies and proposes a hybrid method whereby most of the above problems can be avoided. An efficient integral method that is valid for large k(0) rho is combined with the complex image method in order to take advantage of the relative merits of both schemes. It is found that a wide overlapping region exists between the two techniques allowing a very efficient and consistent approach for accurately calculating the Green's functions. In this paper, the method developed for the computation of the Green's function is used for planar structures containing both lossless and lossy media.

Redes, (en)traves e cercas : notas etnográficas de um conflito socioambiental

Esta dissertação pretende contribuir no debate sobre o conflito socioambiental existente no Campinho, situado no alto do morro da Fonte Grande, Vitória (ES), cenário de uma disputa, profundamente desigual em termos de poder político dos agentes humanos envolvidos, por um espaço urbano “verde” imprensado entre duas secções de uma área de proteção integral, em que habita um coletivo há gerações. Através da etnografia, procurei seguir atores humanos e não-humanos para entender as representações dos ambientalistas, gestores e técnicos ambientais bem como do coletivo, cujas perspectivas defendidas reiteram de um lado a oposição entre natureza e sociedade, consolidando políticas de reclusão (natural) e exclusão (social), e de outro a permanência e o pertencimento ao lugar, como guardiões atuantes de outro regime de relações entre humanos e não-humanos.

Lutzomyia longipalpis behavior and control at an urban visceral leishmaniasis focus in Argentina

During the earlier stages of visceral leishmaniasis transmission in Posadas City, Misiones, both the night activity and attraction to humans of Lutzomyia longipalpis were assessed, in order to provide preliminary recommendations. The impact of peridomestic deltamethrin spraying performed by local officials was also evaluated. Although Lu. longipalpis were found in traps located over a dog the entire night, 90% of the females were captured from 20.30h to 1.30h, and only landed on a human when he was at a distance of 1.5 m from the dog. Peridomestic spraying of deltamethrin (25 mg/m²) reduced the sand fly capture up to seven days post-intervention without dispersion in the border of the sprayed areas. These results support the recommendations about time-space focus of the protection measures: first half of the night, in the backyard, with pets and domestic animals kept at least 5 m from humans. The deltamethrin as it was used did not seem very effective in this scenario; neither did the eventual use of bed nets, at least in adults, due to the place/hour of sand fly higher activity. This study strengthens the need for a multidisciplinary approach to develop prevention strategies based both on biological and anthropological studies.

Quantification of urban land use intensity - A case of Dhaka City of Bangladesh

Dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Degree of Master of Science in Geospatial Technologies.

Public Participation geographic information systems in developing countries: lessons from Uganda on the impacts of interactive screens PPGIS and community perceptions of space

Dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Degree of Master of Science in Geospatial Technologies.

Safe reuse of treated urban wastewater in Praia, Cape Verde: a case study

Dissertação para a obtenção do Grau de Mestre em Engenharia e Gestão da Água