Rebalancing urban mobility: a tale of four cities

The key of mobility in urban planning is not in dispute. Integrated strategies that take into account the interrelations among land use, transport supply and demand and the different transportation modes are more necessary than ever. In Europe, regulatory tools such as local mobility plans or traffic plans have been enforced for a long time, evolving into so-called sustainable urban transport plans (SUTP) ? that is, plans thatmerge urban planning,mobility governance, social awareness and environmental safeguards to develop a vision based on sustainability and equity. Indeed, SUTP are aimed at solving typical problems in current land use, such as urban sprawl, which make clear the need for a paradigm shift from transport (or mobility) planning to land use (or city) planning, thereby producing urban mobility plans that are fully aligned with integrated urban development plans. This paper describes how SUTP are articulated across Europe according to four case studies: Peterborough (UK), Chambe¿ry (France), Ferrara (Italy) and Pinto (Spain), to highlight variations and commonalities, both among the four national legal frameworks and the actual planning processes at the local level. Objectives, measures and indicators used in the monitoring and evaluation phases have been analysed and the results assessed. The main conclusion of the paper is that, as seen in these real-life examples, the lack of integration between spatial planning and transport strategies results in the unsustainability of urban areas and, therefore, in a significant loss of competitiveness.

Sensing Aeropolis. Urban air monitoring devices in Madrid, 2006-2010

Esta tesis examina las implicaciones técnicas, políticas y espaciales del aire urbano, y en concreto, de la calidad del aire, para tenerlo en cuenta desde una perspectiva arquitectónica. En oposición a formas de entender el aire como un vacío o como una metáfora, este proyecto propone abordarlo desde un acercamiento material y tecnológico, trayendo el entorno al primer plano y reconociendo sus múltiples agencias. Debido a la escasa bibliografía detectada en el campo de la arquitectura, el objetivo es construir un marco teórico-analítico para considerar el aire urbano. Para ello el trabajo construye Aeropolis, una metáfora heurística que describe el ensamblaje sociotecnico de la ciudad. Situada en la intersección de determinadas ramas de la filosofía de la cultura, los estudios sobre ciencia y tecnología y estudios feministas de la ciencia este nuevo paisaje conceptual ofrece una metodología y herramientas para abordar el objeto de estudio desde distintos ángulos. Estas herramientas metodológicas han sido desarrolladas en el contexto específico de Madrid, ciudad muy contaminada cuyo aire ha sido objeto de controversias políticas y sociales, y donde las políticas y tecnologías para reducir sus niveles no han sido exitosas. Para encontrar una implicación alternativa con el aire esta tesis propone un método de investigación de agentes invisibles a partir del análisis de sus dispositivos epistémicos. Se centra, en concreto, en los instrumentos que miden, visualizan y comunican la calidad del aire, proponiendo que no sólo lo representan, sino que son también instrumentos que diseñan el aire y la ciudad. La noción de “sensing” (en castellano medir y sentir) es expandida, reconociendo distintas prácticas que reconstruyen el aire de Madrid. El resultado de esta estrategia no es sólo la ampliación de los espacios desde los que relacionarnos con el aire, sino también la legitimación de prácticas existentes fuera de contextos científicos y administrativos, como por ejemplo prácticas relacionadas con el cuerpo, así como la redistribución de agencias entre más actores. Así, esta tesis trata sobre toxicidad, la Unión Europea, producción colaborativa, modelos de computación, dolores de cabeza, kits DIY, gases, cuerpos humanos, salas de control, sangre o políticos, entre otros. Los dispositivos que sirven de datos empíricos sirven como un ejemplo excepcional para investigar infraestructuras digitales, permitiendo desafiar nociones sobre Ciudades Inteligentes. La tesis pone especial atención en los efectos del aire en el espacio público, reconociendo los procesos de invisibilización que han sufrido sus infraestructuras de monitorización. Para terminar se exponen líneas de trabajo y oportunidades para la arquitectura y el diseño urbano a través de nuevas relaciones entre infraestructuras urbanas, el medio construido, espacios domésticos y públicos y humanos y no humanos, para crear nuevas ecologías políticas urbanas (queer). ABSTRACT This thesis examines the technical, political and spatial implications of urban air, and more specifically "air quality", in order to consider it from an architectural perspective. In opposition to understandings of the air either as a void or as a metaphor, this project proposes to inspect it from a material and technical approach, bringing the background to the fore and acknowledging its multiple agencies. Due to the scarce bibliography within the architectural field, its first aim is to construct a theoretical and analytical framework from which to consider urban air. For this purpose, the work attempts the construction of Aeropolis, a heuristic metaphor that describes the city's aero socio-material assemblage. Located at the intersection of certain currents in cultural philosophy, science and technology studies as well as feminist studies in technoscience, this framework enables a methodology and toolset to be extracted in order to approach the subject matter from different angles. The methodological tools stemming from this purpose-built framework were put to the test in a specific case study: Madrid, a highly polluted city whose air has been subject to political and social controversies, and where no effective policies or technologies have been successful in reducing its levels of pollution. In order to engage with the air, the thesis suggests a method for researching invisible agents by examining the epistemic devices involved. It locates and focuses on the instruments that sense, visualise and communicate urban air, claiming that they do not only represent it, but are also instruments that design the air and the city. The notion of "sensing" is then expanded by recognising different practices which enact the air in Madrid. The work claims that the result of this is not only the opening up of spaces for engagement but also the legitimisation of existing practices outside science and policymaking environments, such as embodied practices, as well as the redistribution of agency among more actors. So this is a thesis about toxicity, the European Union, collaborative production, scientific computational models, headaches, DIY kits, gases, human bodies, control rooms, blood, or politicians, among many others. The devices found throughout the work serve as an exceptional substrate for an investigation of digital infrastructures, enabling to challenge Smart City tropes. There is special attention paid to the effects of the air on the public space, acknowledging the silencing processes these infrastructures have been subjected to. Finally there is an outline of the opportunities arising for architecture and urban design when taking the air into account, to create new (queer) urban political ecologies between the air, urban infrastructures, the built environment, public and domestic spaces, and humans and more than humans.

Urbanism and dictatorship: perspectives of the field of urban studies

In 1933 public letter to Wilhelm Furtwängler, Joseph Goebbels synthesized the official understanding of the link between politics, art and society in the early steps of the Third Reich. By assuming the ethos of art, politics acquired a plastic agency to mold its objects —population and the state— as a unified entity in the form of a ‘national-popular community’ (Volksgemeinschaft); in turn, by infusing art with a political valence, it became part of a wider governmental apparatus that reshaped aesthetic discourses and practices. Similar remarks could be made about the ordering of cities and territories in this period. Dictatorial imaginations mobilized urbanism —including urban theory, urban design and planning— as a fundamental tool for social organization. Under their aegis the production of space became a moment in a wider production of society. Many authors suggest that this political-spatial nexus is intrinsic to modernity itself, beyond dictatorial regimes. In this light, I propose to use dictatorial urbanisms as an analytical opportunity to delve into some concealed features of modern urban design and planning. This chapter explores some of these aspects from a theoretical standpoint, focusing on the development of dictatorial planning mentalities and spatial rationalities and drawing links to other historical episodes in order to inscribe the former in a broader genealogy of urbanism. Needless to say, I don’t suggest that we use dictatorships as mere templates to understand modern productions of space. Instead, these cases provide a crude version of some fundamental drives in the operationalization of urbanism as an instrument of social regulation, showing how far the modern imagination of sociospatial orderings can go. Dictatorial urbanisms constituted a set of experiences where many dreams and aspirations of modern planning went to die. But not, as the conventional account would have it, because the former were the antithesis of the latter, but rather because they worked as the excess of a particular orientation of modern spatial governmentalities — namely, their focus on calculation, social engineering and disciplinary spatialities, and their attempt to subsume a wide range of everyday practices under institutional structuration by means of spatial mediations. In my opinion the interest of dictatorial urbanisms lies in their role as key regulatory episodes in a longer history of our urban present. They stand as a threshold between the advent of planning in the late 19th and early 20th century, and its final consolidation as a crucial state instrument after World War II. We need, therefore, to pay attention to these experiences vis-à-vis the alleged ‘normal’ development of the field in contemporary democratic countries in order to develop a full comprehension thereof.

Urban voids, spaces of great expectations

Study and progress of urban voids. opportunities for new urban design.

Hybridization Processes: The case of the urban game: Hybrid Hunt: Petrified

The proposal highlights certain design strategies and a case study that can link the material urban space to digital emerging realms. The composite nature of urban spaces ?material/ digital- is understood as an opportunity to reconfigure public urban spaces without high-cost, difficult to apply interventions and, furthermore, to reactivate them by inserting dynamic, interactive and playful conditions that engage people and re-establish their relations to the cities. The structuring of coexisting and interconnected material and digital aspects in public urban spaces is proposed through the implementation of hybridization processes. Hybrid spaces can fascinate and provoke the public and especially younger people to get involved and interact with physical aspects of urban public spaces as well as digital representations or interpretations of those. Digital game?s design in urban public spaces can be comprehended as a tool that allows architects to understand and to configure hybrids of material and digital conceptions and project all in one, as an inseparable totality. Digital technologies have for a long time now intervened in our perception of traditional dipoles such as subject - environment. Architects, especially in the past, have been responsible for material mediations and tangible interfaces that permit subjects to relate to their physical environments in a controlled and regulated manner; but, nowadays, architects are compelled to embody in design, the transition that is happening in all aspects of everyday life, that is, from material to digital realities. In addition, the disjunctive relation of material and digital realms is ceding and architects are now faced with the challenge that supposes the merging of both in a single, all-inclusive reality. The case study is a design project for a game implemented simultaneously in a specific urban space and on the internet. This project developed as the spring semester course New Media in Architecture at the Department of Architecture, Democritus University of Thrace, Greece is situated at the city of Xanthi. Composite cities can use design strategies and technological tools to configure augmented and appealing urban spaces that articulate and connect different realms in a single engaging reality.

Urban Planning 2. Informal notes from the course’s practical content (2014-2015)

This document compiles, in an informal manner, the briefs of some of the practical exercises developed during the Urban Planning 2 course. The purpose of this compilation is to serve as reference and basis for future courses.

Portland’s Urban Growth Boundary and Lessons for Shanghai and Suzhou-Wuxi-Changzhou Urban Agglomeration, China

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

PLACE AND URBAN EXPERIENCE IN THE SUBURBS: MICROSOFT’S CAMPUS LOCATION AND ITS LONG-TERM COMPETITIVENESS

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

From Process to Product: An Analysis of Seattle's Design Review Program

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

Common Ground: Building A Better Seattle Through an Improved Democratization of The City’s Design Review Process

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

A MORE COMPLETE STREET A STREET FOR EVERYONE TO ENJOY, NORTH EAST STREET, FREDERICK, MARYLAND – A DESIGN INVESTIGATION OF DIFFERENT STREET DESIGN THEORIES

This design-research thesis suggests that the improvement of North East Street performances by using Complete Streets, Green Street, Place Making and Context Sensitive Solution principles and practices. Heavily used by a variety of users, often conflicting with one another, University of Maryland Campus Drive would benefit from a major planning and design amelioration to meet the increasing demands of serving as a city main street. The goal of this thesis project is to prioritize the benefits for pedestrians in the right-of-way and improve the pedestrian experience. This goal also responds to the recent North East Street Extension Phrase I of economic renaissances. The goal of this design-research thesis will be achieved focusing on four aspects. First, the plans and designs will suggest to building mixed use blocks, increase the diversity of street economic types and convenience of people’s living. Second, design and plans will propose bike lanes, separate driving lanes from sidewalks and bike lanes by street tree planters, and narrow driving lanes to reduce vehicular traffic volume and speed in order to reduce pedestrian and vehicle conflicts. Third, plans and designs will introduce bioswales, living walls and raingardens to treat and reuse rain water. Finally, the plans and designs will seek to preserve local culture and history by adding murals and farmers market. The outcome of the design-research thesis project is expected to serve as an example of implementing Complete Streets, Green Street, Place Making and Context Sensitive Solution principles and practices in urban landscape, where transportation, environment and social needs interact with each other.

Urban Identity and tourism:different looks, one single place

‘Urban identity’ is high on the policy agenda and pervades the discourse of the planning community on the value of historical city centres. Unfortunately, there seems to be, until today, no proposal in scholarly literature of any unified conceptual framework or any tools to make identity operational. ‘Tourism’ takes advantage of this process, by seeking the qualities of the place, its authenticity and its perceived uniqueness that is grounded on the physical features as well as on the presence of local communities – their way of living and investing in the place. The interdependence between identity as perceived by tourists (external observer) and the identity of the residents rooted in the relationship with the place (in-group) are key to addressing the identity of historic urban areas. These issues are addressed in the context of the growing attractiveness of Lisbon, Portugal, using a historic neighbourhood as a case study. The findings, which are on a set of interviews with different groups of users, showed the points of convergence and divergence between the different groups’ views of the neighbourhood’s identity. This actor-oriented approach is pivotal to understanding the process and to produce knowledge for informed action.

Leonardo Ricci in the United States (1952-1972). A twenty-year American transfer as a turning experience in teaching and design.

The research solved the historiographic lacuna about Leonardo Ricci’s work in the United States focusing on the span 1952-1972 as a fundamental period for the architect's research, which moved from the project for the community space to macrostructures. The considered period is comprised between Ricci’s first travel to the United States and the date of his resignation from the University of Florida, one year before his resignation from the deanship of the faculty of architecture of Florence (1973). The research retraced philologically the stages of Ricci’s activity in the U.S.A. unveiling the premises and results of his American transfer, and to what extent it marked a turning period for his work as educator and designer and for the wider historiographic contest of the Sixties. The American transfer helped him grounding his belief in avoiding a priori morphological results in favor of what he called the “form-act” design method. Ricci’s research in the U.S.A. is described in his books Anonymous (XX century) and City of the Earth (unpublished). In them and in Ricci’s projects one common thread is traceable: the application of the “form-act” as the best tool to conceive urban design, a discipline established in the United States during Ricci’s first stay at M.I.T., in which he encountered the balance point between architecture and urban planning, between the architect’s sign and his being anonymous, between the collective and the individual dimension. With the notions of “anonymous architecture” and “form-act”, Urban Design and “open work” are the key words to understand Ricci’s work in the United States and in Italy. Urban design’s main goal to design the city as a collective work of art was the solution of that dychothomous research that enlivened Ricci’s work and one possible answer to that tension useful for him to seek the truth of architecture.

Associations between rural background and where South Australian general practitioners work

Objective: To determine the association between rural background on practice location of general practitioners (GPs) (rural or urban). Design: Comparison of data from two postal surveys. Subjects: 268 rural and 236 urban GPs practising in South Australia. Main outcome measures: Association between practice location (rural or urban) and demographic characteristics, training, qualifications, and rural background. Results: Rural GPs were younger than urban GPs (mean age 47 versus 50 years, P<0,01) and more likely to be male (81% versus 67%, P=0.001), to be Australian-born (72% Versus 61%, P=0,01), to have a partner (95% versus 85%, P= 0.001), and to have children (94% Versus 85%, P=0.001). Similar proportions of rural and urban GPs were trained in Australia and were Fellows of the Royal Australian College of General Practitioners, but more rural GPs were vocationally registered (94% versus 84%, P=0,001). Rural GPs were more likely to have grown up in the country (37% versus 27%, P= 0,02), to have received primary (33% versus 19%, P=0,001) and secondary (25% versus 13%, P=0,001) education there, and to have a partner who grew up in the country (49% Versus 24%, P=0.001). In multivariate analysis, only primary education in the country (odds ratio [OR], 2.43; 95% CI, 1.09-5.56) and partner of rural background (OR, 3.14; 95% CI, 1.96-5.10) were independently associated with rural practice. Conclusion: Our findings support the policy of promoting entry to medical school of students with a rural background and provide an argument for policies that address the needs of partners and maintain quality primary and secondary education in the country.