Wooden Facade Renovation and Additional Floor Construction for Suburban Development in Finland

Finnish urban settlements are in the age of restoration, and the suburbs need improvements in Finland. In this sense, wooden facade renovation and additional floor construction are viable and sustainable solutions for this development in the Finnish context. This chapter focuses on these important applications from the Finnish residents’ perspective as ecologically sound engineering solutions through a survey. In doing so, the challenges of facade renovation, as well as the benefits of additional floor construction, were presented. The main purpose of the survey was to get the opinions of the residents, find out which variables are important, make inferences for the planning and improvement of such areas, and determine what will be emphasized in the sustainable suburban development of the future. Therefore, the results were based on this empirical approach—survey—but further research such as energy analysis, wood-based facade renovation, and additional floor solutions will be done as part of other studies. It is believed that this study will contribute to the use of sustainable materials and decarbonization of buildings as well as zero energy building (nZEB) to overcome the challenges posed by climate change by the diffusion of wood in the renovation of buildings.

Hamilton's Kirikiriroa Gully: Engaging with waterway social life from the ground up

<p>The social value of waterways and gullies in new suburban development is something that is often overlooked and given limited resources to be developed. They have the potential to be intense centres of neighbourhoods and provide much needed social relief in the age of rapid urban expansion. This thesis explores the social potential of Kirikiriroa gully in Hamilton where suburban development has occurred at an alarming rate. The research extends the traditional top down masterplan design methodology used for large project sites by investigating the reverse of this, a study of life on the ground to inform the design. Using on-site analytical and design methods, the design attempts to reveal the workings of the landscape in a way that a masterplan cannot. Key to this was the identification of three important social experiential typologies within the gully system. The understanding and documentation of the relations and forces that produced these types facilitated adjustments to strategically identified sites, with the intention of intensifying the relevant social ecology of the gully at that site. This intensification is intended to influence the wider neighbourhoods and the gully system more broadly.</p>

Hamilton's Kirikiriroa Gully: Engaging with waterway social life from the ground up

<p>The social value of waterways and gullies in new suburban development is something that is often overlooked and given limited resources to be developed. They have the potential to be intense centres of neighbourhoods and provide much needed social relief in the age of rapid urban expansion. This thesis explores the social potential of Kirikiriroa gully in Hamilton where suburban development has occurred at an alarming rate. The research extends the traditional top down masterplan design methodology used for large project sites by investigating the reverse of this, a study of life on the ground to inform the design. Using on-site analytical and design methods, the design attempts to reveal the workings of the landscape in a way that a masterplan cannot. Key to this was the identification of three important social experiential typologies within the gully system. The understanding and documentation of the relations and forces that produced these types facilitated adjustments to strategically identified sites, with the intention of intensifying the relevant social ecology of the gully at that site. This intensification is intended to influence the wider neighbourhoods and the gully system more broadly.</p>

Delivering higher density suburban development: The impact of building design and residents’ attitudes

The urgent need for housing in London will be met almost exclusively through building on brownfield sites. While Inner and suburban Outer London are both home to a range of brownfield sites, the politics of delivering new housing varies between the two. First, Outer London is built at significantly lower density and therefore densification has a more noticeable impact. Second, many residents in Outer London value living at lower density and will see densification as undermining that which they value. Third, homeownership is more common in Outer London and as housing is the most significant asset for most homeowners any threat to its value is likely to be strongly resisted. Our research tests whether design can positively impact both the perception and acceptability of densification. For this, we run a randomised control trial presenting 939 Outer London residents with simulated images representing different design features. We find that the effects of building design are limited and relate almost exclusively to low and medium density options. Our research shows that vernacular design can make some increase in density acceptable but for significantly higher density the influence of design declines. As density increases, the perception and acceptability of density are more influenced by people’s views on, for example, the extent of London’s housing crisis. This indicates that planners and politicians must reach beyond design and seek to better inform and persuade residents about housing need if the impasse on densification is to be overcome.

Barn Adaptation: A Proposal To Protect Rural Architecture

The countryside that surrounds the Greater Toronto Area possesses a significant amount of Canada's prime farmland. However, to accommodate urban growth, this precious resource is being converted to provide urban developments. The area of interest for this thesis is the rural-urban fringe, a zone of transition between working farms, rural communities and urban residential developments. The developments that are built in this area illustrate a common development approach, the elimination of all obstacles, including farmland and rural architecture. This thesis introduces the concept of an alternative approach for suburban development, one that presents a compromise between rural and urban needs. At the heart of this concept is the design project, the adaptive reuse of a barn that serves as a tool to communicate the unique qualities of these monumental buildings. It also identifies the need to rethink suburban development approaches to include the preservation of rural architecture and prime farmland.

Barn Adaptation: A Proposal To Protect Rural Architecture

The countryside that surrounds the Greater Toronto Area possesses a significant amount of Canada's prime farmland. However, to accommodate urban growth, this precious resource is being converted to provide urban developments. The area of interest for this thesis is the rural-urban fringe, a zone of transition between working farms, rural communities and urban residential developments. The developments that are built in this area illustrate a common development approach, the elimination of all obstacles, including farmland and rural architecture. This thesis introduces the concept of an alternative approach for suburban development, one that presents a compromise between rural and urban needs. At the heart of this concept is the design project, the adaptive reuse of a barn that serves as a tool to communicate the unique qualities of these monumental buildings. It also identifies the need to rethink suburban development approaches to include the preservation of rural architecture and prime farmland.

The Country Book

Picturesque aesthetics and an increased focus on men’s domestic life shaped the rapid growth of the suburbs in the mid-nineteenth century, one of the most consequential reconfigurations of American understandings of national space. This suburban development had its own popular literary genre in the period, the country book. Although the country book is now largely forgotten and many of its more prominent examples have lapsed into obscurity, canonical writers such as Herman Melville wrote in the genre, and Thoreau’s Walden can also be understood in the context of this genre. The country book’s vision of the suburbs as a site of picturesque male domesticity that allowed for both privacy and homosocial intimacy countered a dominant vision of urban masculinity as public, individualistic, and competitive. Although the country book in general offers an idealized vision of male suburban life, individual texts also often feature deferrals, debility, and even death that threaten both male privacy and intimacy. The country book promoted the imaginative investments in suburban development at the same time that it hinted at the contradictions at the heart of middle-class masculine identity that foreclosed on that dream. In this way, as with the park movement texts discussed in Chapter 3, the country books that supported mid-nineteenth-century suburban development expressed both the social aspirations and fears of bourgeois men.

The Making of the West End, 1850–1914

This chapter argues that the modern West End pleasure district really emerged in the years after 1850. Change was driven by several factors: the development of new middle-class audiences with suburban development, new female consumers, the railway age, and changes in the built environment including the construction of Shaftesbury Avenue and the Charing Cross Road in the 1880s as well as the creation of Piccadilly Circus in its modern form. Increasingly, the term ‘West End’ came to mean the pleasure district. The chapter then turns to the contrasting world of Soho, which was associated with a variety of foreign populations and thus stood for cosmopolitanism as well as poverty.