Thickening the Public Realm: Choreographing the Interaction of the Public Realm with the Built Environment

The ground plane has always been the primary domain of public activities. However, cities developed under the Modernist influence demonstrate an “object-in-space” circumstance with proliferating sky-scrappers that fragment the city’s ground surface into mid-block spaces and vaguely defined plazas. The demands of motorized-transportation and private enterprise further scatter spaces for pedestrian activities across the plan, section and stratified layers of the city (subterranean or/and elevated networks).The result is an inconsistent public realm that remains from being animated by public vitality. Through the manipulation of the ground-plane, this thesis seeks to remedy such stratification. It posits that a thickening of the ground to create a three-dimensional spatial condition will amplify opportunities for social interaction within otherwise muted civic surfaces. Addressing the contemporary reality of the multiplied ground, this thesis advocates reactivating it as a thickened continuous public domain that dissolves the polarity between the built and social fabric of the city.

Thickening the Public Realm: Choreographing the Interaction of the Public Realm with the Built Environment

The ground plane has always been the primary domain of public activities. However, cities developed under the Modernist influence demonstrate an “object-in-space” circumstance with proliferating sky-scrappers that fragment the city’s ground surface into mid-block spaces and vaguely defined plazas. The demands of motorized-transportation and private enterprise further scatter spaces for pedestrian activities across the plan, section and stratified layers of the city (subterranean or/and elevated networks).The result is an inconsistent public realm that remains from being animated by public vitality. Through the manipulation of the ground-plane, this thesis seeks to remedy such stratification. It posits that a thickening of the ground to create a three-dimensional spatial condition will amplify opportunities for social interaction within otherwise muted civic surfaces. Addressing the contemporary reality of the multiplied ground, this thesis advocates reactivating it as a thickened continuous public domain that dissolves the polarity between the built and social fabric of the city.

Complex interpolation of the predual of Morrey spaces over measure spaces

We prove that block spaces defined on {\mathbb{R}^{n}} with an arbitrary Radon measure, which are known to be the preduals of Morrey spaces, are closed under the first and the second complex interpolation method. The proof of our main theorem uses the duality theorem in the complex interpolation method, the complex interpolation of certain closed subspaces of Morrey spaces, a characterization of the preduals of block spaces, and some formulas related to the Calderón product.

Memory and local Identity: the Persistence of Colonial-Era Street Names in Hong kong after 1997

<p><strong>Abstract.</strong> The critical study of toponymy has paid considerable attention to the renaming of streets following revolutionary political change since 1980s. Such renaming is intended to institutionalize a new political agenda through shaping the meanings in everyday practices and landscapes. For example, after taking back the foreign concessions in 1943,the Wang Jingwei government eradicated all the streets of Shanghai named after foreign figures. The same case as post-colonial Singapore after 1965, where naming streets served to erase the colonial past and assert national independence. Nevertheless, the most of Colonial-Era Street Names still persisted in the city after Hong Kong's reunification to China in 1997.</p><p>This research seeks to advance the critical toponymical study through the history and spatial changes of Hong Kong's street names to explore the street naming operations of Colonial governance with different block spaces in different periods. And further discusses about memory, local identity and the persistence of Colonial-Era street names after 1997.</p>

A cyclic coordinate-update fixed point algorithm

We prove that a cyclic coordinate fixed point algorithm for nonexpansive mappings when the underlying Hilbert space is decomposed into a Cartesian product of finitely many block spaces is weakly convergent to a fixed point of the mapping under investigation. Our result relaxes a condition imposed on the stepsizes of Theorem 3.4 of Chow, et al [Chow, Y. T., Wu, T. and Yin, W., Cyclic coordinate-update algorithms for fixed-point problems: analysis and applcations, SIAM J. Sci. Comput., 39 (2017), No. 4, A1280–A1300].

Perfect codes in poset block spaces

There is a limited class of perfect codes with respect to the classical Hamming metric. There are other kind of metrics with respect to which perfect codes have been investigated viz. poset metric, block metric and poset block metric. Given the minimal elements of a poset, a necessary and sufficient condition for [Formula: see text]-perfectness of a poset block code has been derived. A necessary and sufficient condition for a poset block code to be [Formula: see text]-perfect has also been considered. Further, for each [Formula: see text], [Formula: see text], a sufficient condition that ensures the existence of a poset block structure which turns a given code into an [Formula: see text]-perfect poset block code has been obtained. Several illustrations of well known codes to be [Formula: see text]-perfect for specific values of [Formula: see text] have been explored.