Bazaar in the 'Burbs: Infilling fine grain of activity in the course grain context of Paraparaumu

<p>The regional townships of New Zealand are losing young people. The township of Paraparaumu, located along the Kapiti Coast, is no exception. As a sprawling, low-density suburban settlement with its town center being Coastlands Shopping Center - the local mall - there are few job opportunities available. As a result, many early career adults choose to settle elsewhere. Tasked with creating more opportunities, the Kapiti Coast District Council plans to build a new commercial district. To make space for it, this will be done by paving over a large expanse of wetland adjacent to the mall. The premise of this thesis is that generating opportunities do not have to be large scale. In more dense urban areas where space is limited, many productive activities occur within the fine grain of a city. Wetlands are also recognized as a critical natural infrastructure and a valuable social amenity. Thus, instead of building large commercial facilities that have to occupy the wetland, the design in this thesis proposes a facility made up of a finer grain and infills the glut of car park spaces in front of Coastlands Mall. The parking spaces displaced will be relocated into a parking tower adjacent to the site. The building type of the Bazaar was looked at in this thesis as a model, for it is fine-grained and also ingrained with its urban context. The spatial network of the Bazaar democratizes access. The spatial network of the Bazaar democratizes access, which is a direct contrast to the singular and hierarchical nature of the mall. The design adopts these ideas and expresses them through a network of modules on a tartan grid plan transforming the design into a rhythmic series of spaces that express compression and expansion, allowing it to be an interlinked network of interior and exterior spaces. The grid is a powerful tool for organizing expanses of space though it is only useful in an architectural sense when accompanied by a fine-grained variation. Though the repetitive grid is suitable in plan, as a 3d form it quickly dissolves into monotony when repeated across a field. Similarly, the site itself is inherently charged with spatial hierarchy. Thus, localized adjustments of the roof and exterior details were made to break the monotony and rest the spatial hierarchy. This thesis explores how fine grain activity can be integrated into a large-grained context through the use of an additive, modular network set on a grid. Though the research findings produced on expression of this in the design outcome, the idea of a dense, fine-grained modular network is applicable in any context that has large inactive open space to be filled.</p>

Bazaar in the 'Burbs: Infilling fine grain of activity in the course grain context of Paraparaumu

<p>The regional townships of New Zealand are losing young people. The township of Paraparaumu, located along the Kapiti Coast, is no exception. As a sprawling, low-density suburban settlement with its town center being Coastlands Shopping Center - the local mall - there are few job opportunities available. As a result, many early career adults choose to settle elsewhere. Tasked with creating more opportunities, the Kapiti Coast District Council plans to build a new commercial district. To make space for it, this will be done by paving over a large expanse of wetland adjacent to the mall. The premise of this thesis is that generating opportunities do not have to be large scale. In more dense urban areas where space is limited, many productive activities occur within the fine grain of a city. Wetlands are also recognized as a critical natural infrastructure and a valuable social amenity. Thus, instead of building large commercial facilities that have to occupy the wetland, the design in this thesis proposes a facility made up of a finer grain and infills the glut of car park spaces in front of Coastlands Mall. The parking spaces displaced will be relocated into a parking tower adjacent to the site. The building type of the Bazaar was looked at in this thesis as a model, for it is fine-grained and also ingrained with its urban context. The spatial network of the Bazaar democratizes access. The spatial network of the Bazaar democratizes access, which is a direct contrast to the singular and hierarchical nature of the mall. The design adopts these ideas and expresses them through a network of modules on a tartan grid plan transforming the design into a rhythmic series of spaces that express compression and expansion, allowing it to be an interlinked network of interior and exterior spaces. The grid is a powerful tool for organizing expanses of space though it is only useful in an architectural sense when accompanied by a fine-grained variation. Though the repetitive grid is suitable in plan, as a 3d form it quickly dissolves into monotony when repeated across a field. Similarly, the site itself is inherently charged with spatial hierarchy. Thus, localized adjustments of the roof and exterior details were made to break the monotony and rest the spatial hierarchy. This thesis explores how fine grain activity can be integrated into a large-grained context through the use of an additive, modular network set on a grid. Though the research findings produced on expression of this in the design outcome, the idea of a dense, fine-grained modular network is applicable in any context that has large inactive open space to be filled.</p>

The Regional Uneven Development and the State Intervention to Reshape the Spatial Hierarchy

The central question in this study concerns the way in which the state intervention is strong enough to reverse the tide of regional uneven development that has been intentionally created by the state. To answer the question, we conduct a case study of the Innovation Cities in South Korea. We use the K-means Cluster Analysis and a Two-way Analysis of Variance with well-defined three indices on regional economic competitiveness. The results reveal that the development of Innovation Cities does not have a desirable impact on converging the regional disparity between core and periphery regions. At best, the regional gap has not widened. The outcomes also imply that the trickle-down effects have not been observed during the time-period of study. The findings suggest that policymakers carefully consider diverse full-factors toward periphery regions with consideration of the regional heterogeneity rather than focusing on the homogeneous approach.

Grouping of the Turkistan Area Regions based on a Complex Evaluation of Demographic Processes, Indices of Health, Medication Provision, and Social-economic Development of the Territory

The research objective was to elaborate methodological approaches to group the Turkistan regions through a complex evaluation of their demographic situation, public health, healthcare system, and social-economic development. The regions were grouped by normalizing a set of indices with various dimensions and vectors. The indices used were budget expenses per capita, unemployment rate, birth rate, death rate, income per capita, availability of pharmacies, provision with medical and pharmaceutical personnel, etc. During the studied period, the Turkistan area regions showed varied normalized values. The differences amounted to 1.2 times by normalized values and up to 2.4 times by complex values, which is due to the various developmentlevels, multi-faceted character and complex spatial hierarchy of the Turkistan area regions. The research showed the normalizing method to be very effective for the regional and municipal statistical service as they have consolidated medical-statistical tables for the whole area and individual regions.

Trends of Social Polarisation and Segregation in Athens (1991–2011)

This article investigates social and spatial changes in the Athens metropolitan area between 1991 and 2011. The main question is whether social polarisation—and the contraction of intermediate occupational categories—unevenly developed across the city is related to the changing of segregation patterns during the examined period. We established that the working-class moved towards the middle and the middle-class moved towards the top, but the relative position of both parts did not change in the overall socio-spatial hierarchy. The broad types of socio-spatial change in Athens (driven by professionalisation, proletarianisation or polarisation) were eventually related to different spatial imprints in the city’s social geography. Broad trends identified in other cities, like the centralisation of higher occupations and the peripheralisation of poverty, were not at all present here. In Athens, changes between 1991 and 2011 can be summarised by (1) the relative stability and upward social movement of the traditional working-class and their surrounding areas, accounting for almost half of the city, (2) the expansion of traditional bourgeois strongholds to neighbouring formerly socially mixed areas—25% of the city—and their conversion to more homogeneous middle-class neighbourhoods through professionalisation, (3) the proletarianisation of 10% of the city following a course of perpetual decline in parts of the central municipality and (4) the polarisation and increased social mix of the traditional bourgeois strongholds related to the considerable inflow of poor migrants working for upper-middle-class households.