MARCH, University of Cincinnati, 2017, Design, Architecture, Art and Planning: Architecture

Building in the city ought to include some consideration for the impact that structures can have on city life. Within the urban context, architecture and infrastructure together come to shape the public realm. The space between these two constructions is where occurrent city life can sometimes be found. Traditionally, architecture simply fills in the gaps that infrastructure leaves. The problem is that there is often very little, if anything, that is left for city life. Formally, the city becomes a grid of inaccessible volumes divided by streets that function solely as conduit for transit. The focus of this research is to determine specific ways in which structures can provide for city life. It is a search for methods of cohesion between architecture and infrastructure that form lively and dynamic city space environments. Part 1 considers the work of various thinkers and designers who are concerned with this question of how architecture and infrastructure can work together, and how architecture can come to operate in a somewhat infrastructural manner. These ideas are then held up against a series of case studies of exceptional structures in urban environments. Some of these structures were designed with city life in mind, while others were reimagined and adapted for the purpose. Part 1 concludes with the identification of two major areas for design consideration: the “city floor” and the “city ceiling”. Part 2 exercises some of the methods identified in Part 1 in a hypothetical design project as a means to further explore and visualize the ways in which structures for city life might be designed and function. Focus is given equally to the development of an appropriate structural scheme, and to imagining the various types of city life that the structure might come to support.

Master of Arts (M.A.), University of Dayton, 2009, English

CONCRETE EVIDENCE: A COLLECTION OF POEMS VERSIFYING THE CITY is a poetry manuscript that contemporizes “thinking into the heart,” as the Romantic Period poet, John Keats, put it, and the forms used for such thought. As modernity started to unfold, in the beginning of the nineteenth century, the Romantics were inspired by their immediate and natural environment of scenic, pastoral expanses that served as the basis for versified meditations. However, CONCRETE EVIDENCE: A COLLECTION OF POEMS VERSIFYING THE CITY is composed on the objects of the urban environment, its inhabitants and their relationships, and it speculates, aesthetically, on how 21st century subject matter changes formal poetics. The manuscript is intentionally funnel-shaped in that it begins wide then hones in on the specific effect of the city on people. It is organized in three parts: 1. CONCRETE EVIDENCE The section, CONCRETE EVIDENCE, is a wide-lens poetic rendering of urban objects: transportation, garbage, buildings, work, people, sky, and pavement. It is intended to be a meditative treatment of the sights of the metropolis through observations that can be gleaned by any eye. The poems frame identifiable images in poetic forms and language to discover how each influences the other. How will the urban environment change rhyme, versification, diction and shifts in thought that are characteristic of the form, and what aesthetic choices can be made to satisfy form and function successfully—if this is at all possible? 2. VISAGE AND PERSONA The focus of this section of poems is pointed to urban and suburban people and how their relationships have been shaped by their environment. How do environmental elements prompt the interpersonal relationships and resulting events that mark the profile of suburban dwellers? VISAGE AND PERSONA examines the urban environment's effect on us. 3. SPECULATION Writing poetry and approaching problems poetically changes me over time. The turn inward, that it takes to offer a (open full item for complete abstract)

Ph.D., Antioch University, 2020, Leadership and Change

This research is a case study examining the relevance of three holistic city frameworks—Compassionate Cities, Healthy Cities, and UN Sustainable Development Goals—to the intentional or tacit thinking of city leaders, community leaders, and activists of Marina, California. Beginning with a discussion of the origin and development of the three frameworks, the study occurred in three phases: Phase I involved interviewing the five elected leaders, city manager, community development leaders, and two planners; Phase II consisted of a survey of appointed city leaders and community organizers and activists; and Phase III was an analysis of relevant public discourse, drawing from local newspapers, social media, and city council and other public agencies' agendas and public records. In the background is a discussion on the challenges of a city that is transitioning from a former U.S. military base support city to one that embraces a new generation of urban dwellers, becoming an economically and socially sustainable municipality. This dissertation is available in open access at AURA: Antioch University Repository and Archive, http://aura.antioch.edu/ and OhioLINK ETD Center, https://etd.ohiolink.edu/

MCP, University of Cincinnati, 2010, Design, Architecture, Art and Planning: Community Planning

Istanbul, Turkey, is a city of exceptional significance. The history, culture, longevity, and evolution of the city have catapulted Istanbul into one of the world's most intriguing cities. Since its inception, Istanbul has been an ever-changing city with multiple layers, making urban planning critical to preserve the uniqueness of the city. As the economy in Turkey continues to succeed, Istanbul is faced with the reality of urban renewal in order to accommodate growing industries and an increasing population. Urban planning in Turkey is focused primarily on urban design, neglecting social considerations in the planning and implementation processes. As a result, targeted communities are left out of the planning processes and find themselves unaware of what their future holds should their communities be subjects of urban renewal projects. This study focuses on Tarlabasi community members and key informants who specialize in urban renewal projects in Turkey, specifically, the Tarlabasi Renewal Project. Through semi-structured interviews, respondents provided insight into their impressions of the Tarlabasi neighborhood, access to information opportunities to participate in the planning process, their opinions of the project, and, finally, their future should the project be implemented. Respondents confirmed that they have been left out of the planning process of the project and, as a result, are unaware of how to plan accordingly for their future. The findings from this study also revealed that property owners over forty years of age would have been in support of the project had they been offered a fair price for their property. Nonetheless, recommendations to integrate social considerations into the Turkish approach to planning as well as modifications to the academic approach to the planning curriculum in Turkey have been made based on the results from this research study.

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2024, City and Regional Planning

Transportation infrastructure has generated a wide-ranging socioeconomic impact on society. Evaluating this impact is crucial for transportation planning and policymaking. This dissertation contributes to socioeconomic impact assessments of transportation infrastructure by developing an analytical framework based on a set of quantitative approaches, including structural equation modeling, machine learning, and network analysis. The objective is to provide a systematical and holistic examination of transportation infrastructure's effects on city development. Transportation infrastructures examined in this study include high-speed rail (HSR), highways, and aviation systems. City development involves multiple aspects: ranging from economic growth to urban amenities, from individual city development to city interactions. This dissertation consists of three essays. The first essay untangled the influence mechanism through which transportation infrastructure affects city attractiveness using structural equation modeling. The second essay compared the relative significance of multimodal transportation infrastructure in shaping city attractiveness using machine learning models. The third essay investigated the network effects of transportation infrastructure on human mobility and city interaction by network analysis. The results uncover that transportation infrastructure increases city attractiveness through its role in stimulating the economy and increasing amenity accessibility. Despite economic growth, amenities such as housing, education, and technology also play a significant role in enhancing city attractiveness. The analysis also shows that HSR has a higher importance in predicting city attractiveness than highways and aviation, particularly during the rapid development period of HSR from 2008 to 2018 in China. Moreover, the impact of transportation infrastructure on city attractiveness demonstrates a threshold effect, which is consistent with the law of dimin (open full item for complete abstract)

MARCH, University of Cincinnati, 2021, Design, Architecture, Art and Planning: Architecture

Skyscrapers of the late 19th century looked vastly different than they do today. Historically, the skyscraper began as a single form extrusion containing a single program. Throughout history the skyscraper took on many new forms. Zoning and setback laws of the 1960's changed the way that the skyscraper looked and was thought about. There has always been a race and desire to have the tallest skyscraper in New York City, and as technology developed it allowed for skyscrapers to be built taller. New York City would become one of the most prominent cities for the skyscraper as well as one of the most iconic skylines. As new heights were reached there was a split from the once ornamental and sculptural skyscraper. Both in past and present day New York City there is an emphasis on designing the tallest and most slender skyscraper. As previously mentioned with the emphasis on height, there was importance placed on the glass tower. Over time this led to the skyscraper becoming an ambiguous and aesthetically standardized building. Office towers and apartment buildings look the same and offer no indication as to what the skyscraper contains. Newer developments have taken over historic parts of New York City and are alien to the architecture surrounding it. While the technology has enabled these skyscrapers to expand, people and historic architecture is forgotten. This thesis explores the historic and theoretical development of the skyscraper and how to challenge the current entire glass clad skyscraper. Through facade articulation, program, section, relationship to the ground and character, this skyscraper will become a place in which every person can have it all. Through the relationship of both public and private spaces, the skyscraper will transform from an ambiguous, glass tower into something that represents the history of New York City.

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2021, Entomology

The majority of the human population resides in cities. This transformation to an urbanized world has disrupted many species due to habitat disturbance, alien species colonization, and changes in soil and air quality. This reality has raised concerns about the impact of urbanization on insect communities. Many cities are implementing conservation efforts to combat these stressors by transforming habitats to urban farms, pocket prairies, and rain gardens. Although urbanization is a negative driver of insect biodiversity, opportunities exist to implement conservation strategies in “legacy cities” that can support insects and allow us to understand how challenges of urbanization affect their distribution patterns. Legacy cities are cities that have faced significant population decline due to the fall of manufacturing industries. This has resulted in an increase in vacant land that can be revitalized to target key conservation initiatives. My research was focused on how urban habitat transformation affects predatory insects and their community assembly, distribution patterns, and diet. I used lady beetles (Coccinellidae) and long-legged flies (Dolichopodidae) as my target species due to previous evidence illustrating their decline and importance as biological control agents. My key objectives were to determine how the local management and landscape context of urban greenspaces influenced the abundance, richness, and health of these predators. To examine their health, I focused on their ability to locate prey as well as their dietary breadth. In Chapter 1, I found that habitat type had no effect on native lady beetle abundance while local variables within a site such as plant height, biomass and bloom abundance supported a greater richness of lady beetle species. Also, I found that landscape variables such as decreased impervious surface surrounding a site and sites that were surrounded by less isolated greenspace patches supported a greater abundance and richness in (open full item for complete abstract)

MARCH, University of Cincinnati, 2020, Design, Architecture, Art and Planning: Architecture

Ho Chi Minh City, otherwise known as Sai-Gon, like many thriving cities in the East, possesses an intriguing character of duality – an identity straddling opposing forces. The city is both a physical place and a collective consciousness, whose memories are simultaneously written and re-written over by convoluted acts of construction and destruction. This condition of duality is the core theme of exploration in this thesis, with the intent to reveal the underlying forces at play in a city's nuanced process of self-adjusting. Perhaps one of the most controversial icons of Vietnam's modern era, the Tan Son Nhat Airport holds many different memories and meanings to the people of Vietnam—repression and resistance, exploitation and subversion, or civility and dispossession. The airport has always been in tension, between the thrive for modernization and a global city, against the right to the city for its people. The news about the Tan Son Nhat Airport expansion and the scandal around the misuse of airport/government land started the interest for this thesis in finding out what exactly is built there, who is occupying that area day-to-day, and how they use the space. Around the airport the boundary between authority and free will may seem more apparent, yet it speaks to the condition of duality of the city. The self-adjusting architecture proposes the translation of the dynamically temporal nature of movements, actions and interactions of the everyday life into a physical construct that can adjust itself to meet any needs of its user-occupier, while capturing its own course of transformation and re-absorbing the produced form and socio-cultural implications to evolve. The result is a structure-network that perform in time and space on the physical site of the city, while oscillating the role of the person as the user, spectator, and actor of architecture.

PhD, University of Cincinnati, 2020, Design, Architecture, Art and Planning: Regional Development Planning

This research aims to define characteristics, interrelations, and transformation processes of urban representations and representations of space of the Sukhumvit Corridor in Bangkok, Thailand between 1873 and 2014 through archival materials. Urban representations are socio-economic images of a city that are generated via media, while representations of space are the areas within the city in which urban representations take place. The results from the analysis are chronologically explained in five periods: the Semi-colonial Period (1873-1932), the Nationalism Period (1932-1957), the American-influence Period (1957-1973), the Early Global Period (1973-1997), and the Global Period (1997-2014).

Master of Arts, The Ohio State University, 2017, Theatre

The Radio City Rockettes are one of the most famous dance troupes in the United States, having performed at Radio City Music Hall since 1932. This thesis serves as the first stand-alone, expansive history about who they are, what they represent, and how they developed under the leadership of founder Russell Markert (1899-1990). This study will trace how the Rockettes began as an emblem of modernity and developed into a symbol of nostalgia under the leadership of one man from their Missouri inception in 1925 through his retirement in 1971. Intrinsically linked to the design and vision of Radio City Music Hall, the company was a symbol of American ingenuity and national pride. As an embodiment of industry, precision dance was first introduced by the British Tiller Girls, and codified by Markert into a technique that Rockettes still carry on today. Besides their iconic status, Rockettes also benefitted from the familial environment of Radio City Music Hall and paternal affections of Markert, both which contributed to a workplace that offered stability, safety, and a dependable income to the women who sought an independent life in the dance world. This line of thirty-six dancers who perform as one unit will reach its centennial anniversary in 2025, and their longevity demands a closer look at why they remain beloved despite fluctuations in popularity and what they have represented to the American people throughout the decades.

Master of City and Regional Planning, The Ohio State University, 2016, City and Regional Planning

The purpose of this study is to explore emerging research and planning concepts in conjunction with practical case studies to yield specific insights into promoting transit-oriented development (TOD). As it relates to TOD, this thesis focuses on public sector strategies, including public-private partnerships. Each of the case study cities exhibit unique contexts, including varying degrees of market strength, existing transit ridership, and funding capacity. The TOD solutions that these case study cities implement, the focus of this thesis, are shaped by and for those unique contexts. A review of literature will examine a broad array of sources that shed light on transit-oriented development practices in similar contexts. This discussion draws from specific examples of innovation in finance, policy, design, and planning; as well as a discussion of the advantages and disadvantages. Following the literature review, this study will analyze the historical evolution of transportation and transit policy, including federal and state-level programs. The crux of this study is ten (10) case study cities that transcend several fixed-guideway types (heavy rail, light rail, bus rapid transit, streetcar) and markets of varying size and strength. Findings on significant strategies that yield results within these case studies will be organized into benchmarks and best practices, intended as a uniquely contextual resource for emerging cities aspiring to incorporate transit-oriented development into planning for sustainable development.

Master of Arts in English, Youngstown State University, 2014, Department of Languages

The study of the documents involved in the planning of these American cities allows for an understanding of the methodology behind the design. With some interpretation, it is possible to draw out of the documents the kinds of things Americans expected from their city. While urban planning was not a field of study until the 20th century, a great deal of planning went into many cities. This was especially true for American cities. As with anything, certain things change with time and changes can be evidenced from the design plans over the centuries in the United States. A great deal of the society's wants and needs are embedded in these city plans as the designers of the city kept a keen eye on those requirements. With this consideration in mind, it is possible conjure an image of what each city's citizens were like through the writings. This thesis focuses on the cities of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, Savannah, Georgia, Cleveland, Ohio, and Chicago, Illinois, each representative of a different time in American history to allow for the similarities and differences of American society to be illuminated. The goal is to identify these societal changes over the 300 years that spanned the founding of Philadelphia to the redesign of Chicago through the plans for the cities themselves.

Bachelor of Arts, Ohio University, 2014, Classics and World Religions

In the early 2nd century CE the Roman emperor Hadrian created one of the most unique Roman deities with one action on the Nile in Middle Egypt; he deified an imperial favorite- a youth from the Greek East called Antinous. While this action alone was uncommon enough to warrant the nearly 2000 year-long discussion of the emperor Hadrian and his boy lover Antinous, what makes the discussion so compelling is the survival of the god Antinous past Hadrian’s reign and lifetime. The ephebe’s image spread through the Roman Empire with Hadrian’s declaration of his apotheosis in Egypt, but the question is: Why, after the death of Hadrian, did a Greek boy deified without the consent of the Roman Senate keep his place in Rome’s pantheon of deities? An exploration of the evidence for the establishment of Antinous' cult and the subsequent responses of the cities of the East sheds light on how this unknown provincial teenager became one of the most iconic faces of Imperial Rome.

PhD, University of Cincinnati, 2008, Arts and Sciences : Germanic Languages and Literature

This dissertation explores the relationship between the visual and textual Berlin representations of E.T.A. Hoffmann and Wilhelm Raabe and architectural and city paintings among others by Karl Friedrich Schinkel, Eduard Gaertner and Adolph Menzel. Besides interart comparison the dissertation uses non-fictional aesthetic writings, socio-historical analyses and contemporary concepts of urban planning for the interpretation of canonical Berlin texts. As city texts often bear an explicit or implicit affinity to the art of painting, concepts and techniques such as the elevated view, window view and the bird's eye view in text and images are compared in Berlin texts and paintings. The dissertation argues that the innovative visual and textual representations of the civic spaces of Berlin served as frame for transforming the Berliners' relationship to their urban environment and raised a new urban consciousness. The dissertation argues that early city texts and city paintings reflect similarly upon a new significance of seeing and a changing urban perception. The introduction is devoted to methodological questions as it explores the necessity of an interdisciplinary approach, the terminology for the concept intermediality and the interconnectedness of the representations of the urban environment in literature and in the visual arts. The first chapter analyzes eight Berlin-texts by E.T.A. Hoffmann and discusses the label "Berlinische Geschichte" in a wide cultural context with the aid of Hoffmann's Berlin drawings and of contemporary Berlin paintings. The second chapter is devoted the Hoffmann's Des Vetters Eckfenster (1822), which is compared to two architectural paintings of the Gendarmenmarkt from 1822 and to the curtain design of the Schauspielhaus by Karl Friedrich Schinkel. The similarity of the representations manifests itself in extraordinary perspectives and reveals how the Gendarmenmarkt contributed to the emergence of a new civic space and a new urban consciousne (open full item for complete abstract)

MARCH, University of Cincinnati, 2006, Design, Architecture, Art and Planning : Architecture (Master of)

The small towns America was built upon have begun to deteriorate allowing for a loss of identity and a community without a sense of belonging. The center of the city has lost its importance with the loss of specialty stores and locally owned venues, along with the creation of new businesses and workplaces being established outside its boundaries. The integration of identity, local pride, and social organization were key elements implemented within the structure of the community. In order to reestablish identity and encourage civic presence once again, the city center must be revitalized. By exploring the history of the small town, researching examples of strong city center principles, investigating the essentials of civic space and the public realm, and examining the necessary elements that promote active citizens, this thesis proposes a solution to the decay of the American small town.

MARCH, University of Cincinnati, 2003, Design, Architecture, Art, and Planning : Architecture

In the past century public policy, public opinion, and design trends have left many U.S. cities "donuts." These donut cities are characterized by destructive edge growth and a decaying center; contributing to socio-political, economic, and environmental ills. Pubic policy and public opinion are slowly changing to address the situation; yet, designers have little direct control over these underlying forces. However, designers can re-evaluate, re-conceive and re-envision the city in regards to a paradigm appropriate to cities of the new millennium. The paradigm calls for design and development that recognizes new economic possibilities for the city, conceives of the city in terms of its culture, and provides a vision. Using design metaphors of collage and text help to fill the "empty" hole by telling the story of the city and of the culture it contains. In particular, this thesis is explored through the design of a youth recreation park located in the "empty" center of the donut city of today's Cincinnati.

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2008, Geography

Since the 1980s the greater London area has been home to an increasingly large proportion of the British population, economic activities and profits; its population growth has been quite phenomenal. Many observers over the past few years have been warning that this growth threatens to be self-inhibiting. This has to do with London's escalating housing costs. Housing shortages in turn tend to create labor shortages in low-skilled low-paying jobs as much as for middle-and-higher-income positions. This problem is quite common in large economically-booming cities, and even more so in what have been identified as 'world' or 'global cities', such New York City, Tokyo, and London. These cities are characterized, in particular, by their concentration of command and control functions of the world economy, and especially global financial functions. These have become a crucial aspect of capitalism in an era of increased globalization and financialization of capital. However, although the world city and global city literatures appear as a very important departure point for analyzing London's housing crisis and, crucially from the standpoint of this dissertation, the ways different agents and coalitions of actors have been approaching this issue, I argue that it is necessary to go beyond the rather standard world/global city accounts that have ensued. This is so in particular because they do not allow us to fully understand how this situation has emerged, the particular conditions, forces and space-time juxtapositions that have led to the production of London as a global city and the subsequent issues of labor reproduction that have to be dealt with today. In short, they are, in many instances, de-contextualized accounts. In this dissertation I address some of the shortcomings of global city theory and I argue that global cities have a political geography of a quite complex nature, one that has been constructed over time and that has to be taken into account if we are to underst (open full item for complete abstract)

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2006, French and Italian

This dissertation is predominantly an analysis of urban (and suburban or peripheral) representations in four francophone postcolonial fictional narratives: Xala (1973) by Ousmane Sembene, Texaco (1992) by Patrick Chamoiseau, Les honneurs perdus (1996) by Calixthe Beyala, and La Belle Creole (2001) by Maryse Conde. My intention is to show how Sembene, Chamoiseau, Beyala, and Conde recreate the postcolonial urban geography and its inhabitants, and which coordinates they follow in this process of recreation. The dissertation is divided into four chapters. In the first chapter, the introduction, I present the bio-bibliographical resources I have used, as well as the objective of this dissertation, the texts and the authors. In the second chapter, I attempt to analyze the representation of the city as a space of fulfillment or disillusionment, a space of hope or a dystopia. My intention is to emphasize the literary strategies and images that highlight the representation of the urban aspects, as well as some of the external factors, economic, social, racial or cultural, that preside over a specific recreation of urban reality. In the third chapter, my goal is to identify the modes of representation of some urban structures and territorial networks in the selected literary texts, showing how this effect of ‘spatialization' is obtained, and to what end, if other than purely esthetic. Another aspect I pursue is showing how the hierarchies and the interdependences of the urban spaces are represented in the four novels. The last chapter emphasizes the place of women in the postcolonial francophone city, their relationship with urban spatiality, their vision of the city, as represented by the selected authors. This dissertation attempts to analyze the aforementioned aspects in their close connection with the narrative substance.

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2006, History

The Roman city of Corinth, founded at the crossroads of land and sea, on the narrow Isthmus connecting northern Greece with the Peloponnese and the Adriatic with the Aegean Sea, became one of the most famous commercial centers of the ancient Mediterranean. The prominent image and myth of Corinth centered around its place as a commercial and traveler's cosmopolis, and its unity with its connective eastern landscape, the Isthmus. The physical landscape communicated the central myth and identity of the city, while stories and ancient literature reinforced a particular vision of the landscape. The eastern territory of Roman Corinth reflected and structured the image of the city. This is a study of the transformation of that city in its landscape in the period of Late Antiquity (3rd-7th centuries AD). In the course of Late Antiquity, the image of Corinth on the Isthmus was fragmented and redefined concomitant with the broader transformation of the Mediterranean world. The study analyzes two bodies of evidence that speak to this phenomenon. It discusses (Ch. 2-3) the wide array of literary testimony for the city and countryside and argues that during Late Antiquity, a strong tradition of conceptualizing and talking about Corinth as the traveler's crossroad and commercial city on the Isthmus ceased to cohere in light of a general decline in classical literature and the developing narratives of a Christianized society—the myth of ancient Corinth died. On the other hand, the dissertation discusses (Ch. 4-6) the archaeological evidence for extra-urban structures of trade, settlement, and land use in the eastern territory during this period. The rural structures of the eastern Corinthia remained stable in Late Antiquity, contributing to the city's commercial resources as long as broader Mediterranean networks of trade and commerce to which the city connected remained vital and flourishing. Only in the later sixth century is there strong evidence for the localization of the cit (open full item for complete abstract)

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD), Ohio University, 2012, Mass Communication (Communication)

This dissertation examines the bid book produced by the NYC2012 organization as part of its effort to have New York City named host of the 2012 Summer Olympic Games. The NYC2012 bid book, like any other Olympic bid book, is a unique, complex document. It is both a blueprint or future vision of a city, and an extensive, carefully-constructed piece of place-marketing aimed primarily (but not solely) at the elite decision-makers who control the Olympic Movement, along with all its economic and cultural power. Using a qualitative approach, drawing upon cultural history, urban studies, political economics, and other perspectives, this work identifies and discusses the key themes in the NYC2012 bid book: New York City's cosmopolitanism; its urban needs and networks; its renascence and recaptured traditions; and its drama and spectacle. These themes, articulated explicitly and implicitly in the bid book's overarching narrative of New York City at the start of the new millennium, parallel themes embedded in the story of the contemporary Olympics, permitting an evaluation of how the interests of a modern "entrepreneurial city" are tied to the interests of a globally-mediated "mega-event." Such attempts to attach the interests, images and symbols to each other may or may not prove successful (as NYC2012's effort was not) but remain viable, concrete sites for urban and cultural scholars to interpret.