(Georgia Institute of Technology, 2009-11-19)
Middleton, Deborah Antoinette
This dissertation resituates C. A. Doxiadis in Post-War urban design history with a detailed examination of how urban growth and change was addressed by urban design strategies as applied in the master plan for Riyadh Saudi Arabia, undertaken between 1968 and 1972. The Riyadh master plan commission is important within Doxiadis' career, occurring in the midst of his prolific writing projects and approximately eight years after he completed the Islamabad master plan, his most renowned project.
Most Post-War architects focused on the socio-spatial components of urban life, elaborating architectural projects that intertwined transportation, infrastructure, and concentrated on mass housing strategies. This dissertation argues that Doxiadis' contribution to urban design theory and practice during the Post-War period was to define a rational scientific methodology for urban design that would restructure settlements to enable urban expansion and change while addressing issues of community building, governance and processes of development. The applied urban design for Riyadh Saudi Arabia strongly exemplifies Doxiadis' rational strategy and methodology as outlined in Ekistics theory and the conceptual model of Dynapolis. The comparative analysis examines how Doxiadis applies the Dynapolis model in the urban spatial planning of Riyadh to organize urban territory at the macro and local urban scales, define neighborhood communities, and connect the new master plan to the existing spatial territory of the city. The longitudinal analysis contrasts the Doxiadis master plan, Riyadh's first urban development strategy, to the most recent comprehensive approach MEDSTAR to understand how the Doxaidis' urban design has sustained its spatial continuity over time.
This dissertation makes two significant contributions. The first is to broaden knowledge of Post-War urban design specific to the spatial problem of urban expansion and change, and second to resituate Doxiadis within the Post-War history of urban design specifically revealing his previously unrecognized project of the Riyadh master plan undertaken from 1968-1972.
(Georgia Institute of Technology, 2009-05-18)
Jiang, Peng
In the last few decades, new centers have emerged at the edges of traditional cities and pre-World War II suburbs. As these evolve, do they converge towards the urban forms of traditional cities? This question is explored based on a study of urban areas in the Atlanta Metropolitan Region. Atlanta Downtown, Decatur and Marietta, are compared to the new centers in Buckhead, Cumberland and Perimeter. The evolution of the street network of Buckhead is examined in detail. The morphological history of a particular urban block in Buckheadâ "the Tower Place blockâ "is documented. Morphological analysis, focusing on street patterns, block shapes and sizes, property boundaries and building footprints, is complemented by Space Syntax, focusing on the structure of street networks and connectivity. It is shown that new urban centers tend to grow on very large blocks accessed through major transportation infrastructure, but situated in otherwise sparse and fragmentary street environments. As these centers grow and as the density of land use increases, a secondary private road system is created, to take advantage of development potential and provide access to major building investments. The effective fragmentation of the large blocks suggests a pattern of metric convergence towards an optimum block size. In traditional cities, however, the street network is stable over time and acts as the framework for changes in architecture and land use. In the new centers, the secondary road system serves to access particular private investments without regard to the creation of a public framework of connections. From a syntactic point of view, the new centers are spatially unintelligible, thus substantially diverging from traditional cities, even as they accommodate dense mixed use developments. The thesis points to the need of developing and using subdivision regulations and zoning classifications in order to better regulate the spatial structure of new urban centers in the future.