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(2020)ThesisThe role of Italian architects has changed during the last ten years evolving from traditional architectural design work to small design-maintenance interventions. In addition to the recent European economic crisis, other factors have contributed to this transformation. The aim of this study is to evaluate these factors and their significant impact on the profession by providing an overview of both the practice of Italian architects over the last decade and the changes affecting the profession in recent times. This process has involved investigating the specific causes of this evolution and identifying the broader and contextual factors that have contributed to this situation. Various methods have been adopted to include architectural historiography, analysis of existing data and oral history interviews. The results showed that although the impact of the economic crisis has been critical, the transformation of the role of the Italian architects depends also on the geographical location, the educational background and the socio-cultural mindset. Further, this study revealed that the Italian situation evaluated against the European economic recession might be considered unique in particular because the role is still evolving. In-depth studies of the influence of geographical, cultural and social aspects over a wider time-frame may produce further insights into the profession. In addition, this research might be applied to other European countries in the common interest of a cross-cultural comparisons.
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(2020)ThesisA vast range of redundant buildings have been converted to various forms of tourist accommodation for thousands of years and Sydney has excellent recent examples of this phenomenon. This study has sought to understand why adaptive reuse hotels have been more prevalent in Sydney city since the 1980s. Research of academic, industry, authority & property documents have contributed to the creation of customized Tourist Accommodation Registers for all current and most former tourist accommodation in the city, to allow analysis and comparison of both adaptive reuse and custom-built establishments across all types including hotels, pubs, serviced apartments and backpacker hostels. A study of the characteristics and history of tourism, adaptive reuse buildings, heritage and property sector dynamics related to Sydney city have provided context for this thesis and revealed trends and counter-cyclical patterns of hotel development in the city. The effects of heritage awareness, legislation and fluctuating property fortunes since the late 1970s, together with the inherent suitability and sustainability of hotels for conversion from a wide range of building types, have combined to make adaptive reuse hotels a significant feature of Sydney’s tourist accommodation scene. The faster delivery, relatively smaller scale and good triple bottom-line ESD credentials of adaptive reuse hotels compared with custom-built hotels have made them flexible, viable and attractive to owners and developers and more prevalent since the 1980s. Although large custom-built hotels still dominate room numbers in the city, the challenges of site consolidation for large developments, and changing tourist patterns including more free-independent travellers from China and other huge growth markets, should continue to enhance the attractiveness of boutique and authentic establishments, especially those converted from obsolete heritage buildings in prime tourist precincts. Due to their long history of hospitality, hotels are usually perceived to be more public than other commercial building types and consequently more politically palatable for conversion of government assets, which will continue to be the source of adaptive reuse opportunities.
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(2022)ThesisThe year 2020 started with more than 100 fires burning across Australia. Bushfire is a phenomenon that cannot be mitigated completely by human intervention; however, better management practices can help counter the increasing severity of fires. Hazard Reduction (HR) burning has become one of the resolute applications in the management of fire-prone ecosystems worldwide, where certain vegetation is deliberately burned under controlled circumstances to thin the fuel to reduce the severity of the bushfires. As the climate changes drastically, the severity of fires is predicted to increase in the coming years. Therefore, it becomes increasingly important to investigate automatic approaches to prevent, reduce and monitor the cause and movement of bushfires. Methods of assessing FL levels in Australia are commonly based on visual assessment guidelines, such as those described in the Overall Fuel Hazard Assessment Guide (OFHAG). The overall aim of this research is to investigate the use of LiDAR to estimate the volume of fuel load to assist in the planning of HR burning, an approach that could quantify the accumulation of elevated and near-surface FL with less time and cost. This research focuses on an innovative approach based on a voxel representation. A voxel is a volumetric pixel, a quantum unit of volume, and a numeric value of x, y and z to signify a value on a regular grid in a three-dimensional space. Voxels are beneficial for processing large pointcloud data and, specifically, computing volumes. Pointcloud data provides valuable three-dimensional information by capturing forest structural characteristics. The output of this research is to create a digitised map of the accumulation of fuel (vegetation) points at elevated fuel and near-surface fuel stratum based on the point density of the pointcloud dataset for Vermont Place Park, Newcastle, Australia. The output of this information is relayed through a digital map of fuel accumulation at elevated and near-surface fuel stratum. The result of this research provides a rough idea of where the highest amount of fuel is accumulated to assist in planning of an HR burn. This will help the fire practitioners/land managers determine at which location in the forest profile should be prioritised for HR burning. There is a short window to conduct HR burning that is why it is prevalent that a tool that can provide information on fuel at a fast pace could help the fire practitioner/land managers.
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(2023)ThesisUnderstanding urban office markets remains a challenge, further complicated by the COVID-19 pandemic and the changing nature of work. Property developers and planning professionals are expected to face difficulties in estimating the future need for office space, across various consumer segments. Closely linked to economic cycles and growth, demand for office spaces is fundamentally derived from the economic activities that they facilitate. Yet, a lack of data has limited understanding of how the demands of office users shape market structure and contribute to segmentation. Tenant preferences, occupier mobility, functional specialisation and agglomerations are mentioned in the introductory sections of many studies, as potential explanations, yet in-depth analysis is largely absent. Other issues related to the adequacy of neoclassical economic frameworks for conceptualising office (property) markets also remain unresolved, with several academic urban economists calling for a more multi-disciplinary approach (Clapham, Clark & Gibb, 2012). This thesis explores the topic of office market segmentation at the intra-urban level, from a perspective of office users and market structure. As markets are multi-faceted phenomena, a composite view of urban morphology was adopted in conjunction with more traditional economic measures of property market segmentation such as migration flows. Using the metropolitan area of Greater Sydney between 2001-2021 as the case study, a series of quantitative exploratory techniques were utilised to understand the topic holistically and from the bottom-up. The focus was on the real-world characteristics of office users, rather than assumptions of perfect competition. The results showed that all 18 office user agglomerations, identified in Greater Sydney, had sufficient self-containment values (above 25%) to be identified as either submarket or core market areas. However, statistically, the migration flows between them were better explained with spatial than with sectoral similarity measures – diminishing the apparent significance of agglomeration economies in explaining market segmentation. Office users tend to stay in their existing location and near their workforce, with most intra-market moves relating to up- or down-grading, particularly to the Sydney CBD. Overall, office submarket areas had a similar employment compositions. It can be concluded that the characteristics of office users lead to, or at least reflect, a locally segmented and tiered intra-urban market structure. However, there is little evidence that the operational requirements associated with different types of office activity – e.g., knowledge intensive or administrative functions – are the primary determinants of market structure. Based on the research findings, it is more likely that the market structure reflects the limited search patterns and constrained purchasing powers of office users. This provides a counterview to location theory, which revolves around knowledge spillovers and functional specialisation. Market trends observed during the COVID-19 pandemic confirm such conclusions. The successful transition to working-from-home, showed that being physically separated from other similar firms (i.e., without agglomeration economies) was not only possible but, on average, was more productive. Two other pandemic trends, decreased employees willingness-to-travel and ‘flight to quality’ by firms, reinforced key thesis findings: office users tend to stay in their existing location and near their workforce and most intra-market moves are for up- or down-grading. These trends seem likely to continue. Looking forward, gravity models, which match these trends by estimating migration flows as a function of locational attractiveness and distance decay, may provide a better platform for modelling the structure and dynamics of office markets than neoclassical economics.
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(2021)ThesisAir pollution in China has received growing consideration in recent years, and numerous studies have sought to comprehend the relation of air pollution to property value with the focus on the sale of housing market but concluded with somewhat mixed results. This study aims to fully understand the relation of air quality to housing markets through the following two stages. The first stage is to explore the genuine effect of air quality on housing price and comprehend the variations of the estimated price of air quality by conducting a systematic quantitative review of Meta-regression analysis (MRA). The other stage is to compare the value of air quality between the sale and rental of housing markets via a panel analysis based aggregate empirical study. Furthermore, the second stage also extends to a submarket analysis to compare the effects of air quality in different city tiers. The MRA is conducted based on a weighted least square model and finds that air quality is significantly associated with housing price beyond the publication bias. Additionally, estimated air quality effects are affected by the following four types of factors: the indicator of air quality, the sources of air quality data, control variables and estimation approaches. These findings confirm that air quality has an impact on housing prices and indicate that the inappropriate models lead to biased estimates. The panel analysis focuses on the housing markets and air quality within 283 prefecture-level cities in China from 2014 to 2018 and finds that air quality significantly affects both housing sale prices and rental prices. Furthermore, the differences between the estimated effects are insignificant. This finding can be interpreted as renters and homeowners have similar air quality preferences and place homogeneous value on improvements in air quality. Then, the submarket analysis quantifies the price of air quality based on five city tiers in China and finds that the influences of air quality are evident to be significant in first, second and third tier cities but insignificant in fourth and fifth tier cities. In other words, the impact of air quality varies across submarkets in that large and medium cities are more sensitive to air quality, while air quality shows little effect on housing values in smaller cities.
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(2020)ThesisThe safe and effective treatment of human waste through sanitation is a significant challenge for rural coastal communities in Papua New Guinea. This study investigates the effectiveness of family-sized sanitation solutions for rural, coastal families. For this purpose, the study implemented sanitation solutions based on two different technologies for two local families, a single-vault composting toilet, and a urine-diverting double vault dehydration toilet. Because the study was interested in the complex array of factors that affect the successful performance of each system, it examined the technical and human aspects that determine the effectiveness of the toilet. The study used an action research approach to facilitate the collaboration between the agency, the author and the participant families and address the need to make adjustments to the experiment in the field. This meant setting a prescribed set of temporal data collection ‘cycle’ periods over the course of one year. This method also allowed the families involved to participate as active stakeholders and make adjustments where necessary. Though both toilet systems experienced early challenges, the study found the double vault dehydration toilet was more technically successful than the composting toilet. The compost toilet eventually failed and was replaced with another double vault dehydration toilet. The study also revealed the key role played by senior family members as ‘champions’ in managing the care and maintenance of the toilets and educating the family on safer sanitary practices. Furthermore, despite the challenges faced in running a transnational project of this nature, action research proved its worth in evaluating dynamic project outcomes for this type of prototype study of development in a Papua New Guinean village.
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(2020)ThesisLocal residential streets that can support the growth of significant shade trees are critical for mitigating urban heat - an increasing public health risk in Western Sydney; and for increasing total urban canopy. In the state of New South Wales, regional and district plans for the rapidly developing suburbs of Western Sydney include a planning priority to increase urban canopy. However, planning controls that encourage increased density, combined with development models that continue to favour single-family, detached dwellings, result in decreased lot sizes with insufficient space to support canopy trees around homes or in the streetscape. Using a qualitative methodology, the research undertook a comparative analysis of local residential streets in two areas of the Camden Local Government Area in the metropolitan region of Western Sydney - one that was developed in the mid-1990s and the other constructed within the past three years. The investigation sought to reveal the spatial factors that contribute to the realisation of tree-lined streets. A tree-focussed reading of the urban planning and development controls, codes, guidelines and specifications that specifically apply to local streets was carried out to assess how these documents impact on the implementation of tree-lined streets. Council officers involved in the planning, design, certification and maintenance of streets were first interviewed individually and later participated together in a focus group discussion. Findings indicate that although there is political will to implement tree-lined local streets, codes and specifications for other infrastructure impact on the space available for trees. The research concludes that unless trees are accepted as a critical component of the streetscape, urban canopy will not increase and the potential for street trees to mitigate urban heat will not be realised. The discussion suggests actions for policy and for codes and practices that impact on trees. If implemented these actions would result in more tree-lined streets in Western Sydney. The actions could also be replicated in other jurisdictions.
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(2021)ThesisThe ‘gated community’ phenomenon became widespread as an emerging trend in the last decades of the 20th century. Gated communities—as a part of the suburbanisation tendency resulting from capitalist economic order and modernisation—have changed the macrostructure of urban design in cities worldwide. Gated communities may be defined as privatised residential areas with controlled entrances to separate insiders from outsiders. Such developments commonly offer a variety of leisure facilities for middle- and upper-income groups formulated to their lifestyles. Despite the vast body of research on social polarisation generated by gated developments, little is known about the relationships between the various design approaches and the role of design elements in the public experience of social groups’ division stemming from the phenomenon. Conceptual and physical boundaries, along with other factors in the planning and architectural decision-making, play essential roles in providing a sense of isolation and separation between residents and non-residents. This research examines the role of the architectural design elements and whether (and how), in contributing to the separation between residents and local communities. Accordingly, it focuses on the elements that define inside-outside and private-public spaces among two gated developments in Istanbul, Turkey. A qualitative research method is used to evaluate the role of design elements as separators in selected gated communities. It investigates the architectural characteristics, historical background, site arrangements, site plans and sections, and social perspectives for two case studies of the gated community designed by the celebrated Turkish architect Mehpare Evrenol. The design elements are analysed using maps, architectural drawings, and photos that were taken specifically for each project. The survey results are then discussed descriptively to provide an overview of nonresidents’ perceptions of the separation and differentiation concepts applied for both case studies. In addition, the study argues that the architect has used historical elements, cultural icons, and design motifs as reference points to present the splendour and wealth of the residents belonging to these gated communities. With the first case study, the Bosphorus City project, the thesis demonstrates that multiple design motives—such as a water path in the centre of the development and the construction of units in imitation of traditional residential villas—connect this gated community to Istanbul’s historical water mansions alongside the Bosphorus Strait. These reference points act as key icons for advertising the project in the market and symbolise the luxury lifestyle associated with this project. Similarly, the landscaping, water, and walking paths intersecting small islands in a private square in the middle of the Koycegiz Residence, the focus of the second case study, have been created by the architect as an oasis of escape far from the city chaos and a centre of communication for residents within this facility. In addition, the survey results, taken from 20 participants in two groups (architect professionals and non-architects), indicated that perceived notions of separation and differentiation are generated by spatial designs and architectural elements in the case studies. The design features and cultural references used as marketing icons attracted participants from both groups who desired to live in these gated communities. The participants mainly discussed the privilege of security, privacy, and luxury lifestyle provided by the architectural features inside the gated projects. Moreover, the public spaces that are inaccessible to non-residents are explicitly and repeatedly mentioned by participants as forming an extraordinary advantage for those living inside the gated communities. The public area within related projects as an urban paradise plays a vital role in promoting close social interactions. In addition, the main concept of offering a new lifestyle and environment inside gated communities has been created through these privatised public spaces. Therefore, as a proposed solution, a controlled communal space that could serve as a meeting point for residents and non-residents alike creates a more permeable urban arrangement, reducing the sense of polarisation and differentiation in global cities.
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A Helping Hand: Design process of a soft anthropomorphic end-effector for the construction industry.(2022)ThesisThis thesis conducts design-led research to develop a soft anthropomorphic end-effector that is specifically designed for use with a collaborative robot on a construction site. As the construction industry changes to meet the demands of increasing populations and lack of skilled trades workers, new approaches are needed. This research explores the possibilities of a collaborative robot working on a construction site to help workers complete tasks deemed unsafe or detrimental to their health. The study acknowledges the different requirements of human-robot collaboration. However, it focuses on designing a hybrid end-effector that allows a collaborative robot to carry out more than a singular task on a construction site to increase productivity through all construction stages. The research conducts an iterative design process using soft robot techniques to replicate human hand elements, such as muscles and ligaments and currently available sensor technologies to create a hybrid end-effector. This end-effector is tested for grip strength and the ability to use both power and precision grasp functions to pick up a paintbrush, screwdriver, and a screw.
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(2020)ThesisThis thesis asserts that the promotion of the California bungalow in the Australian trade magazine Building was undertaken in the interest of communicating and transferring ideological agendas. Specifically, the editors and publishers of Building used the California bungalow as a vehicle through which to advocate the relevance of architects in the changing suburban housing market of the 1910s and 1920s. A review of the literature on the California bungalow in Australia demonstrates that this literature is limited in its exploration of print media as a source of information about the bungalow’s role in architectural history. This research addresses this gap by drawing on existing theories from the discipline of media discourse analysis to reveal new insights into the significance of the California bungalow. The research shows that the campaign for the California bungalow in Building was ideological, and reflected personal and professional agendas. It also reveals that the promotion of the California bungalow played a part in facilitating the involvement of the architectural profession in a changing housing market. This thesis indicates the potential for future research that examines print media as a legitimate source of history in order to expand and deepen our understanding of architectural history.