Stormwater management has long existed as a daunting task for many cities. Within recent decades, a novel landscape design approach to effectively and sustainably manage urban stormwater known as Low Impact Development (LID) was initiated in the United States. Unfortunately, the LID projects, although holding ecological benefits, have often fallen short of achieving public recognition and satisfaction because of their illegible and unkempt looks.

Concerning this onerous problem, the tenet that stormwater knowledge can play a role in stimulating aesthetic appreciation of LID landscapes has been reiterated. This study, accordingly, intends to provide information and insight regarding public appreciation of and education about the LID design. San Francisco Bay Area was chosen as a study area due to its unique and critical stormwater management situations. Eight projects, which demonstrate a range of LID designs, were selected as the test sites. In addition, other eight places representing a range of conventional landscape designs, the non-LID sites, were also selected as the control sites. The questionnaires were developed and distributed to visitors of these 16 selected study sites using the street intercept method. Results from the analysis of 502 responses demonstrate that, in most of the cases, the LID facilities were well recognized and appreciated by the respondents, compared to the conventional-designed landscapes, thereby suggesting that these LID cases can serve as good models for the ensuing projects and, besides, the implementation of LID design in San Francisco Bay Area can be continued without serious concern about public resistance. Nonetheless, because some LID facilities were unlikely to receive positive public responses, making better designs and advancing stormwater literacy are both considered key strategies. The analysis results also reveal that respondents thought they were not quite knowledgeable about sustainable stormwater management, yet they were open to information and knowledge, especially through reading the interpretive signs at the facilities, leading to the recommendation that LID projects in the Bay Area be developed in a manner that they can facilitate stormwater education.

This dissertation concludes by highlighting the role that landscape design can play in making successful and meaningful LID facilities and, ultimately, establishing desirable relationships between aesthetics and ecology. Based on the review of design strategies proposed in relevant literatures and used in existing projects along with the insights derived from the survey results, an innovative set of design criteria for creating the LID facilities which can enrich aesthetic experience and enhance stormwater knowledge of their visitors is developed. These design criteria include 1) visibility and legibility, 2) accessibility, 3) functionality, 4) attractiveness and interest, 5) cultural aesthetics, 6) ecological revelation, 7) interactive activities, 8) interpretive signage, 9) water features, and 10) application and replication. In addition, this dissertation also develops the guidelines for designing the prominent stormwater management features, which include 1) water tank/ cistern, 2) street gutter/ storm drain/ runnel, 3) pavers/ permeable pavement, 4) lawn/ grass/ turf, 5) rain garden/ bioretention planter/ bioswale, 6) stormwater pond/ constructed wetland, 7) green street/ green parking lot, 8) green roof, 9) green wall, and 10) scupper/ downspout. Even though these criteria and guidelines are developed based on the situations of San Francisco Bay Area, they are considered applicable to other geographical areas.

Abstract

Heterogeneity within Indian cities:

Methods for empirical analysis

by

Krishnachandran Balakrishnan

Doctor of Philosophy in Landscape Architecture and Environmental Planning

University of California, Berkeley

Professor Louise Mozingo, Chair

This dissertation proposes new methods for analyzing the heterogeneity within Indian cities. The research focuses on developing methods which rely mainly on secondary datasets and demonstrates the application of the methods using data for Bangalore city. The dissertation is structured as a set of three papers, each of which focuses on a specific dimension of heterogeneity within Indian cities. The first paper uses data from the Census of India to generate sub-city typologies based on socio-economic attributes, housing quality, and access to water and sanitation infrastructure. The second paper proposes a predictive framework for high-resolution population density estimation in Indian cities. The method uses data on land-use, land-cover, street network, building height and asset ownership to predict population at a resolution of 30m. This paper also demonstrates the application of a new method for generating building height estimates at a city-wide scale using satellite stereo imagery. The third paper in this dissertation focuses on understanding heterogeneity in the volume of domestic piped water availability across parts of Bangalore city. It combines the high-resolution population mapping method of the second paper with data from the local water utility, to analyze domestic piped water availability. Using normative demand scenarios, it also estimates the deficit in domestic piped water availability and the extent of direct or indirect dependence on groundwater in a spatially disaggregated manner. The dissertation concludes with a discussion on the patterns of spatial inequality within Bangalore, as revealed by the three papers.

Within the past 10 years there has been a rapid growth in studies addressing the link between the built environment's relationship to physical activity and chronic disease. However, even in a time of rapidly expanding spatial data, researchers still struggle with how best to measure the built environment within this context. In the past, disease mapping and an etiologic approach to public health often led to the elimination of entire neighborhoods (and the relocation of vulnerable populations within). Today, the origins of these "man-made" illnesses are often a confluence of genetic, biologic, and small-scale environmental factors, exacerbated by today's urban landscape--an environment that is in no way accidental. Through the lens of current research on walkable neighborhoods and an eye towards health equity, this dissertation examines larger questions regarding both the historical and present relationship between urban landscape and health. To begin to address these complex interactions not only between individuals and neighborhoods, but between parts of the built environment itself, this research also proposes an alternative model for built environment measurement that maps multiple opportunities and barriers to well-being in the urban landscape.

Studies still often rely on coarse measures such as density and land use to judge the walkability of a neighborhood, and often neglect more nuanced features of the built environment. The promised effectiveness of "walkable neighborhoods" also still relies on certain foundational concepts that proved to be pitfalls in past movements focused on health and the built environment. Proponents of walkable environments advocate for a one-size-fits-all framework of the influence of the built environment. This overlooks the fact that vulnerable populations, such as the elderly and youth, tend to feel the effects of the environment more acutely, or that low-income populations don't have the same amount of leisure time available for physical activity. Another is the premise that all can choose to live in a neighborhood deemed healthy, a confounder often referred to as "self-selection" in the literature--a premise that is disconnected from today's economic landscape. It is also unclear how the plethora of research on built environment and physical activity will become realized while avoiding the mistakes of past movements centered surrounding health.

This dissertation traces the historical and theoretical foundations of health and the built environment to the current state, as well as possible implications of contemporary study. Using lessons learned from a case study of how active design research has become policy in Sacramento, California, I propose a flexible model of built environment measurement for chronic disease outcomes. These multiple mappings of the city can reveal where risk of illness and opportunities for well-being lie in the built environment for focused and thoughtful interventions.

This dissertation investigates the concept of cultural routes, how they are planned, designed and developed as a unique type of landscape-based memorial/narrative project, and, as they ultimately present a possibility of travel, what sort of experience in mobility they afford a user. Cultural routes, taken globally, represent a broad and diffuse field of scholarship and an even broader physical setting. Therefore, this work considers specifically the case of cultural routes projects of the US National Park Service (NPS), the National Historic Trails System. The nineteen such National Historic Trails (NHT) in the NPS portfolio represent more than 37,500 miles of linear territory and are overseen by multiple US governmental agencies and citizen interest groups. However, the NHT are most often invisible to the eye and only loosely understood insofar as how this immense undertaking and those who “use” them are to activate the landscapes at hand. Almost no scholarship exists to look directly at the NHT despite their clear investment in the overlapping fields of landscape and public history.

This dissertation first attempts to situate the NHT within larger, established frames: the landscape Picturesque, pilgrimage and the anthropology of tourism, historical retracement, and the advent of neoliberal dynamics in historic narrative creation and the institutional approach to landscape and meaning-making. To draw these investigations together, an overarching theoretical framework of mobility geography emerges: the NHT are an unseen provider of a specific type of mobility. Therefore, in order to both test and synthesize the NHT, the aforementioned historical interrogations serve as a foundation for an experimental-method-driven attempt to capture the mobile experience.

In addition to a utilization of traditional methods of landscape history, this project proposes and reflexively tests its own experimental method, “hodology.” A convergence of other tools available for the research of cultural landscape phenomena, drawing from mobility geography, anthropology of pilgrimage, tourism and embedded ethnography, hodology goes one step further by integrating emerging geolocation technologies while simultaneously considering their own role in the design and experience of the NHT themselves.

The resulting research draws together disparate chapters in landscape history to reveal of what NHT are actually comprised. The synthesis offered by the hodological analysis builds upon this and represents a preliminary effort in capturing what the NHT offer as a mobility. However, operating within a wider gap in scholarship, it is the critique of this new method that serves as a building block for further focus and study, applicable to the expanding field of cultural route study and design. Critically, hodology places landscape architecture in a central position with respect to this field and its overlap with mobility geography.

This project examines the post-Cold War development of two new public parks at Tempelhof Airfield in Berlin, Germany, and the Presidio Army Base, in San Francisco, California. It situates these two cases against a larger literature on the revival of the public park during the same period, providing an alternative theoretical understanding of public parks linked to technology and geopolitics. This takes form by examining each case across three chapters, the first establishes the development of each site and its role in nation-state formation and urban development in its respective location. The second examines the emergence of post-war urban environmentalism, and the new concepts of nature and citizenship that manifested in the management of the urban environment by organizations like Grün Berlin GmbH, the Golden Gate Parks Conservancy, and the Presidio Trust. Finally, the third chapter examines the impact of these organizations on the production of public park spaces at the Presidio and Tempelhof. Comparing the genealogical development of these spaces sheds light on the political and social processes at work in the contemporary production of public park spaces, as well as the broader reconfiguration of concepts of citizenship and nature.

This project is an attempt to recuperate citizen participation in urban design and planning from the top-down attitudes that make them less and less relevant to informing the complex, dynamic ways that public space is actually produced. It critiques the status quo modes of practice and conceives of urban activism as reactions against that system, reactions that follow particular dispositions between preservation of the status quo to revolt. It focuses on two modalities of urban activism that hold promise for transformation--reform activism and autogestión. The dissertation specifically examines experiments in participatory urbanism in Barcelona, through which urban activists engage with institutions, organizations, and residents to either reform existing systems or to build alternative systems that are semi-autonomous (autogestionado). Using archival and ethnographic methods, this study offers insights on emerging activist roles that designers and urbanists are assuming in an effort to give citizens more local control over urban space. Understanding these new roles is important not only for aspiring urban activists but also to officials and other professionals who likewise must negotiate the dynamic terrain between institutions, professionals and publics.