Climate Research at the A-School

Malo A. Hutson
Dean and Edward E. Elson Professor

Malo A. Hutson, Dean and Edward E. Elson Professor, describes how the UVA School of Architecture serves as a convener to debate the pressing climate issues of the day.

Landscape Futures

Bradley Cantrell
Chair and Professor, Landscape Architecture

Chair and Professor of Landscape Architecture Bradley Cantrell explains how climate research at the A-School is plural.

Pioneering New Material Assemblies

Katie MacDonald and Kyle Schumann
Assistant Professors, Architecture

Before Building Laboratory's Katie MacDonald and Kyle Schumann, Assistant Professors of Architecture, define biomaterials and share their promise for the future of architecture.

Infrastructure as a Cultural Landscape

Brian Davis
Associate Professor, Landscape Architecture

Associate Professor Brian Davis, Co-Director of the Natural Infrastructure Lab, asks us to consider how accelerating sea level rise can be an opportunity to reimagine the future.

Arctic Resilience

Leena Cho and Matthew Jull
Associate Professor, Landscape Architecture and Associate Professor, Architecture

Assistant Professor of Landscape Architecture Leena Cho and Associate Professor of Architecture Matthew Jull, co-directors of the Arctic Design Group, describe their research in the rapidly changing environment of the Arctic Region.

Climate Justice

Barbara Brown Wilson
Associate Professor, Urban and Environmental Planning

Associate Professor of Urban and Environmental Planning Barbara Brown Wilson shares how a justice-oriented approach to climate research centers community partners.

Nature-based Infrastructure

Michael Luegering
Assistant Professor, Landscape Architecture

Assistant Professor of Landscape Architecture Michael Luegering talks about his work at Morven Farms where he is studying multiple ways we can engage plants, through common agricultural grading practices and adaptive management techniques, as well as, through drone technology and non-visible spectra sensing.

Building Codes

Jeana Ripple
Chair and Associate Professor, Architecture

Associate Professor of Architecture and Department Chair Jeana Ripple explains how her research addresses what is left out of building codes, like the social impact of how and what materials are used, their longevity and their relationship to urban wellbeing.

Imagining Climate Futures

Bradley Cantrell
Chair and Professor, Landscape Architecture

Professor of Landscape Architecture and Department Chair Brad Cantrell asks: "We may know what’s going to happen tomorrow, but we have a very difficult time of understanding of what’s going to happen over the next century and so how can we be more humble as designers?"

Immersive Environments

JT Bachman and Katie Stranix
Assistant Professors, Architecture

Assistant Professors of Architecture, JT Bachman and Katie Stranix, describe their ongoing research and body of design work that explores immersive environments, spaces where someone can go, disconnect, unplug, and transition from one environment to another.

Beyond Building

Katie MacDonald and Kyle Schumann
Assistant Professors, Architecture

Assistant Professors of Architecture Katie MacDonald and Kyle Schumann, Co-founders and Co-directors of Before Building Laboratory, imagine new materials, methods, and technologies that can shape the future of the built environment around us.

Community Action

Vaness Guerra
Assistant Professor, Urban and Environmental Planning

Assistant Professor of Urban and Environmental Planning Vanessa Guerra explains her research that explores the environmental resilience of informal urban practices in cities in the Global South.

How We Live Together

Leena Cho and Matthew Jull
Associate Professor, Landscape Architecture and Associate Professor, Architecture

Co-founders of the Arctic Design Group, Assistant Professor of Landscape Architecture Leena Cho and Associate Professor of Architecture Matthew Jull ask how design, as method of collaboration, allows us to question the past as we face the impacts of climate change.

The Practical and the Radical

Andrew Mondschein
Associate Dean of Research and Associate Professor, Urban and Environmental Planning

Associate Dean of Research Andrew Mondschein describes how design and planning, and subsequently climate research at the UVA School of Architecture, possess a distinctive fusion of technical knowledge, synthetic creativity, and inclusive methods that can be defined as both practical and radical.

The Diaspora Synagogue: Jewish Architecture and the Inter-Communal Networks of the 17th and 18th Century Atlantic

The Jewish Atlantic world of the 17th and 18th centuries was fundamentally connected by a shared Jewish culture that developed directly out of the experience of the mass conversions and expulsions of the prior centuries, most significantly those of the Iberian Inquisitions. At the start of the 17th century, a Jewish community emerged in Amsterdam that over the course of the century became a center of an extensive inter-communal network that linked newly established Jewish communities in the Netherlands, England, the Caribbean, South and North America. This network was economic, religious, and social, and provided Jewish congregations in the Dutch and English world with the material support and religious leadership required to maintain Jewish practice, build public synagogues, and strengthen their shared cultural identity.

This dissertation is focused on the 17th and 18th century Dutch and English Jewish communities in the Atlantic region and studies the synagogues constructed within this diaspora as outputs, or events, of a complex system. The scale and complexity of relationships within this system is addressed through the use of a custom-built relational database and methods in network analysis. These digital methods enable an expansive study of synagogue architecture that exposes patterns that interrogate existing arguments surrounding the impact of “mother synagogues” in Amsterdam and London on colonial synagogues, and also illuminates the complexities of architectural inheritance and the ways that buildings reflect communal values.

Toward a Paradigmatic Approach of Meaning-Making: Memorial Art and Architecture in Mao Zedong's Birthplace

In the summer of 2020, demonstrators in the United States are again calling to dismantle Confederate monuments along with statues of Christopher Columbus, Thomas Jefferson, and George Washington. Across the Pacific Ocean, monuments are raising widespread schisms in China, too. Many young urban residents imagine Shaoshan, the Communist leader Mao Zedong’s birthplace, as an obsolete, propagandistic site. Yet, the place attracts millions of commemorators each year, and stands as a highland where various social strata attempt to capture and curate the nation’s memory. My dissertation offers the first comprehensive study of Shaoshan’s memorial art and architecture from the 1950s till today. The project is both historical and theoretical. On the one hand, building on first-hand archival materials and data collected from a three-month participant observation, I examine: 1) the history of heritage preservation and memorial constructions in Shaoshan from the 1950s to the 2000s; 2) the culture of memorial practices among the local commemorating community; and 3) the architectural design of three memorial museums that articulated Shaoshan’s significance in different historical contexts. On the other hand, my research is led by the overarching question of how commemorators understand Shaoshan’s built-environments to be memorable. I argue that Shaoshan is part of the far-reaching memorial tradition in Chinese culture, and it indicates a distinct approach toward meaning-making which I call paradigmatic: in local memorial practices, commemorators possess a processual perspective on history, and understand historical figures and events as typological examples that illuminate, in their lives, the constant potentials of practice and knowledge production. I suggest that, from this paradigmatic perspective, scholars could not only better comprehend the relationship between significance and built-environments, but also explore new methods of meaning-making in the contemporary era when communication technologies develop at an unprecedented speed.

Re-Assembling Community: Landscape, Commons, and Local Facts in Scottish Community Land Ownership

Community buyouts in Scotland arose in the early 1990s, driven by a grassroots movement of residents of large estates in the Scottish Highland and Islands who were unhappy with management practices and neglect under private ownership. The movement grew in popularity as new buyouts received state legal and financial support. Estates that transitioned to community ownership have, on the whole, achieved greater success in retaining younger residents, developing renewable energy projects, and growing new businesses on their estates. Current research lacks a strong model for explaining why community ownership has been successful, as well as why some community trusts have faltered or failed to connect with subsets of the residential population.

This study interrogates the dynamics that emerge from community ownership at the points at which the human population interacts with the landscape. This work establishes a theoretical framework which builds upon feminist geographies, commons theory, and science and technology studies to propose a model of community dynamics that can produce large changes in outcomes under community ownership. This model of community centers around a "binding commons," or common property arrangement within a community which both shapes the form of community and is shaped by it. To ground this in empirical work, I use landscape inventory methods to locate sites of strong activity, tension, or importance on or near community-owned estates. Drawing on these results, I focus on small community shops on each estate. Interview data demonstrate how by acting as a binding commons, each shop produces a form of community infrastructure which facilitates the provision of work and information needs across the community.

In turn, this model helps make sense of the dynamics which arose while managing community-owned assets, as presented by current and former trust leaders in multiple narratives in their encounters with difficult projects or questions. These accounts also demonstrate that the specific structures and forms of attachment to binding commons may result in unequal empowerment of community members. From these narratives, I demonstrate how community infrastructure provides valuable mediation and provision of work and information. I then offer a discussion of how the binding commons model illuminates relationality between human and non-human members of the community and the landscape, and use this illumination to address the awkwardness of decolonization in the context of land reform in rural Scotland.

Al-Shaheed Park as Public Space: An ethnographic exploration of everyday landscapes and politics in Kuwait

Kuwait’s City’s Al-Shaheed Park is an example of public space beyond democracy, which disrupts the public/non-public binary. Scholars widely depict public spaces as directly tied to democracy, and emphasize their active production through protests and informal and insurgent practices. Drawing from thirteen months of ethnographic fieldwork in Al-Shaheed Park, this dissertation investigates publicness through the lens of everyday life. Each chapter identifies a seemingly banal practice that highlights the park’s heterotopic (real and unreal) nature. Through its uncanniness, the park reveals political cues and enables people entry into the public sphere. Practices include cleaning, managing, maintaining, programming, securing, and traveling to and through the park. Through ethnography and theories of everyday life, the chapters investigate how the park and definition of the ‘public’ it serves are reinforced by the actions of multiple actors. These include officials, visitors, cleaners, ecologists and designers, amongst others. Instead of seeing public spaces as lost, this study suggests that publicness exists on a spectrum, showcasing parks in particular as active political sites of reflection and exclusion. Ontologically, multiple definitions of public space exist. By engaging with power in parks, we access and alter the different meanings and understandings of public space and foresee room for change.

COMMITTEE:
Advisor: Dr. Jessica Ellen Sewell
Other committee members: Prof. Elizabeth K. Meyer, Dr. Gareth Doherty

Al-Shaheed Park in Kuwait City, Kuwait (2019); Source: We'Aam Al-Abdullah

Examining Travel to Non-work Destinations: Integrating Geosocial Media and Smartphone-based GPS Traces

Urban commercial districts and centers are places that provide concentrated opportunities for non-work activities. Traveling to these non-work destinations, such as shopping centers, restaurants, bars, grocery stores, movie theaters, etc., is an important part of urban life. Recent advances in information and communication technology (ICT) and mobile devices create new opportunities for today’s transportation planners to understand travel perceptions and behavior using non-survey sources of data. The emergence of such “transportation big data” has resulted in a large quantity of information documenting people’s everyday movements, travel events, attitudes, perceptions, and emotions, all connected with the location and time.

This dissertation develops a data fusion framework that integrates geosocial media, fine-grained individual GPS trace data, land use and built environment data, and demographic data from the U.S. census to quantify people’s travel experiences and mobility patterns to commercial and mixed-use districts, taking the Phoenix Metropolitan Area as a study case. Specifically, the geosocial media data used in this dissertation is collected from Yelp reviews and the GPS trajectory data is collected from smartphone apps with GPS-enabled location services. This dissertation research first examines the perceptions of travel in major commercial and mixed-use districts using transportation texts embedded in Yelp reviews. Then, it analyzes travel behavior to these destinations using GPS trajectory data with a fine scale in space and time. Following on from the prior two analyses, it develops a data fusion framework by integrating geosocial media and GPS traces to further examine 1) the relationship between attitude and built environment, and 2) the impacts of attitude and built environment on travel behavior.

Given the prospect of the big data era for transportation research, this dissertation research shows the promises of emerging data and analytics in providing useful information about travelers’ attitudes and behaviors. It also enhances our understanding of non-work travel and has implications for transportation planning and management. Therefore, this dissertation makes two major contributions to urban transportation planning research, one regarding the travel to non-work destinations, and second regarding the methods developed to integrate multiple types of big data for transportation planning informatics.

Zhiqiu Jiang is a postdoctoral researcher at CISPA Helmholtz Center for Information Security in Germany. Prior to that, she was a postdoctoral fellow in Computer Science at University of Massachusetts Amherst. She received her Ph.D. in Constructed Environment from University of Virginia in 2021. She was selected as a Presidential Fellow in School of Data Science and a Praxis Fellow in Digital Humanities at UVA. Her research is motivated by two fundamental questions: how technology can enhance our comprehension of humans, and in turn, how we can better understand technology. To this end, her work explores how the boundary between human and AI environments is expanding, where AI is not just a tool but a partner that interacts with and adapts to human needs. Her interdisciplinary research focuses on advancing AI for social good, with a particular emphasis on large language models, generative AI, and responsible data science.