Thesis Advising

The following is a sample of theses I have advised. The theses described here include community service-based theses and other field-based theses with a social action focus. All of these theses relied upon a significant amount of fieldwork and offer innovative perspectives on the social scenarios they study.

The topics of the theses I advise typically echo my own professional interests and experience, which include low-income housing, poverty action practice, community participation, alternative sanitation and other green technologies, and the politics surrounding these issues. My experience in these topics enables me to offer advice and to help students to further define what is relevant in their research endeavors.

The theses listed below are categorized by topic. Topics include: housing-related, design-build and design activism, and planning and urban studies.

Unless otherwise indicated, I was the thesis director or committee chair.

1. HOUSING-RELATED THESES

Interrogating Affordable Housing Design: Holyoke, Massachusetts

Susannah Auderset’s thesis, “Understanding ‘Thoughtful’ Affordable Housing” (2023), investigates advocacy on behalf of good design in U.S. affordable housing practice. As a representative example of such advocacy, Susannah cites a statement on the website of the Harvard University’s Joint Center for Housing Studies: “Thoughtful design can create high-quality affordable multifamily housing.” She asks what thoughtful design means, observing that this is a vague term based upon the practitioners’ subjective perception and good intentions.

In her thesis, Susannah explores the prevalence of the thoughtful design paradigm in U.S. affordable housing history and examines the claims about thoughtful design in present-day affordable housing practice.

Susannah supports this inquiry with a field study of the design of Library Commons, an affordable housing project in Holyoke, Massachusetts. Library Commons is designed in such a way that it does not look like the surrounding building landscape although it still blends in with it. It is, indeed, a thoughtfully designed affordable housing project and thus a very relevant one to study when exploring the role of architectural design in affordable housing.

Susannah’s thesis is an action-based project, as she partnered with Way Finders, the affordable housing nonprofit that developed and (at the time the thesis was written) managed Library Commons. One of the outcomes of this partnership was for Way Finders to use Susannah’s findings to inform its design and other decisions for its future housing interventions in Western Massachusetts.

Susannah’s thesis was largely based on fieldwork. In addition to exploring the design aspects of Library Commons in the field, she interviewed a representative number of tenants, inquiring about their experiences of living in this housing project. She undertook this research project without any preconceptions, allowing the research to unfold organically. Her original plan was to act as a regular design researcher, proposing changes to optimize the layout of the apartments (e.g., kitchen location, room size, etc.). She did take this role, but only to the extent that the residents were interested in such discussions. We designed the research in such a way that the interviewees were able to shift the conversation to whatever topics they wanted to discuss, even ignoring the question about design—which, in fact, they often did.

What Susannah found was surprising. Despite the great emphasis that architectural practitioners currently place on the design aspects of affordable housing, for the tenants of Library Commons the design of the building was largely a non-issue. Instead, their primary concerns were related to safety, affordability, and unemployment, among other topics that had more to do with social issues than with the form-related aspects of the apartments.

Based on this finding, Susannah’s thesis recommends that affordable housing practice in the U.S. should be less fixated on housing design and should focus more on the provision of social support.

(Bachelor’s Thesis, Amherst College, 2023)

Accompanying a Housing Rights Movement: Holyoke, Massachusetts

“Que Viva Lyman Terrace” (2014), cowritten by Erika Linenfelser and Julie Pedtke, studies housing activism in Holyoke, Massachusetts. The thesis focuses on the case of Lyman Terrace, one of the oldest public housing projects in the United States. In 2012, the City of Holyoke intended to demolish this project, displacing its mostly Puerto Rican- descendant population. The residents resisted the demolition with the support of a group of local activists.

Erika and Julie joined this group, offering support to residents in activities such as English-to-Spanish translation in the often contentious meetings between residents and city officers. After the residents obtained assurance from the city that they would not be evicted, Erika and Julie also helped the residents to analyze proposals submitted by various housing nonprofits. Throughout the whole process, Erika and Julie also volunteered at the neighborhood’s Boys and Girls Club.

In their work, Erika and Julie set out to tell the story of the residents’ struggle, including the initial formation of the community, the residents’ efforts to resist the eviction, and the successful outcome of this resistance.

Thus, Erika and Julie’s thesis was profoundly based on fieldwork, but it embodied a particular kind of fieldwork. The thesis was action-oriented in the sense that the students became allies in a housing movement, offering practical support to the community members who were involved in that movement, while at the same time documenting the movement as it happened.

Through the process of narrating the story of the Lyman Terrace movement, Erika and Julie studied the inner workings of community participation in low-income housing practice. Their final thesis products included an audiovisual exhibit at the Holyoke Public Library that presented selections from the neighborhood’s oral history. A portion of the exhibit was later displayed at the Boston Foundation for Architecture’s exhibition hall in Boston. Erika and Julie also published their thesis as a book through a print-on-demand service.

After Erika and Julie concluded their research, I, along with new cohorts of students, continued to accompany the residents as the housing project underwent its physical rehabilitation. This process of “acompañamiento” continued until that process was concluded a few years later.

I team-directed this thesis with Myrna Breitbart and Tim Zimmerman.

(Bachelor’s Thesis, Hampshire College, 2014)

Christian Churches as Housing Providers: The Case of the U.S.

Dana Kulma’s thesis, “Affordable Housing Development on Church-Owned Land” (2021), focuses on Christian churches as low-income housing providers. The thesis starts with a simple premise: Many Christian churches find themselves owning a great deal of land from bequests by wealthy donors. How can these churches make the best use of that land to further fulfill their social mission, particularly with regard to helping people in poverty?

In her thesis, Dana makes a compelling case for studying Christian churches as housing providers: it has to do with the current housing crisis. Citing numbers from the National Low-income Housing Coalition, she explains that the deficit of rental housing for the families in greatest need in the United States is already nearing 7 million units. She also explains that affordable rental housing currently only exists for a little more than one third of the country’s extremely low-income families. At the same time, she estimates that Christian churches in the United States currently own hundreds of thousands of acres of undeveloped land. Thus, Dana puts the issue and the opportunity into conversation and asks: “What is the best use of church land and resources to confront the affordable housing shortage in the U.S.?”

Dana addresses this question, first, by carrying out a comprehensive reading of academic literature on the role of faith-based organizations in housing and poverty alleviation in general. Second, she makes a careful analysis of 40 church-based housing development projects located throughout the United States. Third, she interviews a number of professionals presently involved in Christian housing development initiatives.

Based on this research, Dana identifies the four most common approaches currently in use by Christian organizations in their present low-income housing initiatives: Habitat for Humanity’s, community land trusts, tiny homes, and co-development.

After studying these approaches in detail, Dana concludes that the most effective one is co-development. This model entails a partnership between churches and housing developers, in which the churches lease their land and the developers build and manage the low-income housing projects. She argues that this is the best approach because, among other reasons, it is the most affordable to execute and offers the best outcome in terms of the quality of the housing, given that the church does not go beyond its realm of expertise to serve as a housing developer.

Dana’s thesis finding regarding the benefits of co-development is particularly relevant because, of the four identified approaches, co-development is the newest and least researched one in the academic literature. The main focus of current housing literature is government housing, while the nonprofit housing sector receives comparatively less attention. Additionally, within the area of nonprofit housing, even less research has been conducted on housing provided by religious organizations. Lastly, another important contribution of Dana’s research is that she focuses on the case of the United States, while most existing research on housing by religious organizations focuses on the work done by these organizations in so-called developing countries.

(Bachelor’s Thesis, Amherst College, 2021)

Modernist Housing vis-à-vis Cultural Difference: The Russian Microrayon

Emilie Flamme’s thesis, “A Study of the Soviet Courtyard in Contemporary Russia” (2020), studies the microrayon, a modernist urban form that was massively used in post-WWII Russia for housing and connected public infrastructure.

Microrayon housing is standardized; the most typical microrayon units are five-story low-rise international-style buildings. Formally speaking, these buildings are unmarked—they look alike whether they are built in Russia, South Africa, or Brazil. For that reason, they tend to obfuscate the cultural identity of the people who inhabit them.

As Emilie observes, in Russia, people with subaltern ethnic identities tend to find it difficult to customize these international-style units to suit their traditional space uses or other cultural expressions. However, they do still manage to express their ethno-cultural affiliations in the small transitional courtyard space that exists between the building (domestic space) and the park (public space).

Emilie’s focus on the courtyard is significant because, in her vast reading of both Russian studies and urban studies literature, she finds that most of this literature focuses either on houses or on urban spaces, while the courtyard remains an under- researched space. However, as Emilie argues, it is in looking at the courtyard that one can witness an often unnoticed struggle among subaltern Russian citizens seeking to make visible the difference between their identities and the predominant national identity. The decorations and customized uses of courtyards are visible expressions of cultural identity, reflecting an ethnic diversity that a decades-old hegemonic state project has attempted to obfuscate with campaigns of “Russianness” modeled upon the image of the ethnic white Russian population.

Thus, the courtyard organization ultimately becomes a powerful political statement in the guise of decorations or the placement of objects. This is especially true for sites of immigrant populations who inhabit spaces that were once populated by forcibly removed groups, such as the Soviet Koreans in Vladivostok, a case that Emilie studies in her thesis.

Emilie concludes that the Russian courtyard is not, nor has it ever been, simply an unmarked spatial form. Instead, the courtyard is a site of a grassroots opposition to a centralized, hegemonic ethno-political project.

In making her argument on cultural difference as expressed in space use, Emilie proposes her own method of formal analysis, a visually-based method using layered plans of the studied sites. In addition to the value of these plans as an analytical tool, they are well-designed and well-elaborated. As such, they provide the thesis with a distinctive design element that highlights its place as an architectural studies thesis. The thesis carefully explores architectural theory, engaging with a complex historical context while making use of Emilie’s original analytical drawings of both buildings and urban spaces.

To carry out the field research for this thesis, Emilie learned Russian at Amherst College as a sophomore, conducted interviews in Russian, and read a considerable amount of Russian literature. For her site visits, she traveled across the whole country, covering according to her own records 11,000 miles (including 100 miles on foot) and surveying 42 different sites from Moscow to Vladivostok.

(Bachelor’s Thesis, Amherst College, 2020)

Community Currencies: Nairobi, Kenya

Norah Oteri’s thesis, “Slum Currencies: An Economic Solution to a Housing Problem” (2018), explores the use and impact of community currencies. These are forms of decentralized physical currency that are coined by the members of a given community with the goal of trading goods and services with each other. Community currencies precede cryptocurrencies—another decentralized form of currency—by centuries, having been in use since the early 1800s in Europe.

Norah’s thesis is significant in that it focuses on a community currency that is used in a so-called Third World slum. This currency, called Gatina-pesa, was introduced (and, at the time of Norah’s field work, still overseen) by the nonprofit organization Grassroots Economics in the Kawangware slum in Nairobi, Kenya.

Why are community currencies necessary, and why would they be beneficial for slums and other sites of poverty? In her thesis, Norah offers several reasons, including the fact that “community currencies keep money circulating locally, providing liquidity in cash- poor areas to relieve unemployment and enable people to meet their needs, promoting active citizenship or volunteering, or encouraging greener behavior.”

For her study of the Gatina-pesa, Norah carried out extensive fieldwork, including interviews with small business owners and other Kawangware residents who use the currency, as well as with staff from the Grassroots Economics nonprofit. She carried out most of these interviews in Swahili, the slum’s predominant language. She also engaged in onsite day-to-day observations of how the Gatina-pesa is traded and took a grassroots economics course offered by the nonprofit.

The goal of these research activities was to gain a full, field-based understanding of how a community currency like the Gatina-pesa operates in the real world, including an awareness of both its potential and its drawbacks.

The picture that came into focus through Norah’s fieldwork was a complex one. On one hand, the currency’s success has been affected by ethnic tensions in the slum and the general climate of political polarization in the country. The system also faced some adoption hurdles when the organization tried to increase the scale of its adoption in the slum.

On the other hand, Norah observed that the Gatina-pesa has been effective in strengthening community bonds and bringing some economic profits to the local businesses that have adopted it. These profits come from transactions that community members make with the currency, and a portion goes into a “community basket” that is used to fund small environmental improvement projects in the neighborhood (e.g., trash collection and waste management). At the individual level, Norah also found that the system has worked fairly well for families that have adopted and use the currency, particularly those who are more entrepreneurial and self-empowered.

Based on these key findings, Norah asks whether some of the financial gains accrued by the Gatina-pesa trade system could be used for the community’s self-financing and self-management of housing-related services such as water, sanitation, and electricity, which are very scarce in the neighborhood.

In exploring how to make this initiative possible and materialize its goals, Norah details adjustments that would need to be made to the ways in which the currency is managed, as well as hurdles that the Grassroots Economics nonprofit would need to overcome.

(Bachelor’s Thesis, Amherst College, 2018)

2. DESIGN-BUILD AND DESIGN ACTIVISM THESES

A Critical Engagement with Humanitarian Architecture: Pine Ridge, South Dakota

Ryan Herrick’s thesis, “Okiciyapi: Examination of Architectural Intention” (2013), studies the complexities inherent to the practice of humanitarian design. Ryan explores this subject through a construction intervention of his own in one of the United States’ communities in greatest poverty, the Oglala Lakota Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota.

Ryan worked at Pine Ridge as a volunteer for a project called Earth Tipi Pallet House Project, initiated by a non-profit organization in partnership with a green building firm. This group set out to build, for demonstration purposes, a green design prototype for Native American populations in poverty. The beneficiaries of that prototype were an elderly couple and their family. However, the group ended up abandoning the project, leaving behind a barely inhabitable structure.

After the main project promoters left, Ryan decided to stay and finish the house himself. Reflecting upon his experience, Ryan examines the role of a humanitarian architect vis- á-vis issues of positionality and green orientalism.

In the process of describing the interpersonal conflict that contributed to the abandonment of the Pallet House project, Ryan provides an impressive first-hand account of an unfortunately common situation in social design work. Motivated by their great passion to “save the planet,” some green humanitarian activists endeavor to do whatever they can to materialize an idea of sustainability for people in poverty with whom they have had no previous connection. In the United States, some well-intended activists actually take advantage of the fact that local building codes might not be as stringent in rural areas as in urban centers, and use those areas as a testing ground for green technologies.

In many cases, such green humanitarianism projects do not work for the particular local conditions, or the humanitarian activists are amateur architects who have no expertise to draw upon to materialize their ambitious ideas. Consequently, the projects often end up abandoned, resulting in a sad display of the ruins of failed projects. Ryan describes how this occurred in the case of Pine Ridge:

With non-existent building codes, alternative and experimental ways of building can be utilized on the reservation at any individual’s discretion. In recent years, there has been an influx of natural building projects, ranging from Earthships to earthbag domes to cob and straw bale homes. [ . . . ] In Wounded Knee, a town just a few miles from Pine Ridge, there lays a half-completed earthbag dome structure, slowly being reclaimed by the earth as its contents are being scattered by the wind.

In his thesis, Ryan notes that local Pine Ridge residents are very aware, and also very critical, of this situation. He quotes a local Lakota engineer, who told Ryan he had confronted the Pallet House builder about what he was doing in the reservation: “‘I told [the builder] that he was experimenting with Lakotah peoples’ lives!’”

Ryan also quotes another resident who, speaking on behalf of his community, said: “We’re not into green-earth-building saving the planet. People should be more concerned about saving themselves.” This quote reflects a typical dilemma when implementing green building technologies in sites of poverty: between the sometimes hard-to-reach standards of sustainable building and the need to survive, what should be the ultimate priority?

While he does not attempt to solve this dilemma in his thesis, Ryan concludes that, for humanitarian design activism in sites of poverty, the challenge is not as simple as merely going to those sites to implement naturalist green technologies:

I realized the dichotomy that existed beneath my motivations; yes, I was there for humanitarian purposes, yet the basis of my work was rooted in a natural, sustainable building process that was directly in conflict with the human need that was being addressed. I asked myself, ‘What have we come here to do, build a house for a family, or the environment?’ Immediately, my hypothesis found itself on the operating table.

I served as an advisor on this thesis, which was chaired by Pamela Stone.

(Bachelor’s Thesis, Hampshire College, 2013)

Naturalist Construction: Bird Watching Hide, Easthampton, Massachusetts

For their coauthored thesis, “Conservative Architecture: Birding and the Built Form” (2016), Cole Cataneo-Ryan and Christopher (Chris) Hurlow built a small educational structure, a bird observation hide, in the Arcadia Wildlife Sanctuary in Easthampton, Massachusetts. This design-build project enabled Cole and Chris to engage with various aspects of the profession of architecture. They codeveloped the basic design concepts for the structure through sketches, physical scale models, and structural detail prototypes. They also built a 3D digital model to visualize the structure and lay out the technical plans for the construction.

This project gave Cole and Chris the opportunity to explore the knowledge area of structural design. Environmental regulations regarding the wetlands in Massachusetts require that no land be removed beyond a certain maximum amount of cubic feet. To comply with these regulations, Cole and Chris designed and implemented a creative foundation system based on circular section bars that are driven into the ground diagonally, using salvaged train track chairs as guides, to help anchor the structure and reduce displacement. The track chairs also keep in place the I-beams upon which the framing rests. The parallel placement of these I-beams recalls those of a railroad—a fitting comparison, as the structure stands on an old train line. This type of foundation allowed the project to comply with the code requirements by making it possible to remove virtually no soil from the area.

Adding to the foundation’s design, Cole and Chris also developed an innovative movable roof, which both made it possible to increase the viewing area and to ventilate the shelter—making it warmer or cooler as the season demanded. The roof was gabled and formed by two triangular pieces that moved up and down like wings, thus communicating the bird-watching purpose of the structure. In addition, since the structure’s floor plan aligned with the axis of the old train line upon which it was built, the metaphor of the train tracks for the foundation became that of an old rural station, complete with the use of salvaged boards from an old barn.

I co-directed this thesis with Naomi Darling.

(Bachelor’s Thesis, Hampshire College, 2016)

Inclusive Restaurant Design: Hadley, Massachusetts

For her thesis, “The Home in My Belly: The Space for Belonging and Comfort in a Restaurant” (2015), Dominique White combined two of her main interests, architectural studies and food studies. As part of her fieldwork, Dominique offered support to the owners of a restaurant in Hadley, Massachusetts. The owners, a Latina family, had lost their entire business to a devastating fire. Compounding the misfortune, at the time of the fire the business was uninsured. Dominique accompanied this family in their campaign to rebuild their business with public support. In the rebuilding process, Dominique provided design assistance at various levels while simultaneously documenting the family’s recovery process.

In her research, Dominique observed some commonalities between this case and that of a Japanese restaurant where she had previously worked and conducted research. Dominique noticed the extent to which customers of so-called “ethnic” restaurants like those two often demand “authenticity” in that they expect the servers to be from the cuisine’s country of origin. Dominique also found that, in terms of restaurant design, little consideration is often given to the back-of-house workers, including the cooks. These are often immigrant workers who endure difficult conditions, including 12-hour shifts, while carrying out physically and emotionally taxing labor. In her research, Dominique observed a number of space-related hardships that these employees have to endure, including restricted mobility and a lack of space to keep personal items during their long shifts.

Based on this finding, Dominique decided to shift the focus of her study to “bringing place-making into the forefront of restaurant design.” Thus, while she was initially interested in how an ethnic food restaurant creates a sense of place-making among customers, she ended up reflecting upon how place-making is reclaimed by the workers who prepare the food and who, paradoxically, tend to be regarded as invisible players in these businesses.

Dominique also studied a situation that further complicates matters in some ethnic food restaurants: that of space use among the family members in a family-run restaurant like the two she studied. In comparing the families’ use of space in the restaurant to that in their homes, she observed the extent to which these types of restaurants might become similar to a “second home” for the owners and their families.

Dominique closes her thesis by reflecting upon what is considered acceptable space use in restaurant management vis-à-vis the often-unfulfilled spatial needs of owners and staff members.

At the time she submitted her thesis, Dominique was still offering support to the restaurant owners in design and organizational matters.

I co-directed this thesis with Jennifer Hamilton.

(Bachelor’s Thesis, Hampshire College, 2015)

Exploring Public School Design: The Bronx, New York City

Grace Orr’s “Building for a Brighter Future” (2019) studies the impact of architectural design on middle and high school learning, particularly in a public school context. This is an action-oriented design thesis based on the case of the Bronx Lab School of Finance and Technology.

The Bronx Lab School is a public school serving mostly low-income students in the Mott Haven neighborhood in the Bronx, New York City. This neighborhood is part of New York’s 15th congressional district, which was, at the time of the thesis (2019), the poorest in the United States.

In its effort to cater to students in considerable poverty, the Bronx Lab School has seen success in improving these students’ rates of applying, staying in school, graduating, and getting past second year in college. This successful outcome has resulted from pedagogical innovations and the unwavering commitment of teachers. However, school reform measures implemented by Mayor Michael Bloomberg required the school to share its already outdated building with another school, the South Bronx Prep Academy. Thus, a building originally designed for a three-grade junior school ended up housing almost 1,400 students from 6th- to 12th-grade and two different schools.

Predictably, this situation created a number of issues due to overcrowding, the added stress to the existing and already crumbling infrastructure, and the forced coexistence between two different school cultures with different schedules and space needs.

Grace’s thesis proposes a series of design alternatives for the Bronx Lab School to continue to fulfill its mission despite these circumstances. She offers suggestions on how to manage the space through “soft” design interventions that do not require a full demolishing or a deep redesign (alternatives that, at the time of her research, were not possible due to budget constraints).

To develop these designs, Grace first carried out a participatory consultation process through workshops involving design-thinking activities, focus group discussions, and mapping exercises. These workshops included both teachers and students. The workshops explored three basic questions, asking what the participants loved about their school, disliked about their school, and wished their school would become or have in the future. Participants answered these questions using Post-it Notes and employing copies of the building’s architectural plans in their discussion. Grace then compiled and coded the responses and classified them using Venn diagrams.

To inform her proposals, Grace also carried out a careful study of school design precedents in the United States. The goal of this study was to identify schools with recent design interventions that had made them more successful in reaching their pedagogical and other formative goals.

From this examination of precedents, Grace identified five different criteria to define successful school design: adapting to new pedagogical approaches, fostering of school culture and identity, supporting democratic participation and socialization, ensuring durability and livability, and facilitating a connection with nature.

Grace then cross-compared these criteria with what she found from the Bronx Lab School consultation workshops. She found out that most of the participants’ responses fit within the first three categories. Specifically, the responses referred to embracing pedagogical adaptation, emphasizing the unique school identity, and helping students to develop social skills. Her design proposals thus focused on those categories as the ones in which “the school was most lacking, in order to generate a design proposal that was specific to the school’s needs.”

Grace proposed a series of small and feasible changes to the school layout to address those needs. The proposed modifications, which were made in a preliminary form, were designed to be easy to carry out and relatively low-cost. In general, what Grace proposed was not a “long-term solution, but rather a conversation starter.”

Thus, rather than offering a hypothetical and utopian design solution for the school, Grace decided to adopt a realistic position “to put the school’s needs before the architect’s ideology,” framing her proposed intervention within the question of what could be done within the given space and budget constraints.

(Bachelor’s Thesis, Amherst College, 2019)

3. PLANNING AND URBAN STUDIES THESES

Vertical Green Urbanism: Manhattan, NYC

Joshua Levitt’s “The Ills of Rationalist Urban Planning” (2013) examines three urban interventions under Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s 2007 PlaNYC, which the thesis describes as “a bold agenda seeking to boost the city’s sustainability.” The projects are the East River Esplanade South, the East River Greenway, and the High Line. While Joshua finds limitations in the first two of these projects, he sees great potential in the third.

The High Line is a linear park built over an abandoned elevated section of New York City’s Central Railroad. When Joshua’s thesis was submitted (2013), the project’s third phase was still under construction, so Joshua was studying a relatively new project. Despite finding shortcomings in the project, including the wave of gentrification it quickly unleashed, Joshua argues that this project embodies a new form of ecological urbanism, a vertical type of ecological urbanism where humans circulate above cars.

In addition to identifying this innovative urbanism form, Joshua proposes a few modifications to improve the model. These modifications are intended to improve both the accessibility of outsiders to the High Line’s public space and the quality of life of the people living adjacent to the High Line, whose privacy was affected by the project.

To support his argument, Joshua draws upon classical theories on sustainability, finding particular inspiration in Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s theoretical dichotomy between smooth space (a space of open-endedness, heterogeneity, and free action) and striated space (a less desirable space of confinement, homogeneity, and state apparatus). In his thesis, Joshua analyzes Manhattan in terms of this smooth/striated space dichotomy. He observes that Manhattan was originally built as a striated space— a space of practicality, rationality, and ends-meeting—while the notion of smooth space—a space of processes, reflection, and experiences—has been historically missing there.

Joshua sees in the High Line project the promise of balancing Manhattan’s striated space with a smooth counterpart, in both morphological and “felt” (i.e., experiential) terms. He argues that the High Line defies Manhattan’s strict grid by going above it— sometimes in a diagonal or meandering way, which Joshua describes as more in line with the natural forms of human movement. Additionally, the ecological landscape design of the High Line offers an opportunity for people to have relatively close contact with nature, thus honoring the innate human trait of empathizing with nature, as famously formulated by Edward O. Wilson in Biophilia.

In concluding his thesis, Joshua finds in Manhattan’s High Line a number of important lessons for the practice of urbanism in large urban centers. He advocates for more projects that feature the characteristics of the High Line and that implement the improvements that he proposes. He argues that such projects have the potential to give people more freedom of movement in the city by liberating them from forced coexistence with vehicles at the street level. Joshua concludes that projects like the High Line not only give pedestrians the ability to circulate physically above cars but also place pedestrians above cars symbolically as well.

(Bachelor’s Thesis, Amherst College, 2013)

Gentrification in Chinatown: Boston, Massachusetts

Megan Do’s thesis, “Chinatown for Whom? Power and Participatory Planning in Boston’s Chinatown” (2018) studies the (mis)use of community participation to validate processes of displacement among low-income ethnic Chinese residents in Boston’s Chinatown. Such processes, she argues, might result in the officially sanctioned overall gentrification of the area under the guise of a benevolent renovation of Phillips Square, a small tract of public space that is strategically located near the northern edge of Chinatown.

For her field research, Megan worked in the neighborhood as a participatory action researcher. She partnered with the Asian Community Development Corporation (ACDC), a nonprofit that does affordable housing work with Chinatown residents. Thus, in her exploration of community participation, Megan used participation itself as a research method. She led participatory design workshops with local youth who were affiliated with ACDC’s afterschool program, with the goal of learning about their vision of the future of Chinatown. She compared the resulting designs to previous designs from participatory processes that the city of Boston had run in the neighborhood. In doing so, she found that, although similarities existed in outcomes, the city’s designs lacked some of the social elements that were present in the youth’s proposals, most notably the availability of low-income housing options.

To understand this omission, Megan investigated how the city had carried out its participatory process in the community. She found that, although the city’s process was technically participatory (i.e., there were community members involved), the city had framed the discussion in such a way that the community participants were able to focus their suggestions only on certain aspects, such as the beautification of Phillips Square, despite the fact that those aspects were far less relevant to residents than others such as housing affordability. Indeed, as Megan observes, the focus on the beautification of Phillips Square is poised to greatly raise the property values of the housing stock in the area to a level that would be unaffordable for most of the ethnic Chinese residents, including the participants in the city’s workshops.

Based on this evidence, Megan concludes her thesis by reflecting upon how community participation in a city plan can easily be utilized to justify interventions that end up being detrimental to the very communities that participate in the process.

(Bachelor’s Thesis, Amherst College, 2018)

Bringing Ecological Sanitation to an Urban Scale: New England Region, United States

Catherine (Cat) Bryars’ thesis, “Planning (and) the Sanitary City” (2016), studies the implementation of the first two community-level composting toilet projects in the New England region of the United States. The thesis refers to these toilets as ecosan, short for ecological sanitation.

The two projects that Catherine studies are a urine recycling initiative run by the Rich Earth Institute (REI) in Brattleboro, Vermont, and a town-managed ecosan demonstrative program in Falmouth, Massachusetts. The first project used urine diversion systems in a public setting (i.e., public urinals to collect the urine to be recycled), while the second focused on private residences, with the town-sponsored ecosan toilets collecting both urine and feces.

The goal of the first project was to research and develop a system of urine collection for use as an agricultural fertilizer. This project involved outreach to volunteers willing to donate urine, as well as field testing to establish the conditions under which this urine was safest and most efficient for use in agriculture.

The second project emerged from the need, among Falmouth residents, to find a solution to the increasing degradation of the region’s coastal ecosystems, a growing environmental crisis due in part to pollution from faulty or poorly designed sewage infrastructure. Among the alternatives considered by the town’s governing body were ecosan toilets. Town residents ultimately voted to implement and fund a pilot program to install these toilets in interested households.

Catherine’s thesis examines the outcomes of both projects, concluding that the former was more successful in that it attracted greater and more active participation from residents: It developed a viable model system for urine recycling, and REI was ultimately approved by the state of Vermont to process urine as a fertilizer. REI’s success inspired the formation of other groups devoted to the collection and reuse of human urine, as well as the introduction of a state bill aimed to simplify the requirements for the installation of ecosan and greywater systems.

Conversely, the Falmouth ecosan demonstration initiative faced many hurdles, including the lack of locally available expertise in installing the toilets, political opposition to the program, and presumed interference on the part of conventional wastewater treatment industry lobbyists. Ultimately, only a few households ended up adopting the ecosan toilets.

Catherine explores the reasons for these contrasting outcomes, including the Falmouth project’s complexity and scale, the fraught political negotiations involved, and the town officers’ reluctance to endorse ecosan alternatives (partly due to current gaps in federal and state regulations with regard to the code compliance of ecosan toilets). Catherine also mentions issues of cost and budget availability, as well as cultural issues related to comparatively affluent people’s rejection of the idea of using composting toilets at home.

By examining in detail the circumstances affecting the outcomes of both initiatives, Catherine’s thesis identifies both challenges and opportunities for the adoption of ecosan initiatives in the United States on a relatively large (e.g., town-level) scale. The thesis ends with recommendations regarding mechanisms to make such adoption possible. These recommendations include encouraging community groups to initiate and manage their own ecosan initiatives, using a centralized system for collecting ecosan toilets’ compost, developing flexible and innovative regulations and codes for the use of ecosan systems, and providing funding to support ecosan-based programs.

One of the most significant aspects of Catherine’s thesis is its contribution to the scholarship on, and practice of, ecological sanitation in the United States. In the literature on sustainability, there is already decades-long consensus on the significant advantages of composting toilet systems (e.g., saving water and producing fertile soil), but the path from theory to practice has been excruciatingly slow. Besides, most existing initiatives have employed composting systems only at an individual or small-group scale, and far fewer large-scale projects have materialized at the community or town level, particularly in the United States.

Another interesting aspect of Catherine’s thesis is the deep amount of field research involved. As an ecological sanitation activist, Catherine was actively involved as a participant in the two studied projects even before she started to consider them as research topics. This participation afforded her a uniquely close knowledge of the circumstances under which the two projects emerged and the hurdles they faced in development. Catherine’s firsthand experience with these projects makes her thesis a unique piece of research—one that closely documents and draws key lessons from two pioneering and comparatively large-scale ecosan initiatives in the United States.

I was an advisor on this thesis along with Carey Clouse. The thesis was chaired by Mark Hamin.

(Master’s Thesis, University of Massachusetts Amherst, 2016)