http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/7583 2017-06-04T06:05:33Z http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/109027 From roots to routes Ma, Xinyi, M. Arch. Massachusetts Institute of Technology Over the past two decades, more than 200 million people in China moved from rural to urban areas. These migrants fled the countryside, which is regarded as an economic wasteland in perpetual stagnation that is locked by feudal traditions and peasant values, to the largest cities. They sought to be connected to a modern China, one that is marked by a booming economy and pronounced popular culture. These rural- to-urban migrants have formed the largest peacetime inland migration in history. Mobility is a socially produced motion that often bears ideologies. It is associated with a desire for progress, freedom, and opportunity. The massive inland migration in China demonstrates the tremendous social force that aims to overcome the outdated social strata. However, as migrants move, limitations on mobility emerge. The Hukou, the household registration system in China, is an institutional framework that has entrenched the social strata for ages. Records of births, marriages, and moves identify each person with a place. As soon as migrants move from their designated origins, immobility appears: welfare exclusion, job inequity, urban transit inaccessibility, to name just a few. This thesis proposes to study this condition of mobility, immobility and estrangement in the district of Minhang, Shanghai, where 1.5 million migrants currently live and work. Scooter, an emerging fast and cheap personal vehicle, is the protagonist in this story of migrants. Linking closely to migrants' life, scooters are not only their primary means of transportation but also their means of production. Its mobility empowers migrants to move beyond their territory, while its unique scale and flexibility links to rich spatial possibilities. Thesis: M. Arch., Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Department of Architecture, 2017.; Cataloged from PDF version of thesis.; Includes bibliographical references (pages 78-79). 2017-01-01T00:00:00Z http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/109026 Conversation on saving a historical community : a participatory renewal and preservation platform Zhang, Xu, S.M. Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Architecture What if stakeholders, architects, and developers/bureaucrats could be in a conversation about preservation? Community heritage in China is in great danger because of the lack of authority, financial support, knowledge of preservation, and requests for development. Local residents, students, and citizens want to preserve the history and living environment of the community but bureaucrats want to demolish entire communities and rebuild for economic development. Architects do not often have enough input and rarely collaborate, while preservationists try to save every piece of historical heritage. Thus, a platform is proposed, here, to bring together voices from all the relevant participants, to democratically communicate between politicians and ordinary people, to create multiple architectural proposals for development reference based on crowd sourced materials. Furthermore, to establish also an experienceable digital world, archived from the evidence uploaded by stakeholders of heritages that are marked by bureaucrats for demolition. In the end, win or lose, the stakeholders will have a digital archive and exploring tool of the former building. Thesis: M. Arch., Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Department of Architecture, 2017.; Page 153 blank. Cataloged from PDF version of thesis.; Includes bibliographical references (page 152). 2017-01-01T00:00:00Z http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/109018 People's Wall : reconstructing a new city wall for the modern city of Beijing Peng, Kaining "If the Warsaw community is to be reborn, if its core is to be constituted by former Warsawians, then they have to be given back, their old rebuilt Warsaw to some extent, so that they can see in it the same city, though considerably altered, and not a different town on the same spot. One must take into consideration the fact that individual attachment to old forms is a factor of social unity." --A writer's Comments Warsaw's post WWII reconstruction project for The Warsaw Escarpment, 1946 The notion of "Wall" is intrinsic to how Chinese people understand and define a city; in fact, the very character "City" in an ancient Chinese pictogram depicts a wall with two gates preventing an attacker from invading. The People's Republic of China came into power with an overwhelming sentiment of restart and revolution following the trauma of World War II and the Chinese Civil War. In the early period of modern China, the critical relics of the wall were quickly dismissed in favor of expansion and modernization. It was dismantled under Mao Zedong's regime in only a decade. The sentiment to resurrect the wall has long been present; people wish for its resurrection in part because many places in Beijing are still named accordingly. It is apparent that the wall and its gates are still instrumental to the local inhabitants' psycho-geographic maps. However, the few reconstruction projects that were actually realized by the government have not only disrupted the life of current inhabitants, but also done more harm to the surviving courtyard house fabric than good. Therefore, this project proposes an alternative method of reconstruction which enriches, rather than damages, the old city center. The new wall is imagined as a continuous landscape infrastructure; the design systematically investigates the original footprint and existing context. A set of interventions, ranging from constructions of new wall structures to minimal marking of the original footprint, aim to actualize a much-missed coherency in a fragmented reality. Thesis: M. Arch., Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Department of Architecture, 2017.; Page 99 blank. Cataloged from PDF version of thesis.; Includes bibliographical references (pages 97-98). 2017-01-01T00:00:00Z http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/109017 Interactive design process based on augmented intelligence : a framework and toolkit for designers to interact and collaborate with AI algorithms Cheng, Chin-Yi Designers can use artificial intelligence, such as Genetic Algorithms, to deal with the design problems which seem impossible to be quickly resolved by the human mind. However, none of the current Al algorithms interact with the designers while executing the assigned tasks. Therefore, when the designers use Al to generate design solutions, they can only pick from the results and often feel that their creativity is deprived. Also, it is often the case that designers are not satisfied with the generated results because the algorithms cannot optimize goals which have not been represented as numerical values, such as aesthetic. Moreover, even if designers wanted to use Al algorithms for their design problems, most of them do not have enough programming skills to implement the algorithms, let alone use Al to solve design problems. Therefore, in this thesis, I propose a framework and a toolkit for designers to interact and collaborate with Al algorithms. Following this framework, designers with moderate programming ability should be able to embed Al algorithms in the toolkit into their design process and make the design process interactive. With the interactive assistance from the Al algorithms, designers not only have full control of the results, but can also tackle difficult problems and iterate the design outcomes smoothly, as if their intellect is augmented. To prove the feasibility of this idea, I demonstrate several examples of how to follow the framework and how to use each Al algorithm in the toolkit. I also create an interactive design tool for a modular kinetic structure system. The tool for the structure system utilizes multiple Al algorithms to show that the framework and toolkit can help designers navigate a complex design problem. Finally, I will open the toolkit and examples to the computational design and computer science community. Thesis: S.M., Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Department of Architecture, 2017.; Thesis: S.M., Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, 2017.; Cataloged from PDF version of thesis.; Includes bibliographical references (pages 101-102). 2017-01-01T00:00:00Z