City form and changing process : the case of the North End, Boston, 1860-1930

Abstract

This thesis originated from the assumption that the effects of time on city form involve complex processes and are closely related to different physical and social factors where human beings as changing agents play only a partial role. Taking the North End, Boston as a case study, it tries to explore the complexities of the combined effects of some of these processes bearing on city form. In conclusion, the thesis shows that changes in city form do not happen only because there is a deterministic need, such as a population increase, or only because human beings as the primary changing agent wants something to happen in a certain way. Evidently, none of the processes or elements, alone, can sufficiently explain the changes in city form. The relationship between the processes bearing on city form is far more complicated and is generally non-deterministic in nature. At the most abstract level that can be conceptualized as a three dimensional relationship, acting between 1) the stimuli like economic and population growth provoking change, 2) the adaptive change required by the stimuli, and 3) a wide variety of factors that mediate between this stimulus-response relationship, sometimes by enhancing it and at other time by retarding it. The thesis tries to extrapolate the characteristics of these mediating factors, and the relationship between the city and humans as changing agents in the form of some intrinsic regularities and constraints of the changing process in city form.