Manifesto/s 2018 abstracts
Postgraduate students from the School of Architecture and Department of Landscape presented their research which was organised into four distinct themes.
Mixed methods in research
Sorting nature: the forest as a territory for the operations of planetary urbanisation
Iulia Hurducas, Sheffield School of Architecture
Lefebvre’s 1970 prophecy of the total urbanisation of society has come true with the expansion of the urban into natural and rural territories. For Lefebvre, the question of nature is closed by its “steady, violent death” (Lefebvre, 1970) and its replacement by a “second nature” (Schmid, 2014; Smith, 1984). This closure accounts at an epistemic level, for the the dominance of the urban (Krauss, 2013; Brenner and Schmid, 2014).
Far from being closed, the question of nature is renewed within the present conditions of planetary urbanisation, as the interiorised non-urban is “operationalised” to sustain urban growth, thus making the non-city “an essential terrain of capitalist urbanisation” (Brenner and Schmid, 2016). In what follows, I present how the Romanian forest is operationalised as a territory of planetary urbanisation through forest management practices. Bringing forth the practice of forest management comes as a way to overcome the anxiety on deforestation that places an immense pressure not only on the forest but also on forest management structures.
How do front gardens impact health and well-being?
Lauriane Suyin Chalmin-Pui, Department of Landscape
In the dual context of evidence showing the benefits of green spaces on human health and well-being, and the growing trend in the UK to pave over front gardens, I investigate whether introducing plants to paved front gardens improves residents’ well-being. Front gardens bridge domestic and public realms, thereby playing a role in shaping both outward and inward sense of place.
Reflecting on experiences from a front garden greening intervention in a street of a deprived suburb in northern England, my research builds on Attention Restoration Theory (Kaplan and Kaplan, 1989) and Stress Reduction Theory (Ulrich, 1983; Ulrich et al. 1991) to provide a basis on which to value these liminal spaces of urban nature in terms of their sociocultural impacts.
Game of being state: the untitled graphic novel
Cagri Sanliturk, Sheffield School of Architecture
This graphic novel book, which is untitled yet, presents alternative possibilities for the inhabitants of Pyla and Cyprus as a whole, and it is inspired from the experiences learnt as a result of the design interventions which concerned the acts of fantasy and imagination.
It offers narratives of real inhabitants living their everyday life performances and the resulted forms of spatial and cultural conducts, through which the reader can delve into their own curiosities, oppressed feelings, likewise hidden desires about fictitious realities that might be encouraged to become reality.
The comic drawings reveal the spatial and social phenomena while not exposing the real identities of people, but presenting them in a fictional time and space, done anonymously and ethically in the respect of the UN photography restrictions in the village. The graphical novel is a composition of realities which goes beyond the mundane practices in the village to show that other activities are still practiced in the limited village under surveillance.
Research workshop and field design
Danni Kerr, Sheffield School of Architecture
The research involves the design and fabrication of prototype time capsules which when deployed in the public domain record contextual and human interactions over time, record radically different outcomes in different contexts. I employ a small scale version of the time capsule as the vehicle for discussion in a series of research workshops I run where I provide the participants with a simple design exercise and carefully record and analyse their conversation using video and narrative analysis.
A key finding emerging from the research is the potential for divergent outcomes observed for different time capsules with an identical design due to contextual/human interactions. Therefore the fieldwork extends to the fabrication, deployment and exhibition of architectural scale time capsules which have been deployed in the field to communicate these divergences.
The impact of the research is the development of temporal theory in a manner which is practical and meaningful to architects, designers, creative practitioners and students.
Hypertext as feminist method
Cathryn Ladd, Sheffield School of Architecture
This conference presentation focuses on my methodological dissemination approach: creative analytical practice (CAP). CAP is the process “of expressing what one has learned through evocative writing techniques and forms” often as a way of representing “nonhierarchical, collaborative, and/or multivocal writing” (Richardson, 2004).
I demonstrate how CAP is a way of reaching audiences beyond the confines of the academy and how it manifests as an interdisciplinary cross-cultural way of producing knowledge.
In order to do this, I focus on my specific CAP medium: The Hypertext. I discuss its theoretical framing, its relationship to my research context (the architectural identity of the Japanese kyosho jutaku [micro house]) and how it can be considered feminist methodological scholarship.
Human environment and liveability
Post evaluation of courtyard design in Malaysian hospitals: integrating their environmental and restorative roles
Madihah Binti Mat Idris, Sheffield School of Architecture
The introduction of courtyard gardens in Malaysian hospitals can be traced as early as the 1970s, however, their design quality is yet to be systematically evaluated. Until today, there is no specific design guidelines or evaluation criteria to assess courtyard garden design in Malaysian hospitals with a particular focus on both their environmental and restorative roles.
This study aims to investigate how the different types of courtyards that have been included in the planning of Malaysian hospitals after 1998 are currently performing in relation to their intended environmental and restorative roles and how they are used and perceived by building occupants and visitors.
A multi-method approach is employed which includes visual analyses, participant observation, interviews with the designers and surveys. Thus, the outcome of this study will assist the hospital planners and designers to review and update the planning and design requirements for optimal courtyard design for future hospital buildings as well as improve the project brief provided by the Malaysian healthcare provider.
Framework for sustainable housing for low-income groups in Abuja, Nigeria
Aliyu Abubakar, Sheffield School of Architecture
While housing is recognised worldwide as one of the basic necessities of life, housing the urban poor in suitable condition is an uphill battle in all countries of the world. This is much more severe in developing countries, with the main driver behind this challenge being population growth and uncontrolled rural/urban migration. Nigeria is one of these countries, with a population of over 180 million.
Nigeria has an official housing deficit of about 17 million houses, which is still growing annually. With the acute shortages of affordable housing, the rapid deterioration of existing housing stock is resulting in monumental urban deficiency both in terms of quantity and quality. The capital city of Abuja is amongst the most hit with authorities estimating a housing deficit of 1.7 million.
The PhD study aims to develop a sustainable housing framework for low-income groups. Through a pilot study, the research interviewed 15 respondents of various stakeholders to explore the current situation of low-income housing in Abuja. The framework is useful to government agencies, private developers, civil societies, housing cooperatives and inhabitants in addressing the housing need of low-income groups in Abuja.
Spaces for the everyday: re-envisioning liveable streets in contemporary China
Sheng Song, Sheffield School of Architecture
In view of the existing problems in contemporary Chinese cities, this research focuses on the concept and mechanism of liveable streets during the development of urbanisation. Since 1996 until now, which is generally a rapid growth period for urban expansion in China, old streets and alleys have been disappearing together with urban vitality and diversity, caused through the construction of super large-scale projects.
Traffic engineering dominates street forms in newly-built districts while the needs of pedestrians are undermined. The conflict between traffic and daily life on streets is becoming more and more serious in Chinese cities. This research focuses on the quality of streets and neighbourhood public spaces for citizens and there are three major objectives:
- To perform an interpretation of traditional streets in Chinese cities.
- To investigate the parameters of streets in terms of liveability, including form, morphology, scale, forms of activities.
- To identify the perceptions and expectations from citizens for streets to improve the quality of life.
Design and assessment tools for an enabling environment for people with dementia: the exploratory study
Yanisa Niennattrakul, Sheffield School of Architecture
The overarching objectives of the research project are to develop architectural design guidelines and assessment tools to support the creation of an enabling environment for people with dementia. Even though the emerging evidence shows that the physical environment is essential for health, quality of life and care, there is a lack of potential contributions of other environmental factors in enhancing the remaining capabilities and independence of people with dementia.
Additionally, regulations and guidelines on the design of care buildings have accumulated over time with little knowledge of their impacts on the quality of life for all building users.
This project will critically review four credible environmental assessment tools to discuss the gap in knowledge, potentials and limitations.
Investigating the relationship between mindfulness-based stress reduction (MBSR) and the setting in which it is carried out
Eun Yeong Choe, Department of Landscape
The evidence highlighting the health and wellbeing benefits of nature is extensive, however, less evidence exists on how the underlying mechanisms could be applied in practice, and the length/nature of intervention needed to achieve the desired extent and duration of wellbeing outcome.
From an applied perspective, we need to know more about the most beneficial ways of interacting with nature and apply this insight in a systematic way to nature-based interventions. Therefore, this research incorporates the restorative function of nature into mindfulness practice and assesses the effectiveness of the practice in different settings.
Comparing policy interpretation of liveability with lived experience: the case of Iskandar, Malaysia
Wan Azlina Wan Ismail, Department of Landscape
Within the sphere of policy-making, practice, and academia, there is growing interest in the development of indicators to measure progress of policies implementation aimed at improving neighbourhoods. Liveability is a concept used interchangeably with quality of life and sustainability in addressing urban neighbourhood quality. It is defined differently in various disciplines ranging from diverse contextual scales of inhabitants, neighbourhood and country.
Liveability measures the quality of people’s life that a city can afford its inhabitants and how it meets residents’ need and adapt to their daily activities. To apprehend liveability indicators, the policy standards need to be evaluated and compare to residents’ perceptions. Identifying the liveability indicators according to people’s desire to live in liveable neighbourhoods, provides a useful tool to measure and monitor progress towards achieving liveable neighbourhood outcomes.
This study compares the interpretations of liveability provided in policy with lived experience drawn from residents’ daily activities and perceptions of their neighbourhoods. The study argues for a deeper understanding of liveable urban neighbourhoods which encompasses the relationship between social and spatial qualities of particular places to meet people’s needs and adapt to their daily activities.
Salvation in landscape in 19th century spiritual and social manifestos: ‘The Broad and Narrow Way’ and ‘In Darkest England, and the way out’
Camilla Allen, Department of Landscape
Visual manifestos of political and social ideas are important ways to communicate detail without too many words. The Conservative Party, in releasing their 25-year environmental plan, have inspired illustrators to create idealised images of rural landscapes, but are these images of rural-idylls so very different from ones produced over one-hundred years ago with quite different intentions?
In the late nineteenth century, the publisher Morgan and Chase produced two lithographs which encapsulated ideas about how the urbanising societies of Germany and England might change for the better. This paper introduces these two images, key to the biography of the English forester and environmentalist Richard St. Barbe Baker, as problematic but important visualisations of the dichotomy too often seen between town and country – the urban and rural – and makes the case for a new manifesto, with trees at its heart.
Co-production of space
Situating spatial appropriation within southern and feminist frameworks: a methodological approach
Victoria Okoye, Sheffield School of Architecture
This presentation focuses on the methodological framework for my research: a southern, feminist approach to exploring people’s everyday spatial practices in public spaces. This research study is sited in working-class neighbourhoods in the rapidly urbanising contexts of two West African cities: Accra, Ghana and Lagos, Nigeria.
Situating my research within the larger discourses of postcolonial/decolonial/southern theory and feminist theory informs my usage of case study approach, participatory methods and reflexive research practices to explore the subjective, diverse, and contested layers of meaning and practice through which individuals relate to space.
Spatial imaginaries beyond (frozen) conflict: activist agency in Cyprus
Esra Can, Sheffield School of Architecture
The research is concerned with the possibilities of spatial agency as transformative activist stance in the context of frozen conflict, such as in Cyprus. It aims to contribute in the growing literature pursuing ‘the political’ in spatial discourses, which brings in concepts such as participation and democratisation, where spatial agency becomes an interruption of the settled social order.
The focus is on Cyprus with more than 40 years of non-violent frozen conflict, providing the context where collective activism of communities emerged out of repeating failures of ‘top-down’ processes of conflict resolution and peacebuilding, led mainly by colonial powers excluding active participation of communities.
The research investigates possibilities for architecture as an expanded field to inherit tools and methods generated by activist agency in spaces of conflict through multiplicity of users, strategies and contexts, allowing transformative participation and democratisation of production of space.
Everyday practices in public space as a form of resistance
Deniz Kesici, Sheffield School of Architecture
Analysing the root of ‘publicness’, the term derived from the word ‘public’ connotes accessible to everyone. Although “The Human Condition” written by Hannah Arendt cover the idea of ‘being seen and being heard by others’, an ongoing confusion concerning the praxis in the cities generally relates ‘public’ to the ‘state’. In other words, the things in relation with ‘public’ are considered as if they belong to ‘state’.
Therefore, this confusion leads to the misperception of public quality of space. In this study, contrary to top-down interventions, unintended uses of public spaces in Turkey are aimed to be examined as they provide possibilities to increase public quality of space.
This study focuses on how individuals and social groups use everyday practices as a form of resistance, and under what circumstances public spaces are re-produced and re-appropriated by them.
Reclaiming the intermediary city
Alex Axinte, Sheffield School of Architecture
Most of Romania’s urban population lives in collective housing estates built in the socialist period. Born from the fraternal embrace between the modernist promise and the socialist mission, these neighbourhoods became disciplinary spatial tools in the hands of a totalitarian regime.
In its creationist attempt to forge through mass housing a ‘new man’, the brutal exercise of power triggered resistance and contestation. A new man was born after all, trained in make-do tactics, using double language, expert in shading the official grid and actively engaging the built environment.
After the fall of communism in 1989, these neighbourhoods went from the state’s property and control to radical privatisation and deregulation, with private ownership reaching almost 100%. The weakening of the collective dimension and the inhabitants’ distrust in authority inherited from the socialist period, expanded and flourished within the transition towards capitalism.
The current challenge facing the regeneration of these habitats is how to limit the extreme individualization by reclaiming the surviving commons based practices and the in-built resilience into new intermediary civic formats. The City School is such an attempt, based on an educational live project attached to an existing neighbourhood public library. In my practice-led PhD I discuss the lessons learned from the City School and its inherent potential.
Catalyzing change: exploring networks of activated cracks in Amman
Hala Ghanem, Department of Landscape
Nowadays, formal and informal public spaces in Amman are activated by the presence of a new user profile due to the pressure of emerging migration; we can clearly detect higher numbers of Syrians using Amman often deserted public spaces, and utilising informal ones to accommodate their needs.
Syrian refugees are playing a role in shaping Amman’s urban environment within a process of place making, this process is produced when refugees are introducing new unintended uses of formal designated spaces or by simply using decayed abandoned formal public spaces, or by generating new potential spaces to accommodate their needs, mostly those potential spaces are vacant in-between spaces.
This study explores possibilities of direct and indirect interaction with Ammani people, provides a mapping and classifying system of cracks to fulfil the overall aim of assessing how this network of activated cracks is catalyzing urban change overtime. This study also discusses the potential of enriching a well-established culture of recreation and promoting better public space usage to Amman citizens.
Complexities of communication and practice in architect-client interactions
Ahlam Harahsheh, Sheffield School of Architecture
This paper gives insight into the early findings of the empirical work for ongoing PhD research, especially in the understanding of the architect’s value and role in the society. The architects’ expected role within society is beyond the physical environment or the technical role; architects are expected to address larger society issues and crises for example, energy consumption in the housing sector, or the impact of refugees.
This research project aims to investigate early design stage communication between architects and clients in residential projects in Jordan. The role of architects in addressing wide-scale problems in the built environment is still not fully recognised in the Jordanian context. By studying architect-client communications in the early design stages, this research proposes improvements that demonstrate the additional value that architects can bring to the construction industry, particularly in housing, through improved design solutions.
Technical environment research
Sound as a tool in the education of architectural design
Yussur Al-Chokhdar, Sheffield School of Architecture
Should architects and architectural students be more aware of sound when designing? What impact might that have on wellbeing and perhaps the future of architectural education?
Our cognition and awareness in architecture visually is by far more stronger than perception. In this information age, communication is key, and the modes of communication reduce the actual perceived information that we recognise and need to understand. Sound and taste both have a significant relationship with our memory and psychological state. Both taste and sound will be explored and analysed which may give the study an extra creative dimension which suggests an unorthodox solution.
This research aims to understand how sound may effect and enhance the design process in architecture. Defining the significance of our awareness of sound acoustics, quality and interpretation. The advantages and disadvantages of aural acoustics and its effects may help students, during their early years of studying architecture, consider sound more thoroughly as a perceived space through senses which seem to be considered secondary.
Focus group: relationship between spaces and openings experienced
Gioia Fusaro, Sheffield School of Architecture
Nowadays, architects and engineers are trying to involve the perception of people in the development of new technologies and the design of architectural elements. The perception of the users is at the core of this study which aims to understand how windows influence people’s lives through five specific categories: the frame shape, the inclusion in the wall, the frame thickness, the glaze transparency and the glaze division.
To conduct this study it was necessary to use a focus group methodology. This in turn helped to understand not only people’s perception, but also people collective awareness regarding the influence of such a architectonic tool and it was also useful to compare participant awareness using visual examples for each category.
Structural performance of bamboo from an atomic perspective
Olivia Espinosa Trujillo, Sheffield School of Architecture
Everything is made of atoms. The mechanical and structural properties of any material are determined by how the atoms are arranged and the strength of the atomic bonding. A material fails or breaks apart when the chemical bonding of its atoms is broken. The understanding of the atomic configuration of a material is key to guarantee its structural reliability.
This study focuses on analysing the atomic structure of bamboo and how its particular arrangement determines the structural efficiency of bamboo when used as a building material. Bamboo is a natural fibre-reinforced composite that consists of cellulose fibres embedded in a soft and ductile lignin matrix. The atomic structure of bamboo reveals a system of cellulose fibres running along the longitudinal direction of the cane. The distribution of cellulose fibres increases towards the exterior face of the cane.
This particular arrangement explains why bamboo is a strong material when loads are applied in the direction of its fibres, whilst, it becomes brittle when loads are applied in the opposite direction. Bamboo becomes suitable for construction as the cane matures and the percentage of cellulose fibres becomes larger than the percentage of lignin. The early stages of this research suggest that the successful use of bamboo as a building material relies greatly on the acknowledgement of its microstructure, morphology and material properties.