Vertical Urbanism

With more than half the world’s population living in urban areas which accounts for just under 3% of the world’s land mass, today’s cities face an ever evolving urban crisis. Hong Kong, renowned for its high density
urbanism, was culminated by its now demolished Kowloon Walled City. With living conditions similar to the notorious Walled City, today’s subdivided apartments, locally called ‘butchered flats’, are homes to some 200,000 people, accommodating families in crowded environments, which in some instances, are barely 10 square metres.
The culture of congestion with its spatial and programmatic juxtapositions of the Walled City have continued to manifest today in the city’s composite building typology such as Chungking Mansions and Mirador Mansion situated in Kowloon. With kungfu schools alongside travellers guesthouses, garment factories next to restaurants, private dwellings near social clubs, all occurring along a common corridor above ground, these buildings exhibit certain unexpected orders within apparent disorder. Here, seemingly opposing activities co-exist with legal, illegal, or even extralegal operations, with intricate business networks of various suppliers or retailers in the podium serving the ‘shop-houses’ within the tower above. This produces a sense of a dense ‘city within a building’, whereby the outside pervades the inside, the city enters into domesticity, public blurs with the private, collective contest with the individual, and informalities become formalized.
This paper seeks to re-examine Hong Kong’s composite building typology and its underlying informally-formal urban orders by mapping such unexpected ecologies to reveal the messy vitality of their invisible socio-economic networks within interiorized urban conglomerations. By interrogating these buildings in this manner we can further understand their potential to impact the way we perceive the city, as well as how they can productively foster these unexpected yet everyday practices.

Urban verticality is often discussed in terms of superlative structures like skyscrapers and in relation to equations of height with forms of power, privilege and prestige. As a counterpoint, this thesis employs the idea of ‘ordinary verticalities’ to examine quotidian elevated spaces.In particular, the elevated public spaces of Singapore’s public housing estates are examined. It asks two broad questions: How does verticality transform public spaces and publicness in Singapore? What can be theorised differently about vertical public spaces? Through examining Singapore’s urban history and four representative vertical spaces, and by also using a ‘fully volumetric' lens, it reveals that vertical public spaces are caught between paradigms of the ‘ordinary’ and the ‘spectacular’; they are thrown into a constant tension between fulfilling ideals of publicness and the ineluctably privileged and exclusive positions of height. Vertical public spaces are constituted by the vexed relations between the ‘ordinary’ and the ‘spectacular’; the inclusive and the exclusive; and the high-rise and the low-ground. Vertical publicness and spaces are reconfigured by these tensions - some spaces constitute a heightened, exclusivity, and hold ‘disciplined’ publicness, while others grant credence back to the ground and are contingent upon and relational to the ground-level realities. Singapore’s case has shown that new theorisations that are attendant to verticality needs to be formulated to arrest the thus far inchoate, confused and messy notion of vertical public spaces.

The objective was to characterize the properties of cellulose nanofibril/TPS based nanocomposites. The cellulose nanofibrils were extracted from wheat straw using steam explosion, acidic treatment and high shear mechanical treatment. These nanofibrils were dispersed in thermo plastic starch (TPS) using a Fluko high shear mixer in varying proportions and films were casted out of these nanocomposites. The cellulose nanofibrils were characterized using AFM, TEM, SEM, TGA, FTIR and WAXRD and the nanocomposite films were analyzed in terms of SEM, WAXRD, TGA, DSC, mechanical and barrier properties. XRD and TGA results confirmed the crystalline nature of nanofibrils. AFM and TEM images revealed fiber diameter in the range 30-70 nm. TGA depicted an increasing in residue left with increase in cellulose nanofibrils content. Mechanical properties increased with nanofiber concentration. Barrier properties also improved with addition of nanofillers up to 10% but further addition deteriorated properties due to possible fiber agglomeration.

As cities cope with rapid population growth—adding 2.5 billion dwellers by 2050—and
grapple with expansive sprawl, politicians, planners, and architects have become increasingly interested in the vertical city paradigm. This paper reviews and examines shortfalls of tall buildings found in the literature to inform future developments. The paper gathers a vast amount of fragmented criticism and concerns, and organizes them around the three pillars of sustainability: social, economic, and environmental. Mapping out the “unsustainable” aspects forms the foundation for addressing them in future research and tall building developments.

Por mucho que nos empeñemos, nuestra cotidianidad está y seguirá estando ligada a la horizontal, aunque al mismo tiempo nuestras ciudades busquen el crecimiento en altura para seguir siendo “manejables”.
Por ello, a la hora de plantearse la construcción en altura, es imprescindible analizar y reflexionar previamente sobre lo que sucede en el “suelo” para abordar con ciertas garantías la conquista de la vertical, sobre lo que significa e implica separarse de una hipotética “cota cero” común para alcanzar los privilegios de la altura.