VictorJuiz/thesis huggingface dataset:
The Development of Quayside: Planning Toronto’s Smart City
Keywords: Participatory Planning
Public-Private Partnerships
Smart Cities
Waterfront Regeneration

Smart cities are a growing area of scholarship, but they are understudied in the literature in urban planning. This case study of the Sidewalk Toronto/Quayside project offers insights into the smart city planning process and its actors. The public-private partnership between a tripartite government agency, Waterfront Toronto, and an Alphabet Inc. subsidiary, Sidewalk Labs, to plan one of the most significant urban smart city projects in North America, and its cancellation after two and a half years, provides an opportunity to study a smart city project that has not been undertaken anywhere else at this scale. My research examines the Sidewalk Toronto/Quayside smart city planning process through semi-structured interviews, participant observation, and discourse analysis. This dissertation is organized into a three-paper model, informed by three objectives: to contextualize the Quayside project within the history of waterfront regeneration in Toronto, to understand the origins and motivations underpinning the “co-creation” partnership between Waterfront Toronto and Sidewalk Labs, and to trace how the partnership shaped public engagement in the planning process. This research expands smart city planning literature by further illuminating the unique conditions and considerations of smart cities within established planning processes, including waterfront regeneration, partnership development, and participatory planning. Based on my research findings, I make three central arguments. The first is that Quayside represents both a repackaging of established entrepreneurial discourses on Toronto’s waterfront and a new phase of Toronto’s waterfront development in that the project was specifically designed to ensure the organizational longevity of Waterfront Toronto rather than to meet development objectives that were previously prioritized in the corporation’s work. Second, I argue that smart city planning processes are a fraught application for collaborative public-private partnership models given that these models depend on equity and mutual respect between partners, which is difficult to achieve in smart city partnerships where significant resource and knowledge asymmetries exist between large technology corporations and government agencies. Third, I argue that regardless of the scale and volume of public engagement opportunities, a smart city planning process cannot be citizen-centric if participation is directed and facilitated by a private smart city actor.
Long-term Remote Sensing for Investigating Forest Change across a Suburbanizing Landscape
Keywords: Aerial photography
Landsat
Suburbanization
Time-series
Urban forests
Vegetation change

Forests, especially in urban and surrounding landscapes, are important natural resources that provide environmental, climatic, economic, social, health, and aesthetic benefits. It is thus important to continuously monitor these forests, which may grow, shrink, or be otherwise impacted by abrupt or gradual changes from many drivers. Long-term remote sensing time-series represent the only means by which the spatio-temporal dynamics of these forests can be consistently collected since the mid-1900s. Aerial photography provides the longest temporal coverage and can observe individual trees, but is limited in temporal density, in spectral coverage, and by differences in photograph technology through time. Landsat satellites with medium spatial resolution cannot observe individual trees but, with recent advances in sensor harmonization and time-series algorithms, can provide a consistent annual record of forest change since 1972. Combined with appropriate validation techniques and predictive modelling, Landsat holds potential for investigating changes in forest canopy cover over 50 years across landscapes that surpasses aerial photography. Both aerial photography and Landsat cover much of post-war suburbanization, when many rural-agricultural landscapes surrounding cities developed into suburban areas. However, few studies have utilized aerial photography time-series, and no studies have utilized Landsat’s full temporal record, for historical urban forest investigation and a better understanding of the suburbanization process. In this thesis, I demonstrate how long-term aerial photography and Landsat time-series can be built, validated, and analyzed to provide unique spatio-temporal results about forests and forest change across a suburbanizing landscape. With aerial photography, I capture tree density changes and drivers during the agriculture-suburban transition. With Landsat, I model a relationship with canopy cover for predictive mapping and explore connections with tree-rings as a form of temporal validation. I then build the longest-possible canopy cover time-series for investigating forest change across a heterogenous suburbanizing landscape and, more specifically, post-development residential canopy cover change in comparison with historical population demographics. These findings exemplify the power of long-term remote sensing for investigating different aspects of urban forest change, which have important research implications in urban forest and remote sensing time-series literature, and applied implications for municipal forest monitoring practices and knowledge acquisition for decision makers.
Vital Bodies, Natural Cures: Moral Quests for Care in Kerala, South India
Keywords: Care
Kerala
Medical anthropology
Naturopathy
Personhood
South India

Based on long-term ethnographic fieldwork, this dissertation offers a semi-person-centered analysis of nature cure (prakr̥ti jīvanaṁ) caregiving in Kerala, South India. First promoted in India as part of M. K. Gandhi’s anti-colonial project, this medical tradition draws on the metaphor of vitality to frame the body as having a natural wisdom—a vital force—that works to restore health and balance. This dissertation examines care practices in homes, mobile health camps, and hospitals in order to canvass last-resort quests for cure, where patients become ‘self-doctors,’ taking their sickness as signs of alienation from plants and nonhuman animal life. Through mentorships with non-professionalized healers, patients aim to repair their ill bodies, revitalize the toxic environment, and respond to moral collapse. By foregrounding the ethical stakes of rehabilitation, this dissertation pushes against reducing the logic of health choices to the neoliberal realm of individual lives; instead, it engages a relational approach to care, asking how these actions intersect with larger social and political shifts. In doing so, this dissertation shows how healers and users co-construct ethical imaginaries of reviving local lifeways, in counterpoint to larger changes in failed care regimes, migrated kin networks, widening class, caste, and gender inequalities, and publicly mediated concerns of a toxic present. At the same time, this dissertation shows how even though naturopaths aspire to transcend enduring inequalities, the medical tradition remains embedded in a wider political context of communalist conflict. This dissertation braids together the pragmatic thought of William James with Gandhi’s philosophical explorations on health and self-determination, asking how their insights may guide us to better understand what freedom and care mean within and between the particulars of individual lives and the general strands of existence that weave through all lives. Together, their teachings help amplify how scientifically-unvalidated alternative medicines may be efficacious at the levels of moral personhood and temporally shaped intersubjective care. By examining how nature cure healers and users in Kerala engage a collectivized vision of wellness and self-care, the dissertation ethnographically brings into relief the ways that biomedicine does not in itself equate to effective rehabilitation.
A Performance Guide to George Enescu's Later Violin Works
Keywords: articulation
detailed notation
dynamic
George Enescu
Impressions d'enfance
The Third Violin Sonata

Born in 1881 in Romania, George Enescu’s career combines the roles of composer, violinist, conductor, pianist, and pedagogue. Enescu’s multi-talented and multi-dimensional musicianship formed the basis for a complex compositional style. This reflects in his later two violin compositions, the Third Violin Sonata (opus 25) and the Suite Impressions d’enfance (opus 28). The complicated quality is achieved not only through the use of harmony but also in his approach to notation. The highly detailed markings include twenty different types of articulations, Enescu’s own system of dynamics, tempi changes, and performance instructions. Exploring the complexity of his music, addressing difficult performance issues, and building a performance guide are at the core of my research. Unlike his German-influenced First Violin Sonata and Fauré-influenced Second Violin Sonata, Enescu developed his own compositional language by infusing and creating Romanian folk music elements in his later violin works. The dense markings allow Enescu to express an expanded range of sonorities and nuances. However, differentiating these meticulous notations can be challenging, and a performance guide is much needed. My research offers guidance to performers in developing nuanced and colourful playing through a deeper understanding of Enescu’s music and its notation. The first chapter of the thesis outlines the purpose of the research, provides background on Enescu’s biography and compositional language and offers a literature review. The second chapter demonstrates complexities of notation and performance through close analysis of twenty-one recordings of the first seventeen bars of Ménétrier from Impressions d’enfance. The third chapter presents interviews with violinists Sherban Lupu and Axel Strauss, who have recorded both the Third Sonata and the Suite. The fourth chapter examines how specific dynamics that Enescu utilized fit in the commonly understood system of notating dynamic levels. The fifth chapter systematically explores the range of Enescu’s different articulations and offers guidance for violinists who wish to explore Enescu’s later violin works.
Elucidating Met Receptor Tyrosine Kinase Interactome to Identify Novel Regulators of Met Biology
Keywords: Mammalian Membrane Two Hybrid
Met receptor tyrosine kinase
Non small cell lung cancer
Protein Protein Interactions
Signalling

Met receptor tyrosine kinase is a growth factor receptor implicated in multiple diseases, including cancers, whereby aberrantly activated Met underlies metastasis, survival, sustained proliferation and angiogenesis of tumor cells, and thus is a sought-out target in cancer drug discovery. However, despite its critical role, Met and its associated functions are considerably understudied, and this is further underlined by paucity of successful therapeutics and precision medicine approaches targeting Met-mediated oncogenicity. Given that protein-protein interactions (PPIs) govern protein function and are, since recently, considered to be druggable, novel knowledge and new therapeutic strategies can be uncovered by identifying and characterizing interacting partners of Met. Using the Mammalian Membrane Two-Hybrid (MaMTH) PPI mapping technology developed in our lab, this thesis takes a PPI mapping approach to enable study of Met to uncover novel regulators of Met biology. In this study, I have generated and characterized a MaMTH-compatible PPI mapping platform, which expresses inducible full-length Met, recapitulates known Met localization, and can detect previously known interactors of Met. Utilizing this platform, I have further mapped a targeted interactome of Met against SH2/PTB-domain containing proteins and FpClass-predicted putative interactors of Met, and identified thirty-two, including sixteen novel, interactors of Met. Non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC)-focused functional characterization of one of the novel Met-interacting protein, B cell LiNKer (BLNK), reveal that BLNK is a positive regulator of Met signalling, and modulates surface localization and HGF-dependent trafficking of Met in NSCLC cell lines. Molecular studies in HEK293 models reveal that in the presence of BLNK, interaction between Met and its known interacting protein, GRB2 is increased, while the known constitutive interaction between BLNK and GRB2 is also increased in the presence of active Met. Finally, tumor phenotypical assays further uncover roles for BLNK in anchorage independent growth and chemotaxis of NSCLC cell lines. Cumulatively, my PhD thesis provides a PPI mapping platform for Met, targeted PPI map of Met, and describes a role for BLNK, a novel PPI of Met identified through this study, in regulating Met biology in NSCLC.
Factors Affecting Liquefaction Assessment of Granular Soils through Laboratory Testing
Keywords: Critical State Line
Laboratory testing
Liquefaction Triggering
Natural soils
Residual strength
Tailings

In practice, liquefaction assessment is largely driven by case histories, but the case history database is limited and there are huge gaps in the information available in each case. As a result, laboratory tests have continued to play a key role in determining how various factors influence liquefaction susceptibility and consequences. Eventually, a mechanics-based liquefaction assessment method which can differentiate among soils depending on their intrinsic properties will help geotechnical engineers better manage liquefaction risk especially in non-conventional materials such as tailings.This dissertation presents an investigation into how factors such as particle size, particle size distribution, and specimen preparation method influence the liquefaction response of a natural soil and a tailings material. Twelve particle size distributions ranging from pure silt to fine gravel and their various mixtures were studied in detail. The results are viewed through the critical state framework by first quantifying how these factors influence the critical state loci. Liquefaction response established through cyclic and monotonic simple shear testing was then compared to a large body of work from the literature to understand how the choice of testing method influenced the outcomes of these assessments. Cyclic liquefaction triggering and its relation to the number of cycles applied, as well as post-cyclic and monotonic residual strengths were reviewed.
How the Food Environment, Time Use, and Household Labour Division Influence Dietary Activities: A Case Study of Two Neighbourhoods in Toronto
Keywords: diet
food environment
gendered division of labour
sequence analysis
time geography
time use

The dietary transition from home-prepared meals to increased reliance on food prepared away from home has led researchers to study the factors influencing participation in various food-related activities. While exposure to food environments, a key factor impacting what food people purchase, has been extensively studied, the dynamic spatiotemporal contexts for food retail exposure remain underexplored. Time use also plays a role in what people eat. However, most studies have neglected the division of household labour, a factor that can help explain the ways coupled partners spend time on food activities. Furthermore, in food environment research, the prevailing reductionist view conceals compositional and contextual complexities of household food-provisioning practice. To address these research gaps, this dissertation aims to develop conceptualizations and methods to better understand how the food environment, time use, and household labour coordination collectively influence dietary behaviours, using a case study of two neighbourhoods in Toronto. Chapter 2 proposes a novel application of multi-channel sequence analysis in food environment research based on time use diaries and GPS trajectories concurrently collected. This method offers an effective way to assess how food exposure in varying spatiotemporal contexts is associated with food activities. Chapter 3 expands the individual-level time use analysis of in-home food chores to the household level by examining time use diaries of coupled men and women. The results suggest possible gender differences in responsiveness to partners’ time allocations, highlighting a need to account for potential impacts of intra-household dynamics on food behaviours. Chapter 4 proposes to conceptualize the interconnected food-provisioning activities undertaken by household members using the time-geographic concept of the project. The applicability of this conceptualization is demonstrated through a test case on coupled adults’ activities for providing dinner. Chapter 5 summarizes this dissertation and discusses how the three chapters above contribute to advancing the current research. Ultimately, these chapters substantially improve our understanding of the various ways in which the food environment, time use, and household labour division influence food behaviours and expand the conceptual and methodological approaches that are geared toward a more holistic understanding of food behaviours in the built environmental and social contexts.
Joint Influence of Human Activities and Indoor Microenvironments on Contaminant Exposure: A Mass-Balance Modeling Investigation
Keywords: Clothing
Human exposure
Indoor air
SARS-CoV-2
Semi-volatile organic compounds (SVOC)
Transdermal uptake

Human populations globally are exposed to a wide variety of contaminants in indoor “microenvironments” (e.g., homes and workplaces). Such exposures are important contributors to the global burden of disease. Measurements reveal that human occupants dynamically influence indoor environmental quality (IEQ) through their presence and activities. However, measured data of IEQ are difficult to generalize, which can be addressed by computational modeling. This dissertation investigated the joint influence of time-dependent human activities and indoor microenvironments on contaminant exposure through modeling. Accordingly, I developed a novel modeling framework, Activity-Based Indoor Contaminant Assessment model (ABICAM). This framework leverages the principle of mass balance including fundamental processes of contaminant emission, transport, and fate, while accounting for the dynamic influence of human occupants and their activities on such processes. I applied ABICAM to address two general research questions: (1) What are the important drivers of contaminant exposure variability in North American human populations? (2) How can clothing influence the transport and fate of airborne contaminants, and accordingly, human exposure? First, indoor chemical emissions drive exposures, with rates typical for a North American home spanning ~4 orders of magnitude from 1.7 (BDE-28) to 18,300 (DEP) [ng·(h·home)-1]. Time-dependent human activities (e.g., cooking) and location are important contributors to intraindividual and interindividual exposure variability. Inherent physical human attributes influence interindividual exposure variability. Specifically, a toddler’s exposures to three ortho-phthalates can be 3-4 times those of an adult just due to a higher normalized respiration rate and skin surface area; activities (e.g., showering) can triple such exposure differences. Second, clothing influences IEQ and associated human exposure as follows: (1) Clothing readily accumulates various airborne contaminants; (2) clothing can effectively minimize transdermal uptake of such contaminants; (3) cotton clothing can effectively inactivate pathogens; (4) clothing can transport airborne contaminants between indoor microenvironments and be a source of secondary exposure; (5) textile washing transports such contaminants to outdoors, depending on physical-chemical properties. Overall, this research emphasizes the importance of reducing indoor contaminant emissions, highlights vulnerable individuals (e.g., toddlers), and supports the role of clothing in minimizing human exposure while noting the trade-off between this role and increased ecosystem exposure through laundering.
Trait Variation and Ecological Function in Diseased Agroforestry Systems
Keywords: Agroforestry
Coffee (Coffea arabica)
Coffee Leaf Rust (Hemileia vastatrix)
Foliar disease
Functional trait ecology

Biodiverse agroecosystems, including agroforestry, are characterized by complicated multispecies interactions, and it is this complexity that can be exploited for crop protection against pathogens and disease management practices. However, the effectiveness of biodiverse agroecosystems in minimizing disease depends on a range of biotic and abiotic interactions, thus requiring deep understanding of the multifunctionality within these systems. Using a functional trait-based approach, my PhD thesis aims to establish a link between multispecies functional traits in agroforestry systems and disease dynamics. As a model system, I use an economically significant crop, Coffea arabica var. Caturra (coffee), grown in biodiverse agroforestry systems, and one of its equally significant foliar pathogens Hemileia vastatrix, causal agent of Coffee Leaf Rust. I found that shade tree leaf and canopy traits in these agroforestry systems are significantly related to microclimate modifications that uniquely impact pathogens and disease incidence, highlighting the nuances between agroforestry systems. Similarly, coffee leaf functional trait trade-offs show significant shifts in diseased systems. However, disease incidence does not impact the root functional trait expression of coffee. From a theoretical perspective, this research enhances our understanding of multispecies functional traits and ecosystem processes in diseased systems, opening a new dimension for functional trait research. From an applied perspective, this research demonstrates how the multifunctionality of biodiverse agroforestry systems can be optimized for crop protection and integrated into disease management practices. I provide novel information to better inform biodiverse farm design and management, as well further promote the adoption of agrobiodiversity into our agricultural landscapes.