hmmm. a good exercise would be to draw a straight line and start thinking about why the particular straight line you drew has some qualities that differs it from the other lines in terms of its meaning and relationships, for starters.
or,
start reading the zoning ordinances that apply to your site and develope some ideas based on your interpretations of them in dialectical terms.

excuse me, i have never done thesis in my life.

why discourage suburbia?

if your approach is building science driven then there is ample evidence that supports the possibilities in improved construction alone as tool towards sustainability.

jenks has reminded us on a few ocassions the research so far does not point towards either dense or dispersed settelement patterns as being inherently better or more sustainable. and in fact pretty much any definition of sustainability will not include any explicit preference for density.

so what are you interested in? planning debate or architecture? and how will you show that they are inter-related, if you want to straddle both fields?

as far as i am concerned a thesis is intended to be a learning experience for you and for your peers, which means you need to be careful about which assumptions you take on and why...they will set the pattern of your work and become framework for whatever field your thesis is supposed to be contributing to (as an original work). if you are into building science the extent to which you can talk about urban planning is questionable and vice versa...

anyway, if you are interested, mike jenks recently spoke at my uni about rethinking existing conditions as starting point for refinement and improvement of the city. he is not opposed to suburbia being one of those starting points...even though he is one of the worlds leading scholars on the compact city model and its use...def check him out if you want a balanced view of sustainability and the built environment...

luck.

thanks for the suggestions so far, and thanks jump for the jenks reference.

to answer your question, i do agree with you that advances in the building sciences have greatly improved new construction, however, i'd argue that building and developing more and new is not sustainable. stretching city infrastructure and developing greenfields, no matter how sustainable the building practice, is less sustainable than reusing the abandoned fabric and brownfields within the city...or at least that's what im arguing.
rather than expanding out from the city core and stretching the infrastructure with it, looking more towards reuse as really the first step in our sustainable future. after we first re-examine what we have, can we then develop what we don't.

DEGW, who are not really architects, but most excellent space planners suggest that new build should be a last resort - link

I tend to agree, issues with material lifespans though, and possible re-use/deconstruction complicate the issue. Particularly if the embodied energy and economic arguments don't stack up for re-fitting a particularly inefficient existing building, yet the site could be improved and the waste recycled...

Nobody fully understands the metrics for these arguments so a lot of what is said is just polemic.

i have tried re-use in inner tokyo. economically it did not work. and we really really tried. not always the case but re-use requires a different economic system in many instances...

anyway, my view about infrastructure is that it is currently possible with modern (and only slightly advanced) technology to live almost entirely off of the grid, and self-contained self energy producing buildings are not so far off...which is to say infrastructure is in some ways an excuse and not a real reason for high density.

i grew up in rural canada and know lots of farmers who have lived in same place for hundred years without urban-type sewage, water or lectricity. and now there are "living machines" (a la bioshelter ocean arks and city farming fame) that can be used in interesting ways, solar power, etc etc etc...the arguments are well made by lots and lots of architects out there...

what it boils down to for me is the question. are we looking for a way to be sustainable, or a way to get people out of suburbs? the one does not imply the other in spite of the issues being generally conflated. current suburban typologies have big problems but i don't think rebuilding at higher densities is going to be a realistic answer for anyone in the real world. to be frank density has its own rather formidable problems too...i mean i live in a city of 33 million people with very high density, fantastic trains, and cetera, but it is not what i would call sustainable. it is only sustainable if we measure it using a fairly limited set of indicators.

really i think wm mcdonough has it right when he asks for more creative approaches to design...getting that right means asking the right questions. unfortunately architects seem usually to just swallow the green pill and abbrogate intelligence to dogma instead.

first, it seems that you have a thesis: simply stated, that greenfield development is not sustainable and that one alternative is redevelopment of urban brownfield sites. it's somewhat conventional, but i think reasonable and allows you to explore several means of testing your thesis.

from this, i have more questions than answers. first, why do you want to make your thesis any more theoretical? i can understand the desire to research your topic, but i wouldn't try to make the thesis itself any more complicated. i think the best theses are incredibly simple, but can be explored in multiple and complex ways.

second, is this an architectural thesis or a planning thesis? if it is an architectural thesis, think about bring an element of planning into it. if it is a planning thesis, consider the architecture in more depth.

third, does your thesis have a site? probably the most important thing you can do at this point is chose a compelling site. exploring your thesis in tokyo will bring up far different scenarios than exploring it in detroit.

fourth, who are the stakeholders? are you looking to influence developers? change methods within the construction industry? a well defined audience will help you focus the direction it will take in the future.

hope this is some help.

good points.

i would argue that it is still too broad to simply suggest that greenfield development is unsustainable. look at bedzed for example of where this might not be the case. without offering a context in your theoretical base it is impossible to say either way, as jafidler says...

If there is a problem to be solved, it is how to get the Suburbi to reintegrate into this new "fabric". It will require some elements of suburbia for the Soccer Mom's, for example. It could become a new fabric that has yet to be realized instead of the romantic foundation of Europe's mixed use.

Suburbia and the Suburbi will have to be dealt with in the near future. I have yet to see a anything more than a half hearted response in this area.

why doncha do a compare and contrast. find two projects of similar scope. one in the quiet and relaxing suburbs and the other in the hustling and bustling city. see what each uses in whatever terms you want. research it. write it. publish it. become famous. thank me at your acceptance speech.

hhmmmm.
that is

thanks to all for this lively debate.
to answer some of the questions posed...

this is an arch thesis.

jump-
i again agree that buildings and eventually communities will be able to 'live' off of the grid and the major focus of my interest isn't necessarily to get people out of the suburbs and i wouldn't say that im interested in increased density per se. what i am interested in is how to reuse and redevelopment the density that we've already created. to encourage people to move into the abandoned warehouse downtown, rather than build a completely sustainable home [or otherwise] on a greenfield. part of this interest stems from the disdain that architects have with renovations, in most cases for good reason. but i find it ironic that most of our energy is being put into developing new technologies in order to build homes and communities that are completely self-sustained. of course i think this is a worthwhile venture, but before we make this leap, what are we to do with the millions of square feet we've already built? demolition of these buildings [often times 10-20 yrs old] isn't sustainable, neither is following our current model of abandonment. so the thesis isn't offering to build higher density cities, but rather to work with what is already there.

jafidler-
as far as the theoretical component goes...i don't think i have to make it more theoretical, but i guess currently i feel as though the thesis, is less about an untested idea and more about an empirical experiment. ie. take a building, a site, and systematically analyze and renovate it. this seems too predictable. too straight forward and frankly too easy. a theoretical component would begin to make this less about conducting a 'real life' experiment and more about posing it as a question that my design can begin to answer. currently that question is already defined and to an extent already answered. how do i carve out my niche?
currently i don't have a site. i've been debating whether or not i should pick something local, or if i should instead pick something [for example] like chernobyl...the worst case brownfield. and as far as my audience goes, that's a great point and something i don't think i put too much time into thinking about. i think the obvious answer is a change in development models...but this is something i should look into more deeply.

thanks again to everyone

vado - done and done

sounds like you could read this book. It has alot of facinating insights into "ruralizing" cities without necesarilly suburbanising them. Such as turning brownfields into parks, utilizing natural systems aid urban performance sustainably (both sociall and technically), and sustainable redevelopment of existing urban structure into sustainable frame works (like turning a landfill into a "park" but more of a natural landscape than an engineered one).

It may be interesting to look at an entire city and figure out interventions, both large and small, that could make it more sustainable. Dongtan eco-city, being built outside of Shanghai, is being built green from the get-go but it could prove an interesting precedent as it is essentially going to be used as a test bed/model for the greening of Shanghai.

My best advise to these threads is to do a thesis that you will enjoy and benefit from the entire year. I've seem many people do theses that were big "buzz" things and ended up getting bored of them and quiting. You don't want to do that.

Do a thesis that if for you and not for your colleagues and professors.

Why isn't an empirical thesis any better than a "theoretical" one. I am suspicious of theory that cannot be empirically proven. Brownfield rehabilitation can be very costly and usually the most common use for brownfields is for laundramats...(at least in NYC) If you want to do a building tech thesis you should focus on developing a technology or method based on a very simple observation..i think you may enjoy it more

architects are seldom emprirical, so anything that empiri-fies the debate is very good.

sounds good to me Raarch. go for it.

you may be interested in "shrinking cities" work by philip oswalt. he and his crew have written a fair amount about emptying cities and their causes. no solutions, though. which is where your stuff could come in...

chernobyl sounds cool. a generic site sounds better, jes cuz it can be duplicated in other places. have fun

chernobyl sounds incredibly complicated given the geographical, political, and cultural context, probably more than you would be able to take on in a semester or two, and i have a feeling that untangling all of that may actually distract from your real interests in brownfield rehabilitation/adaptive reuse.

having said that, wherever you do choose for a site i think needs a compelling context, but something that you can penetrate through your research.

it's difficult to really tell from your posts what direction you want to go with this. do you want to explore the means to retrofit an existing building (materials, structure, mechanical systems, etc.), or are you interested in a broader context for the building? as most studio professors will tell you, ideally, you should be working both scales simultaneously, but i think that's a bit impractical for a thesis and often leads to confusion. it's important to understand the scope of your inquiry from the outset. don't be accidental about it.

i still think the answer to the above questions are embedded in the site you choose. i had a very interesting studio in grad school on the adaptive reuse of a huge industrial warehouse in pittsburgh. my master's thesis was a large scale master plan for downtown las vegas. both projects were very similar in terms of my own personal interests in urbanism, but the sites chosen took the two projects in very different directions.

good points.

scale of focus is pretty impt.

one of my ol classmates designed a wall system for his phd research. he did no design of a building and focused merely on functional/technical aspects of the wall, which was entirely a quantitative thing. when you talk about building science that is what i think of. somehow i don't think that is the intent though...is it?

if you plan a conversion of a warehouse or similar then i think reality will have to play a backseat; especially if you plan to look at change of a building into anything that would work in a market context. in that sense chernobyl is as good as new jersey cuz it will be about pure design. which is perfectly fine.

still, if you want to be real you might find it useful to go find a real building that you can speak to the owner about and work out a real program in a real budget, and figure out how much the new mechanical sysems will cost, etc. This was a requirement in my school for a m.arch degree (working out the mechanical systems and engineering with real engineers, etc; not the budget)...cuz if you can get over all the existing barriers that make conversion a real possibility it would be very interesting (to me at least).

i do renovations in tokyo all the time. the last time i tried a conversion we had 4 million budget for the building, and a million to renovate 6 flats on 6 stories, with a healthy but relatively small yield based on rental income. when we brought in the consultants it turned out that upgrading the mechanical system alone would cost 1 million dollars. no joke. the only way the project could work was in a depressed economy where the building was being sold for less than value...but then you have to find the people to fill the place, etc, etc...so risk gets higher and the banks won't loan to you...an so the story goes. which is why such problems exist to begin with. in many ways what you are tackling in that context is an economic problem using design ideas...how compatible they are is hard to judge.

in the end that is just too real for school, which is why i pretty much think any old place will do if it is a conversion project.

now if you are talking brownfield renovation, as in landscape urbanism mentioned above, it is an entirely different scale and kettle of fishies...just as jafidler says, context and scale change the project entirely.

main thing is to have fun.

thank you both for this, its been really helpful. right now im digesting it all, but i feel like my head is once again pointed in the right direction.

read r. sennett's USES OF DISORDER (book) and THE ART OF EXPOSURE (article). decent supplemental material that will give you the edge you might need.