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The subject of this dissertation is how the Renaissance humanists of the Italian peninsula conceptualized the formation of the civitas, their term for “state.” Its results point towards a need to re-configure to some degree our historical account of the modern concept of the state. When investigating the origins of this concept, intellectual historians and political theorists alike emphasize the innovations of the mid-seventeenth century. It was at this time, they argue, that the term “state” came to refer to a “fictional person” that, acting through a duly-authorized representative, is responsible for preserving human society. This dissertation shows, however, that the belief that the integrity of human society depends on the institution of an entity called the “state” had already existed for centuries prior to this. It does so by re-constructing a tradition of thinking about the formation of political society indebted to the political, philosophical and rhetorical works of the Roman author Cicero. It argues that this tradition was established by the humanist intellectuals of the Italian Renaissance, then Europe’s leading scholars of Greco-Roman antiquity. According to this tradition, the civitas is the name of a distinctive association established specifically to order and maintain a pre-existing social life. It is, moreover, the name of a kind of abstract person, brought to life by a representative and believed to be the subject of sovereignty. Yet not only did the humanists develop such a theory; the dissertation also demonstrates that this theory became itself an object of debate, with later generations of humanists, most notably Machiavelli, articulating alternatives in response to it. However, shaped as they were by the terms of this Ciceronian theory, these alternatives nevertheless continued to endorse certain key tenets of it, most importantly that the “state” is the name of a kind of body and that this body is instituted to maintain human society. The dissertation concludes by showing that these different ways of thinking about states would go on to shape some of the political thinking of the seventeenth century.

Kant dice que es un deber salir del estado de naturaleza, para entrar en un estado civil: un deber de derecho (Rechtspflicht), no un deber de virtud. El artículo discute el argumento que él da para apoyar este punto de vista, así como el debate contemporáneo sobre la relación entre este deber de derecho y el imperativo categórico. De la discusión emerge una visión del estado kantiano que desafía la explicación convencional: en lugar de un estado diseñado para proteger derechos de propiedad individuales preexistentes, los derechos de propiedad se consideran como resultado de la misma constitución del estado.

In this thesis, I address a critical situation found today within the American suburbs. Many suburban developments lack human scale and places for community interaction traditionally found in the downtown model of the city. The places of interaction, or forums, are inherent in the downtown model and are built into the block structure, and close to where people live. They promote multiple uses and the healthy interaction of the residents of the community. In the suburban model, the places of interaction are separated from neighborhoods and residences, they are highly insular and geared towards a single purpose, usually shopping. This project is an attempt to investigate the possibilities of adaptive reuse of the spaces built with a consumerist mindset that have disrupted American communities since World War II. The structures of malls or big box stores have been used in the past to try to remake public spaces, to varying degrees of success. The purpose of this investigation is to propose a system that can be implemented in order to restore the sense of community to the American suburbs. Specifically, the program will focus on the phenomenon of the mall or big box stores that inhabit much of the suburban areas, and the feasibility of using these locations as a way to try to restore community through adaptive reuse. I feel that these sites have a great potential to become a center or node to bring a more human scale and walkable, sustainable community to the suburbs. In the project, I propose to look at an individual shopping mall, West Town Mall in Knoxville, Tennessee, which is, in my opinion, a product of sprawl and the consumer culture. Through adaptive reuse and densification of the site, the mall and its surroundings will better connect to the site and to the surrounding neighborhoods. This is not intended to be an isolated case, but the connection point of a network of sites that can make transit and walkability a greater possibility in suburban neighborhoods.

The purpose of this study was the development of an architectural methodology capable of re-establishing polycentric civitas in the City of Los Angeles. To establish a new civic design framework for the city of Los Angeles, research and analysis was conducted in many fields using several different methods. A review of literature pertaining to the historic establishment of civitas serves an analysis of the different forms of public space in Western civilization. An analysis of urbanism in Los Angeles was conducted using existing literature related to the topic, while an analysis of the neighborhood chosen as the site for the “execution” of the methodology was performed through first-hand research and field study. This information was then synthesized, producing a building program customized to the Miracle Mile in Los Angeles. The final stage of the study was the design of this new civic core. In the context of the Miracle Mile—defined by the presence of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art—the proposed civic core took the form of an artist commune. The study concludes that the re-establishment of polycentrism in Los Angeles, as a means for (re)discovering civitas, requires the development of several new alternative civic cores, dispersed throughout the urban fabric of the Los Angeles Basin. In order to effectively operate as sites of critical civic engagement, however, each core must be developed independently of the other, responding to specific micro-cultures. This study advocates choosing sites based on the presence of existing civic potentials. In this way, the alienating effects of tabula rasa city planning are avoided. The architectural project presented at the end of this study, should therefore be understood, not as an architectural prototype to be universally replicated across the city, but as a prototype for an architectural research method. In order to (re)discover civitas in Los Angeles, architects and urban planners must recognize the limitations of universal models and accept that the architectural spaces that define the civic realm must reflect the needs of the specific societies who will ultimately activate them.