http://hdl.handle.net/10453/19978 2026-08-05T15:59:29Z http://hdl.handle.net/10453/195918 Title: Blak space : breathing and other acts of resistance to Aboriginal Deaths in custody Authors: Rule, Latoya Aroha Abstract: New South Wales recorded the highest number of Aboriginal deaths in custody in a single year in 2025. For Aboriginal women, identified as co-researchers herein this creative doctorate for their lived expertise of coronial inquests into contested restraint and asphyxiation deaths of their loved ones in carceral settings, they express that coronial inquests are experienced by families as imposing systemic coloniality—inherently anti-therapeutic, violent legal spaces that uphold white law and its surveillance, and suppresses Aboriginal voices, bodies, and accountability for our loved ones. Our obligations to seek justice require responses that resist this harm in anti-colonial ways and create room for us to live and breathe. Much of this labour is led by co-researchers and other families through cultural, creative, and academic practices of resistance. This doctoral work, developed through the Blak Space: Breathing and Other Acts of Resistance podcast, offers critical inquiry and truth telling grounded in bereaved families’ legal relations with the state, drawing on lived expertise to cultivate an Indigenous storytelling jurisprudence. Families in Blak Space, wider communities, and coroners themselves continue to call for independent oversight of coronial inquests and recommendations. Thus, I propose Aboriginal led People’s Tribunals—a physical Blak Space for truth telling—as one pathway. The power of sovereign, self-determining voices is required to resist state’s violence and abolish the means that continue to suffocate our futures. The use of sound of Moana/ocean waves – as storyteller and theorist in itself – is included to complement families’ yarns and situate this work in space that connects us back to our loved ones, back to our position as sovereign people belonging to Land and Moana, and therefore as tangata o Te Moana-nui-a-kiwa/ people of the Pacific ocean. As with the drawing in and out of waves – and the breath that remains in the salt spray left behind – we navigate a way to breathe again. This is our resistance. Description: University of Technology Sydney. Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences. 2026-01-01T00:00:00Z http://hdl.handle.net/10453/195912 Title: Investigating the interface between green infrastructure planning and flood resilience : a Sydney case study to reflect on the current barriers and opportunities Authors: Takin, Mehrafarin Abstract: Urban flood risk is increasing due to climate change and rapid urban development. This research investigates how green infrastructure can be planned and governed to strengthen urban flood resilience, addressing two gaps: the lack of an integrative planning framework and limited collaboration across planning, ecology, hydrology, and disaster risk management. The study applies thematic analysis of the literature, document-based case study analysis of the Cooks River and Georges River catchments in Sydney, a comparative evaluation of the Sydney Green Grid and the Netherlands Room for the River program, and expert insights gathered through a three-round Delphi process. Findings identify key barriers including fragmented responsibilities across agencies, inconsistent regulation, uneven and short-term funding, data fragmentation, and variable community and Indigenous engagement. The thesis proposes practical governance reforms and planning actions, supported by a Green Infrastructure Economic Evaluation Flowchart to improve business cases and investment decisions. Overall, the research provides guidance for more coordinated, evidence-informed, and equitable delivery of green infrastructure for flood resilience. Description: University of Technology Sydney. Faculty of Design and Society. 2025-01-01T00:00:00Z http://hdl.handle.net/10453/195910 Title: Dark Space, Psychic Space: Architecture, Techno and Counterculture Authors: Migliorino, Adriano Angelo Abstract: This research examines the unique relationship between architecture and the countercultural movement of Techno after the fall of the Berlin Wall. With the collapse of the Wall, the visible and invisible partitions of the city came down. The subsequent administrative void affected the State’s ability to govern, control and direct its urban and architectural environment. Consequentially, there was a temporary autonomous zone of the city centre, enabling a new cultural paradigm. Electronic music was one of the actors to step into the gap, firstly inhabiting it, then shaping the city as a unique spatio-temporal culture grew. Electronic music, its historical lineage, and the various socio-political contexts of underground countercultural movements form the basis of this research, with the objective of uncovering the spatial and architectural dimensions of this specific type of heterotopia in Berlin during Die Wende (the turning point). The nightclubs Tresor and Berghain have been chosen as the key case studies for analysis within the thesis because they have developed historically into what are arguably the two greatest institutions of Techno in Berlin. The former, marks the point of inception of the underground Techno nightclub in Berlin, while the latter represents the most contemporary manifestation and progressive iteration of the underground Techno nightclub. The thesis therefore utilises a comparative case-study methodology of the two main nightclubs and buildings in question, Tresor and Berghain, as a way of revealing the unique relationship between architecture, counterculture and Techno. Beyond the formal and factual components of architecture the case studies are analysed through the lens of the dissertation’s theoretical framework, comprised of the aesthetic categories of the uncanny (the Unheimliche) and the sublime. The findings of the dissertation chart a new course for architecture with respect to the way it confers meaning. It does this through an alternative and obscure lineage within architectural discourse known as dark space and psychic space. Description: University of Technology Sydney. Faculty of Design, Architecture and Building. 2025-01-01T00:00:00Z http://hdl.handle.net/10453/195909 Title: Learning-based Point Cloud Geometry Compression with Transformers and Scalable Coding Authors: Luo, Zhe Abstract: Point clouds, as unstructured collections of 3D points, have become essential for representing complex geometries in applications ranging from autonomous driving to immersive media and cultural heritage preservation. However, their large data and irregular structures pose significant challenges in storage and transmission, motivating research into advanced compression techniques that balance rate-distortion (RD) performance while supporting scalable decoding and compressed-domain analysis. This thesis addresses these challenges through proposed learning-based point cloud compression (PCC) frameworks. Firstly, this thesis proposes a transformerbased autoencoder with local neighbor aggregation and global attention mechanisms to preserve intricate local and global features, achieving superior geometry coding and BD-Rate performance over recent baseline methods on ShapeNetCorev2. Secondly, this thesis introduces an edge-preserving compressed-domain classification approach using local attention to extract features directly from bitstreams, enhancing classification accuracy on ModelNet40 at reduced bitrates. Third, this thesis develops ScalaDAT, a density-aware scalable PCC method employing a tail-drop strategy for incremental decoding in a single training iteration, enhancing RD efficiency on widely-used datasets like SemanticKITTI and ShapeNet, outperforming benchmarks. This thesis’s contributions advance PCC by integrating and enhancing transformer architectures, attention-driven feature preservation, and scalable mechanisms, enabling scalable, efficient 3D data handling for real-life applications. These advancements not only mitigate computational and bandwidth constraints but also pave the way for seamless integration with downstream tasks, fostering innovations in 3D spatial data processing. Description: University of Technology Sydney. Faculty of Engineering and Information Technology. 2026-01-01T00:00:00Z