This dissertation undertakes an analysis of the spatial persistence of population in South Africa over the period 1911 to 2011. A comprehensive review is given of the history and development of geographical economics in order to understand the dynamics of the forces of agglomeration. In addition the history of the development of South Africa is discussed and special focus is directed to the geographical, economic and political factors that gave rise to the unequal distribution of population and wealth in the country. In the empirical analysis Zipf’s law was applied and it was found that South Africa’s population was more evenly spread in 1911. With the application of the law to the 2011 data the Pareto exponent of the OLS log-linear regression indicated that urban agglomeration was more persistent. Although this might indicate that apartheid did not influence agglomeration in South Africa it is argued that the nature of the agglomeration was in fact influenced by restrictive measures placed on the urbanisation of the population and industrial decentralisation policies. It is indicated that the apartheid policy altered the equilibrium spatial distribution of population and wealth which lead to a smaller than optimal primate and second largest magisterial districts, too many secondary cities of similar size, and also too many small and uneconomical rural settlements. / MCom (Economics), North-West University, Potchefstroom Campus, 2015

This dissertation undertakes an analysis of the spatial persistence of population in South Africa over the period 1911 to 2011. A comprehensive review is given of the history and development of geographical economics in order to understand the dynamics of the forces of agglomeration. In addition the history of the development of South Africa is discussed and special focus is directed to the geographical, economic and political factors that gave rise to the unequal distribution of population and wealth in the country. In the empirical analysis Zipf’s law was applied and it was found that South Africa’s population was more evenly spread in 1911. With the application of the law to the 2011 data the Pareto exponent of the OLS log-linear regression indicated that urban agglomeration was more persistent. Although this might indicate that apartheid did not influence agglomeration in South Africa it is argued that the nature of the agglomeration was in fact influenced by restrictive measures placed on the urbanisation of the population and industrial decentralisation policies. It is indicated that the apartheid policy altered the equilibrium spatial distribution of population and wealth which lead to a smaller than optimal primate and second largest magisterial districts, too many secondary cities of similar size, and also too many small and uneconomical rural settlements. / MCom (Economics), North-West University, Potchefstroom Campus, 2015

Située dans le centre-Sud du Viêt-Nam, la ville portuaire de Quy-Nhon est le chef-lieu de la province de Binh-Dinh. Celle-ci se développe rapidement depuis la fin de la guerre de libération (1975). L’expansion urbaine transforme l’occupation du sol dans le delta du fleuve Ha Thanh. Le régime hydrologique de ce petit fleuve côtier est encore mal connu. Toutefois, il est susceptible de connaître de dangereuses crues rapides au moment du passage récurrent des typhons. Tandis que l’urbanisation de son delta multiplie les enjeux localisés dans la plaine inondable, cette thèse entend remplir un besoin de connaissance de l’aléa inondation et de la vulnérabilité sociale dans ce delta afin de contribuer à une meilleure gestion des risques. Pour cela, une évaluation environnementale et géomatique est conduite en vue de qualifier le rythme des crues et de leur propagation d’une part et de spatialiser les risques d’autre part. Cette thèse fait le point aussi sur les manipulations de l’environnement du fleuve et de son bassin versant qui sont susceptibles de modifier son comportement hydrologique. / Located in South-Central Vietnam, the port city of Quynhon is the capital city of the Binhdinh province. The city undergoes a rapid expansion since the end of the Vietnam war (1975). Urban spread changes land use patterns in the Ha Thanh river delta. The Ha Thanh river hydrologic regime has not been thoroughly studied so far. However, it is susceptible to flash flood during the frequent typhoon events. Because urban development multiplies exposed buildings within the floodplain, the present dissertation aims at providing a better knowledge of flood hazard and vulnerability in the delta for better risk management. For this purpose, an environmental and geomatic assessment is conducted to identify flood speed and expanse on the one hand, and draw a hazard exposure map on the other hand. This dissertation also analyses the environmental manipulations of the river and its watershed that impact its hydrological regime.

Cette thèse étudie l'urbanisation et la croissance des villes en Chine. Elle est composée de deux parties : la première partie est consacrée à une revue des modèles théoriques d'urbanisation et à une description de l'urbanisation de la Chine. Le problème de la mesure de la population urbaine, des changements institutionnels ainsi que des spécificités du processus d'urbanisation chinois sont étudiés. La deuxième partie relie la croissance économique urbaine aux économies d'agglomération, et étudie les caractéristiques de la croissance récente de la population des villes. Le concept théorique d'économie agglomération est clarifié avant de procéder à des tests empiriques sur une base de données d'environ 150 villes chinoises pendant la décennie 1990. En suite, nous examinons l'évolution de la distribution de la taille des villes par différents instruments d'analyse. Enfin, nous estimons les déterminants de la croissance urbaine durant la période 1990-2000.<br />Notre étude suggère que la Chine a connu un retard de l'urbanisation dû aux stratégies d'industrialisation particulières (biais de l'industrie lourde avant les réformes et industrialisation rurale après les réformes) et au caractère incomplet des marchés des facteurs de production (le travail et la terre, entre autres) ; les villes ne sont pas assez grandes pour exploiter les économies d'agglomération. Avec l'approfondissement des réformes économiques, la Chine doit poursuivre cette transformation structurelle rurale/urbaine car le développement de l'économie urbaine va constituer l'un des moteurs de la croissance économique du pays. Les politiques destinées à promouvoir l'urbanisation doivent consister à améliorer les institutions sur les marchés des facteurs de production, et à relâcher les restrictions sur la taille des villes.

This thesis studies the social history of the poor in Bulawayo, the second largest city in Zimbabwe, between 1960 and 2005. This is accomplished by focusing on the housing and unemployment crises they faced and the manifest reluctance of authorities to either provide enough housing or to accept mushrooming informal housing and economic activities in response to these acute shortages. I attempt to highlight the fragility of the poor’s claim to the right to permanent urban residency emphasizing inadequate state funding and poverty and continuities in some discourses from colonial to the post colonial era as factors responsible for spreading and sustaining the discrimination against low income earners in the city. These included authorities’ perceptions that all Africans belonged to rural areas, have access to land, and that low income Africans were immoral and unclean. While these perceptions tended to be fuelled by the racial divide between whites and blacks during the colonial period, class and gender dynamics among Africans crisscrossed that racial divide. After independence, while these perceptions were still alive, central government policy ambitions and failures were instrumental in influencing the welfare and fate of the urban masses and their relations with the former middle class Africans and nationalist leaders who assumed power in 1980. It becomes clear that there was a misunderstanding by authorities on how most of the rural land was not able to support some families because of infertility or lack of resources to successfully till the land by most some families. The overall conclusion is that poor people’s rights to permanent residency were elusive up to 2005 and their living and survival space has been continuing to shrink in the city.

This study investigates maps and town-views of two port towns, Stockholm and Ottoman Thessaloniki, in the sixteenth, seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. These four centuries of early modern era are very important for the history of these ports and the historical changes made in this period affected the cartographic image of both cities.   The first major aim of this thesis is to examine the maps and town-views as sources for how these two cities were viewed spatially and schematically in the past. The second aim of the thesis is to explore the evolution of these two cities, using the comparative dimension to highlight both similarities and unique features, and again relying on maps and town-views as the major source. The fact that both cities were ports with important roles in early modern empires (the Swedish Empire and the Ottoman Empire respectively), means they offer much scope for comparison.   Defense, religious and financial use of places and buildings and the presence of minorities in streets and neighborhoods will get special attention at several points in this thesis.

Urban nature provides local ecosystem services such as absorption of air pollutants, reduction of noise, and provision of places for recreation, and is therefore crucial to urban sustainable development. Nature conservation in cities is also part of the global effort to halt biodiversity decline. Urban landscapes, however, display     distinguishing social and ecological characteristics and therefore the implementation of nature conservation frameworks into cities, requires reconsideration of what nature to preserve, for whom and where. The aim of this thesis was to examine the current urban nature conservation with special focus on formally protected areas, and discuss their future role in the urban landscape. A social-ecological systems approach was used as framework and both quantitative and qualitative methods were applied. The studies were performed at local to regional scales in the southern part of Sweden. Four key questions were addressed: i) What are the characteristics of nature conservation in urban landscapes? ii) How does establishment of nature conservation areas affect the surrounding urban landscape? iii) In what ways are spatial and temporal scales recognized in practical management of nature conservation areas? and iv) How can the dichotomy of built up and nature conservation areas be overcome in urban planning? Nature reserves in urban, compared to rural landscapes were in general fewer, but larger and included a higher diversity of land covers. They were also based on a higher number and different kinds of objectives than rural nature reserves. Urbanisation adjacent to nature reserves followed the general urbanisation patterns in the cities and no additional increase in urban settlements could be detected. In general, there was a lack of social and ecological linkages between the nature conservation areas and the urban landscape and practical management showed a limited recognition of cross-scale interactions and meso-scales. Such conceptual and physical isolation risks decreasing the public support for nature conservation, cause biodiversity decline, and hence impact the generation of ecosystem services. A major future challenge is therefore to transform current conservation strategies to become a tool where urban nature is perceived, planned and managed as valuable and integrated parts of the city. To enable social-ecological synergies, future urban planning should address proactive approaches together with key components like active enhancement of multifunctional landscapes, cross-scale strategies and border zone management. / <p>At the time of the doctoral defense, the following papers were unpublished and had a status as follows: Paper 2: Manuscript. Paper 3: Submitted. Paper 5: Manuscript.</p>

Thèse numérisée par la Division de la gestion de documents et des archives de l'Université de Montréal.

This study examines how the discourse of wenming (civilisation/civility) has been visualised throughout twentieth century Chinese art, with a particular emphasis on contemporary practice. Originally linked to concepts of modernity and change in the early twentieth century I argue that wenming continues to be of crucial importance in understanding how contemporary China wishes to be seen by the rest of the world. Through a series of close visual readings and case studies I explore how wenming attained considerable saliency as it was invoked to address a range of artistic and political reforms which resulted from China's socioeconomic transformations. Individual chapters focus on the work of Sun Yuan and Peng Yu, Liu Gang, Wang Jin and Ai Weiwei amongst others. Taken together they provide an emic account of artistic praxis that seeks to understand contemporary art from China on its own terms. The study begins by examining how wenming was visualised in the early twentieth century. It then charts what happened to the term after the founding of the PRC in 1949 and how its appearance in locations such as Taiwan and Hong Kong provide sites of contention and alterity to mainland wenming discourse. It analyses how the bifurcation between material civilisation and spiritual civilisation that gained prominence following the economic reforms of the 1980s reconfigured the visual art of this period. Then, turning to a single art work, it theorises the relationship of wenming to an emerging corporeal politics. Finally, it explores how the discourse of wenming is being visually articulated in contemporary China as a result of these developments and traces its interaction with consumer culture, urbanisation and the politics of the internet.

Pour le processus de transformation du rapport ville/fleuve, trois moments variants sont définis par les chercheurs français : celui de la ville commerciale, celui de la ville industrielle et celui de la ville en mutation vers le postindustriel (ou la ville tertiaire). Cependant, les villes fluviales chinoise ont les particularités dans la trace de l'évolution : il n'existait pas au début d'orientation vers le commerce à l'époque dite "du commerce", ni de révolution industrielle à l'époque de l'industrie ; il ne s'agit que d'un emprunt formel au modèle occidental de développement des fonctions tertiaires à l'époque dite "de la tertiarisation".Notre recherche est élaborée autour deux hypothèses principales : premièrement, le rapport ville/fleuve chinois sont passées par les trois états qui caractérisent l'évolution historique des villes occidentales, mais la dynamique de leur urbanisation est née et s'est adaptée au cadre particulier chinois ; deuxièmement, avec l'introduction des modèles étrangers, les villes fluviales chinoises opèrent une interprétation originale pour l'adapter à leurs propres contextes économiques et sociaux. L'emprunt des méthodes externes est mis au service des logiques internes. Nous voulons analyser en plus les enjeux des acteurs dans ces trois moments en Chine. Il existe deux caractéristiques communes dites le pragmatisme et le dirigisme : d'une part la dictature du pragmatisme, (le fleuve est toujours considéré comme un « outil pratique ») ; d'autre part l'effet déterminant des acteurs, dont les plus importants sont l'Etat et la direction des communes, qui ont déterminé en très grande partie le sillon de l'évolution des fonctions et des formes du fleuve. Notre thèse a trois parties principales en répondant aux trois phases de l'évolution du rapport ville/fleuve : l'époque de concession, entre 1840 et 1949, l'époque de reconstruction de la Chine, entre 1949 et 1978, et l'époque de l'”Ouverture”, de 1978 à aujourd'hui. Quatre villes sont choisies comme terrain de recherche après une étude initiale: Shanghaï, Canton, Wuhan et Tianjin. A la lumière de ces études, la diversité des enjeux liés à la thématique de l'usage du fleuve au cours de l'urbanisation est mise en évidence. La compréhension du mécanisme d'interaction entre les modèles étrangers et les logiques internes nous permettent d'établir une théorisation de la relation entre les grandes villes et leur fleuve, et plus particulièrement sur le rôle du fleuve dans le processus de l'urbanisation en Chine / For the transformation process of the report city / river, three periods are defined by French researchers: that of the commercial city, that of the industrial city and that of the city in the post-industrial transformation (or city of tertiary sector). However, the chinese river cities have the specifics in the trace of evolution : there exist no trade orientation in the beginning of the time called "trade period", or the industrial revolution at the time of industry; it use the Western model as major reference for development of service functions at the time called "the service sector". Our research is built around two main hypotheses: first, the report city / river in China passed through the three states that characterize the historical development of western cities, but the dynamics of urbanization was born and has adapted to its specific context; secondly, with the introduction of foreign models, the Chinese river towns operate an original interpretation to suit their own economic and social contexts, the reference of external methods in the service of internal logic. In addition, we want to analyze the main issues and actors in these three stages in China. There are two common characteristics called pragmatism and dirigisme: first the dictatorship of pragmatism (the river is still considered a "useful tool") and secondly determining the effect of the actors. The most important are the state and direction of city, who have largely determined the path of evolution of functions and forms of river. Our thesis has three main parts addressing the three phases of the evolution of the city / river: the concession period, between 1840 and 1949, the era of reconstruction of China, between 1949 and 1978, and then the period of the Opening from 1978 to today. Four cities are chosen for field of research after an initial study: Shanghai, Guangzhou, Wuhan and Tianjin. In light of these studies, the diversity of issues related to the theme of the use of the river during urbanization is highlighted. Understanding the mechanism of interaction between foreign models and the internal logic allows us to establish a theoretical relationship between cities and their river, especially on the river's role in the process of urbanization in China