This study describes and critically evaluates the development of Peterlee New Town, County Durham. The first chapter considers to origins of the post war new towns programs and points to some of the characteristics of the coliey. The second chapter then traces the background of Peterlee's development. The provision of housing in the new town is examined and this i related to population migration and the changing pattern of housing opportunities in the sub-region. Inspects of Peterless's industrial role are discussed, with particular reference to the concerns and efforts of the development corporation. Social policy is then considered and some of the salient social characteristics of Peterlee are indicated: an attempt is made to present a broad social history of the new town. Chapter IV looks at the management of new towns and describes the nature of Peterlees Development Corporation. Finally, we compare the costs with the benefits of new town development at Peterlee.

This study aims to explore community empowerment practice (CEP) in South Korea (SK) and develop a Korean model of CEP. To begin, I describe key contexts of Korean society such as political, economical and cultural backgrounds alongside the history of Korean community work. To achieve the objectives of this thesis, I studied the CEP project for three years from 2003 to 2005. At the same time, I collected qualitative data from 10 participants who were involved in the CEP. I analysed the Korean CEP in terms of a modified Western model of CEP formed by reviewing Western models and ideas of CEP. The analysis revealed: i) the lack of knowledge, values, skills and organisation needed to practice community empowerment in Korea; ii) ways of overcoming some limitations of traditional Korean community work skills in the areas of developing community profiles, community organising, learning from practice, networking, and encouraging resident participation; iii) engaging with differences in practice between community welfare centres (CWCs) and the centres of NGOs that prioritise welfare activities for poor people (WNGOs), e.g., in the fields of community organising, networking and participation; and iv) the lack of positive outcomes in building rights-based and equality-oriented community work to reduce power differences between residents and agencies/ power holders. The proposals for developing a Korean model of CEP include: i) creating an independent organisation that can support knowledge and education as well as play a meditating role in assisting with the acquisition of resources and involvement in political activities; ii) setting strategic directions for the step-by-step changes needed to transfer from working within a traditional Korean model of community work to ‘emancipatory CEP’ by combining both technicist practice and transformative practice; iii) building alliances between CWCs and WNGOs alongside other organisations that are concerned with social justice and equality, while also developing capacity and skills to addresses the weaknesses of both CWCs and WNGOs; and iv) enhancing practitioners capacity and skills to engage not only with policy makers and politicians, but also in collective action together with local people to transform oppressive structures that constrain residents’ rights and equality. This study also demonstrates that community empowerment practice possible in a wide variety of controls and contexts.

This thesis is an empirical study of Thurrock, Essex. The research explored the settlement of Black-British Nigerians within the area and the response by the white majority. The research consisted of an extensive ethnographic enquiry that included a content analysis of local media, qualitative interviews and observations. The methodology re-introduced and embraced value as it provided a sociological analysis of political normativity; particularly in definitions and judgements of racism. The methodology vindicated qualitative technique as a pragmatic strategy to explore issues under the radar of public knowledge. The main findings were that white interviewees responded to the new community with a defensive retort of English Identity. The construction of this identity was used to critique social capital theory and its role in community renewal discourse embodied in public policy. English identity was an attempt to use racial and ethnic discourses of commonality to fuse conventional narratives of land and people. The ascendant aspirations of Englishness were used to criticise political and academic vindications of white working class voices opposed to multi-culturalism. Ultimately, the study is a rebuttal of Dench et al’s (2006) study of ‘The New East’. Using Thurrock as a local example the research argues that public policy should avoid the ‘community solidarity’ model espoused by Dench et al when promoting community renewal. The conclusions of Dench et al are argued to be based upon an invalid conceptualisation of social class and are antithetical to wider inclusive and re-distributive politics. The study concludes by arguing that community renewal should reflect the multiplicity and fluidity of English places and people by enforcing a double bind of responsibility between the State and community. It is argued that a more sincere and pragmatic approach to public/private relations is required if Englishness is to be detached from a racial and colonial past.

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Family subsistence lifestyles, the use of domestic space and familiarity with nature’s ecological cycles has been updated in the medium-size cities of Mozambique, as a means of sustaining livelihoods, creating a comfortable microclimate and preserving vital kinship relationships inside the neighbourhoods surrounding the ‘cement city’. In order to resist the effects of marginalisation in the dualistic city, the external space that surrounds the house – which I call the ‘Outdoor Domestic Space’ – is strategically adapted to integrate both farming and businesses, shaping a green and ruralised pattern of urbanisation, called here the ‘Agrocity’. Rather than being marginal, due to its urban dominance and vitality, the Agrocity is actually the unacknowledged legitimate core of today’s Mozambican cityscape and the place where most cultural, ecological and economic relationships unfold. The Agrocity model that is proposed in this thesis looks at real life experiences and knowledge of people drawn from the case study – Dondo municipality, located in the Central region of Mozambique from the date of independence in 1975 onwards – rather than looking at imported utopian blueprints. Spatial and visual analysis of people’s practice in the field has demonstrated the emergence of a society with a new way of overcoming alienation from nature. The actual practice is explained through existing political ecology theories drawn from its tradition of ecodevelopment and ecosocialism, envisaging a society that is both equitable and in harmony with nature. Therefore, the thesis proposes a vision based on real spontaneous urbanisation, which materialises the ecosocialism paradigm into existence. However, a comprehensive vision of ecosocialism cannot yet be found in the case of Dondo, due to enduring exploitative relationships. Paradoxically, this coexists with a passive form of resistance which, given the current global ecological and political economy crisis, suggests that it may be fuelling the rise of a silent revolution.

The "Achilles heel" of regional planning in the past has consistently proved to be the failure to achieve success in implementing plans. Most scholars acknowledge this reality, but disagree over its explanation, thus, the inadequate theoretical base for planning practice. The essential question behind this dissertation is: What makes decision-makers adopt and implement a given planing product. This concern is based on the perception of planning as a process that depends not merely on the plan's content and competency, but on the way planners choose to integrate their proposals into the decision-making environment within which they operate. Since a plan's approval does not necessarily imply its implementation, it is in the interest of planners to promote implementation. Accordingly, this dissertation proposes a methodological framework to guide planners in creating a highly implementable product. The framework encompasses three elements: the region, with its perceived relative condition guiding the determination of its expected future; the decision-making environment, and the potential to exercise different planning functions within it; and the planning approach which is forged into a strategic perspective that integrates planners' skills and imagination, creating a firm basis for guiding the integration of a planning product into a specific decision-making system, as a means to promote its implementation. The framework is tested through the examination of a particular planning experience in the Galil region of Israel. These two parts, when put together, enable planners to apply prevailing knowledge and skills so as to bridge the gap between plan-making and implementation.

The recent development of civil society in Japan has resulted in considerable attention to the concept of the public interest. The increasing demand for accountability in its policy-making has led to an intense exploration of the concept of the public interest in Japanese planning practices. Despite this, comprehensive studies of the role of public interest in the development of Japanese planning are absent. Although the legitimacy of the public interest has been largely discredited among Western academics, the concept did have a significant impact in developing and shaping planning objectives and procedures in Western liberal states. Acknowledging the importance of the public interest for mobilising Western planning, this thesis investigates the origins and developments of the public interest in Japanese planning, within the framework of the country's progress towards modernisation. Japan's late entry to modernisation significantly affected its interpretation of the public interest and planning. As Japan's prime modernisation objective was the creation of economic growth to establish sovereignty, the boundary between the state (public) and the market (private) led to contradictory planning regulations. Japan's central bureaucracy dominated the public sphere to maintain the developmental state regime, by restraining and guiding civil society, as well as preventing local autonomy in planning operations. Moreover, whereas the rule of law protects citizens from the arbitrary powers of the state in Western liberal states, the legal justice in Japan's planning system has not been very successful in defending the public interest as a collective concern for citizens. In fact, the public interest in Japan worked to prevent its citizens from challenging planning policies. The concept of the public interest has been so static in Japan that its planning policy has failed to be more accountable to its citizens.

Analyses of development in the Brazilian Amazon have concentrated largely on two frameworks. Modernisation approaches interpret the issue in terms of an urban sector irradiating progress into the rural, and have informed most official intervention policy in the region, as was the case with development poles and infrastructure building. Marxist-based frameworks, which have filled most of the literature and inspired the action of social movements and non-governmental organisations, focus on the perverse impacts of capitalist penetration of the countryside. These organisations tend to influence the process of agricultural transition by providing a variable combination of both poverty alleviation welfare-type assistance as well as the means for improving social and political participation through empowerment. In both modernisation and Marxist frameworks, however, "rural" and "urban" appear as totally separate sectors, and therefore the relationships established by rural people in urban areas, and vice-versa, are not scrutinised. From the end of the 1980s, actor-oriented research gained momentum and helped to reveal diversity in local development circumstances. This thesis aims at contributing to the analysis of diversity by highlighting the importance of urban dimensions in the livelihoods of rural producers. This study shows that some 61 per cent of the Legal Amazonian population is now urban, and argues that in today's Amazonia one can not address rural development properly if rural-urban linkages are not taken into account. It is also argued that the interactions maintained by peasants with urban areas allow for the strengthening and diversification of their sources of livelihood. This phenomenon challenges the view of peasants as exclusively subsumed to capital, but also questions the modernisation view of conflict-free, rural-urban relations. Such improvements in rural livelihoods are possible due to the dynamics of local institutions and capitalism. Having expanded their sources of livelihood into urban areas, rural producers become a target for agencies that support sustainable rural development projects, which seek to finance grassroots movements that can implement income-generating activities in a participatory fashion, free from political coercion. The Frutos do Cerrado, a project supported by the PP-G7 Pilot Programme to Conserve the Brazilian Rain Forest, has been selected as a case study. It is argued that programmes such as the PP-G7 should consider the beneficiaries' capacity to commit themselves and their households to the project's aims, and to examine the compatibility of the project with the urban dimensions present in their livelihoods. Theoretical implications of this analysis concern the weakness of grand theories in adequately explaining the dynamics of livelihood strategies, and the developmental roles played by capital and urban areas in contemporary Amazonia.

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No description available.