This PhD thesis examines and evaluates the importance of urban services in environmental quality using economic evaluation techniques. It is a consensus that one of the features of countries that are under development is the rapid growth of urbanization. Rapid urbanization is followed by an intense demand for qualitative and quantitative development in physical dimensions and urban systems. An efficient urban management system is required to tackle and solve the problems of urbanization, using appropriate policies, methods and data to ensure that not only has the urban population got access to the labour market, housing and urban services, but also urban environments are organized to enhance the quality of life for its citizens. Consequently, this research seeks to assess and define a method to help local authorities and policy makers in affective decision making and efficient city management. Thus, the main objective of this thesis is to establish a non-market benefits valuation models for use in current and future policy applications with the aim of better built environment quality and promoting sustainable development. This research shows that allocating appropriate urban services plays a key role in promoting urban environmental quality, and fostering essential amenities such as comfort, safety, aesthetic, attractiveness etc. to citizens. Distribution and accessibility of urban services plays an important role in people’s movements, forming the city size, shape, and density, and importantly living quality in the city. This research reveals how economic valuation techniques can be used to define the market and the value of the urban services and assesses public preferences by determining willingness to pay for better access to preferred urban services. By employing the perspective of welfare economics to identify the structure of public preferences, including preference differences between socioeconomic groups, this study provides valuable information which should help to inform public policy deliberations over city management and land use planning objectives of promoting sustainable development and increasing quality of life and environment.

This study explored the issues of regeneration and sustainable development, and identified evaluation and impact assessment as an important part of successful project delivery. It identified sustainable development as a process which considers its environmental, economic and social aspects as elements in equilibrium within a system, and urban regeneration as the process which seeks to reverse urban decline in an area. It defined three main groups of stakeholders within urban regeneration with varying degrees of involvement with an intervention, as well as a variety of interests. The research went on to examine evaluation and impact assessment within regeneration delivery, and undertook a critical analysis of criteria and techniques used in assessing regeneration and sustainable development as well as delivery in the North West of England. Based on a pragmatist philosophical stance, the study utilised a unique blend of methodologies in order to investigate current practice as well as identify good practice from other sectors. Working with four case study organisations, it developed improvements to existing methods of evaluating regeneration delivery. The study identified key challenges within the evaluation of regeneration delivery, and developed improvements to practice based on five critical success factors which are: • Organisational Culture and Commitment • Clear Strategy • Methodological Pluralism • Communication and Stakeholder Involvement • Action on Findings Finally the research outlined the Objectives based EvaluAction framework to inform the evaluation within urban regeneration.

The research undertaken in this thesis presents an inquiry into community planning which is considered a new governance approach for improving public service arrangements. Northern Ireland is the last of the devolved administrations to introduce community planning with its introduction having taken place in April 2015. Community planning is a comprehensive approach that functions on the premise that enduring social problems are best addressed through assuming collaborative cross-sector partnership working arrangements. As such, it is subject to all the challenges of partnership working with the added challenges associated with participatory democracy - representation, inclusion and empowerment (Cowell, 2004). When this is taken in tandem with the actuality that governance arrangements in Northern Ireland are traditionally centralised and silo-like in nature, the scale of change required for engendering effective community planning is significant. Given its embryonic state, the research takes the view that community planning in Northern Ireland can be enhanced through drawing lessons from the experiences of its devolved counterparts. The scope of the research is twofold. Firstly, it theorises the emergence of community planning and conceptualises the approach. Secondly, it employs new institutionalism as an organisational frame and applies the concepts of lesson-drawing (Rose, 1993) and policy mobility to draw holistic and practical lessons from Scotland and Wales. A multiple case study strategy is employed to investigate the governance, policy and practice of community planning with case stUdies from Northern Ireland utilised to ascertain the receptivity of the proposed lessons. The thesis reports on the transferability of the lessons and asserts those contextual differences in ideology, the institutional environment, knowledge and experience, and resources suggest that the scale of change required to import lessons is considerable.

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The concept of local authority infrastructure planning in England was introduced as part of the transition from land-use to spatial planning ushered in by the 2004 Planning and Compulsory Purchase Act. As a component of this reform of the planning system, local infrastructure planning was envisioned as part of the movement for planning to go beyond traditional land-use planning and integrate policies for the development and use of land with other public policy programmes that shape places. The aim of this thesis is to critically assess the extent to which local authority infrastructure planning conforms to the idea of a transition from land-use to spatial planning. In order to address this aim, the research is set within a historical context of planning which acknowledges that there have been previous attempts to facilitate the planning and delivery of infrastructure at the local level. The thesis then reviews the existing literature of spatial planning and develops a conceptual framework to identify four characteristics of a spatial planning approach namely: evidence, governance, partnership and delivery. This framework expedites an understanding of the spatial planning approach and its association with infrastructure planning. The research utilises two empirical case study local authorities- Bolton and Sheffield- to examine the live processes of local authority infrastructure planning. Methodologically, the thesis employs qualitative methods, specifically semi-structured interviews supported by participant observation and documentary analysis. The thesis concludes that local authority infrastructure planning reflected a ‘squeezed path’ and an incomplete transition from land-use to spatial planning. It finds the spatial planning premise of local authority infrastructure planning to be somewhat detached from its actual implementation, creating an implementation gap at the ‘street-level’. Although, it conveys that infrastructure planners sought to construct and execute infrastructure planning processes in accordance with the spatial planning approach. Furthermore, it is suggested that the effectiveness of local authority infrastructure planning for the delivery of infrastructure is more conspicuously related to financing rather than the genealogy of the infrastructure planning process. In other words, the availability of capital finance and funding was identified to be the dominant factor shaping the process of local authority infrastructure planning in the case studies. Consequently it is contended that there has been a financialisation and neoliberalisation of local infrastructure delivery. In this way, local authority infrastructure planning is subject to the interminable processes of the wider prevailing political economy; impacted by the course of neoliberalisation and ‘new public management’ procedures.

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Conventional architectural practice and education has long been limited to serving a minority of the world's elite population. This research is interested in extending the boundaries of architectural practice and education. It sets out to explore the role of architects in addressing the emergence and growth of informal settlements which represent the majority of the built environment in most developing countries. It traces the transformation from a providing paradigm to a supporting paradigm in global housing policies for the urban poor which calls for a new role for architects and the architectural profession – the 'architecture of empowerment'. As a contribution to this paradigm shift, the research focuses on architectural design processes 'with' poor urban communities in Thailand as a case study. Reflections on the practice of NHA, CODI and CASE architects are examined and compared through an investigation of the relationship between their values, knowledge and skills, in order to understand not only the challenges faced in their practice, but also the implications for architectural education. The research illustrates that architects, who employ the architectural design process as an empowering tool for community members, work as 'reflective educators' encompassing the professional roles of 'provider', 'supporter' and 'catalyst'. The conditions underlining each role include (1) the architect's personal values, knowledge and skills; (2) organizational policies and supports; and (3) clients' values concerning participation and participatory design process. The research argues that the knowledge and skills of the architect as provider remain important, but not enough to deal effectively with the challenges posed by informal settlements. Also crucial are the new architectural values, knowledge and skills related to the roles of supporter and catalyst which relate respectively, to design to support community members to make their own decisions; and empower them to believe in themselves, collectively act for themselves and reflect on their actions. This calls for a transformation in the power relations between architects and their clients in the design process, and when addressed in an 'alternative architectural education', also calls for a transformation in the power relations between architectural tutors and their students in the classroom and design studio, and the promotion of a reflective educational practice.

In architectural and urban design the notion of place is highly desired, or in its absence, strongly criticised. Yet what is place and how might it be engendered by design? Over the last 30 years an extensive body of research on place has emerged, largely based on phenomenological approaches. This work gives rise to the question of whether place is a purely social concept completely divorced from physical space, or is linked to space and therefore amenable to design based intervention. Talen and Relph, for example, assert that there is no link between space and the social notion of place. This thesis attempts to approach place from a highly empirical and positivist methodology grounded in the theories known as space syntax but inspired by phenomenological approaches to place. The hypothesis presented here is that neighbourhoodplace, or sense of the genius loci of a place, is partially dependent on the global homogeneity of the relationships between spaces defining a region (the neighbourhood) combined with a local heterogeneity of the spatial properties that create a place’s identity. Results from a study show that a measure of total revelation (a measure of the difference in information content between a space and its immediately adjacent spaces) is consistent with the degree to which participants would locate a café/place, reinforcing other work done in the area and by environmental psychologists such as Kaplan and Kaplan. Total revelation serves as a powerful measure of the local heterogeneity of a location and hence a place’s identity. In further experiments presented in this thesis, neighbourhood boundaries were compared to the areas reported by inhabitants and against new measures of point synergy and point intelligibility, as well as a number of methods suggested by Raford and Hillier, Read, Yang and Hillier, and Peponis, along with a ‘null’ control measure. Evidence is presented suggesting that point synergy is the most effective method for predicting a neighbourhood’s extent from its spatial configuration, hence making it a suitable method to define the global homogeneity of a named district. This work concludes by suggesting that that while place may be unrelated to geographic location there is evidence to suggest that it is related to space (in the configurational or architectural sense) which would appear to contradict those who assert that the notion of place is wholly unrelated to the physical aspects of space. From an architectural perspective this thesis suggests that certain key aspects of spatial design are present in the affordance of social neighbourhoods.