Despite national and local planning policies that seek to retain rural services, their loss from Devon's villages has led to those communities becoming increasingly less sustainable and self-sufficient. At both the national and the local level there is inadequate quantitative information about the extent of the losses of particular services over time and of the characteristics of those settlements most likely to be affected. The influence of wider contexts, or drivers of change, within which the changes are occurring are also poorly understood. Although several Local Authorities have produced reports recording rural service loss they seldom analyse these changes or seek to explain why such changes are occurring. Accordingly, Local Authority planning officers, both in Devon and elsewhere, have an evidence base of only limited value upon which to develop policy or evaluate individual applications. This thesis addresses the lack of local data and associated quantitative analyses and provides a qualitative assessment of the wider influences on rural service loss. Data about changes in rural services with Devon villages, collected from diverse sources, are subjected to rigorous statistical analyses. These analyses show the differential loss of particular services (Public Houses being markedly more resilient than Post Offices and shops), and identify key factors associated with service loss, most notably population numbers. In order better to understand the wider contexts influencing changes in rural service provision, the influences of a number of themes are explored and assessed. These include: demographic and socio-economic trends; changing retailing patterns; academic and professional debates about the role of rural areas; the national planning policy context that has since at least the early 1940s, and with changing rationales, been urban focused firmly constraining development in the countryside; and the effectiveness of planning decision- making at District Council level. Whilst not offering a simple planning 'solution' to the decline in rural services the case is made for reliable and up-to-date statistics to support objective decision-making and for the explicit consideration of the impacts of wider drivers of change so that the challenges of future potential service change can be more openly, objectively and constructively addressed. Allied to an improved evidence base, further assessment of other models of provision, such community-run and subsidised commercial operation, is urgently needed.

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The Localism Act 2011 in England, provides a legislative mechanism to support participation in the planning process. Additionally, public participation geographic information systems (PPGIS) provide one approach to support public participation in planning. However, their ad hoc and context specific development approaches have resulted in tools that do not easily adapt to the needs of different communities and their diverse stakeholders. Therefore the aim of this research is to design a framework for the systematic development of an information system (IS) that can adapt to the perspective of the stakeholder and the planning context. Through the literature of: participatory design (PD); computer supported cooperative work (CSCW); human computer interaction (HCI); and enterprise architecture (EA), the limitations of previous PPGIS development approaches are identified. Based on this, EA is identified as an appropriate approach. EA frameworks (EAFs) support the development of IS features, but they require a link to organisational processes, goals and a vision. This means that EAFs in their current form have no grounding in loosely coupled organisations such as communities that have no formal processes, goals and vision . Therefore this research proposes a theoretical contribution of an adapted EAF called a 'community architecture' framework (CAF) for the systematic development of tools for a community context. Here, design science (DS) provides a research paradigm in developing the CAF as a designed artefact. To test the framework a community architecture development methodology (CADM) is proposed as a practical contribution to develop a system to support community stakeholders to participate in planning sustainable communities. The developed tool is tested on community stakeholders in Essex, UK. It is found that by using a systematic approach, it is possible to develop a PPGIS that can apply to different contexts and stakeholders. However, the limited examples presented here mean that further testing is required.

The perception of the environment is not yet a part of the "knowledge framework" that is assessed to inform planning. It is investigated but it is still part of a negotiation process that is often based on the power relations of who is negotiating. This hinders a shared vision of development for the enhancement of a "collective sustainability". Parameters to assess the sustainability of an area or to regenerate an area are mainly quantitative and solely related to socio-economic and environmental factors. Cultural analysis is seldom undertaken in the assessment of sustainability. For this reason, new forms of assessing sustainability are advocated in the literature on sustainable development.

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This study set out to investigate the value consumers place on less tangible product attributes. Although some work has been done in the p ast, to establish the relative importance of intangible attributes; very few studies have attempted to produce a financial value for a change. The research was conducted in a rural railway environment and so the product considered was a train journey. The main intangible attribute chosen for the study was ride quality. Rural railway services make significant losses and as a result have been threatened with closure. Reducing track maintenance (and thus ride quality ) on these routes offers considerable scope for cost reduction. But, very little was known about the response of demand to changes in ride quality. Any results obtained could, therefore, make a contribution to maintaining railway services in areas of limited public transport. Although this study concentrated on the railway ride problem, it is believed that the method developed during this research would be applicable, with some modification, to other topics.

An important issue for transport policy is whether more investment should be devoted to rail schemes and less to road schemes and vice versa. This raises the problem of comparing the returns from investments in the two modes currently assessed on a different basis - road schemes are appraised on a Cost Benefit Analysis (CBA) basis, whereas rail schemes are assessed on a Financial Analysis (FA). This study is a step in the direction of identifying the difference between the two techniques (CBA and FA) of appraisal in general and in case of rail investment in particular, and examining the implications of the use of the two different techniques in assessing the investment in road and rail. In addition, the study develops a methodology for assessing rail investment schemes that could be consistent with the cost benefit analysis being used in assessing road investment projects. The differences between CBA and FA are identified. The current practice of assessing road and rail investment schemes is examined and the weaknesses are outlined. The potential implications of assessing road and rail investment on different criteria are explored. Previous rail investment studies where both CBA and FA were undertaken are reviewed and discussed to explore how the task of CBA were carried out to rail schemes and to show the difference with the current study approach. The study framework of rail scheme appraisal is identified to include four elements of impacts. These are; financial impacts to the rail operator (producer surplus), rail user benefits (consumer surplus), non-user benefits, and other impacts on other bodies in the society (tax adjustments). Non-user benefits concerned by the study are road congestion time, noise, air pollution, accidents, and vehicle operating costs. Road congestion time, noise and air pollution are identified as externalities, while accidents and vehicle operating costs are dealt with as cases of cost misperception. The five items of non-user benefits are measured at the margin in a process to identify the Marginal Social Cost (MSC) of travel as a function of the road type alternative. Eight types of road are identified for the study to represent the entire UK road network. The measurement process of non-user benefits incorporates the variation in traffic over time and place. This is carried out by incorporating four traffic distributions in the calculation process. The distributions of traffic reflect traffic variations from hour to another (24 hours) throughout the day, from day to another (7 days) throughout the week, from month to another (12 months) throughout the year and from location to another throughout the UK entire road network. The implications of the study findings are explored. Three undesirable implications are identified. These are welfare losses to the society, lower share for rail travel, and investment bias towards roads. Three policy options are put as a solution. These are, pricing road and rail services according to the MSC, subsidising public transport, and applying a consistent appraisal method for road and rail investment. The contribution of these options towards achieving a sustainable balance between road and rail as well as their applicability in practice are examined. At the end some improvements and attached areas of further research are suggested.

The relationship between urban form and sustainability in general, and the impact of urban form on the energy consumption for transportation, and also on the quality of life in particular, have become established amongst academics and governments particularly after the United Nation Rio Conference in 1992. This has resulted in the increasing demand for sustainable urban form. However the existence of contradictory theories such as the compact city and urban dispersal, and a lack of empirical research in the field was found to be a major obstacle in identifying alternative models. This study therefore begins to remedy this situation and aims to contribute to the body of knowledge in overcoming existing contradictions. Two approaches are used in this study; theoretical and empirical, and the analyses of both secondary, and primary data are employed. The principal focus of this thesis is `an empirical investigation of the impact of density and land use on efficiency of urban form in terms of the defined `quality of life' and the `use of energy for transportation'. The basic proposition of this study thus is that: `there is a relationship between urban form and sustainability'; then that `the compact city form with a mix use of land is more efficient, and can provide a greater accessibility compared to the low density urban development. It can reduce the use of energy for motorised transportation through less use of private car based journeys and it is a safer place to live. It can reduce air pollution and hence promotes both a healthier environment for living in and a better quality of life for residents. ' To examine the research hypotheses through a systematic approach, four different urban forms were selected as the case study areas. These are located in the context of West of Scotland and each representing a particular development in terms of land use and density. Both primary and secondary data enabled a systematic analysis of the four areas, using a questionnaire survey for the former. Through a variety of descriptive and inferential and statistical analyses and tests, a series of hypotheses are examined within a conceptual model. The results are supportive of the basic proposition in most of the cases. Even after controlling for a range of factors, density and land use are seen to exert a strong independent effect on accessibility, energy efficiency and quality of life for the users. The evidence from this study strongly supports the proposition that there is a relationship between density and land-use on the one hand, and the patterns of movement and social interaction and quality of life on the other. It supports the efficiency of the compact city, where walking was found as the dominant mode of transport. The compact city offered a greater accessibility and it was a safer environment to walk in during the day and the late hours; and it was a place in which by reducing the use of the private car, car related problems reduced significantly compared to its rival low density form. This in turn will reduce much of the pressure on the environment. Nevertheless, deficiencies were observed in the compact city in a few areas which needs clarification through further investigations.