Since the first high speed railway came into operation in 2008, China has stepped into a new era of rapid development based on efficient transport connections and a strong economic engine. Subsequently, an unprecedented urban extension campaign of ‘High Speed Railway New Town’ emerged and has attracted immense attention. Local governments have demonstrated great ambitions on urban development around high speed rail stations and shown huge enthusiasm for its potential. A great many cities with connection to high speed rail have set up grand plan and design for the so called ‘High Speed Rail New Town’. Although authorities tend to put great confidence in HSR construction and station area development, the process is, in fact, by no means easy. It is a rather tortuous and complicated process, full of fierce debate, conflicts of interest and ambiguous impact. The major objective of this thesis is to investigate the current development strategies of high speed railway new towns in China in relation to their node value and place value, with the ultimate intention to provide guidelines for the rational development process for this new type of urban settlement. A specific case, Wuxi East New Town, as the earliest constructed ‘High Speed Railway New Town’ in China with the fastest development speed at present, was selected and critically explored to show the current development picture and evaluate its strength and weakness. Due to the uniqueness and the initial development stage of ‘High Speed Railway New Town’ in China, comprehensive lessons from international experience in new town development and urban development around high speed railway stations were critically studied. Hence, synthesising existing literature and knowledge related to China's HSR New Town and relating this to international experience is an important and original contribution to the research.

This thesis is the product of ethnographic research conducted over a period of eighteen months on a council estate, located on the outskirts of a city in Britain. The research explores how the everyday lives of people on The Estate are shaped by their being there. It also examines the material and social conditions, which produce and legitimate knowledges of these people and this place. A central concern of the research is the exploration of classed identity formations. Conducted in ‘austerity Britain' it traces the material and social constitution of the council estate at a moment of heightened interest (popular, political and academic) as ‘other'. The thesis aims to develop a theorisation of being placed on the council estate, which maintains sensitivity to the objectifying processes of claiming to know: specifically, a political commitment to representations of ideas of difference and dissensus (Rancière, 1998; 2006). This work is produced in conversation with class theory; inspired by Bourdieu's linking of objective structures to subjective experience (Bourdieu, 1977; 1980; 1983) and feminist reflexive writings of the affective in classed beings (Hey, 2006; Walkerdine, 2010; Lucey, 2010). However, crucially, it does not produce a new categorisation of class. Rather I begin from a premise that ‘identity categories are never merely descriptive, but always normative, and as such, exclusionary' (Butler, 1992: 15-16). In this thesis, I work through a deconstruction of the concepts of class in order to ‘continue to use them, repeat them, to repeat them subversively, and to displace them from the contexts in which they have been deployed as instruments of oppressive power' (1992: 17). This work is located within academic debates around identity. Thinking with post-structural conceptualisations of gender (Butler, 1990) and race (Nayak, 1977), I develop these as a way to think class. I build upon conceptualisations of habitus (Bourdieu, 2005) as a starting point for exploring subjectivities. Drawing upon work foregrounding the affective consequences of shifts in circumstances resulting in a habitus ‘out of place' (Reay, 2007); I explore the moments of negotiation that occur when one is ‘in place'. Furthering a theorisation of class as a social placing, I bring in conceptual developments within social geography to explore the social constitution of classed places (Massey, 2005; Featherstone, 2013). Through my conceptualisation of ‘being place(d)' I posit identity formation and place making as intertwined processes. Consequently, identity formation through processes of being place(d) on The Estate is not a simple process of socialisation where one learns to be through being of a particular place; rather it is the positioning in place through being in moments of difference. Through my analysis, I theorise identity as moments of identification (Hall, 1996), within which aspects of self are formed in proximity and/or distanced with others. This conceptualisation of relational identity construction is heavily influenced by Bourdieu's thinking, yet moves beyond habitus as ‘forgotten history' (Bourdieu, 1990: 56) to habitus as ‘foregrounded history'. Finally, I bring my range of theoretical resources together in my analysis of a Community Centre as a ‘contact zone' - a social space where ‘cultures meet, clash, and grapple with each other, often in contexts of highly asymmetrical relations of power' (Pratt, 1991: 34). These momentary exposures do not occur in isolation and are entangled within histories and processes of domination that reach far beyond the moment of contact. Consequently, analysis of this interaction requires bifocality - at once interested in the moment of construction, whilst exploring the contexts within which this moment is located and thus interpreted. In so doing, I highlight the importance of power in the maintenance of structures, whilst allowing the possibility of subversion and resistance within moments of contact.

This research explores the dynamic relationship between place, history and landscape in an urban food market, Catania, Sicily. This market informs a mythological image of the island and my main concern is what significance lies underneath this representation. I examine the ways in which this image has been constructed through ideas of history, space, landscape, modernity and tradition. Unpacking these notions in the light of my in-depth ethnography, I address how vendors and buyers frame and define their relationship with space and time. After placing the market in relation to its historical and geo-political context, I argue that the representation of passivity and the lack of agency have contributed to the maintaining of elitist local and national powers. The use of space within the market informs a distinctive cosmology, in which the landscape constitutes the main local organising principle. The landscape is looked at as a cultural process, constantly renegotiated and recontextualised. The principal categories of food classification ‘wild’, ‘local’,and ‘foreign’ are explanatory notions of a specific relationship between people, food and locality. The interaction between vendors and buyers cannot be understood as a purely economic transaction. Their relationship is articulated through a unique set of practices, which are analysed throughout this thesis. Senses, social interactions, culinary knowledge, and conviviality contribute to the ability to operate within the market. I look at my own ethnographic experience as a practical “apprenticeship”. I also address the local ideas of tradition and modernity, mainly through the analysis of the shared fears of being left behind and of losing control over the process of change. The idea of modernisation as an ongoing process carries with it a sense of loss, of nostalgia for an idealised past.

Due to obstruction in the national plan of urbanization in Tripoli (Libya) and population growth, serious problems have emerged in the form of random settlements, overcrowding and poor infrastructure. After more than two decades of inertia, the government has created a national plan in order to resolve the problems, hence it has enforced the demolition of some zones and modified other (irregularly built) ones, however the process is extremely costly. This research introduces a solution through cellular automata (CA) model to predict growth trends; size of residential, industrial and utilities areas; and to project future population. The model is implemented using digitized land use maps of Tripoli to indicate each areas as group of cells to predict their growth. The model incorporates two types of fuzzy rules bases, the first of which is based on the inputs population and area, and the second of which is based on the three inputs of population, area and density. The population prediction is performed using three scenarios, namely decreasing, fixed and increasing growth rates, such that all possibilities of growth are covered. In addition, the residential area prediction is performed based on two cases: normal density and low density. The former is introduced since new areas tend to have more open spaces and bigger houses. Furthermore, the model considers the growth of the industrial areas to be slower than that of residential areas. The model is developed and validated for the period of 1980 to 2010. The prediction is performed for thirty years from 2010 to 2040. In addition to the CA model, a regression model is developed and tested on the three growth scenarios for the same period (30 years). The prediction results are very close for 2040 in terms of population. The model incorporates the introduction of public services areas that are distributed equally on the growth areas, which occupy about 15-20% of the total area. This model can help the government to develop areas in a proper way and controls the expansion to have well layout and planned of the city, improving people's standard of living sustainably, while protecting the environment with better planning.

This research aims to examine the extent to which cultural agency can be seen to ‘act’ in an ecopolitical context and how its operations urge a rethinking of the processes that govern the production of urban subjects and environment(s). Responding to the fact that in recent decades, art and architectural cultures have converged around a shared concern for ‘ecological matters’ and that discourses in visual/spatial culture have become increasingly ‘ecologized’, this research broadens the points of reference for the term ‘ecology’ beyond that which simply reinforces an essentialist perspective on ‘nature’. The thesis re-directs the focus of current theoretical discourse on ‘ecological art’ towards a more rigorous engagement with its frames of reference and how it uses them to evaluate the role of cultural production in enacting ways of thinking and acting eco-logically. In doing so it develops an eco-logical mode of analysis for mapping and probing the attribution of cultural agency, how it intervenes in the production of the commons and how it discloses the participants and mechanisms of a nascent political ecology. Setting cultural agency within a more expansive and multivalent field of action, means that the nexus of agency (and intentionality) is dislocated and translated between ‘things’. Reconfigured in this way, ‘an ecology of agencing’ demonstrates the profound implications this has for any ‘bodies’ of action, cultural or otherwise. Locating this exploration within the socio-natural environment(s) found in urban spatialities this thesis attends to the relatively under-theorised, but highly significant area (in eco-logical terms) of aesthetic praxis operating at the interstices of art and architecture. Pressing at the boundaries of the formal and conceptual enterprises of both disciplines, critical spatial practices represent a distinctive form of eco-praxis being cultivated ‘on the ground’. Through a series of encounters with its operations this research looks to the ways in which practice and theory, in relation to the question of ecology, are becoming increasingly co-constituted.

In the last thirty years, European local authorities have played a pro-active role in the realm of sustainable development, taking part in several European initiatives and projects and setting up municipal networks. The latter, which connect cities scattered across Member States, may focus on specific environmental issues, such as sustainable mobility or energy, or include sustainable development in a wide range of policy priorities. These socio-ecological urban networks (hereafter SEUNs) have attracted growing academic attention. However, the bulk of the literature is located within Geography and Urban Studies, and it is more focused on the structure of the networks, the process of decision-making, and the policy outcomes than on the drivers of cities’ membership of SEUNs. Within this debate, the contribution of Political Science has been scant, and the political and economic drivers of cities’ engagement in European socio-ecological municipal networks have been overlooked. Understanding why local governments decide to participate in these networks is important for two main reasons: firstly, it contributes to shedding light on how contemporary local political elites govern cities within the European context; secondly, it allows us to understand why European cooperation for sustainable development has become a dominant discourse in urban politics. Conversely, this thesis adopts an urban approach to isolate the urban-level economic, political and institutional factors that impact on local authorities’ participations in European socio-ecological urban networks. Using a nested research design that combines a quantitative and qualitative analysis, the thesis seeks to shed light on the factors and motivations underlying the choice of cities to participate in European networks for sustainability. The results show that cities’ European commitment to sustainable development is part of a broad strategy to achieve urban regeneration. Therefore, participation in SEUNs is not necessarily motivated by environmental preoccupations but is functional to achieve economic and political objectives.

This thesis explores three topics within the broad area of urban growth and environment in China, city size distribution, city growth pattern and the environment impacts of city growth. The research is firstly motivated by two key stylized facts- the well-known Zipf's law for cities (which states that the number of cities of size greater than S is proportional to 1/S, i.e. the rank of a city is inversely correlated with its size) and Gibrat's law for cities (which states that city growth rate is independent of its size). Thus Chapter 3 and 4 examine the evolution of city size distribution by testing for Zipf’s law and Gibrat’s law in China from 1879 to 2009 (number of cities varies over time). Chapter 5 thereafter investigates the growth pattern of Chinese cities by testing for the sequential city growth (Cuberes, 2009). Given the concern of the environment impacts of city growth, Chapter 6 examines the impact of city size on local air quality using 30 major cities in China from 2003 to 2012.

This thesis examines the relationship between the production of urban space and the reproduction of capital. Taking the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park as a case study, I conducted ethnographic research during the London 2012 Olympics and the Park's first 'Legacy' year. My research proceeded from an embodied walking practice (which prompted reflection on my transgender presentation as a complicating factor), and also included interviews and archival research. My analysis centres on Henri Lefebvre, situating his work on space within a concern for the relationship between everyday life and the concrete abstractions constituted therein. Taking this relationship as essential to the reproduction of capital, I explore the production of the Olympic Park as an actually-existing abstract space that mirrors the dual character of the value form. I open my account of this production with the Olympic festival, a total social moment mobilised towards the realisation of value. I then examine each of Lefebvre's three formants of abstract space in turn. I present the construction of the Park as the materialisation of an abstractly conceived space designed to incorporate a disordered post-industrial space into a new mode of accumulation. I frame the inhabitation of the Park in its Legacy era as a temporalisation of empty space, arguing that abstract time is co-constituted with abstract space in internally contradictory everyday practice. And I address the incorporation of the Park into a set of post-industrial, anti-urban, and leisureoriented spaces that form a representational space reflective of the movement of capital in its ascendant, financialised, form. I conclude with a discussion of the Olympic Park as 'catalyst', securing the reproduction of capital by encouraging further redevelopment, but also sharpening capital's contradictions as an abstract space in conflict with its own concrete content, predicated on the subsumption of the utopian potential of everyday life.

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