With social media’s increasing importance in modern society, this thesis investigates its role in the digital economy and how it shapes the everyday lives of Sheffield’s residents. The significance of social media ties, transactional relationships and concepts about how new media functions in the public sphere are interwoven throughout the literature review. Digital interactivity is conceived as a process, which in turn, influences the perception of status, reputation and recognition. Qualitative interviews were conducted with participants from each of the following three cohorts: computer learners, knowledge workers and global elites. An interactivity spectrum was developed after participant interviews emphasised how social media usage related to employment prospects. This spectrum evaluates the cohort’s online interactivities based on the following categories: technology and data linkages; networking and engagement; representation and identity; information awareness and sociability. This conceptual framework draws on usage patterns and investigates the social ties forged through digital connections. Interactivity serves to amplify voice and visibility; thus, online presence becomes an active form of social capital incorporating both visibility and voice. These cases suggest how digital interactivity and social capital accumulation may be theorized using voice, visibility and presence on the social media sites of Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. The three groups (learners, knowledge workers and elites) strive separately to achieve both local and national forms of recognition within the public sphere and are clearly marked out by their differences in social media interactivity. This research is important as it delineates a social capital creation pathway that begins with digital engagement and ends with social capital accumulation. The connection between engagement and capital creation also compels a rethink of the digital divide in light of new participatory media practices.

Indigenous areas in Taiwan were a ‘special administrative region’ during the Japanese colonial period (1895-1945). The Japanese police controlled the primary aspects of everyday life of indigenous people. Some policies concerning indigenous people have been continued in the post-colonial regimes of Han Chinese until now. Protected areas (PAs) have been established since the 1980s by central government when Taiwan was still under the martial law. National parks are typical protected area with rigorous conservation restrictions. Some protected areas actually overlapped with the traditional domains of indigenous people. Community conservation is a participatory protected area and has emerged around the 1990s. It is seen as a reform of fortress protected areas such as parks because it integrates both objectives of conservation and development. The rolling back of the state and empowerment of the local community are assumed to be the features of such a reformed policy. Community conservation has become popular among indigenous communities of Taiwan since 2000. This study aims to look at the interactions between state authorities and local indigenous people in PAs. Two Truku villages in east Taiwan were selected as case studies, as one is in Taroko National Park while the other conducted a community conservation project in the 2000s. Qualitative methods were employed for data collection. Drawing from the theory of political ecology, a framework is constructed drawing together human territoriality, resistance, and social impacts. This analysis framework was employed to examine the acts of state agencies and local Truku people, and social repercussions in the Truku examples in the context of PAs. Research results showed that the establishment of PAs and conservation policy implementations in PAs by state agencies were acts of internal territorialisation. Such a spatial classification restricted the locals’ exploitation of natural resources according to the imposed regulations. Through the control enforcement by state agencies and judicial authorities, conflicts between the local indigenous people and state agencies have happened. Even the co-management arrangement of the Park and the planning of scenic areas for local development revealed the domination of power by the government. These restrictions resulted in unpleasant social impacts such as difficulties of cultural practices and livelihood selections as well as the undermining social capital in the local indigenous communities. Accordingly, the local Truku people mobilised resistance to the conservation interventions via individual everyday practices and collective protests. Their resistance aimed to express their sustenance demands and ethnic claims. Differences between covert and overt resistance depended on the degree of empowerment. Through the process of empowerment, local protesters gained more information and political dynamics for their collective action, open resistance. I primarily contend that the establishment of PAs and conservation policy implementations by governmental agencies, whether through parks or community conservation, are acts of internal territoriality. Territorialisation of the state tends to result in resistance by the local indigenous residents due to the negative social impacts as a result of conservation interventions. This argument also interprets the unexpected consequence, resistance of the local indigenous people, of PA policies in Taiwan. To avoid the undesired outcome of policy implementation and social cost, it is necessary to build trust between them. A participatory project which confers genuine power and accords with local norms may be feasible. Decentralised power could be the first step of a breakthrough.

This thesis investigates the use of conditionality mechanisms in family-based intensive interventions in England to achieve behaviour change in families who are perceived to exhibit problematic conduct in society. Conditionality can be defined as a contractual relationship based on ideas of social responsibility, where the citizen receives social assistance from the state, which is reciprocated by practices of positive behaviour change by the citizen (Dwyer, 2004; Deacon, 2004). The use of intensive intervention projects to challenge problematic behaviour in families has been a key strategy in social and family policy in England since 1997, however similar models of intensive case work approaches were used during the 1940s (Ball et al, 2016; Starkey, 2002). Intensive interventions are based on a key worker model and can be described as a holistic approach to support all family members in order to tackle the root causes of problems that are costly to society. However, if the family does not engage with the project they risk being subject to penalties (Flint, 2011a). When the Conservative-Coalition Government was elected in 2010 there was some ambiguity as to whether the use of intensive interventions would continue (Nixon et al, 2010). However, the 2011 urban riots appeared to be a trigger for David Cameron, the Prime Minister at the time, to reinstate a need for people to take responsibility, which could be learnt through the morals, values and routines that are embedded within paid labour (Arthur, 2015). Alongside ongoing welfare reform, the Troubled Families Programme was launched in 2012 and claimed it would ‘grip’ families and their problems and ‘make’ them change their behaviour by using enforcement if necessary (DCLG, 2012). This thesis explores the extent to which an intensive intervention project can ‘make’ individuals change their behaviour, and if so, by what means this may be achieved. The research has used a qualitative and longitudinal methodology and has explored the interactions between families engaged with, and the practitioners employed by different service providers in a large northern English city. Part of the methodology involved following 10 families subject to interventions over a seven-month period, in order to capture the micro-processes of behaviour change. The findings of the research are framed and analysed using Foucault’s conceptualisation of disciplinary power traditionally associated with projects of this nature (Garrett, 2007a; 2007b). This research found that existing governance logics are present in these intervention practices, but there are interesting nuances in the practitioner-family relationship that are not explored in existing academic critiques of governance and social control. However, despite these nuances that centre on the complex interaction between individual agency and practitioner authority, punitive tools (rather than supportive mechanisms) which can be used to influence behaviour though conditionality, can nevertheless, have profound effects on the lives of society’s most marginalised families and these raise ethical implications about the current direction of contemporary welfare policy.

Modern cities today are dependent upon the large infrastructure networks that provide citizens with food, energy, water, telecommunications, transport and waste removal, yet in many cities infrastructures are more than a century old and in need of replacement or repair. The privatisation of many utilities and the often ‘siloed’ management structures of infrastructures can create problems arising from the lack of ‘integrated’ service provision. Today there is a growing discourse around the potential for ‘infrastructure integration’ which is offered as a way to create resource and service efficiencies and to create space for technical and system innovations. There is recognition that future infrastructure needs to be smarter, more cost-efficient and more environmentally friendly and ‘integration’ is often cited as a way to achieve this. However, what exactly is meant by the term infrastructure integration? Although there is broad agreement about the importance of integration, precisely what this means in practice is unclear. This PhD project aims to open the black box of infrastructure integration, to examine the evolving context and the potential of integration and to explore its meanings and implications in theory and practice. The conceptual ideas of the study are grounded on in-depth qualitative research in three cities reflecting different institutional and cultural contexts: Seattle in the United States, Munich in Germany, and Sheffield in the United Kingdom. The approach seeks to test some hypotheses about the links between the institutional, organisational and regulatory context of cities and the potential for urban infrastructure integration. I treat infrastructures as socio-technical systems and I aim to demonstrate that the meanings and implications of infrastructure integration are dependent upon the socio-political institutional frameworks that cities operate in. This research finds three different forms of infrastructure integration: evolutionary integration in Seattle, in which integration arises out of the day to day operational necessities of infrastructure management; innovative integration in Munich, in which integration arises as a result of innovative organisational practices inherent within the city; and aspiring strategic integration in Sheffield, in which the city aims to coordinate the investment priorities of privatised utilities, yet lacks the authority to coerce the privatised utilities to cooperate.

This thesis represents the development and pilot application of a novel methodology for the speculative qualitative assessment (or "prototyping") of new infrastructural systems. Its core aim and guiding principle is to make infrastructure legible: to reveal and narrate its role in everyday life from a more human perspective than that of the paradigmatic technology-focussed approach. Or, more simply, the project aims to understand how infrastructures develop, how they evolve and entangle over time. The methodology is centred on a novel model of sociotechnical change, known as the infrastructural trialectic. The trialectic makes a unique relational distinction between infrastructural systems and the technologies through which infrastructural functions are accessed, traces vectors of influence between focal actors in the model, and provides a framework for mapping the articulatory institutions which are enrolled in the formation and mutation of infrastructural assemblages. The methodology has two modes of application: the historical mode, and the speculative. In the historical mode, the trialectic model becomes the lens of a situated longue duree analysis which explores the historical dynamics of sociotechnical change in the assemblages underpinning a particular everyday practice. In the speculative mode, the findings from the historical mode are used as the basis for an extrapolative and speculative analysis of a novel technological intervention into the practice previously analysed. Drawing on techniques from strategic foresight and critical design, the prospective technology is "prototyped" against the context of a suite of four divergent near-future scenarios, so as to "stress test" the plausibility of its deployment under difficult circumstances. This thesis presents and applies a novel model of sociotechnical change, and in doing so demonstrates that the shortcomings of paradigmatic models of change might be addressed through such an approach. It further demonstrates a unique hybrid method for the assessment and critique of new technologies and practices alike, which provides a more human perspective upon infrastructure (and indeed upon change itself) than prevailing approaches to assessment.

According to Rubio and Fogué (2013, 1039), cities are witnessing a "technological and infrastructural invasion" associated with new low-carbon and sustainable technologies. In this context, infrastructure has (re-)emerged as a topic of debate in design theory and practice. One strand of this debate which, the thesis argues, constitutes a new infrastructure design imaginary suggests that new infrastructures should be designed as "multifunctional" systems, taking account of potential ecological, aesthetic and cultural benefits. It is suggested that design could facilitate new affective relationships between people, infrastructures and ecological systems, thereby contributing to sustainability. Now that new approaches to design are being adopted in some places and circumstances, there is an opportunity to investigate their assumptions, logics and effects and whose interpretation of design and aesthetics is given legitimacy. As such, the overall aim of this thesis was to explore contemporary meanings and practices of infrastructure design. This has encompassed an investigation of what types of infrastructure are being designed, what model of design is adopted and who the "infrastructure designer" mobilised might be. Evidence has been collected in two stages through a total of 42 interviews, first, in a scoping phase with a sample of infrastructure design professionals and, second, in two case studies of stormwater design, Hans Tavsens Park and Korsgade in Copenhagen and "Grey to Green" in Sheffield. The case studies explore where, how and why new visions of infrastructure design are being realised and describes the actors, institutions and agendas which influence the infrastructure design process. The key finding of the case study research is that understanding infrastructure design visions and practices requires exploring the material, institutional and economic context for design. Investigation of the context for design demonstrates that seemingly avant-garde design strategies have, in both cases, become implicated in socially-exclusive processes of transformation. Overall, the research foregrounds and explores an under-researched and under-valued dimension of urban development. It establishes a conceptual framework to guide future research in a field that is likely to become more important. Its key contribution is to provide new perspectives and in-depth analysis of both contemporary visions of infrastructure design and on the infrastructure design process.

There is continuing academic and policy interest in the potential for culture-based urban regeneration, including the use of major arts and cultural festivals to attract investment, re-imagine places and create jobs. However, the social regeneration benefits of such events have been questioned especially when cultural events focus mainly on high profile economic development in central areas of a city. Social regeneration needs to be built into cultural event planning. This research seeks to examine how a one-year cultural event can play an influential role in aspects of social regeneration by focusing on the 2015 Culture City of East Asia (CCEA) event in Cheongju, South Korea. The CCEA is a collaboration between South Korea, China and Japan held since 2014, and is aimed at cultural exchange programmes, the development and regeneration of provincial cities through cultural programmes, and building solidarity in the East Asia regions. The research is based on document review, semi-structured interviews and focus groups with residents and community representatives in three areas of deprivation in the city. The key findings from the PhD are that social regeneration impacts are limited with limited engagement with the CCEA. The limited social regeneration impact is traced to the weak integration of social regeneration priorities and provision within the CCEA. It is argued that the CCEA reflects the wider tendency for cultural events to focus on visitors to the area, where main cultural venue is located, and reimaging at the expense of social regeneration. In the Korean context the weak dimension of social regeneration is reinforced by the weak and limited aspect of social regeneration nationally. In the CCEA the potential to engage communities through arts and culture is largely unrealised despite some prospect and pressure to widen the scope of the programme. The PhD contributes a distinctive Korean perspective to the literature on arts and culture- based regeneration. As this study relies on qualitative methods, it enables a deeper analysis of social regeneration, and local residents were placed into a high priority to attempt to produce a realistic consideration of how residents consider a cultural approach for regenerating an area, developing communities and individual environments. The findings of this thesis not only advance theory within the culture-led urban regeneration literature, but also offer an insight into the opinions of actual residents that can be referred to in the further management of cultural events, to improve the social regeneration through cultural approach.

The essential problem in a study of Geddes is that it is difficult to cite any one particular doctrine providing his final definition of planning. He did not develop his theories in any one single systematic work. He left articles, lectures, pamphlets and innumerable reports on the subject out of which only a handfull have been published. They constitute in effect illustrations of an unwritten theory accompanied by brilliant comments. Neither did Geddes leave a legacy of towns built according to his ideas which could testify to his ability and soundness of doctrine. Indeed for almost a lifetime he worked out a process of ellucidation and realisation of his ideal of planning. It is in his life's work that one must search for answers - to comprehend Geddes as a planner one must investigate Geddes activities as a man of action. This study falls naturally into clearly defined categories. Part I will be concerned with the diversity of Geddes activities. This will be followed by an examination of his early planning ventures in Cyprus, and Dunfermline together with the formulation of his system of correlative thinking. Part III will illustrate his ten years of planning in the Middle East and the Indian subcontinent. The Geddesian philosophy of planning will then be reviewed in part IV followed by an examination of the relevance of Geddes to planning in his day and ours. The source material for this work is the collection of Geddes manuscripts housed in the University of Strathclyde. Gaps in the original Geddes manuscripts have been made good by transcript material relating to Geddes's work in India, Cyprus and Palestine. The analysis of the Geddes manuscripts which was begun in 1967 has been sponsored and supported financially by the Corporation of Glasgow and the University of Strathclyde and without their support this study could not have been concluded. The writer is also indebted to the many correspondents who have provided additional information and especially to the late Arthur Geddes (Department of Geography, Edinburgh University) and his wife Janine Geddes. A final word of thanks is owed to Mrs. O. Prior and Miss E. Keddie who have typed the manuscript and to my colleagues in the Department of Urban and Regional Planning (especially Professor R. E. Nicoll) who have encouraged this research.

A deeper understanding of the structural characteristics of urban settings is a prerequisite to evaluating the effects of urban design and planning proposals more efficiently. This thesis aims at shaping a new, comprehensive approach to uncover the structure of cities through the investigation of a diachronic spatio-functional process and the socio-economic impacts of such a process. It proposes a spatial network-based framework, in which individual street segments, indexed by space syntax centrality measures, are utilised to develop a series of more complex urban function connectivity measures by an analysis of the spatial network and land-use patterns in tandem. The specific application of this approach in Central Shanghai is conducted with a threefold focus: firstly, to trace the evolutionary interdependence between the spatial grids and the land-use distribution; secondly, to explain the varying economic value of the spatio-functional relationship in the housing market; and thirdly, to capture the impact of the spatiol-functional interaction on the variation of co-presence. The outputs confirm that the centrality structures of the spatial network and the land-use distribution affect each other over time; however, certain degrees of inconsistency are observed, suggesting a distinct complementary relationship between these two systems, which is further validated by the improvement of the proposed model’s predictability of urban performance. The findings verify the hypothesis that urban spatio-functional synergy is a strong determinant of the formation of urban function regions, the delineation of housing submarkets, and the discrepancy of the spatial co-presence in the city. These results demonstrate that urban performance is directly affected by the way the spatial and functional structures of the city interact. Such findings support the proposition that understanding the complexities of the spatio-functional interaction in a morphological analysis can enhance the efficiency of urban design and planning interventions, which aim to improve socioeconomic conditions in cities.

The present work is focused on the role of architecture and the built urban environment in helping us to understand how processes of neoliberal govern mentality are experienced in everyday life. The thesis sketches a sociologically informed analysis of newly emerging examples of domestic, commercial and public space in exurban sites in the North of England. It then compares how social practices in these sites resonate with those enacted in previous examples of buildings and spaces serving broadly similar purposes but built in traditional city centres in the Victorian and post-war periods. Through the study of nine case studies across historical periods and primary functions, the thesis attempts a longue duree of the neoliberalization of space as it has occurred in some of the most prominent centres of industrial capitalism. The case studies analysed in the thesis are: • Domestic space: The Allerton Bywater Millennium Community (which is compared with the historical developments of Saltaire in the Victorian era and Sheffield's Park Hill estate in the Post-War period); • Commercial space: The business, logistics and retail parks of Centre 27 on the M62 motorway (which are compared with Liverpool's Albert Docks in the Victorian era and central Manchester's Post-War Co-operative buildings); • Public space: The recent, televised regeneration project in Castleford (which is compared with the historical sites of Victorian Manchester's Free Trade Hall and the development of the University of Hull campus). The primary theoretical reference points are the writings of Michel Foucault and Henri Lefebvre, but the variety of sources and approaches used in the research also spans the literatures of architectural theory, social history, cultural geography, social policy and urban sociology. It argues for a post-disciplinary form of sociology that recognises the complexity of the social world, and reflects that in the methods it uses and the truth claims it makes.