Like other communities throughout the world, Sault Ste. Marie has had to meet challenges that arise and achieve various goals that require the mobilization and organization of community members. Government, alone, cannot satisfy all community needs and desires. One type of community mobilization that is utilized is the single-issue community mobilization that takes place without an ongoing formal organizational structure in limited time frames of re latively short duration. This type of recruitment and organization of community assets in Sault Ste. Marie was required to assist in saving its largest employer and its favorite hockey team, provide needed services and facilities, raise funds sufficient to meet government requirements for a state-of-the-art hospital, host provincial, national, and international events, celebrate the community and support many other worthy endeavors. For more than forty years, I was a practising lawyer in Sault Ste. Marie acting on behalf of numerous institutions, industries, businesses and government agencies. Much of my time was spent sitting on federal, provincial and local boards and agencies as well as being involved, at all levels, in community projects in sports, the arts, political campaigns, and fund raisers. In addition, I have had the privilege to take a leadership role in a number of successful community mobilizations that required the organization and recruitment of community assets to meet a specific challenge or goal. Being only one of many who have taken on such responsibilities in a number of specific challenges requiring community mobilization in Sault Ste. Marie, I have been interested for some time in examining examples of successful community mobilization in Sault Ste. Marie to determine the influences and processes that assist in leading to successful community mobilization.

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Tackling urbanisation and climate change requires more sustainable and resilient cities, which in turn will require planners to develop a portfolio of measures to manage climate risks such as flooding, meet energy and greenhouse gas reduction targets, and prioritise development on brownfield sites to preserve greenspace. However, the policies, strategies and measures put in place to meet such objectives can frequently conflict with each other or deliver unintended consequences, hampering long-term sustainability. For example, the densification of cities in order to reduce transport energy use can increase urban heat island effects and surface water flooding from extreme rainfall events. In order to make coherent decisions in the presence of such complex multi-dimensional spatial conflicts, urban planners require sophisticated planning tools to identify and manage potential trade-offs between the spatial strategies necessary to deliver sustainability. To achieve this aim, this research has developed a multi-objective spatial optimisation framework for the spatial planning of new residential development within cities. The implemented framework develops spatial strategies of required new residential development that minimize conflicts between multiple sustainability objectives as a result of planning policy and climate change related hazards. Five key sustainability objectives have been investigated, namely; (i) minimizing risk from heat waves, (ii) minimizing the risk from flood events, (iii) minimizing travel costs in order to reduce transport emissions, (iv) minimizing urban sprawl and (v) preventing development on existing greenspace. A review identified two optimisation algorithms as suitable for this task. Simulated Annealing (SA) is a traditional optimisation algorithm that uses a probabilistic approach to seek out a global optima by iteratively assessing a wide range of spatial configurations against the objectives under consideration. Gradual ‘cooling’, or reducing the probability of jumping to a different region of the objective space, helps the SA to converge on globally optimal spatial patterns. Genetic Algorithms (GA) evolve successive generations of solutions, by both recombining attributes and randomly mutating previous generations of solutions, to search for and converge towards superior spatial strategies. The framework works towards, and outputs, a series of Pareto-optimal spatial plans that outperform all other plans in at least one objective. This approach allows for a range of best trade-off plans for planners to choose from. ii Both SA and GA were evaluated for an initial case study in Middlesbrough, in the North East of England, and were able to identify strategies which significantly improve upon the local authority’s development plan. For example, the GA approach is able to identify a spatial strategy that reduces the travel to work distance between new development and the central business district by 77.5% whilst nullifying the flood risk to the new development. A comparison of the two optimisation approaches for the Middlesbrough case study revealed that the GA is the more effective approach. The GA is more able to escape local optima and on average outperforms the SA by 56% in in the Pareto fronts discovered whilst discovering double the number of multi-objective Pareto-optimal spatial plans. On the basis of the initial Middlesbrough case study the GA approach was applied to the significantly larger, and more computationally complex, problem of optimising spatial development plans for London in the UK – a total area of 1,572km2. The framework identified optimal strategies in less than 400 generations. The analysis showed, for example, strategies that provide the lowest heat risk (compared to the feasible spatial plans found) can be achieved whilst also using 85% brownfield land to locate new development. The framework was further extended to investigate the impact of different development and density regulations. This enabled the identification of optimised strategies, albeit at lower building density, that completely prevent any increase in urban sprawl whilst also improving the heat risk objective by 60% against a business as usual development strategy. Conversely by restricting development to brownfield the ability of the spatial plan to optimise future heat risk is reduced by 55.6% against the business as usual development strategy. The results of both case studies demonstrate the potential of spatial optimisation to provide planners with optimal spatial plans in the presence of conflicting sustainability objectives. The resulting diagnostic information provides an analytical appreciation of the sensitivity between conflicts and therefore the overall robustness of a plan to uncertainty. With the inclusion of further objectives, and qualitative information unsuitable for this type of analysis, spatial optimization can constitute a powerful decision support tool to help planners to identify spatial development strategies that satisfy multiple sustainability objectives and provide an evidence base for better decision making.

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Contributing to research on geographies of diasporas and migration, this thesis examines how the Moroccan diaspora in the city of Granada, Spain, has transformed urban space, and conversely, how the spatiality of Granada engenders distinctive diasporic identity formations, senses of belonging and spatial practices. Using the geographical insight that diasporas alter and are altered by the places they inhabit and that identities and belongings are often spatialised and spatially contingent, the research examines how these processes function for the Moroccan diaspora living in Granada. Granada’s mixed Christian and Islamic heritage, its relatively recent transformation from an ethnically homogenous space into a diaspora space, and the close proximity of the Maghreb and Africa, all herald Granada as a rich arena to explore social, cultural and spatial processes of diasporas and migration. Conceptually, the research is positioned within urban geographies of diasporas. The centrality of the urban spatial scale in diaspora formations and experiences, rather than the national, is demonstrated and examined. The thesis focuses on four concepts that are at the core of geographies of diasporas: space, belonging, home and identity. Drawing on eight months of ethnographic fieldwork, the thesis provides an empirical analysis that is grounded in the everyday and intimate spaces of the Moroccan diaspora. As such it responds to calls for grounded studies on diasporas that take locations and their contexts seriously. Overall, the thesis underlines the fundamental centrality of place for diaspora formations, and argues that the experiences and perceptions of the Moroccan diaspora in Granada provide distinctive narratives of European urban diversity.

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Born out of a long term interest in thought and social values and nearly ten years of involvement in space and design as a student of architecture and urban design, this dissertation aims to make a contribution to both the structural theory of the transformation of society and space and to our knowledge of the principle of centrality in the structure of built environment. It looks at the concept of centrality in the Iranian city of Meshed. However, this is not intended as a study of a unique experience. Rather the spatial and temporal co- ordinates of the text, Islam and Iran, and the historical period of Modernist thought, offer a framework within which theoretical and principal questions of a more general nature concerning the structural character of society and space can be explored. The emphasis throughout is on the concept of the social production of the built environment at the centre of which lies the ideal process, understood in its most general sense as purposeful human activity. The dissertation seeks to show how changes in the relations between the elements and actors of production, the physical and mental means by which the built environment is created, and the relation between moment and totality within which the production process occurs, are central to an understanding of the structural transformation of human society, the form of city and the organization of space.

This thesis compares the impact of two modes of state-led urbanisation on the livelihoods of resettled rural villagers with case studies from Tianjin and Zhejiang. In the ongoing debate over the path for rural development and human welfare in China, it is unclear whether to integrate the rural area into the urban area or whether to develop the rural economy independently. Based on eleven months of fieldwork with resettled villagers in Huaming Town (Tianjin), and Dongheng Village, Wusi Village and Qingyanliu Village (Zhejiang), this research analyses the two different livelihood patterns generated by the two antithetical approaches to rural development, the urban-integration approach and rural indigenous development approach. Focusing on villagers’ capabilities, possession of assets and activities, this research examines the imbalances in rural resource redistribution at three levels, among social groups, between villages and across the rural-urban divide. This research shows that the urban-integration approach leads to a livelihood pattern which relies on rental income from ownership of properties, leaving unskilled farmers with very limited livelihood strategies; in contrast, the rural indigenous development approach creates a livelihood pattern with a balanced dependence on labour and ownership income, generating a diversified livelihood pattern for resettled farmers. Furthermore, this thesis raises deeper structural questions about the driving forces behind the land rights reforms, which release the liquidity from the rural farming land. It argues that the structure of incentives in the governance system, particularly at the village committee level, plays a key role in reorganising and redistributing rural and capacity for village intervention is also critical for the success of the rural development programme; resources; at the same time, having the space and capacity for village intervention is also critical for the success of the rural development programme.

Understanding the changing and complex urban thermal environment is key to addressing the health and sustainability of the cities in which more than half of the world’s population live. The monitoring and assessment of the thermal environment requires spatial resolution that so far has precluded air temperatures from being a viable parameter in most cities. Land surface temperatures (LSTs) offer the ability through satellite remote sensing to investigate the urban environment in a robust and consistent manner. Additionally land surface emissivity (LSE) is required to enable accurate LST estimation and characterise broad-scale thermal infra-red properties of materials. In this thesis, the first optimal estimation of simultaneous LST and LSE data optimised to be robust for urban areas with highly complex surfaces is presented. It uses the thermal channels of the ASTER instrument with a spatial resolution of 90 m. In simulations the algorithm retrieved LST to 1 K or better, and LSEs to within 0.01. The simulation uncertainties retrieved are better than 1 K in LST and 0.015-0.017 for LSE. This marks the first usage of an inverse method with ASTER data. Verification of the LSE for a non-urban scene (Algodones) was undertaken, through inter-comparison with the TES method. Results agreed well with both TES and the validation site in channel 12 and with very low retrieval radiance residuals. The algorithm was also used in three urban case studies. In each, this scheme was able to address key scientific issues, including urban green space and rapid urban expansion, using a combination of the LST and the LSE. The high accuracy of the retrieved LSE was able to distinguish characteristic LSE spectra and identify surface changes. These results show the retrieval of robust and scientifically meaningful LST and LSE data for the heterogeneous urban environment from ASTER, vital to urban studies.

The global appeal of culture-led urban development is commonly attributed to the increased inter-city competition for foreign investment, talents and tourists. But this reason alone is insufficient in explaining the ‘cultural turn’ in East Asian cities, which do not fit into the framework of the post-industrial ‘entrepreneurial’ city. Urban cultural policies and the meanings attached to them transform as they move from one site to another, and it is therefore imperative to consider the historical, cultural and political specificities and complexities that shape and define them. This research aims to explore the context and continuous transformation of the creative city policy discourse in three Chinese cities. Specifically, it examines the understandings that urban policymakers attach to the ‘display’ (Williams, 1984) role of the creative city in Shanghai, Hong Kong and Taipei, interrogating the reasons behind the adoption of ‘imported’ templates of large-scale cultural events and the decision to promote cities as creative. Drawing on thematic analysis of policy documents and semi-structured elite interviews, this study found that in all three cities, policies have been adopted primarily as a political rather than as an entrepreneurial strategy. The findings reveal mutation as a two-way process: the ‘imported’ cultural policies not only are transformed by the city, but they also transform the city’s approach to culture and the arts, which has both positive and negative implications. This research contributes to the developing field of policy mobility and the understanding of urban cultural policy in Chinese cities.