A growing body of critical literature seeks to identify conceptual and practical problems accompanying the realisation of mainstream ‘eco-city’ initiatives around the world. However, little attention has been paid to the status of the ‘city’ itself within the broader discourse. If eco-cities are to be more than experimental ‘technological showcases’, and aim to transform urban life more generally, the question of what types of ‘cityness’ will ensue is of considerable importance. To effect a more significant sustainability transition, eco-city plans and policies may need somehow to encompass a more nuanced conceptualisation of cities as complex, unpredictable, and emergent spaces. The incompatibility of such a conceptualisation with liberal-modernist modes of planning means that radically innovative new approaches to eco-city development may need to be found. This thesis considers whether the eco-city, theorised as a multiple process of real-world experimentation, may shed some light on how ‘cityness’ might better be planned for in future. To do so, it conceptualises cityness through the lens of ‘publicness’. It makes an original contribution to knowledge by developing a new theoretical model of publicness as an ‘assemblage’ of space and behaviour, with an ‘emergent’ and ‘civic’ modality. It thereby extends recent debates over the idea of ‘urban assemblage’, and makes innovative links between theories of planning and of the public. This model informs the analysis of original empirical research, investigating the conceptualisation of the public in an international sample of official eco-city documents, and exploring the publicness of two implemented initiatives, in Portland, Oregon (US) and newly built Sejong City (South Korea). The research finds that publicness tends to be poorly articulated in mainstream eco-city plans and policies, with potentially negative implications for sustainability in the ‘urban age’. However, it also argues that state institution-led planning – even when experimental ‘governance’ approaches are adopted – may inevitably be limited in its ability to encompass the emergent public life of the city. The thesis concludes by considering the prospects for overcoming or more productively acknowledging these limits in future.

This thesis is about urban sociality in the context of an urban settlement in Port Moresby, Papua New Guinea. I explore issues of urban life through everyday stories of settlers who reside in a settlement (also known as a blok) at Nine Mile, Port Moresby. I present settlers' ideas of work and money through their income generating efforts as well as their perception about giving. This thesis explores settlement notions of the forms that relatedness takes through everyday interactions of eating together, sharing and thinking of one another. These actions in turn inform ideas of personhood and gender. I use blok ideas to rethink assumptions about the meaning of land and place in an urban setting. Furthermore I seek to use blok understandings of kinship, personhood and gender to portray an urban sociality that is entwined in relations.

This research analyses how the criminalisation of the Amsterdam squatting movement works. The key research question addresses how criminalisation operates as a technology of government, what kind of relations of power are constituted through this processes, and how these are experienced and resisted. By paying attention to the relationship between politics, ethics and affects, the focus of this project is on the micropolitics of criminalisation and its resistances, where affects, everyday lived experiences, and embodied relations of power and resistance play a central role. The analytical framework conceptualises power relations as heterogenous, productive and constitutive forces rather than simply repressive and oppositional ones. This enables to analyse how criminalisation works by deployment of legalistic tools and policing practices, by engendering contested moralities around private property and the uses of urban spaces and by constituting specific modes of experiencing, acting and resisting. Moreover, this perspective unfolds the complex relations between criminalisation and resistance: the focus is placed on the active and creative power of heterogenous struggles that counter relations of power by means of protests and direct actions, as much as by experimenting subversive conducts, social relations and modes of life. This project engages with Activist-Research, aiming at producing a platform for collective reflection on how to resist criminalisation. Here resistance is not intended as an object of study, but as an epistemological perspective: namely a mode of unmasking, knowing and analysing how power operates. The empirical materials presented in the form of Intermezzi (between chapters) and Boxes (within chapters) constitute composite and collaborative process of reflection and narration.

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In recent years the significance of urban culture has become a principal theme in defining and conceptualizing the nature of life in early modem towns. Important as these historiographical shifts are, however, they have not yet resulted in complementary reassessments of explanatory models for the study of urban society in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, which still largely follow that sketched by Peter Clark and Paul Slack some twenty eight years ago in Crisis and Order in English Towns (1972). In its most basic form, their model presents the century between the Reformation and the Civil War as one of urban difficulties, realignments, and economic decline, especially in 'second rank' towns. In contrast, the century after 1660 was a dynamic phase for English towns: a time of steady population growth, economic renewal, and, more importantly the creation of a new urban identity, which was urbane (for it followed metropolitan fashions) rather than civic (something derived from the traditions of individual towns and the common values of their inhabitants). Based as it was on emulation, interpretations of urbane culture often neglect the cultural production of townspeople themselves, who emerge only as passive followers of London-led provincial urban cultures. For this reason, we now know a great deal about assembly rooms, subscription libraries, and race courses, for example, but continuities in civic cultures have been under-emphasized. It is the intention of this work to explore both continuities and disruptions in two second rank towns, Chester and Coventry, over a long period of time, spanning the period of the Civil War which has been seen as a customary watershed in studies hitherto, and one which many urban historians have been reluctant to address or bridge.

The sustainability challenges that are threatening cities are increasingly being tackled through the use of smart technologies. These smart technologies have implications for the citizen; however, the current discussions of smart citizens within the extant literature were found to be abstract and limited in their considerations. The aim of this thesis, therefore was to explore the smart citizen concept, from a psychological perspective, in terms of factors influencing smart energy technology acceptance. Study 1 investigated the smart city and smart citizen in order to gain further understanding of the current issues and potential challenges. As such, interviews were conducted with UK city stakeholders who were involved in smart city initiatives. Overall, they felt that citizens should sharing the goals for smart city developments and pursuing goals for the collective benefit. Studies 2a and 2b used the extended technology acceptance model (TAM2) in conjunction with psychological empowerment, environmental concern, and environmental citizenship to predict participants’ intention to use a home energy management system (HEMS) to engage in either energy reduction (2a) or load shifting (2b). Study 3, used the same factors to again explore acceptance of the HEMS, however the HEMS and load shifting were then framed with either a gain goal-frame or a normative goal-frame, as per goal-framing theory. The framing of the information across the studies lead to different factors being significant in each of the predictive models. This thesis concludes that internalised goals may undermine the effect of more individualistic concerns for intention to use a HEMS. As such, the internalisation of wider collective national or city goals by citizens will be a critical aspect of citizen engagement and empowerment within the smart city and is likely to be important in supporting the roll out of smart technology and the achievement of the smart city strategies.

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Rapid urbanisation and severe housing shortages help explain why informal settlements of self-built housing are widespread in Pakistan today. Failure to ensure an adequate supply of affordable housing has led to the steady encroachment of state-owned and private vacant land for informal dwelling. Current estimates are that 67% of the urban population of Pakistan lives in unrecognised settlements (UN-Habitat, 2013). Urban informality is arguably under researched within the South Asian context, particularly Pakistan. This study considers how everyday life unfolds through various forms of extra-legal, social and discursive regulations in this context of pervasive informality. This exploration is developed for the particular case of the Siddiquia Mill Colony, Faisalabad City. A central premise is that we need to develop new theoretical analytic tools that reflect current global urban trends in order to shift the perception of informality from one of deviance and disorganisation to one of alternative functionality and complementarity. The vast majority of new housing and urban economic opportunities around the world occur in informal sectors and unregulated settings. Contrary to conventional understanding, particularly in relation to South Asian informality, the research findings highlight that informal housing and irregular settlements function as enduring modes of urban development, inadequately portrayed as symptoms of economic backwardness. The study provides concrete examples of how informality is co-produced with formal urban development, often filling the institutional, structural and administrative gaps that state-led planning practices leave behind. The empirical research draws on a mix of ethnographic data from a detailed survey of household housing characteristics, in-depth interviews and immersive observations, in a two-tier research design. The findings reinforce the notion that informality is ordinary rather than deviant. Inhabitants exhibit a sense of attachment, a recognition of alternative property rights and a perceived sense of entitlement in relation to their properties. It is noted that, while a desire to ‘own’ their property could be perceived as falling in line with neo-liberal ideals, the drivers and objectives underpinning ‘ownership’ in this context are far removed from the desire, or need, to be part of a capitalistic, neo-liberal, propertied citizenship. Rather, these aspirations are based on ideas of security and perpetuity. This is evident through a close reading of well-defined but complex webs of horizontal and vertical social relations. Social relations internally differentiate the inhabitants of Siddiquia Mill, highlighting the persistence of unequal power relations. The insights gained from this case study contribute deeper understanding in geography and planning debates by demonstrating the multiple ways that urban informality functions simultaneously as a social field of competition and cooperation. This work makes two significant contributions to scholarship. First, it explores the previously neglected context of informality in urban Pakistan, which is quite different from informality in other, more-well documented countries of South Asia. Second, it argues in favour of informality as a counter to neo-liberalist ideology.

This thesis builds up a three part genealogy of the theoretical apprehensions of space through a three part narrative of a recently constructed public square, serving as the gateway to Edinburgh's new financial quarter, the Exchange. The aim of this genealogy and its narrative counterparts is to re-imagine the ways in which public spaces in the urban environment can be understood with reference to their materiality and use or non- use. This re-imagining aims to move away from all subjective accounts that focus only on varying degrees of use and the use-value of materiality and can lend themselves all to easily to ideals and aspirations of city planners and various scripted political projects. The thesis argues that of key importance in this re-imagining is to give space a clear role to play in its own apprehension. The argument of the thesis is that in order to apprehend public spaces in terms of their own materiality at one with use, a detailing of their materiality and use or non-use is insufficient if set up in juxtaposition to each other or made to interact through a dialectical confrontation. The thesis maintains that a strong empirical focus on the relations between materiality and use or non-use, on the most general level, will yield the most productive way of apprehending public spaces in terms of not reducing interactions between its materiality and use or non-use to a scripted theatre of determined functions and their subversion.