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Home-Based Enterprises (HBEs), as part of the informal sector, have been studied over the last three decades from economic, social, urban planning, housing policy, and environmental impacts perspectives, among others. But to date, their spatial implications have not been thoroughly explored. In urban areas, many households deploy all their potential resources, such as human, social, financial and physical assets, to generate income from a home business as part of household survival strategies. For those who live in large dwellings, the issue of business activity in the domestic area might not lead to conflict between home and work, between reproduction and production. However, generally low-income households who engage in HBE activities live in small dwellings, and thus there is a premium on space. This study therefore explores various adaptation strategies undertaken by households with HBEs associated with their use of space. It is focused on kampung of Yogyakarta City in Indonesia. By taking a qualitative approach and using a multi-method strategy, the study investigates selected dwellings with HBEs in Kampung Prawirodirjan, Yogyakarta, where one in three dwellings has a home business. The study draws on synchronic and diachronic approaches that not only observe processes of adaptation but also document the use of space over time. This offers a thorough assessment of the strategies used by households to respond to the co-existence of domestic and business activities within the same dwelling, including their motivations and reasons for their decisions. The analysis of strategies is based on Berry’s (1980) adaptation theory in terms of exploring how households arrange interior space, make more space, and manage activities and movements. Although this study is highly context-specific, it offers a range of insights into how urban households accumulate capital as part of their survival strategy and to overcome poverty. Furthermore, it shows how households who conduct a home business construct spatial capital not only to make a living but also to achieve a better and more harmonious home environment.

There is an ever-present demand for new housing in the UK, and current government policy dictates that this is to be built on both green and brown field sites. Ecological or naturalistic woodland can be used to integrate new housing into its surroundings, and as part of the process of reclamation of brown field sites, as well as being a means of regenerating existing urban green space. There are many potent arguments in favour of using green and natural landscapes as part of new developments in urban settings, including physical, social and health benefits to humans. The evidence also suggests that many types of urban green space can contribute to the creation of a more sustainable urban environment, and can constitute important wildlife habitats in their own right. However, naturalistic woodland is often regarded as unsafe by members of the public, and the agencies involved in shaping the urban environment, suggesting that such woodland may not be appropriate within the urban fabric. This research sought to evaluate the suitability of the ecological woodland housing model, as practised at Birchwood, Warrington New Town, by means of a case study. Using a mixture of quantitative and qualitative methods, the study examined a range of perceptual factors in relation to Birchwood's naturalistic woodland environment, including issues relating to aesthetic appreciation, place identity, safety and the suitability of Birchwood as an environment for children. The study found that most Birchwood residents value their woodland environment, which has a range of diverse meanings for them, though there are some significant safety issues. The findings confirmed previous research suggesting that wild-looking or naturalistic urban landscapes often evoke simultaneously positive and negative responses: these landscapes are greatly valued and feared at the same time. In general terms the ecological woodland approach to landscape planning and design used in Birchwood has been very successful, with some shortcomings relating to attempts to integrate naturalistic woodland too closely with housing within the fabric of the residential areas; the use of tall, dense vegetation in conjunction with children's play areas as part of the streetscape; a bland, undifferentiated treatment of the woodland as a setting for the expressway and access roads; and the absence of a clear footpath hierarchy that responds to user needs. There is also a need for vegetation management strategies to be reviewed. Ways in which these issues could be addressed in future are suggested. Subject to these refinements, the study concludes that the ecological woodland approach to landscape planning and design used in Birchwood is a viable option for urban landscapes of the future.

Situated at the intersection of economic restructuring and crime control, this thesis explores the practices and policies of economic regeneration, community safety and policing in the city of Glasgow. In particular old-industrial cities and regions have felt the pressures to ‘revitalise’ and regenerate their failing economic base, as well as to change the modalities of governance, and subsequently embarked upon local economic development and attracting growth industries. Examining the interest in quality-of-life offences within such regeneration agendas, my thesis explores the importance of crime control, policing and community safety in a series of empirical ‘cuts’ through the subject, starting with wider issues of crime control, imagineering and city centre upgrading. Practices of regulating city spaces are carried out in distinctive fields of community safety policies, the policing of homeless people and street prostitutes, and also include the regulating of businesses in the wake of economic regeneration. Furthermore, a city centre warden project, the City Centre Representatives, is studied in detail in relation to their work remit, encompassing a tourist service as well as a range of ordering tasks in the newly regenerated spaces of the city centre. Explicitly framing these substantive debates in a theoretical context, the first part of the thesis engages in questions of social ontology, working towards a research perspective of a reworked critical Marxism. Such critical Marxism is arrived at by discussion of current approaches, both in policy and academy, of how to account for processes of economic restructuring and crime control in late-capitalist societies. While maintaining concepts of a(n), although fragmented, social totality, held together in dialectical processes, social praxis as mediation between social totality and agency becomes the central hinge for researching such ontology. As embodied, routine and partially reflected upon social practices that centre on people’s work practices, such social praxis is subsequently spatialised by drawing on Lefèbvre’s work on the production of social space and employed in a detailed empirical study. In so doing, this thesis puts forwards a proposal of how a reworked critical Marxism can fruitfully engage with current theoretical debates within geography and he social sciences more widely without neglecting the importance of in-depth empirical research to develop and strengthen any theoretical engagement.