A study conducted by The Department of Environment Malaysia shows that there is an increase in numbers of polluted rivers. One problem is said to be due to indiscriminate dumping of wastes into the rivers. This phenomenon adversely affects the drainage capacities of rivers which then leads to more frequent occurrences of floods as well as an increase in the intensity of the floods. The issues are critical since 97% of the total water use originates from rivers. In Malaysia, 40-60% of water use comes from the domestic domain. Domestic wastewater gives an impact on the quality of water. Public involvement is very important in order to control the current water situation as public contributions to water issues are very significant. In daily activities, the public pollutes the drainage runoff unconsciously. Increasing urban population causes a massive impact on human activities, especially in a developing country like Malaysia. In Malaysia, urbanization has a lot of advantages for the economic sector. Therefore, development needs to be carried out in order to provide a range of facilities for the population. On the other hand, living in comfortable and convenient spaces has persuaded many people to renovate their houses. This then results in an increase in the number of impervious areas because housing developers only have to comply with providing 10% of open space. Developers usually choose to maximise the built-up areas to take full advantage of land use and this situation has resulted in an increase in surface run-off. This is in fact a major cause of flash floods. Natural filtration devices have been incorporated in Sustainable Urban Drainage System (SUDS) as a means of imitating natural hydrological processes. They are found to be more effective compared to the conventional drainage system, and delay filtration and run-off of surface water. SUDS not only improve the technical approaches of a drainage system, but also assists in `Best Management Practices' (BMPs). This includes management and maintenance together with better daily water usage. However, to assist the success of SUDS, public participation should be encouraged. The wider public and all stakeholders should have a better understanding of SUDS in order to allow them to get a clearer idea of their potential role. Improvement in the education system, frequent updates on information and training for maintenance workers are some of the actions that might influence the implementation of SUDS in Malaysia.

The UK programme for Environmentally Sensitive Areas (ESAs) began its implementation in 1987/88 with the designation of 19 ESAs. Since then, 18 more ESAs have been designated to date. Concurrent with this programme has been the legislation concerning the monitoring of ESAs (Agriculture Act 1986, Section 18[8]) "designed to identify any significant changes to wildlife, landscape or historic features which occur after designation" (Hooper [1992]). In addition to the monitoring of ESAs, MAFF commissioned a series of Socio-Economic Evaluations. The Thesis comprises a Critical Appraisal of this evaluation programme, with reference to a specific case study: The Socio-Economic Evaluation of Breadalbane ESA. The Critical Appraisal builds on government-published guidelines for policy evaluation, and upon farm-level research from a number of disciplines which highlights the complexity of the policy recipients' contexts. The discussion also examines the development of the ESA policy as an indicator of the significant shift in norms of environmental obligation faced by individuals and institutions within the farming industry. Further, the MAFF Evaluation of Breadalbane ESA is examined in detail in the light of specific farm-level data gathered through the 1993/4 Fieldwork, subsequent to the MAFF Evaluation itself. The discussion points to data omissions, concealment and inaccuracies, as well as the underlying conceptual emphases and assumptions consistent with overall government guidelines. The primary conclusion is the conventional approaches and methods applied within the MAFF Evaluation have resulted in poor analysis. When the specific implications of a continued adherence to this dominant tradition are outlined, it becomes evident that such an Evaluation scenario can no longer be justified.

Mixed-use development is not a new phenomenon in urban planning and real estate management. This development is currently promoted to revitalise inner towns and cities particularly utilising unproductive urban spaces being referred to as 'brownfield' and 'greyfield' (underutilised) land for social, economic and environmental benefits. Mixed-use development is also challenging various players (planners, policy makers, investors and developers) in terms of the diverse of uses, density of the scheme, inclusion of high quality urban form and design, and the delivery of optimum utilisation of the development scheme in terms of highest and best use. This research explores the underlying factors in the promotion of mixed-use schemes (MUS) in response to the emerging challenges of urban regeneration agenda towards achieving sustainable communities. The study presents the findings from the case studies carried out in the UK and the Republic of Ireland using a set of variables identified from the literature towards establishing success indicators that have a strong contribution to the overall occupancy level of MUS against single-use or mono-use developments in the revitalisation of urban centres. Finally, the application of Multiple Regression Modelling proves that the component mix (number of uses), the balance of uses (space allocations), site condition and integration with the neighbouring uses which are essential elements in accomplishing the maximum potential for viability and success of mixed-use developments. Certainly, these findings offered invaluable inputs in carrying out further investigations of various mixed-use schemes to fully understand the determining qualitative and quantitative factors in the feasibility and performance for this type of development in regeneration areas. The results from the MRA also presents relevant judgments in assessing the optimal composition of the mix of uses which enhance the scheme promotion in regeneration areas which could leads to the potential optimising mixed-use and policy decision making.

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This research thesis is an empirical investigation of how changing patterns of employment geography are affecting the transportation sustainability of the London region. Contemporary world cities are characterised by high levels of economic specialisation between intra-urban centres, an expanding regional scope, and market-led processes of development. These issues have been given relatively little attention in sustainable travel research, yet are increasingly defining urban structures, and need to be much better understood if improvements to urban transport sustainability are to be achieved. London has been argued to be the core of a polycentric urban region, and currently there is mixed evidence on the various sustainability and efficiency merits of more decentralised urban forms. The focus of this research is to develop analytical tools to investigate the links between urban economic geography and transportation sustainability; and apply these tools to the case study of the London region. An innovative methodology for the detailed spatial analysis of urban form, employment geography and transport sustainability is developed for this research, with a series of new application of GIS and spatial data to urban studies. Firstly an intra-metropolitan scale of spatial analysis is pursued, allowing both an extensive regional scope and a sufficiently intensive local level of detail to analyse the decentralisation processes described above. Secondly a series of detailed spatial datasets are introduced to analyse employment geography and dynamics, including business survey data and fine-scale real-estate data. For the measurement of accessibility, detailed network analysis and congestion data is used. Finally for the assessment of transportation sustainability, an indicator of CO2 emissions at intra-urban scales is developed, and is calculated for the 6.5 million journey-to-work trips in the study region. The results highlight extreme intra-urban variation in accessibility, employment geography and travel carbon emissions with clear relevance to urban form and sustainable travel debates in the London region.

Dynamic urban models embody current theories about how urban systems evolve. To explore the consequences of this theory for a particular urban system requires an urban simulation because the theories are necessarily complicated to deal with the nonlinearity and complexity found in urban systems. Making sense of this output is challenging and in this thesis we explore using interactive visualisation and participation in a simulation to help a user interpret this output. Seven different simulation models are developed and explored using this methodology and applied to present day Greater London and South Yorkshire and the historical United States.

Urban growth, urban sprawl if uncoordinated and dispersed, can be considered one of the most important policy agendas in modern urban regions. While no single policy option or remedy exists, understanding the urban growth system is the first step towards sustainable urban growth futures. Spatially explicit and dynamic urban growth models provide valuable simulations that encapsulate essential knowledge in planning and policy making such as how and where urban growth can occur and what the driving forces of such changes are. Over the past two decades, cellular automata (CA) models have proven to be an effective modelling approach to the study of complex urban growth systems. More recently Agent Based Modelling (ABM) has developed to yield a useful framework for understanding complex urban systems and this provides an arena for exploring the possible outcome states of various policy actions. Yet most research efforts of this sort adopt physical and heuristic approaches which tend to neglect socio-economic dynamics which is critical in shaping urban form and its transformation. This thesis aims to develop an agent based urban simulation model which has a more rigid theoretical explanation of agent behaviour than most such models hitherto. However, before developing such an agent based model, this study first conducted a series of experimental simulations with two well-known generic CA based urban models, SLEUTH and Metronamica, in order to better understand the complexity of designing and applying this class of urban models. Although CA and ABM are two distinctive modelling approaches, they share certain fundamentals concerning the complexity of systems and thus the empirical simulations with widely used CA models provide useful insights for the development of a new dedicated agent based urban growth model. For this purpose, each CA model is calibrated to the study area of the Seoul Metropolitan Area, Korea. The research then moves towards developing an agent based model based on microeconomic foundations. Utility maximising residential location choices made by households are modelled as the main impetus for urban growth through agglomeration and sprawl. Furthermore, based on such urban dynamics, alternative planning policy options such as greenbelts and public transportation are simulated so that their impacts can be clarified and assessed. In this way, the model is also able to examine how planning policies alter the economic utility of households and redirect market-led urban development. These results confirm the unique value of such modelling approaches. Yet, new research challenges such as the estimation of model parameters and the use of such models in planning support continue to dominate this field and in conclusion, we identify future research directions which build on these challenges.

The period 19l9-1946 is widely regarded as crucial to the developme~t of modern town planning in Britain; it marked the final stage of the transition from an initial concern with suburban housing to the regulation of the physical environment in the interests of the community as a whole. A number of studies have described this transition in overall terms, but comparatively few have focused on specific policy areas and their emerging relationship with land use planning. This thesis examines civil aviation, with particular reference to London's terminal airports, and, by using unpublished material, i.e. correspondence, internal memoranda, and the Minutes of meetings and presented papers, presents an insight into the deliberations behind public pronouncements. The policy for London's terminal airports developed as a result of private initiative and public enterprise, while the role of individuals was often significant - notably Raymond Unwin, Robert Hardy-Syms, Thomas Adams, Frank Hunt, and Alan Cobham. Some fifty sites were considered during the inter-war period including Croydon, Heston,Fairlop, Gatwick, Lullingstone, and Heathrow, although the latter only emerged as a departmental proposal in response to the war-time needs of the RAF. Civil aviation and land use planning developed as separate activities throughout the 1920s, neither recognising the significance of the other. Thereafter, statutory land use planning failed to respond positively to pressures from the growth of air travel, mainly due to the limitations of the institutional framework. The advisory planning bodies of the 1930s, by contrast, put forward original, long-term proposals for airports in the Greater London area; these were not well received by Government departments but they proved influential. An examination of the background to the civil airports proposals of the Greater London Plan (1944), the famous war-time advisory plan, reveals that Patrick Abercrombie merely accommodated the Coalition Government's policy for Heathrow and formulated his road and rail proposals accordingly

The central aim of this thesis is to explain the weak participatory performance achieved by mechanisms of public participation in urban planning and management in the City of Buenos Aires. The analysis bears on the adoption by the Buenos Aires municipality of two participatory planning schemes modelled on initiatives successfully implemented in other urban settings: the Strategic Plan and the Participatory Budget. The theoretical foundations of the research rest on the assumption that the traditional scholarly literature on public participation in planning and development studies does not provide the analytical framework necessary to fully capture and understand the determinants of the `participatory performance' of initiatives of public engagement in urban policy-making. It is posited that the conceptual tools associated with the literature on `new institutional theory' offer an alternative theoretical perspective which is wellsuited to the analysis of the adoption and evolution of participatory planning schemes. New institutional theory has been consistently used to analyse and compare the economic performance of different institutional arrangements. The endeavour is to exploit its analytical potential to examine the performance of participatory planning mechanisms which are traditionally expected by the academic and development community to support a transition from purely electoral, representative forms of democracy towards `higher' modes of popular involvement in democratic decision-making. Strategic planning and participatory budgeting in Buenos Aires are examined through the analysis of two phases of institutional change: the first phase corresponds to the adoption of `foreign' planning models through institutional borrowing, whereas the second phase refers to the process of institutionalisation of these imported schemes in their host setting. This thesis seeks to contribute to the theoretical refinement of specific aspects of the literature on institutional change, and to assist policy-makers in enhancing the performance of the participatory planning mechanisms they choose to adopt.

Reforms to the English planning system introduced from 2001 by the New Labour government under the rubric of "modernisation" have made a series of claims to revitalise planning as a governmental and professional activity. In order to realise the ambitious goals of reform there have been widespread calls for a "culture change", particularly amongst professional planners in the public sector. The discourse of culture change is rooted in the managerialist thinking that has been central to long-term processes of state restructuring, and suggests a concern to regulate the attitudes and identities of workers. The thesis aims to interrogate the claims that have been made for a reformed planning system and practice. In so doing it seeks to uncover the cultural politics of modernisation, assessing the ways in which the discourses of reform have targeted and sought to change local planning cultures and planners' roles and identities. It therefore opens up identity as an analytical lens for assessing the modernisation of planning. I argue that the modemisation agenda has been marked by a series of tensions, simultaneously positioning planners as the agents of modernisation, but also as objects to be modernised. Reform has therefore imposed a considerable burden on planners as they seek to understand what is expected of them, and negotiate their professional identities in the midst of a complex set of changes that have intensified the demands of their practice. This suggests the need for greater attentiveness to the lived experience of processes of reform, and its impacts on those charged with realising change.