The occurrence of fatal landslides in Nepal is increasing with time, faster than the effects of monsoonal variations. Possible explanations for the trends observed include: land-use change, population growth, and the development of transport infrastructure. However, to date, there is little evidence to support these postulated causes and very little research into the nature of landslide vulnerability in the Nepalese context. This research takes an interdisciplinary approach to examine, and where necessary, challenge a series of assumptions made regarding landslide vulnerability in Nepal with a view to developing a better understanding of social vulnerability and its underlying causes. Firstly, a bottom up livelihoods based approach is adopted to examine the following research questions: (1) Who is vulnerable to landslide hazard?; (2) Why do people occupy landslide prone areas?; and (3) How do ‘at risk’ rural communities perceive and respond to landslide hazard and risk? In so doing, this thesis approaches the question of landslide vulnerability from the perspective of the vulnerable people themselves. Secondly, the research explores how scientists and policy experts view landslide risk management in Nepal and how policy is subsequently informed and shaped. The findings highlight the impact of infrastructure projects in rural Nepal. Within the Upper Bhote Koshi Valley clear transitions in settlement patterns and rural livelihoods (and thus the occupation of landslide prone areas) have been seen over time. For the majority of households, their decision to occupy these areas is driven by the economic and social benefits associated with the road. Landslide risk therefore emerges not just from societal marginalisation but also from situations of relative prosperity. The findings suggest that occupants of landslide prone areas have a good understanding of landslide hazard and its associated risk. However, these risks are contextualised in relation to other social concerns. The significance of the findings for landslide policy and practice are addressed along with different actors’ views of landslide risk management in Nepal.

This research is located in the fields of the geographies of childhood, social and environmental policy and urban transport studies. It adds to geographical thinking about children’s choices in their everyday mobilities. My thesis makes an original contribution by filling in large gaps in knowledge about the journey to school experiences of the children, commenting on household circumstances, public space policy, social exclusion and children’s participation in decision making (Hillman, 2006; Jarvis, 2005; McDonald, 2008; Pain, 2006). Children’s choices in their everyday lives are found to be influenced by a complex mix of factors including gender, age, household structure, residential location, health, social culture, urban design and school culture. The research is timely in light of current high profile public and political debates about childhood health, access to public space, social exclusion, sustainable transport policy and children’s rights (Barker, 2003; CABE, 2008; Lolichen, 2007; SEU, 2003; Unicef, 2007). Despite heightened interest in these issues, little is known about the individual experiences of children’s journeys to school at a fine-grained level. My thesis therefore brings together a number of isolated debates and investigates the opportunities and constraints shaping children’s everyday choices; provides policy-relevant insights into the ways in which they reconcile their everyday mobility behaviour within overlapping spheres of impact; provides a theoretical framework within which to understand the sustainable mobility choices available to children in contemporary British society with relation to their journeys to school; and highlights how children view sustainable policy and practices and the relevance and application to their individual circumstances. The research employed a participatory action research approach whereby the children and young people themselves helped specify the range of qualitative methods (interviews, discussion groups, photography, videos, art, drama, statistics and poetry). This dynamic process revealed the fluid and ambiguous nature of children’s journeys to school. It showed that high levels of understanding exist amongst children and young people concerning health and environmental issues associated with the journey to school, yet circumstances located within the key spaces that children occupy (the home, public space and school) limit individual choice, leading to less healthy behavioural patterns of unsustainable travel. Despite ongoing strategies employed at national and local levels to encourage sustainable travel, modal shift has proved negligible. Possible reasons advanced in this thesis are a lack of understanding on behalf of policy makers of the complexities inherent within the spheres of influence that impact on children’s decision making capabilities, policies and strategies proving to be ambiguous or ineffectively communicated and unsuitable for localised situations and the lack of active, meaningful child participation within the decision-making processes. This research therefore provides a critique of some of the more positive assumptions underpinning current concepts regarding children’s participation within policy debate and argues for more micro- research on individual children’s lives. This research highlights the importance of the social aspects of sustainable policy. This relatively neglected dimension of sustainable environmental policy suggests the possibility of an alternate model of sustainable travel with respect to the journey to school, which accounts for the web of interconnecting influencing structures involved in the formation of children’s everyday lives, and which also considers the importance of children’s agency. Providing a physical structure for sustainable travel is insufficient and a progressive, holistic model encompassing the social and cultural dimensions of sustainability is required. Interventions at the school level to encourage more sustainable journeys to school need to be matched by changes in the social and cultural contexts found within the home in particular, as well as within public space, so benefits can be enhanced and healthier choices, with regards to everyday travel behaviour, can be made.

Flooding is a world-wide problem that is considered as one of the most devastating natural hazards. New commercially available high spatial resolution Synthetic Aperture RADAR satellite imagery provides new potential for flood mapping. This research provides a quantitative assessment of high spatial resolution RADASAT-2 and TerraSAR-X products for mapping water bodies in order to help validate products that can be used to assist flood disaster management. An area near Dhaka in Bangladesh is used as a test site because of the large number of water bodies of different sizes and its history of frequent flooding associated with annual monsoon rainfall. Sample water bodies were delineated in the field using kinematic differential GPS to train and test automatic methods for water body mapping. SAR sensors products were acquired concurrently with the field visits; imagery were acquired with similar polarization, look direction and incidence angle in an experimental design to evaluate which has best accuracy for mapping flood water extent. A methodology for mapping water areas from non-water areas was developed based on radar backscatter texture analysis. Texture filters, based on Haralick occurrence and co-occurrence measures, were compared and images classified using supervised, unsupervised and contextual classifiers. The evaluation of image products is based on an accuracy assessment of error matrix method using randomly selected ground truth data. An accuracy comparison was performed between classified images of both TerraSAR-X and Radarsat-2 sensors in order to identify any differences in mapping floods. Results were validated using information from field inspections conducted in good conditions in February 2009, and applying a model-assisted difference estimator for estimating flood area to derive Confidence Interval (CI) statistics at the 95% Confidence Level (CL) for the area mapped as water. For Radarsat-2 Ultrafine, TerraSAR-X Stripmap and Spotlight imagery, overall classification accuracy was greater than 93%. Results demonstrate that small water bodies down to areas as small as 150m² can be identified routinely from 3 metre resolution SAR imagery. The results further showed that TerraSAR-X stripmap and spotlight images have better overall accuracy than RADARSAT-2 ultrafine beam modes images. The expected benefits of the research will be to improve the provision of data to assess flood risk and vulnerability, thus assisting in disaster management and post-flood recovery.

From screen image to imagined spaces, the Lord of the Rings film-tourism experience – that is, tourism to New Zealand apparently motivated by the popular film trilogy which was filmed there – has received much anecdotal attention, yet little scholarly examination. In particular, how tourists are affected by the “you’ve seen the movie, now visit the set!” adage, remains under-examined. Whilst sociologies of tourism tend to emphasize the visual, spectatorial and passive nature of mediated forms of tourism, actual experiences of visiting the former film sets tend to challenge such theorizations of the phenomenon. In fact, what we find in New Zealand is a touristic landscape marked only by its absences and virtualities- little remains to show of ‘Middle-earth on earth’, leaving us with the question of what it is that, as tourists, we actually consume, and on what basis the apparently visual causality of cinematic tourism can be sustained. This research thus employs recent scholarship in cultural geography attuned to the more-than-representational and affective realms, in order to build a conceptually novel approach to thinking through ‘the film-tourist’. Rather than starting out from a position of critique, such an approach seeks to explore the ‘operational logics’ of tourist experience, how meaning is made through practices of popular culture consumption and tourism. Through a consideration of how tourists navigate these complex cinematic spaces, we find that visitors – both those who are fans or enthusiasts of The Lord of the Rings, and those who are simply ‘doing a rings thing’ as part of a broader touristic itinerary – engage in a range of animated practices, that demonstrate both an awareness of these multiply-mediated spaces, and an interest not only in ‘walking in the footsteps’ of Frodo and the fellowship, but also in the ‘backstage’ of the films’ production, and the very creation of ‘Middle earth- on earth’ in New Zealand.

This thesis explores the gradual and by no means unproblematic emergence of solar photovoltaic technologies (PV) in European cities. It is a qualitative study of innovation in urban PV across three European cities: Barcelona (Spain), London (UK) and Paris (France) which draws on documentary evidence and interview data with a broad range of urban professionals engaged in implementing the technology. The thesis interrogates current understandings of how ‘green’ technologies such as PV are thought to bring about ‘sustainable’ transformations by ‘breaking through’ from the margins into mainstream society. Several innovation studies frameworks are assessed in terms of their merits and shortcomings for understanding innovation in urban PV. It is argued that extant literatures succinctly frame innovation as an interplay between that which is ‘novel’ and that which is ‘in place’, however, that they fail to address three issues that are critical for understanding how new technologies may emerge and transform: the multiplicity and heterogeneity of actors and their means for contesting ‘sustainable’ (or other) transformations, the complex spatio-temporality of ‘barriers’ to innovation, and the ways in which technologies gather humans, materials and spaces into new, potentially more ‘sustainable’ constellations. The thesis develops ‘material semiotics’ as a conceptual foundation and methodology for understanding innovation. Material semiotics provides powerful analytical sensibilities that enable the thesis to radically re-imagine the objects, processes and places involved in innovation. Through understanding innovation as characterised by attempts to bring forth into the present aspirations for alternative futures, urban PV is understood as simultaneously a vehicle for, as well as an outcome of, sustainable transformation. Its entanglement in a myriad of social, material, spatial and temporal relations is shown to engender a geography of ‘sustainable’ innovation that is much more partial and imperfect than current understandings suggest.

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This thesis explores young people’s emotional experiences of fear of crime. It is based on a long-term and in-depth piece of participatory fieldwork in a low-income urban area in Newcastle upon Tyne. I engaged in the use of participatory diagramming, group discussions and individual interviews in order to access the lived experiences and material realities of local residents, to identify and understand how fear works in the neighbourhood. The research includes insights from a variety of groups: the emphasis is mainly on the young, but with a perspective from older people too. It shows that fear is tied to power and has a bearing on people’s freedom, including their access to and use of space, their participation in social life and their ability to control their future. The theoretical contribution is to enhance understandings of fear, by showing that it is bound up with a practice of citizenship; and to enhance understandings of what citizenship means, by documenting its entanglement with fear. Methodologically, the work contributes to the development of participatory geographies. In both an empirical and a theoretical sense, the thesis brings to light how participating in research as well as in wider community activities enabled participants to envision ways that fear can be negated through increasing ‘confidence’ of all kinds. As such, the thesis concludes that participation – in the fullest sense of the word – can be empowering in the face of fear. It enables us to imagine the possibility of a more hopeful future trajectory.

This study analyses the Nigeria – Benin international boundary, around the Yoruba geo-cultural space. The primary research question, which the study is centred on, is the assessment of the impact of partition on the Yoruba identity and group relations The study relies on the multidisciplinary approach in the analysis of the boundary and the people it partitions. Multidisciplinarity is particularly required for such a study as this in order to accommodate the various nuances, which a specific disciplinary approach would not be able to adequately cater for. The methodology utilised in answering the research question was the historicised case-study, which relied on field work in the specific borderland communities astride the Nigeria – Benin boundary as well as archival research. It also relies on a content analysis of the news media as well as government publication. The secondary sources of data are collected from extant literature on the theme of African boundaries. The study finds that contrary to the expectation in the research literature that the partition would have a disruptive effect on the Yoruba, the peculiar characteristics of the group created a buffer, which resisted change. Thus, the Yoruba identity has remained relatively unscathed by the forces of colonisation and contrasting socialisation processes.

Kashan is one of a number of ancient city regions on the margins of Iran’s arid central plateau. The region has a well-defined territorial socio-economic pattern in which an urban upper class has in the past maintained its control over the illiterate mass of the people in the city and its satellite villages through the ownership of land and water rights, carpet-weaving contracts and credit. In recent years, however, Land Reform and the co-operative movement have altered the economic and political balance between town and country, while the growth of a modern textile industry has radically altered urban industrial structure. Rural response to change, through migration or agricultural development, has been governed by an inheritance of land and potential water resources which varies much between upland and lowland. A multivariate analysis of one hundred Iranian cities is described: the occupational, housing and demographic structures of the cities are shown to be related to their location and to their relations, through migration, with their hinterlands. The need for study of cities with under one hundred thousand population is stressed since size directly affects urban growth. In the present case, though commerce and industry in Kashan City are growing rapidly the pace of regional urbanization has been relatively slow. Within Kashan City the grafting of new suburbs onto the old pre-industrial quarters is the latest manifestation of an already established social order, but a detailed areal study reveals that the statistical dividing line in population and housing between the suburbs and the old town, and between urban and rural areas is hard to distinguish. The operation of central-place principles in the provision of goods and services in the region and in the land use and land value surfaces of the city is described.

Sitting at the intersection between Health Geography and Children’s Geographies, this thesis explores the ways in which young people’s health beliefs and behaviours are constructed, mediated and performed. Concomitantly, the thesis connects with interdisciplinary work relating to young people and health. Using a mixed methods approach, and drawing on the aims and values of participatory research, the empirical focus of the thesis is the Wear Valley area of County Durham, North East England. Unlike much of the existing work in Health Geography and Children’s Geographies, this thesis both makes explicit its understanding of space and scale and draws upon some of the recent reworkings of these concepts which view them in a fluid and abstract manner instead of a hierarchical, absolute or relative one. Space and scale are viewed as being produced and yet are also regarded as continually under construction and (re)formation; they are fluid and involve plurality, multiplicity and juxtaposition and thus cannot be reduced to simple networks or hierarchies. In addition, this thesis draws on the work of Goffman, Foucault and Judith Butler, both in the development of its theoretical framework and in its discussion of the sculpting and performance of young people’s health beliefs and behaviours. Drawing on these theorists, particular attention is given to issues of power, discipline, performance and identity. Building on these discussions, the thesis will consider the ways in which global trends, globalisation and local culture intertwine in the sculpting and performance of young people’s health beliefs through discussions of the media and technology, food, and understandings of the countryside and health. Issues of power, discourse, performance and identity will also be discussed in relation to young people’s beliefs about, and experiences of, the countryside and the pervasive but problematic notion of the ‘rural idyll’ will be contested.