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This thesis investigates whether the regeneration, and in particular, housing refurbishment-led regeneration of deprived urban areas can contribute to the creation of sustainable communities, by looking specifically at the impact of the current Housing Market Renewal Programme on three areas in the North of England. Research has long acknowledged the multifaceted nature of sustainable communities. Evidence has shown how sustainable communities are determined by the complex interdependencies of economic, social, environmental and institutional phenomena and the need to balance these over time. At the same time, the government’s drive to ‘create sustainable communities’ through its prominent and ‘holistic’ Housing Market Renewal Programme has been well publicised. Many studies have challenged what is and what is not a sustainable community, and whether progress towards sustainable communities is currently being made in Housing Market Renewal areas. This study addresses these two issues. First, the thesis seeks to address issues related to framing, defining and evaluating sustainable communities within the context of the built environment. It suggests a framework for doing so which is anchored in the Housing Market Renewal context and draws on the values and understandings of those involved in the ‘making’ of sustainable communities in this context. Second, the framework is applied to three case study Housing Market Renewal areas: Langworthy North in Salford, North Benwell in Newcastle and the Triangles in Wirral. The study involves a survey of approximately 150 residents, semi-structured interviews with over 50 regeneration officials and other stakeholders, and secondary analysis of existing survey data and Census analysis. We find that the proposed framework for assessing sustainable communities is overwhelmingly supported by residents in the three areas and that housing refurbishment-led regeneration has had an overall positive impact on community sustainability in those areas. However, the impact is varied in intensity and scale: all aspects of an area’s physical environment and some economic and social aspects of areas benefit significantly following regeneration, while aspects of local governance, resource use, services and facilities benefit to a lesser degree. We also examine the scale and extent of the Housing Market Renewal Programme and assess how the Programme’s wider challenges impact on local communities. The research concludes by acknowledging that sustainable communities are subject to a continual process of change and that housing refurbishment-led regeneration can contribute to creating more sustainable communities. The thesis also observes that urban intervention, no matter how holistically’ delivered, is only one among many dimensions of sustainable communities; the integration of different policy areas, continued investment and support, and, above all, community empowerment are key to the sustainable communities agenda.

This thesis is concerned with empirically determining whether a particular political sequence can be interpreted through Badiou’s philosophy. It focuses on the public works that transformed Paris in the middle of the 19th century, and more specifically on Haussmann’s planning practice. From an epistolary exchange between property owners, Haussmann and the Minister of the Interior during Haussmann’s first years as Prefect of the Seine, the thesis draws out a political event: the playing out in a singular context of an opposition over a political practice predicated on equality. In this case, the opposition is in the field of planning as regulation: the sanctity of property rights against a planner’s efforts to break the complacency of the planning apparatus towards property owners. The thesis argues that Haussmann was a Saint-Simonian state revolutionary that sought to make property owners contribute to the public works in equal relation to the benefits they extracted from them. In the face of sustained opposition, this planning practice was ultimately sacrificed by the imperial regime. Haussmann’s first years as Prefect are shown to have taken place in the temporality of Badiou’s events, while the commonly invoked process of Haussmannisation best describes the situation that followed the demise of Haussmann’s planning practice. Badiou’s notion of the state revolutionary gives us a way to think through the difficulty and evanescence of regulation. It can help us understand those fleeting moments when political will was used to break hierarchies of power and capital. Badiou’s philosophy is shown to be compatible with a social science that is concerned with isolating and singularising particular political sequences, of which early Haussmann is one.

The United Nation's World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS), that took place between 2003 and 2005, elevated the 'information society' to the level of 'gender equality' 'environmental sustainability' and 'human rights' as one of the central Development tropes of our time. The concept of the network has come to figure heavily in the political discourse of both developed and developing nations and transnational agencies. These organizations employ statistics, academic theories, popular wisdom, and utopian visions shaped by Western experiences to extrapolate an expected impact of new technologies on the developing world. However, to date there has been very little on-the-ground research on the diffusion and appropriation of these technologies as it is taking place in developing nations and how this might challenge and reorient the expectations of traditional Development perspectives. This thesis seeks to provide such a response drawing on the experiences of Internet café users in Accra, the capital city of Ghana where an estimated 500 to 1000 of these small businesses were in operation. Departing from the categories and hierarchies favoured within Development circles, my approach is to look holistically at the way the Internet was produced as a meaningful and useful tool through the practices of users. The practices that defined the Internet in Accra encompassed not only individual activities at the computer interface, but also other formal and informal, collective and everyday rituals such as story-telling, religious practices, and play and socializing among youth. A similar production process was observable in the activities of the Development experts and government officials who arrived in Accra in February 2005 to discuss the role of networking technologies in socio-economic development at the WSIS Africa regional conference. The activities of both groups reconstituted the Internet, Development and the relationship between the two, but along very divergent pathways.

The aim of this thesis is to provide a new framework for cultural regeneration planning, the so-called 'Thirdspace approach', while examining the different ways in which culture is articulated in the context of urban regeneration. The research critically analyses approaches to urban regeneration which have used culture as a tool to influence development. It will be argued that the multiplicity of stakeholder voices and viewpoints are rarely heard by those who manage and plan urban regeneration, especially those of diverse local communities. Cultural planning has already started to take into consideration the lives and traditions of local places and people, however it is argued that a Thirdspace framework (Soja, 1996 as influenced by Lefebvre, 1974) takes this a stage further. Thirdspace suggests that planning should mediate between physical and material elements, symbolic visions and perceptions, and lived experiences and everyday life in urban environments. Using a case study of Maritime Greenwich in South-East London, the researcher employs a crystallisation of mainly qualitative methods to challenge prevailing planning paradigms in the context of culture-led regeneration. A Thirdspace framework helps to elucidate the complex inter-relationships between individuals and organisations and the representation and production of city space. More creative synergies are developed between academic disciplines and practical actions than in previous studies. The research advocates more holistic approaches to planning with the accommodation of multiple viewpoints and the consultation of diverse stakeholders, which are prerequisites for sustainable urban regeneration. The data analysis leads to the establishment of new models of communication, consultation and social impact research. Although planners are still viewed as central to the regeneration process, recommendations for good practice encourage them to question their ingrained value systems and to engage in more open and radical thinking. By using a participatory Thirdspace framework, different perceptions, functions and uses of culture can be accommodated. Whether culture is articulated as being about leisure, business, tourism or everyday life, benefits can be maximised for multiple user groups with important links to quality of life issues. Overall, the research demonstrates that Thirdspace thinking can produce a form of cultural planning which is even more pluralistic and inclusive, aspirational and creative, as well as emancipatory and progressive.

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This thesis studies small town development in contemporary China (1978-present). It focuses on the socioeconomic impact of economic reform on small town development, with particular emphasis on how gradually released market forces enable urban proximity to play different roles to determine the developmental trajectory of small towns. The research design chooses two economically prosperous towns with different degrees of urban proximity, in which fieldwork is conducted. Xihongmen town is located in suburban Beijing and Zhulin town is located in a rural area of Henan province. The research focuses on government, firms and people as three key elements of small town development, and systematic comparisons have been used as the key research strategy throughout. The main research findings are as follows: 1) Xihongmen town's government has been transformed into a sophisticated, bureaucratic and complex organisation and the role of leadership in local development has declined over the years, but a simple and hybrid governmental structure was founded in Zhulin town and the personal capacity of local leaders still plays a vital role in local development; 2) The industrial environment in Xihongmen town is dynamic and an upswing has been observed in the local industrial structure (from the primary to the secondary and tertiary sectors), but Zhulin town still relies solely on the ongoing government-led entrepreneurship; its private sectors are underdeveloped and the industrial structure remains unchanged, and some key firms have even relocated themselves to larger cities duo to the constraints of the local infrastructure; 3) The local residents of Xihongmen town enjoy much more secure livelihoods, with multiple income sources, welfare and flexible job opportunities available in the local area, but the residents of Zhulin town rely primarily on the local government to provide non-farming jobs and both income sources and job opportunities are very limited to the local area. The thesis concludes that the economic reform initiated in 1978 played a key revitalising the rural industries and hence laid the foundations for the growth of small towns. The rural reform policies gave rural areas advantages over urban ones in the early stages of the reform. The evolving policy frameworks gradually lifted the various constraints and enabled urban proximity, a previously less important factor under the centrally planned system, which became the key factor to differentiate the developmental trajectories of small towns. The thesis further explains that proximity has multi-dimensional impacts on the socioeconomic development of small towns. On the one hand, small towns that enjoy close proximity to cities can benefit enormously from economies of scale and urban spillover effects, and this advantage could be further reinforced during the course of ongoing urbanisation. On the other hand, urban proximity could also have impacts on the social structures/orders of small towns, which in turn could affect their economic outcomes. For those towns with low degrees of urban proximity, a high level of community solidarity generated from dense clan/kinship networks might also act as a force to motivate their economic development. However, the latter type is certainly more vulnerable and requires the right blend of a number of historically contingent factors, which are path-dependant and difficult to replicate.