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Local diversity is often credited with being a driver of creative economic activity. Comparative research on this topic is often however highly structural in nature and does little to address questions of agency. This work seeks to link the traditional regional science approach to questions of potential advantages of local diversity with a more bottom-up view of the creative process. From a theoretical perspective this involves incorporating the social psychology literature on the creative process as well as concepts from social network analysis with more aggregated spatial notions of creativity and diversity. More specifically, it addresses how different knowledge is connected through social interaction and how this fuels the creation of new ideas and ultimately creative economic activity. A number of empirical innovations are made in order to test these theoretical constructs beginning with an agent-model/simulation which illuminates how social networks form and evolve over space and time. These artificial networks suggest how agents embedded in diverse local contexts have a creative advantage by possessing greater access to a variety of knowledge. Subsequent statistical analysis of large secondary datasets seeks to provide external validity to the agent-model. The first demonstrates a strong relationship between local diversity and the concentration of creative economic activities across 140 Canadian city-regions. A key implication of this finding is that local diversity is more closely associated with certain types of economic activity, rather than overall economic performance. The second statistical analysis uses the Canadian General Social Survey to compare the social network characteristics of individuals. This analysis shows that people engaged in creative industries and occupations tend to have larger, more dynamic, and more diverse sets of social relations than any other category of worker. The dissertation concludes with a model that suggests policy interventions should focus on developing local environments that provide the necessary conditions in which creative activity can thrive, rather than attempting to intervene directly in the creative process itself.

This research explores the agency and positioning of cultural workers in the restructuring of contemporary cities. This positioning is ambiguous. Cultural workers often lead precarious professional lives, yet their significant symbolic and cultural capital is widely mobilised in the service of neoliberal urban restructuring, including ‘creative city’ flagship developments and gentrification. But cultural workers’ actual agency, their reactions to urban processes that exploit their presence, and their relations to other urban social groups, are poorly understood and hard to decipher. This thesis addresses these issues through three articles. Paper I examines a process of artist-led gentrification ongoing in Bushwick, Brooklyn, New York. It shows that artists, gallerists and other members of the local art scene contribute to sustaining gentrification through their everyday practices and discourses. The gentrification frontier is constructed on an everyday level as a transitional space and time in the scene members’ lives. Gentrification is de-politicised by discursively underplaying its conflictual components of class and racial struggle. Forms of resistance to gentrification amongst scene members are found, but they appear to be sector-specific and exclusive. Finally, scene members tend to fail at establishing meaningful relationships with long-time residents. Paper II brings the perspectives of long-time residents in Bushwick to the forefront. Examination of the emotional and affectual components of displacement reveals that these aspects are as important as material re-location to understanding displacement and gentrification. The encounter with newcomers’ bodies in neighbourhood spaces triggers a deep sense of displacement for long-time residents, evoking deep-rooted structural inequalities of which gentrification is one spatial expression. Paper III examines the case of Macao, a collective mobilisation of cultural workers in Milan, Italy. There, cultural workers have mobilised against neoliberal urbanism, top-down gentrification, corruption, growing labour precarity and other regressive urban and social issues. The paper considers the distinctive resources, aesthetic tactics and inaugurative practices mobilised and enacted in the urban space by Macao and it argues that by deploying their cultural and symbolic capital, cultural workers can reframe the relations between bodies, space and time, and hence challenge power structures. Cultural workers might not have the power to determine the structural boundaries and hierarchies that organize urban society, including their own positioning in it. Nonetheless, through their actions and discourses and subjectification processes, they can reinforce or challenge those borders.

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This thesis describes and analyses how the school sector in sparsely populated municipalities in northern Sweden has developed with emphasis on spatial dimensions and in relation to demographic change and political reforms during the last 20 years. In paper I primary schools were studied in a number of small municipalities in the northern parts of Norway, Sweden, and Finland. The aim of the study was to investigate how the spatial structure of schools has changed, what strategies the municipalities have developed to adapt their schools to changing conditions and what constraints there are to apply the strategies. To answer these questions, semi-structured interviews with municipal representatives were conducted. In paper II, the upper secondary school system was studied. The aim of the paper was to analyse the combined consequences of the school reforms, demographic development and competition on the ability of small municipalities to provide upper secondary schools during the period 1997 to 2015 in the four northernmost counties of Sweden. The study was based on data from the database SIRIS at the Swedish National Agency for Education and has a descriptive approach. The spatial structure of school organizations under study has undergone substantial changes during the recent decades, with closures and mergers among primary schools and an expansion of upper secondary schools. In recent years, the size of the young cohorts have decreased, which overall has led to increasing pressures to close primary schools and has created a detrimental competition between upper secondary schools. The large distances and the already small and declining number of pupils have had major effects on the ability to offer a good range and quality in the supply and availability of education. According to representatives from all the studied municipalities, the ambition is to prioritize the primary schools in the municipal centre and have as few small village schools as possible, taking into consideration quality of education, per capita costs, distances, and how scattered the pupils are within the municipalities. Independent schools and their increasingly larger role have attracted a great deal of attention in media, but this is a change that has mainly occurred in municipalities with large populations and their presence in the studied municipalities is very small both at the primary and upper secondary level.

North American railways were crucial to the integration of national territories from the mid-1850s through the 1920s. In the US, Canada, and Mexico, their development supported population settlement, resource extraction, industrialization, and the expansion of markets to regional and national spatial scales. From the 1920s, rail's dominance in transportation declined as highways and trucking developed. Strict railway regulation and direct government ownership, motivated by earlier rail firm abuses, limited railways' strategic adjustment to trucking competition and aggravated the problems of falling revenue and decreasing profitability. From the 1970s, however, a dramatic shift began as three prongs of economic liberalization were implemented: deregulation of the industry, privatization of state-owned firms, and the liberalization of controls on foreign direct investment. This dissertation characterizes the liberalized governance regimes that have emerged, evaluates changes in the industrial and geographic organization of the freight rail industry, and examines significant episodes of regional rail restructuring involving the dominant Class I firms. Shifts in governance are examined by outlining pre-reform regulatory regimes in the US, Canada, and Mexico, then discussing the step-wise sequence of changes enacted in each country that significantly reduced restrictions on freight rail firms' business options (Chapter III). Liberalized governance enabled changes in the industry's organization, including its firm-size distribution, privatization of state-owned firms, and consolidation, as firms employed hitherto restricted strategies to restructure their assets and activities (Chapters III and IV). Case studies of regional restructuring, designed to highlight the interplay of regulatory governance, intra-industry competition, and firm strategies, include: the consolidation of firms in the Eastern US and the privatization of Conrail (Chapter V); the consolidation of firms in the Western US and the impact of increased rail container traffic on infrastructure and operations (Chapter VI); the expansion of freight rail ownership, investment, and traffic patterns integrating the NAFTA countries (Chapter VII); and comparison of the strategies adopted by CPR and CN, the dominant Canadian firms (Chapter VIII). Research materials included official and trade organization statistics, corporate reports, the trade press, and mapping datasets of rail lines. Numerous maps illustrate the changing geography of the North American freight rail industry.

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Det urbana livet är fyllt av bilder och fyllt av reklambilder. På många reklambilder visas natur, naturen tycks kunna sälja allt. Men vilka egenskaper har naturen i reklamens bilder och vad säger det om naturen i våra urbana sinnen? Kvinnan tycks också ha en given plats i reklamens bilder. Kan det tänkas att kvinnan tillskrivs samma egenskaper som naturen? För att få svar dessa frågor kommer reklamens bilder att analysera. Analysen är en näranalys, i form av bildanalys, med fokus på bildens inre och yttre kontext.</p><p>Naturen kan vara ett rum eller en plats och upplevs som alla andra rum och platser genom våra sinnen. Hur vi upplever rum och plats är ett resultat av rådande kultur. Den urban kulturen påverkar således upplevelsen av naturen. Reklambilder påverkar också vår verklighetsuppfattning och vår upplevelse av naturen. Tidigare har det gjorts studiet om naturens egenskaper i resereklam och bilreklam. Mitt resultat har dock inte gått att helt förena med tidigare studier vilket visar bredden i ämnet.</p><p>Fyra reklamkampanjer har valts ut för analys; Loka, Lumené, Bregott och Alprosoya. Alla är produkter som används i vardagen och kampanjerna kan sammanfattas som dagligvarureklam. Naturen och kvinnan bär på snarlika egenskaper i kampanjernas bilder. Båda är goda, harmoniska, starka och eviga. Den urban kulturen har gett bilderna kraft att reducera naturens (och kvinnans) egenskaper till upphovsmannens syfte. Den imaginära geografin tar allt större plats i vår kultur.</p><p> </p>