This thesis recovers the practice of ‘armchair geography’ as an overlooked, yet significant aspect of the mid-nineteenth-century culture of exploration. These histories are popularly associated with such famed explorers as Dr David Livingstone and John Hanning Speke, who travelled across Africa. Yet, far from the field, there were other geographers, like William Desborough Cooley and James MacQueen, who spoke, wrote, theorised, and produced maps about the world based not on their own observations, but on the collation, interpretation, speculation, and synthesis of existing geographical sources. The dominant historical trope of geography through the nineteenth century is one of transition, shifting from an early modern textual practice of the ‘armchair’ to a modern science in the ‘field’. This thesis challenges such a limited view by demonstrating how critical practices continued to be a pervasive presence in the period 1830–1870, and how these two modes of geography co-existed and overlapped, and were combined and contested. It seeks to dismantle the static binarism that positions the critical geographer as both separate and in opposition to the field explorer. The chapters move to survey explorers that sit; explorers that read; critical geographers that move; books that travel; and libraries that lay out the world. In so doing, it identifies and attends to the unsettled physical and spatial boundaries between modes and methods of geography. It examines the role of the ‘armchair geographer’ in developing geographical thought and practice, and in negotiations concerning credible knowledge at the newly founded Royal Geographical Society. Crucially, this thesis expands the history of ‘armchair’ practices in geography beyond an entertaining tale of ‘conflict’ in exploration, and presents a critical examination of the many spatial manifestations of the ‘field’ and ‘fieldwork’ in geography’s disciplinary identity. This thesis contributes a spatially sensitive account of geographical knowledge making that interrupts and challenges current histories of the development of geography as a field of knowledge and set of practices in the nineteenth century.

This thesis explores a network of international and national non-governmental organisations (NGOs), donors, development subjects and materials, in order to understand the politics of designing mobilities for development. It does this by tracing the flow of second-hand bicycles from their production in the Global North to Namibia, sub-Saharan Africa. An analytical framework of Script Analysis is used to examine the social and technical meanings that are written into second-hand bicycles as they are re-valued for use in the Global South. Following the bicycles to Namibia, the thesis examines how users subscribe to, reject and adapt the bicycles’ social meanings and physical properties in local contexts in order to suit their needs. The thesis finds that the bicycle is prescribed singularly as an object that intends to technologically modernise homogenous utilitarian subjects in inaccessible ‘rural’ Africa. A scene is set onto which an appropriate piece of machinery is inserted. Desirable industrious activities are promoted and less productive practices, such as play, embodied sensory experiences of mobility and identity performance, tend to be discouraged. The thesis finds that with little opportunity for negotiation between designers and users, the needs and desires of Namibian consumers are being dictated. The proscriptions and politics of the network are further compounded by the second-hand materiality of the bikes, which reduce the flexibility of producers to respond to users. NGOs are also operating under pressure to align to the current trends and expectations of donors. Meanwhile, in a local context bicycles are proscribed by sand and thorns, a lack of infrastructure and gender norms, for example. The thesis demonstrates the complexity of design, which goes beyond a linear process, also includes heterogeneous social and material entities that relationally act in conflict with a prescribed and universal ‘tool’ for mobility imagined by NGOs.

There is a large number of underground utilities buried in urban areas, which is one of the most complex networks in the world. It has been estimated that only 50% of buried utilities are accurately recorded. However, failure to identify accurately the location of existing buried utilities results in numerous practical problems, costs and dangers for utility owners, contractors and road users. The underground utilities positioning accuracy requirement is 100 mm for both the accuracy of positioning system and the accuracy of detection devices. While the accuracy up to 300 mm would be acceptable for many respondents. This aim of this thesis is to research various means of improving the accuracy of positioning systems and the accuracy of detection devices for underground utilities in urban areas. GNSS is mainly used to find and record the position of utilities. However, the performance of GNSS is constrained by an insufficient number of visible satellites, poor satellite geometry and multipath in urban areas. The combination of GNSS systems increases the possible visible satellite number. Moreover, the geometry of satellites will be improved by integrating different GNSS constellations. This thesis evaluates the performance of different GNSS constellations such as GPS, GLONASS, BDS and QZSS and multi-GNSS integration in a controlled environment at UNNC and Ningbo city centre. The results provide evidence that using more than one GNSS constellation will significantly increase the availability of GNSS positions and improve the satellite geometry. There are 75% markers (21 out of 28) on campus of UNNC obtained the positioning error within 10cm either by GPS, BDS or GPS and BDS integration. In Ningbo city centre static test, 47% positions (7 out of 15) obtain ambiguity fixed solutions by GPS and BDS. For the underground utilities detection system, this thesis develops a low-cost IMU and odometer integration system to estimate the position of an approximately 30m long test pipeline. Moreover, a tightly coupled integration between IMU and odometer is developed to decrease error caused by the odometer installation attitude error and scale factor error. Besides this, a novel approach to this application of using a Robust Kalman filter is developed to remove the effect of odometer measurement outliers due to wheel-slip. Compared with the loosely coupled integration method, the use of loosely coupled integration with scale factor correction, tightly coupled integration and tightly coupled with Robust Kalman filter provide a horizontal position improvement of 11%, 41% and 43%, respectively. Similarly, the height accuracy is improved by 14%, 50% and 57% before the wheel-slip. The Wheel-slip leads to wrong odometer measurement that makes the positioning results far away from the truth. After applying Robust Kalman filter, the positioning error is reduced to 0.61 m in the horizontal plane, and 0.11 m in the height. Moreover, if using the forward and backward Kalman filter with known start and end positions, the test pipeline positioning maximum error in height is 4 cm, and the maximum horizontal error is 10 cm.

This thesis combines analysis of the political economy of Mexico with the global value chain approach to study the trajectory of the development of the Veracruz cluster and the governance structure of vertical inter-firm relationships in the locality. The petrochemical cluster located in the state of Veracruz is formed by a pool of state-owned and local private companies and is arguably the largest agglomeration of industrial firms in southern Mexico. These firms are linked to one another through output-input relationships. State-owned petrochemical complexes, which are part of Petróleos Mexicanos (PEMEX), Mexico's oil and natural gas company, supply industrial raw materials that local private firms use to process intermediate petrochemical inputs. Empirical evidence demonstrates that state-owned firms exercise a disproportionate degree of authority over input transactions. The latter assertion is illustrated by the fact that PEMEX-Petrochemicals is the only domestic producer (and therefore supplier) of a large number of inputs demanded in the locality. This, along with the hazardous nature of petrochemical inputs and spatial proximity, has contributed to locking local firms into captive transactional relationships. The significance of studying the Veracruz cluster and the nature of inter-firm transactional relationships lies in the fact that both are heavily influenced by drivers inherent in the development path the country has followed in past decades, which is characterised in the first place by the adoption of import-substituting industrialisation (ISI) policies in the 1960s and 1970s and later by the implementation of market-orientated policies in the 1980s and beyond. The discussion is therefore situated in a much broader empirical setting that pays considerable attention to economic, political, and institutional factors. For instance, external determinants such as the extent of state intervention in economic planning in the 1960s and 1970s, the economic liberalisation process embarked on by Mexico in the 1980s and 1990s, the institutionalisation of sectoral regulatory policies, the reliance of the government on PEMEX revenues, and the implications of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), among others, will help us understand the trajectory of the petrochemical industry and the governance of inter-firm transactional linkages in southern Veracruz.

Padang city is a coastal city in Sumatra. Padang is the region that is most likely to be devastated by a tsunami that may occur in the near future. The research estimated that the arrival of a tsunami (ETA) in Padang city could be about 20-30 minutes. Padang city is situated on the very flat liquefiable ground, with approximately 800,000 people in which 50% of residents live in tsunami inundation area. Therefore, it would be difficult to evacuate almost 400,000 people in a short time to a safe tsunami zone. There would not be enough time for people to reach a safe or higher place. The local government has made various efforts to develop local early warning systems and disaster management. These activities include preparing legislation, preparing evacuation infrastructure, building shelters, and preparing resources for government officials and for the community, and other support activities that must be done to anticipate the tsunami hazard. It is recognized that the provision of all infrastructure for evacuation requires a longer period, and is not an easy thing to do considering that Padang city is not a prosperous city, and it has low revenue. In the light of the condition, Padang city needs a tsunami evacuation planning. This study aims to evaluate the process of tsunami evacuation planning in Padang city, Indonesia. The evaluation will be through measurement and assessment of a disaster preparedness index of tsunami evacuation, with the assessment object given by the government and society. To achieve the aim and the objective of the research, the single case study is selected. This study implements a mixed method application, with semi-structured interviews and a questionnaire survey. Content analysis is used to analyse qualitative data, and the descriptive statistics technique is used to examine quantitative data. Based on the results of the survey, it is known that the knowledge of individuals in Padang city is apparently good. It is comprehended by their ability to understand the meaning of the tsunami disaster, the causes of the earthquake and tsunami and their characteristics. Mosque in tsunami zone is the basis in tsunami preparedness, because it has many advantages among them: as a vertical tsunami shelter, as a shortest-fastest way, as a facility to disseminate disaster/EWS and as a facility to educate students. People who work in BPBDs will stay/permanently there for five years. If the displacement remains the case, at least BPBD can recommend an employee who has the capacity in disaster and participates in a forum on the disaster in Padang city. Tsunami evacuation maps must be reviewed, both from the number of maps distribution and the ability and willingness of the public to read maps, the effectiveness of the placement of maps at the intersection and the road.

This thesis is about space, politics and the community. It examines how spatial politics constitutes a community through time. It explores the way that urban governance interacts with community politics, and more importantly, how people can rework politics through spatial practices. The thesis scales down to focus on a case study of Kinning Park Complex (KPC), an independently run community centre that was saved from closure by building users in 1996 following a 55 day sit-in. I track the trajectory of this space since 1996, to investigate the resourcefulness of the community to withstand multiple crises at local and national levels. KPC is a valuable social and political space that continues to exist in, against, and beyond neoliberalism. I focus on the paradoxical nature of KPC, as the space appears in-line with the current government plans to expand third sector projects in a context of austerity, whilst simultaneously striving to function as a non-hierarchical and not-for profit space. It is both an important site of social of reproduction and a symbolic community space. Through participatory methods and ethnographic observations, I have explored the social practices at KPC to investigate what they reveal about social relations and the structural problems that independent spaces face in the context of austerity. I draw upon the theories of Pierre Bourdieu and Jacques Rancière to elucidate the contradictions in their theoretical disagreement by relating their ideas to the rich empirical material that I gathered at KPC. Finally, I draw upon Doreen Massey to bridge this theoretical divide and to provide an essential spatial context to my work. The thesis brings to light the complexities, contradictions and tangible forms of labour involved in simultaneously struggling against, and providing services autonomously from, the state during austere times.

Dry-stone walls in Britain have a rich and enduring landscape heritage: they extend for miles across the countryside but are all too often overlooked. Contrary to common laments that describe walling as a dying craft, this thesis explores the social, cultural and historical geographies which frame walling as a thriving trade and lively hobby. It employs ethnographic and practice-led methodologies (undertaken primarily in Scotland) to understand the embodied, emotional and material dimensions of the dry-stone craft. Methods include observant participation of instructional courses, craft demonstrations and competitions; in-depth interviews with professional and amateur wallers; and, documentary analysis of textual walling material dating from the early 20th century. The thesis considers the place of the rural dry-stone wall and explains how economic, social and cultural developments have led to the construction of dry-stone features within more urbanised locales. In so doing, this research explains how walling has become a socially and culturally diverse activity, enrolled within narratives of contemporary forms of craftpersonship and community engagement projects. By engaging directly with dry-stone walling practice, this thesis also addresses recent disciplinary appeals to explore experimental and participatory approaches to doing research. Taking seriously knowledge acquired through the body, it therefore refigures, in vital and novel ways, how contemporary realisations of historic landscapes and craft traditions are known and understood.

This thesis concerns itself with the excavation of the historical and cultural geographies of the production, circulation, and reception of a grassroots-initiated geography education journal, and of the lives of the people and movement that contributed to its existence. Contemporary Issues in Geography and Education (CIGE) was the journal of the Association of Curriculum Development in Geography (ACDG): a pan-institutional collective of school geography teachers, authors, artists, activists and academics who desired a vision of school geography informed from the political Left, to enable the voices of those excluded from power to be explored and heard, and to offer up an alternative version of disciplinary geographical knowledge-making. Between the publication of its launch issue in 1983 and 1991 when it ceased publishing CIGE produced eight theme issues covering universally significant and highly contentious themes (racism, multinational trade, apartheid capitalism, war and peace, gender, ecological crisis and anarchism) from a humanist and critical perspective, offering critical analyses of the geographies therein and educational resources to utilise in educational training across schools, universities and staff education resource centres. CIGE questioned the spaces though which geographical education perpetuating social inequalities might be encountered (children’s TV through to national press criticism, publishers, subject associations, examination boards and academia). Well enough known during its publishing life and subscribed to nationally and internationally across a range of organisations, many of its contributors subsequently forged significant careers as human geographers within the Anglo-American academy, yet limited reference has been made to the journal post-1991. Recovering the stories of the journal and the people whose lives made the series, brings forth controversies and in turn awkward geographies in recovering how and why the journal series ceased publishing and why there appears to be such omission in historiographic accounts. Employing conceptual ideas pertaining to themes of archival activism, activist archives, navigating the recent past, disciplinary identity-making and geobiography, the thesis illustrates the strengths of ‘slow methodologies’ and the adoption of longitudinal research methods to enable the recovery and corroboration of primary sources, while signposting how mechanisms of contemporary academia (giving seminar workshop and conference papers on national and international scales, writing papers and co-authoring book chapters) through can reactivate engagement with the recovered archives and agitate for further materials to be revealed.

Recently, especially within the last two decades, the demand for DSMs (Digital Surface Models) and 3D city models has increased dramatically. This has arisen due to the emergence of new applications beyond construction or analysis and consequently to a focus on accuracy and the cost. This thesis addresses two linked subjects: first improving the quality of the DSM by merging different source DSMs using a Bayesian approach; and second, extracting building footprints using approaches, including Bayesian approaches, and producing 3D models. Regarding the first topic, a probabilistic model has been generated based on the Bayesian approach in order to merge different source DSMs from different sensors. The Bayesian approach is specified to be ideal in the case when the data is limited and this can consequently be compensated by introducing the a priori. The implemented prior is based on the hypothesis that the building roof outlines are specified to be smooth, for that reason local entropy has been implemented in order to infer the a priori data. In addition to the a priori estimation, the quality of the DSMs is obtained by using field checkpoints from differential GNSS. The validation results have shown that the model was successfully able to improve the quality of the DSMs and improving some characteristics such as the roof surfaces, which consequently led to better representations. In addition to that, the developed model has been compared with the Maximum Likelihood model which showed similar quantitative statistical results and better qualitative results. Perhaps it is worth mentioning that, although the DSMs used in the merging have been produced using satellite images, the model can be applied on any type of DSM. The second topic is building footprint extraction based on using satellite imagery. An efficient flow-line for automatic building footprint extraction and 3D model construction, from both stereo panchromatic and multispectral satellite imagery was developed. This flow-line has been applied in an area of different building types, with both hipped and sloped roofs. The flow line consisted of multi stages. First, data preparation, digital orthoimagery and DSMs are created from WorldView-1. Pleiades imagery is used to create a vegetation mask. The orthoimagery then undergoes binary classification into ‘foreground’ (including buildings, shadows, open-water, roads and trees) and ‘background’ (including grass, bare soil, and clay). From the foreground class, shadows and open water are removed after creating a shadow mask by thresholding the same orthoimagery. Likewise roads have been removed, for the time being, after interactively creating a mask using the orthoimagery. NDVI processing of the Pleiades imagery has been used to create a mask for removing the trees. An ‘edge map’ is produced using Canny edge detection to define the exact building boundary outlines, from enhanced orthoimagery. A normalised digital surface model (nDSM) is produced from the original DSM using smoothing and subtracting techniques. Second, start Building Detection and Extraction. Buildings can be detected, in part, in the nDSM as isolated relatively elevated ‘blobs’. These nDSM ‘blobs’ are uniquely labelled to identify rudimentary buildings. Each ‘blob’ is paired with its corresponding ‘foreground’ area from the orthoimagery. Each ‘foreground’ area is used as an initial building boundary, which is then vectorised and simplified. Some unnecessary details in the ‘edge map’, particularly on the roofs of the buildings can be removed using mathematical morphology. Some building edges are not detected in the ‘edge map’ due to low contrast in some parts of the orthoimagery. The ‘edge map’ is subsequently further improved also using mathematical morphology, leading to the ‘modified edge map’. Finally, A Bayesian approach is used to find the most probable coordinates of the building footprints, based on the ‘modified edge map’. The proposal that is made for the footprint a priori data is based on the creating a PDF which assumes that the probable footprint angle at the corner is 90o and along the edge is 180o, with a less probable value given to the other angles such as 45o and 135o. The 3D model is constructed by extracting the elevation of the buildings from the DSM and combining it with the regularized building boundary. Validation, both quantitatively and qualitatively has shown that the developed process and associated algorithms have successfully been able to extract building footprints and create 3D models.

This thesis is the product of three years' research in the Department of Geography, University of Glasgow. I have spent part of the time in the field and have travelled the western and north-eastern coast of the Mainland, the islands of the Inner Hebrides and the Orkneys islands. The results of my research are here arranged in three parts, Part I comprises a discussion of the shoreline configuration of Western Scotland. A hypothesis of differential submergence is put forth in an attempt to explain the shoreline configuration. Evidence in support of this hypothesis is sought for from the construction and interpretation of a bathymetrical map of Western Scotland and from the study of soundings and of the longitudinal and cross profiles of rivers of the present drainage. I have drawn many profiles of both land and submarine features and calculated the gradients of the river thalwegs and valley sides, with the result that I have arrived at an estimation of the amount of differential submergence. Chapter I and II have been accepted by the Editor of the Geografiska Annaler of Sweden for publication within this year. Part II is wholly devoted for the study of raised shorelines. Of the many areas in which I have observed and examined, I have included only those regions to the raised shorelines of which I have been able to devote adequately detailed study. In describing the field observations, I have used a terminology and working principles which it seemed good to explain in chapter V. In chapters XIII and IX studies of glaci-fluvial deposits have been included, as they are in these two chapters, connected with the discussion of raised shorelines and the physiographical history of the regions. Part III is composed of papers on the present day shore deposits. Perhaps the interpretation of the Ayres of Orkneys and the classification of storm deposits are the more outstanding points in this part. Chapters XI and XII have been published in the Geological Magazine and the Scottish Geographical Magazine respectively and it is hoped shortly to publish chapter X. In the appendix, I have included three short papers.