Sudan is the largest country in Africa, but there is poverty and a lack of infrastructure, skills and opportunity despite its substantial natural resources. The capital of Sudan is Khartoum City, located at the confluence of the Blue and White Nile Rivers. Unfortunately development on Nile River Front is limited due to the risk of flooding and erosion. There is a danger that rapid economic development may take place in this unique area without sustainable development planning. This research project aims to develop strategies to protect the Nile River banks by suitable stabilization methods so that development can take place safely. Data has been collected about hydrology, morphology, geotechnical factors, soil classifications, river pattern systems, driving forces, and the main problems restricting sustainable development and engineering works for the Nile River. In addition the following have been reviewed: historical background, existing land uses, current environmental situations, and the economic and social conditions of the study areas. Research identified Cairo, Egypt as a similar case study, where data collected by the author included historical background, current situations, strategic visions and development plan for Nile River Shores. Further information was collected about sustainable development from a general literature review. From these collected data a set of guidelines and indicators for sustainable development was established related to environmental, economic and social factors. Based on those guidelines and indicators, methods of stabilization of the banks for each shore were specified and a proposed development plan was established. Methods of stabilization of banks and the development plan were refined and evaluated to establish a final version of the development plan: Sustainable Development of the Nile River Front (SDNRF) at Greater Khartoum. From refinement and evaluations, barriers and constraints for implementation were specified with their suggested solutions. Finally, conclusions and recommendations related to the SDNRF Manual about development and regulations were established.

This thesis imagines an ecological future for the post-industrial landscape of Govan Graving Docks, situated on the banks of the River Clyde in inner city Glasgow. The research is framed by a context of urban renewal and at times violent change in early 21st century Glasgow which has seen the city’s riverside transformed, with centres for culture, tourism and entertainment built on its infilled docks and sites of dereliction. Prompted by the development priorities of this change, and the nostalgia for an industrial past that has become a ‘way of seeing’ the river, this research seeks to better know the material life of this landscape. On Govan Graving Docks - an abandoned ship repair and fitting facility that remains as yet ‘unresolved’ - this thesis unearths the agencies, temporalities, ecologies and material legacies of a less familiar elemental landscape, and considers how these expressions could be tended and extended in a vision for a different future, focused on fostering new kinds of environmental engagement. The research themes draw insight from emerging theories in new materialism and the environmental humanities, particularly those that are responding to the matter of the Anthropocenic landscape, and they are explored through a repertoire of creative and collaborative field methods crafted with the site of study; variations on ecological performance, landscape and ecological survey work, public consultation, material imagining and sitewriting. These methods are founded on openness and attentiveness, they are opportunist and affirmative in nature, they are practiced on site and taken into the wider estuarine landscape, and they enrol many others beyond the researcher. These methods are first used to explore the expressions of life and vitality that can be found in the Graving Docks’ new ecologies, material memory and more-than-human publics, and then to imagine the creative capacities of these agencies in new configurations of shared possibility. The researcher is another site of investigation: a distributive understanding of agency informs the emergence of an ecological sensibility through material engagement, which has implications both for the design process and the imagined landscape. These resources are used to imagine an alternative future for Govan Graving Docks: it is a vision that works with ruination, re-wilding, and the liquid dynamics of the city; a vision that honours both natural and industrial histories; a vision that is both challenging and necessary, where new experiences of ‘worlding’ in the city are made possible. Through this process of investigation and conjecture, the Clyde imaginary emerges as a space for critical and creative thought; a discursive space where the challenges facing this ecological landscape and its future are explored. This thesis is both a product of, and contribution towards, cultural geographical enquiry, but it also has an interdisciplinary reach both theoretically and methodologically speaking, which enables the research to contribute to a wider debate about environmental futures that is currently taking place across the sciences and humanities. It can be defined as ‘interdisciplinary in practice’ for the way that it brings a wider range or perspectives to bear on a precarious urban wilderness and its associated communities, and seeks to develop a broader repertoire of research methods capable of exploring it’s diverse material world, and the multiple expressions of value that exist therein. Written in a style that has been highly affected by this kind of open and inclusive style of research engagement, the emotive environmental story that is contained within this thesis is open to a wider audience. This thesis identifies the productive role that cultural geography can play in larger environmental debates concerned with the current state and play of ‘life on earth’, and by enacting and engaging ideas related to the cultural landscape, place-based identities/communities/values, and landscape practices, it also identifies the particular conceptual and methodological resources that make cultural geography’s contribution both unique and necessary to these debates.