One response to the increasing pressure of urban living is in the re-appropriation of public spaces and urban green to help sustain and enhance the environmental, social and cultural life of cities. But a major paradox arises here: while they are increasingly leaning on voluntarist discourses of sustainability, the pressure of privatization, the implementation of risk-based policies and the general principles of consumer-based urban economies only scarcely fit with the notion of common, public spaces, and hardly accommodate with the freedom of their users or their alternative or even subversive occupation. Using an explicitly anarchist analytical lens and based on extensive fieldwork in Birmingham and Belfast (UK) and Amsterdam (NL), this thesis uses an ethno-geographic approach, consisting mainly of documents and policy analysis, semi-structured interviews and field notes to replace urban green commons in their broader spatial, social and political networks. It demonstrates how sustainability is a consensual but ultimately undetermined political object. Emerging co-operative processes of environmental governance and stewardship are identified and traced to the development of a new category of actors and networks. The potential of urban green commons to foster more resilient, socially inclusive cities is assessed alongside the need for radically re-politicized urban environments.

Research into coworking has failed to take space seriously. I address this concern by analysing three ‘coworking spaces’ as meeting places constituted as a ‘bundle of trajectories’, following Doreen Massey’s (2005) reimagining of space. Understood as the product of lively interrelations and coexisting heterogeneity, I examine claims that these pay-to-access shared workplaces create the conditions for happenstance meetings between ‘like-minded entrepreneurs’. In doing so, I make connections with feminist and poststructural geographies concerned with relational performances, working bodies and diverse economic practices (Gregson and Rose, 2000; McDowell, 2009 and Gibson-Graham, 2006a; 2006b). By researching through coworking, I make three interconnected arguments. Firstly, despite attempts to separate spaces of home and work, these boundaries are continuously negotiated and contested. Secondly, amidst claims that these architectural spaces are designed to feel like ‘fast-paced laboratories’ orchestrating chance encounters, I insist that embodied experiences can be far more ambiguous. Thirdly, I consider how the performative ontologies of diverse economies might fracture and infect the coherence of these apparently ‘entrepreneurial’ spaces. Together, this brings a new perspective to recent geographic scholarship on architectural inhabitations addressing concerns that there has been limited attention towards human subjectivities.

While many countries in the West have been broadly pursing policies of deinstitutionalisation since the latter half of the 20th Century, orphanages remain the norm for many countries. Orphanage research has often tended to be conducted through a bio-psychological lens, and there remains little qualitative research to reveal the nuances of micro-scale practices taking place within these institutions. This thesis employs a multi-sited ethnography and explores the orphanage as a complex institution influenced by Soviet and Post-Soviet practices of childcare. In particular, this research draws upon an ethnography conducted in an orphanage for children with severe intellectual disabilities. The thesis considers the multiscalar nature of this institution and explores childhood mobilities, agency and elements of discipline and control within the institution, destabilising the notion of the orphanage as an environment of care. This research addresses significant empirical lacunae in human geography and studies of post-socialism through an ethnographic study of Russia's disability orphanages. This research also challenges understandings of mobility in children's geographies by drawing upon theories of coerced and disciplined mobility. Finally, in highlighting the vulnerability of these children, this thesis develops the concept of 'contingent agency' to provide a more nuanced understanding of agency in children's geographies.

This thesis presents a comprehensive institutional analysis of China’s urban tap water provision system from a ‘source to sip’ holistic research perspective. With the examination of each agent’s function in the system, this thesis coins the concepts of semi-potable tap water and Hybrid Institutional Architecture to illustrate the essence of China’s urban water provision system as a ‘source to consumer’ semi-potable tap water provision system. Based on this argument, the concept of Consumer Coping Strategy Matrix is established with analyses of its seven facilitating factors to explain Chinese tap water consumers’ involvement in the potable water production. Their activities have established a ‘consumer to sip’ potable water production process, functioning as a compensation to ‘source to consumer’ urban semi-potable tap water provision system. The combination of these two systems is a ‘source to sip’ urban potable tap water provision system. This thesis also provides a detailed analysis of the three institutional inconsistencies in this system, arguing that they have filled the Hybrid Institutional Architecture with internal inconsistencies, which makes semi-potable tap water an inevitable outcome of Hybrid Institutional Architecture. Meanwhile, this thesis illustrates the concept of Consumer’s Normalisation to semi-potable tap water, the Hybrid Institutional Architecture and Consumer Coping Strategy Matrix, arguing that such normalisation has disguises and justified not only the existence of the aforementioned concepts, but also the existence of the latent social injustice and consumer’s powerlessness. All of these analyses contribute to the form of consumer’s institutional distrust in semi-potable tap water. With this institutionalised distrust, an imbalanced dialectical relationship between the Hybrid Institutional Architecture, the Consumer Coping Strategy Matrix and water crises will turn consumer into the trigger of sociogenic water sustainability crises. A detailed case study of Harbin is presented to demonstrate the two sociogenic water sustainability crises occurred in Harbin with archival data and the establishments of contingent combination model, and the Hybrid Institutional Architecture of Harbin’s urban tap water provision system with examining interview materials from four senior officials of key departments.

Everyday occupations have mainly been studied in the fields of occupational therapy and occupational science within a Western context. Research has mostly focused on individual occupations of people with disabilities, and findings were mostly interpreted within Eurocentric and human-centred perspectives that misrepresented marginalised communities and their daily lives. Aiming to reduce some of this gap in knowledge, I set out to explore everyday activities of olive farmers in the occupied Palestinian territories (oPt). My ‘liminal’ positionality of being a Palestinian living and working in the UK enabled a bridging between Palestinians’ ways of life in the Global South and occupational science as a Global North perspective. I posed two research questions: How do the structures, policies and practices of Israeli settler colonialism and its military occupation influence the daily activities of olive growing communities in the oPt? What are the means that communities adopt to enable the daily occupations of olive farming to continue? I wished to study the motivations and principles for the activity of olive growing which were used as active responses – or resistance – to occupational injustices caused by settler colonialism. I designed a study that adopted de-colonial ethnographic methods. Field trips were carried out throughout the olive growing cycle, during which 11 in-depth interviews were conducted with – and observations made of – participant families and individual participants. An iterative (inductive and deductive) thematic analysis and an ‘intercultural translation’ (Santos, 2014) resulted in identification of themes, which were analysed in relation to Wilcock’s ‘occupational determinants of health’ (2006). Sutra expressed the Doing for Well-being principle of olive growing, A’wna was identified as the collaborative aspect of the activity, or the Doing for Belonging to land and people, and Sumud – as a third principle of action for olive growing – means that olive farmers do this activity for Belonging and Becoming, or as a resistive daily act. Sutra-A’wna-Sumud were collectively conceptualised as Everyday-Forms-of-Resistance (to occupational apartheid), were found to extend occupational sciences’ notions of Doing-Being-Becoming-Belonging, and illustrated communal Palestinian ways of knowing and resisting. Sutra-A’wna-Sumud demonstrated a set of means of action and interpretation that move beyond the individual as the main area of concern, and perceive human communities as a continuation, and in mutual relation to, their environment. This study provides insights, learned from a Global South group, on specific manifestations of occupational apartheid, a unique collective occupation (olive growing) and an occupational consciousness (Sutra-A’wna-Sumud/ Everyday-Forms-of-Resistance) that was employed to counter occupational apartheid. This is hoped to widen occupational science’s and occupational therapy’s understanding of people, their environments and occupations, which will be useful in other fields of study concerned with humans, their daily activities and their well-being.

This thesis explores the variety of barriers to accessing microfinance that people with disabilities in Uganda experience. The research is based upon both quantitative and qualitative data collected in the capital Kampala in 2014, and comprises of 223 questionnaires with people who have a permanent physical disability and 26 interviews with representatives of both microfinance institutions and disabled persons organisations in Uganda. Analysis of the quantitative data suggests that people with disabilities are able to access credit from formal financial providers such as commercial banks, microfinance institutions and savings and credit cooperatives, but at lower rates than the national average. Despite dominant narratives of microfinance which promote it as means to reduce financial exclusion, just 5% of the survey sample of people with disabilities had gained access to credit through a microfinance institution. The thesis goes on to examine the multitude of factors which impact the ability of people with disabilities to access such services, including the affordability of credit, the design of financial products, physical accessibility, social discrimination and self-exclusion. It also provides an assessment of the ways in which such barriers may be reduced, for example, through the employment of field agents, greater utilisation of mobile money platforms and the design of specific products targeted at people with disabilities. In addition, the research considers the impact that commercialisation has had on the microfinance sector in Uganda, and in particular the effect a move to a for-profit model has had on the accessibility of microfinance for people with disabilities. The thesis concludes by offering specific recommendations to reduce barriers to access, including collecting increased levels of data on current usage of small-scale loans by people with disabilities, strengthening relationships between disability organisations and microfinance institutions, and more rigorous enforcement of the existing Federal disability legislation in Uganda.

This thesis explores the origins and logic of the interplay between landscape and public policy in the Caribbean island of Tobago. Tobago is the location of the world's oldest protected tropical forest, established in 1763. This was the first but by no means the last occasion when particular policies have been formulated to regulate the relationship between land, commerce and people in Tobago. The thesis traces the emergence of particular ethics of land use and property in the Tobago from 1763 up to the present day and their interplay within the logic of policy. The central research aim was to analyse the disjuncture between the intention of government development plans in Tobago, and the actual outcome of those plans for the people and landscape. This was approached both by ethnographic field study, and by archival and oral historical work that could discern the historical development of the language of modern policy. The project involved the writing of an environmental history of Tobago and an ethnographic account of debates and trends in contemporary environment and development policy in Tobago. The fieldwork revealed many gaps in the existing literature with respect to Caribbean environmentalism and the history of Caribbean landscapes. The detailed archival research, coupled with a revised theoretical frame that it supports, should reframe and improve modern debates concerning environment and tourism. Drawing together the findings of the thesis research is intended to help form a new understanding of the origins of contemporary Caribbean policy processes, the beliefs from which they derive, the debates they generate and their interaction with the physical environment.

This thesis examines the interrelationship between migration and gender, exploring the migration trajectory of Ghanaians in London from their motivation to migrate, their settlement patterns and their transnational activities. The study specifically investigates two main questions: firstly, if and how patriarchal gendered ideologies and relations are influenced by the new migration space and how gender interacts with other social differences (e.g. class, nationality, education, legal status) to reconfigure gendered patterns of behaviour in the country of destination? Secondly, how do gender ideologies and practices influence the maintenance of transnational links with migrants' home country and vice versa? The study adopts a multi-sited ethnographic approach to gain an insight into the experiences of migrants. It demonstrates that paid employment, contextual factors and social differentials simultaneously reinforce and transform patriarchal gender relations in different social spaces. The thesis argues that the international division of labour, institutional challenges and socio-economic factors in the new social space of London provide different dilemmas for migrants. These opportunities and constraints lead to contestations and renegotiations which require that migrants reconcile earning with caring. This in turn leads to changes in the relative power and status of women and men in the host country. This study distinguishes the factors leading to gains and losses; shows that Ghanaian migrants are gendered actors; and contributes to disaggregating the persistence or transformations in patriarchal gender relations. The man's position as the breadwinner is often significantly challenged undermining his patriarchal authority in the household. Ghanaian women on the other hand have often been able to gain new access to resources, make life choices and participate in decision making in the households thereby being empowered across space and time. The study contributes to current understanding of empowerment processes by focusing on the role of men in this process, maintaining that socio-cultural and economic factors impact the lives and activities of male and female migrants differentially, reconfiguring patriarchal hierarchies and levelling power relations and decision making processes to more egalitarian patterns. It also argues that the formation of transnational families as a result of ‘split marriages' and children being sent back to the origin country for fostering leads to different gendered outcomes for migrant and non-migrant women, men and children. The study shows that responsibility for production, reproduction and socialisation is divided across national borders, with the performance of financial, emotional and practical support, decision making patterns and power relations negotiated in the transnational social space. The study contributes to deepening understanding of the critical nature of the interplay of the private and public spheres in gender dynamics and its interrelationship with migration, and also demonstrates that childcare has a significant impact on the caring and earning roles of parents, the organisation of households and enhancement of gender equality.

Without contention, aerial surveying has been one of the most fundamental and effective tools in archaeological research. The mapping of cropmarks using aerial surveys, which appear over buries features, has revealed tens of thousands of new archaeological sites in Britain in the last few years. Cropmarks have most commonly been found when the weather is dry and in areas where soils drain quickly, causing crops to come under stress due to a lack of water. This knowledge informs archaeologists in the planning of surveys. However, targeting these areas in dry conditions introduces bias into the dataset and the rate of new discoveries is slowing. This research assesses the underlying geotechnical characteristics of soils within and adjacent to buried ditches at four field trial sites, to increase the understanding of why these cropmarks form and the conditions in which they appear. Analysis methods using existing archaeological and geotechnical data have been proposed to increase the knowledge of the conditions in which cropmarks form. The methods have been tested and the results showed that cropmarks formed in areas of clay-dominated soils in wet conditions, and cropmarks were recorded across a much wider range of soil-water conditions than was expected from current knowledge.

Environmental conservation in many parts of Africa has for a long time been a centralized matter in which resource management was dominated by the application of the fortress conservation model which posits a sharp divide between people’s livelihoods and conservation. This highly centralised approach confined environmental decision making to bureaucratic circles and excluded local actors who live within or around conservation areas from participating in the resource governance process. In addition, environmental conservation was concentrated in areas designated as protected areas while human dominated landscapes were assumed to be of marginal ecological value. Over the past three decades, however, the rise of sustainable development as a new construct for environment and resource management has seen the emergence of new conservation strategies that challenge the dominance of the fortress conservation model. In Zambia, in contrast to the exclusionary discourse associated with fortress conservation, the embracing of policies derived from the sustainable development discourse has resulted in the adoption of new conservation strategies that emphasise local actors’ participation in resource management and extend conservation policy and practice to agricultural environments. In this regard, this thesis examines the changing nature of environmental conservation in Africa, using the case of Zambia. In particular, the research questions the way in which the new strategies are being contextualized and translated into practice at the local level. It examines the extent to which the new strategies represent the realities and interests of local actors who interact with environmental resources on a day-to-day basis. Drawing on political ecology and livelihoods’ perspectives, the research uses two local level studies from Chongwe district of Zambia to examine this shift in the direction of natural resource policy and practice. By combining insights from political ecology and livelihoods thinking, it links a critical review of conservation discourse and policy with field level studies and thus provides an enhanced understanding of processes of society-environment interactions. While the findings show a definitive shift in policy rhetoric from fortress conservation to sustainable development, the translation of sustainable development initiatives into practice is fraught with both conceptual and practical difficulties, such that the initiatives are far from representing the realities and interests of local actors.