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Within the UK the concept of the ‘city-region’ has gained increasing prominence in both academic and policy realms, particularly within the inter-related domains of spatial planning, public service delivery and economic development. However, our knowledge on the concept is currently limited in several respects. This includes a paucity of de-tailed accounts of how city-regions are formed and an over-reliance in existing analyses which consider city-regions as contingent responses to globalising economic impera-tives. The main aim of the thesis is to show how powerful city-regional narratives are materal-ised. To achieve this aim the research considers three key theoretical, methodological and empirical issues. In terms of theory, the research considers the role played by processes of narrative construction and institutionalisation in mediating the development of city-region agendas and subsequent material change. Methodologically, it asks how research can be designed to understand the relationship between these processes. Empirically, the research looks to increase our knowledge and understanding of these processes and events within South East Wales. South East Wales was identified as a fertile geographic location for research attention in light of the significant progression of a city-regional debate and the unique social, historical, institutional, and economic characteristics of the area. The research covers a period between 1992 and 2008 and explores the changing geographies of state spatiality and region-building processes operating in and around the case study area. The research approach draws on literature from several disciplines including human geography, political economy, international relations, and urban and regional planning. A three-stage analytical framework was developed to focus attention on particular elements of city-regionalism: i) the narrative construction of the city-region by key stakeholders; ii) institutionalisation of the narratives; and iii) materialisation of the city-region concept. Evidence was generated through the use of semi-structured interviews, documentary analysis and participant observation. The results indicate that greater attention should be given to the specific contexts in which city-regional agendas are promoted, including the roles played by personal relationships and the socio-economic conditions in the hinterland. The results also highlight the role played by the politics of scale as part of city-regional contestation and the tangible links which exist between discursive processes and the materialisation of city-regions.

This thesis aims to understand the politics, implications and interpretations associated with the transfer and mobilisation of sustainability concepts from elsewhere into Abu Dhabi. The emirate's pursuit of sustainability encompasses opportunities and also complexities which require trade-offs and creative solutions amidst the demands of globalisation and the existing authoritarian status quo. Exploring the rationale for the transfer of sustainability concepts from elsewhere into Abu Dhabi and its subsequent mobilisation in the local context expands our understanding of the different mechanisms, processes, platforms and change agents that enable sustainability-driven assemblages to thrive. By juxtaposing theoretical constructs from the academic literature on policy mobility, policy transfer and related governance, against empirical data in the areas of housing, transport, energy and urban design, nuanced meanings and experiences associated with the transfer and mobilisation of sustainability emerge. By situating Abu Dhabi's sustainability developments relationally within the context of the Gulf Co-operation Council (GCC) nations, exploring the historical, social and political factors that have influenced the adaptation and interpretation of foreign sustainability concepts at multiple levels including the institutional level at Masdar and the UPC, this research on Abu Dhabi adds new knowledge to studies on policy mobility. Similarly, solutions that emerge as a result of concepts and actors moving and engaging across time and space expands our understanding of policy transfer processes in an authoritarian context. The nuances of the local context cannot be underestimated, particularly around the assertion of authoritarian power, persisting inequalities, and the forms of knowledge production and governance that emerge.

This thesis investigates the question of how East Asian universities have engaged in urban processes as spatially grounded variegated social processes from the colonial era to recent decades by adopting a comparative urbanism approach. Historically, universities in the US and Europe have been influential urbanisation actors in their hosting cities, having occupied a substantial amount of land. The relationship between a university and its hosting city was often defined as ‘Town and Gown’; that implies an adversarial link, but this traditional relationship has changed. Universities in East Asia have also participated in urbanisation processes in diverse ways since their birth, but the dynamics behind this multi-faceted process has rarely been addressed. Using research data collected mainly from fieldwork in Singapore and South Korea, including 42 interviews and archival records, this thesis highlights the relationship between universities and cities in East Asia, focusing on three distinctive periods: the colonial, developmental, and postdevelopmental eras. In all these enquiries, land ownership by universities acts as a thread that weaves the diverse facets of the role of universities into different periods. The findings of this thesis can be summarised as follows: Firstly, colonialism has been influential in the university-urbanisation relationship. During the colonial era, the East Asian university emerged as a symbolic and political institution in the city. Various colonial and local actors surrounded the colonial universities to promote or fight against the ideology of imperialism, which demonstrates the diverse aspects of colonialism in cities of East Asia. Such legacies of colonialism are still found today. Secondly, the East Asian developmental state is a variegated concept. The university plays an important role in society, but the way in which the university engages with the developmental state has varied across geographies. The developmental state attempted to utilise universities to support rapid economic and urban development, but such efforts were not always successful. This finding challenges the conventional understanding that assumes a homogeneous conceptualisation of the East Asian developmental state. Lastly, the entrepreneurial character of East Asian universities has become increasingly evident while the presence of the state is still visible. Thus the role of East Asian universities in urban processes has also become more diverse and dynamic in the postdevelopmental state since the 1990s. While the entrepreneurial university has a long history in East Asia, the globalised and financialised interests are penetrating the university more actively through various urban development projects. This thesis concludes that there is an emerging need to recognise East Asian universities as land-based institutions playing an influential role in diverse and uneven urban processes. Investigating universities also provides an opportunity to identify linkages between their colonial legacies and contemporary urban processes in East Asia.

This thesis explores Chinese older people’s perception and experiences of ageing and age care in an urban neighbourhood in Beijing China. It is informed by a growing body of theoretical and empirical research regarding ageing and also draws upon research that has made linkage between ageing and place. However, little research has investigated older people’s experiences of ageing in a rapid changing urban neighbourhood and how these environmental changes affect their day to day lives in China. Thus, by conducting 34 in-depth interviews, participant observation in three urban neighbourhoods in urban Beijing and photography produced by the researcher, this study took a social constructionist stance and ethnographic research design to explore older people’s ageing experience in a rapidly changing environment, in this case, the role of the neighbourhood outdoor places in their day to day lives. The findings from this study demonstrate that the Western understanding of AIP is not sufficient to apply to the current social, economic and cultural context in urban Beijing. As the nascent concept of Ageing in place (AIP) has been embedded within broad socio-cultural institutions, numerous institutional legacies and socio-cultural factors directly and indirectly related to AIP serve as the discursive resources that shape and inform individuals’ disputant discourses. These factors not only frame their basic logics, vocabularies and moral reasoning but also shape their structural positions on housing access, pension rights and later-life care. Participants in these three neighbourhoods have been constantly constructing and reconstructing their understanding of ageing and AIP with the wider economic, political, social and cultural influences. These interesting perceptions of and attachment to neighbourhood engagement invite further theoretical reflections, as ageing and age care for older people in China have been greatly influenced by existing cultural norms, as well as new social trends, in a far more complicated and ambivalent fashion than commonly assumed and observers have envisioned.

This thesis consists of four independent chapters on urban and development economics. Chapter 1 looks at the issue of distance and labour outcomes in urban areas of a developing country. It studies the effect of a housing relocation program on the labour supply and living conditions of low-income households across major cities in South Africa. For this, I use four waves of panel microdata collected between 2008 and 2014, and I exploit the arbitrary eligibility rules of the policy with a fuzzy regression discontinuity design to obtain causal estimates. In the short-term of two to four years following relocation, I find that the labour supply of recipient households decreases by one standard deviation, driven mostly by a decrease in female hours. I find evidence of a large increase in distance (km) to economic opportunities. This is likely to be an important factor behind the decline, directly or indirectly through within-family shifts in livelihood strategies. Evidence is limited regarding improvements in housing and neighbourhood quality. Chapter 2 examines how neighbourhoods where children grow up can play a significant part in shaping their opportunities later in life. It provides unique evidence in a developing country context by using the random allocation of households to ethnically segregated residential areas during apartheid in South Africa. The main observations come from a panel of young adults aged 14 to 22 at baseline and residing in the city of Cape Town. It covers 5 periods of their life between 2002 to 2009. I focus on black children in families living in former black-only residential areas. I find compelling evidence of neighbourhood effects on labour and educational outcomes in adulthood across deprived neighbourhoods. The differences are more marked for young women, suggesting a stronger hold of social norms and institutions for young men. Location, both in terms of access to jobs and access to higher quality public amenities (schools), social networks and the underlying human capital composition of the neighbourhood are positively correlated to having better socioeconomic outcomes in adulthood. Chapter 3 moves beyond socioeconomic outcomes, to study the relationship between extreme weather events and disease in developing cities. As climate change is making extreme weather events more frequent around the world, urban residents in developing countries have become more vulnerable to health shocks due to poor sanitation and infrastructure. The chapter empirically measures the relationship between weather and health shocks in the urban context of sub-Saharan Africa. Using unique high-frequency datasets of weekly cholera cases and accumulated precipitation for wards in Dar es Salaam, we find robust evidence that extreme rainfall has a significant positive impact on weekly cholera incidence. The effect is larger in wards that are more prone to flooding, have higher shares of informal housing and unpaved roads. We identify limited spatial spillovers. Time-dynamic effects suggest cumulated rainfall increases cholera occurrence immediately and with a lag of up to 5 weeks. Chapter 4 addresses questions related to the local impact of economic policies in developing countries. Specifically, I provide evidence on the local effect of a popular trade policy: export processing zones. The chapter examines the impact of their establishment on the levels of per capita expenditure across Nicaraguan municipalities for the period 1993 to 2009. Using the time and cross-section variation of park openings in a difference-in-differences framework, I find that on average consumption levels increased by 10% to 12% in treated municipalities. Yet, average effects mask significant disparities across the expenditure distribution. The results suggest that the policy benefited the upper-tail the most: expenditure levels increased by up to 25% at the 90th percentile. At the opposite end of the distribution, only the bottom decile registered a positive increase in expenditure levels of close to 10% across the period.

This thesis is an ethnographic study of urban development in Colombo, Sri Lanka. Drawing on 12 months of fieldwork, this manuscript explores the way that the city of Colombo is increasingly being re-imagined by policymakers, developers, government officials and elite residents as a “global city” similar to Singapore or Dubai. As my multi-sited project demonstrates, however, these visions of the new Colombo are far from being the current reality. Through chapters exploring diverse corners of Colombo including: a suspended Chinese-funded waterfront development project; a coastal fishing enclave; a new marketplace opened under the former government; and the city’s luxury apartment buildings, this thesis offers insight both into the varied forms of dispossession faced by the urban poor and working class as well as the aspirational projects designed to appeal to the Colombo elite. I argue that the primary principle governing Colombo’s urban development is the idea of “hubness,” an aspirational trope which emphasizes connection and mobility, especially across the Indian Ocean region. Rather than taking its island geography as a sign of insularity, many Sri Lankans hope to leverage what is now framed as the country’s “strategic location” to boost its appeal and transform Sri Lanka – and by extension, Colombo – into a major global hub connecting Asia, Africa and the Middle East. I argue that hubness as an ideal is both a spatial and temporal claim. Rather than being a self-evident statement of geography, hubness discourse is also a specific understanding of futurity. These complex entanglements of spatiality and temporality are present in each site. The ethnographic findings presented in this thesis point to the need to reconsider global city making as a process suffused with uncertainty, rather than as a straightforward, linear evolution. Global cities, I suggest, are not fixed or static entities, but contingent urban forms which are actively created as material and symbolic entities through various forms of dispossession and aspiration.

This thesis challenges established scholarship on fan cultures—based on foundational assumptions of fandom as an ‘imaginary community’ (Hill, 2016) bounded off from the mainstream—on a theoretical and methodological level. It traces these assumptions to canonised theoretical frameworks of Bourdieu’s (1984) economistic concept of cultural capital and to a lesser extent Foucault’s (1966) heterotopic spaces of otherness, and breaks with this tradition by placing fan/scholar practices in relation to the overarching socio-cultural structures and ideologies they remain part of. By synthesising a new theoretical framework from Bourdieu’s (1977) system of dispositions (habitus) and Foucault’s (1977) disciplinary notion of the panoptic sort (Gandy, 1993), I shift focus from mapping fandom to exploring scholarly sorting practices and the dispositional attitudes they serve. This not only explores naturalised fan scholarship practices, but also provides a means for scholars to move away from them. I then examine two academic case studies, analysing scholarly discourse of the BBC’s Sherlock and Disney’s Marvel Cinematic Universe, chosen for their cultural omnipresence and abundance of scholarly discourse. Each case study is contrasted with over 400,000 words of discourse collected from 400 participant accounts through the transnational, multi-sited, ethnographic ‘Views on Fandom Project’. Through this triangulation, I demonstrate that scholar-fans implicitly draw from established brand, media, and fannish discourses, resulting in accounts that uncritically reproduce established, neoliberal value systems as the natural order of things. Through new theoretical pathways opened up by the framework of disposition and panoptic sorting—Sloterdijkian (2009) spherology and the Archerian (2012) reflexive imperative—I theorise the absence of scholar-fan reflexivity regarding these practices as attempts to maintain dispositional security. Additionally, I demonstrate that by focusing on fan/scholar dispositions, scholarship can break with this tradition of implicitly reproducing established discourses based on assumptions of fandom as bounded and different, and move on to critically analyse the complex relationships between fan cultures and the mainstream.

Venture capital firms are collaborative and location specific actors. A significant source of specialised factor inputs (knowledge, expertise, resources, and finance) for investing in new high tech companies are large corporations, making them potentially complementary partners for independent venture capital firms in collaborations from which considerable value adding capacity might be derived. Employing a qualitative approach based on in-depth interviews with 30 London based technology oriented venture capital firm, this study (1) captures and explains the how, why, and under what circumstances do venture capital firms collaborate with large corporations and their corporate venturing divisions, and (2) the role that geographic proximity plays in facilitating this collaboration. Using a cross sector comparison, the core of the research inquires as to the structures employed, and the motivations and conditions for which this collaborative activity is pursued. In addition, it assesses the facilitating role that geographic proximity, and the opportunities and capacities of the London metropolitan region might play. The findings demonstrate that collaboration between venture capital firms and large corporations is increasingly common, but more formal collaborative structures are the exception. Driving this collaboration is the exchange of complementary knowledge for purposes of better investment selection and for improving options for investment exit. Geographic proximity plays a facilitating role and is particularly important during the investment selection phase. While the significance of co-location is somewhat downplayed, collaboration is indirectly facilitated through the innovation capacities and the opportunities for network interaction and international knowledge exchange which the London metropolitan region offers.

This study constitutes the first socio-historical reconstruction of Scotland-based anti-racist formation, spanning the post-WW” period to the present day. Historical in that a chronological map of anti-racist mobilisation is reconstructed; sociological in that anti-racist formation is analytically founded with the purpose of subjecting conceptualisations of ‘racism as a social problem’ to historical scrutiny by tracing its increasing public profile across time. This thesis is concerned with the making of the meaning of ‘racism as a social problem’, an understanding of which is framed by the interplay between anti-racist formation and the policy agenda of the British state. This interplay is contextualised and scrutinised specifically in Scotland, such that the state’s role in defining racism as a social problem is subject to critique. Focus is on the perceived role of ‘race’ and migration as social conflict variables, and state institutions as agents of legitimation, incorporation and regulation. Scotland provides a robust geo-political framework for analysis in that there is explicit recognition that the problem of racism in Scotland has been neglected historically. We have moved from a social policy context in which racism was not given sufficient attention by the Scottish arm of the British state, to a newly devolved institutional set-up which has allowed a significant place to the social problem of racism as specifically a ‘Scottish problem’. The newly devolved Scottish polity’s commissioned anti-racist media campaign – One Scotland, Many Cultures – provides an explicit statement of what the state means when it declares itself-anti-racist, how its agenda informs the signification of ‘racism’, and consequently how ‘racism’ is typified as a social problem requiring state intervention. This study explores ‘problem definition’ with the use of multiple methods of enquiry, including: archival recovery; elite interview; policy analysis; event analysis; media analysis; visual analysis; and audio analysis. Media analysis incorporates representations of anti-racist claimsmaking, which takes a specifically Scottish focus in the Scottish press and is systematised over a particular period ranging from 1994 to 2004. This is supplemented by interviews with anti-racist activists and policy officials, with a specific focus on those who played a key role at an institutional level pre-devolution and those with a close involvement in the development of One Scotland, Many Cultures. This triangulation is grounded via a historical approach which seeks, through archival recovery, to unravel the contextual construction of ‘racism as a Scottish problem’ from 1968 to 2004. This thesis concludes that the devolved polity’s problem typification draws on historical currents specific to representations of ‘racism’ as influenced by Scotland-based anti-racist formation, but adds a new dimension, such that the definition of ‘racism’ is ‘therapised’.