Broadly speaking, we deal with government activities and their migration-related consequences in this dissertation. There are two parts. The first part examines the influence of social welfare provision on individual demands for immigration. In the second part, we study the impact of tight border control on the incidence of labour exploitation in the migrant smuggling market. In Part 1, we theoretically show that the existence of redistributive welfare programmes reduces the difference between individual demands for immigration by creating a common economic interest among heterogeneous citizens. By analysing a survey data set that contains individual responses to immigration-related questions in the European Union, we also study the importance of the perceived impact of immigration on the national labour market and the domestic public finance for the desirable level of immigration. In Part 2, our theoretical model suggests that the government's battle against migrant smuggling may increase the labour exploitation of migrants on average. Furthermore, the common use of social networks by which the information about reliable smugglers is transmitted to potential migrants suggests that the migrant smuggling market may converge to an exploitative state in the long run if smugglers are impatient.

This research aims to address the impact of globalisation on urban development process in the context of global South, through the case study of the socio-spatial dimensions of retail areas in three provincial Thai towns over the last 50 years. Contemporary issues of urban growth linked to globalisation have been studied in various disciplines but mostly in relation to large cities. They have been less concerned with the local scale and particularly in the transitional/new urban areas of developing countries with loose planning policies and regulations. The methodology and research design uses two different theoretical frameworks, primarily spatial configuration, and secondarily spatial political economy and the relations between them. The analysis focuses on three main types of data: spatial configuration by applying space syntax techniques; secondary data including maps of urban development over a 50-year time period; and fieldwork observations of physical retail area development and retail behaviour of users through systematic recording and analysis of a questionnaire survey. There are four research questions. The first two focus on the physical and spatial transformation of retail areas in two aspects: the centrality of the town centre (Chapter 5) and urban expansion on the fringe of town (Chapter 6). The last two questions address the relationships between the changing physical and spatial configuration and the political economy, through a particular emphasis on the retail area development (Chapter 7) and retail patterns (Chapter 8). According to the primary framework of the research, the analysis reveals that the spatial structure of towns has been dominated by the road networks and that urban land use has changed over time, which has altered the spatial properties leading to development, decline and redevelopment, as well as spatial segregation in varying degrees, in some areas of the towns. From the secondary framework, the political economic contexts of the sites were identified as significant in terms of generating production and (re)production of urban spaces through the planning policies and practices, which has been mainly through a top-down and static approach to development although there is evidence of some tensions between the local and global political economy. The research contributes to the extension of understanding of the globalisation impact on retail urban development in the global South. The analysis of socio-spatial processes of urban development can be emphasised using the multi-disciplinary approach and framework, as shown in the three provincial case study towns in Thailand. The empirical research findings reveal that globalisation in the global South is not static and uniform but dynamic and complex process, for example, the land use conflict between local and multinational retailers at local level. Notably, this research emphasises the importance of local context consideration in terms of informality, traditionalism, localism which influence the characteristics of place, including patterns of socio-spatial relations within urban retail development.

This thesis aims to enrich academic scholarship by investigating cultural narratives of Italians in Wales from 1920s–2010s. It will make use of sources that have been understudied, such as the photographs of Italians in Wales during the interwar period and local newspapers reporting on the incident of the Arandora Star sinking during the Second World War. It also provides an original contribution to debates on migration, memory and identity drawing on recently emerged sources, such as the accounts generated by second and third generations of Italian migrants about the traumatic experience of the Second World War and the published works by Welsh-Italian authors such as Servini, Pelosi, Spinetti, Emanuelli and Arcari. Finally, this thesis also provides an original approach by comparing these ‘narratives of belonging’ with the representation of the Italian migrant experience in Anglo-Welsh literature.

The purpose of this study is to examine how children of Jamaican parentage, who came of age during the 1980s in Britain and the 1990s in the United States, constructed their identity by using social memory and popular culture. This research project is an interdisciplinary, comparative study that seeks to analyze how the shifting of boundaries, sense of dislocation, and loss of rootedness are grounded in the construction of a new transnational urban Jamaican Black identity, for which I have coined the term yáad/yard-hip hop. Yáad/Yard-Hip Hop characterizes the post-1960s immigrant generation, who found themselves “locked symbiotically into an antagonistic relationship” between their parents’ memories of home and their understanding of self within the socio-political context of Britain and the United States (Gilroy, The Black Atlantic 1-2). The deconstruction of these two narratives exposes the position of this age group as being wedged in-between two temporal spaces. Therefore, the significance of this study serves to demonstrate that the state of ambivalence experienced by this post-1960s immigrant generation not only encapsulated their identity within the period of the 1980s and the 1990s, but can also be viewed as indicative of how Caribbeanness, or more specifically, Jamaicanness, came to be reconfigured outside of the Caribbean region from the 1960s onwards.

The Macpherson Inquiry (1999) was instrumental in forcing into the public domain the issue of police racism, which for decades had been an endemic part of police culture. My thesis, undertaken post Macpherson (1999), examined ongoing tensions in the policing of minority ethnic communities through a case study of policing in London’s ‘Little India’. My thesis highlights the continuing influence of racism in policing, describing a world of policing ethnically diverse communities that is far more complex, variable and contradictory than has yet been documented in the empirical policing literature. I describe how policing in Greenfield was a patchwork of continuity and change, illustrating how, despite the advances the police in Greenfield had made in eradicating overt racism from the organisation, passive prejudice remained rife among officers. Most notably, despite acknowledging Greenfield’s long resident Asian communities as the ‘indigenous population’, officers still had little knowledge about these communities, tending to classify them as ‘Asians’ in a way that obscured, rather than illuminated their diversity. Furthermore, while officers regarded ‘Asians’ as the established communities of Greenfield, new ‘problem populations’ - most notably Somalis, Muslims and travellers - emerged, with officers tending to engage with these communities in antagonistic ways, echoing themes from early studies of race and policing. Yet beneath this somewhat depressing overarching picture of policing, a more complex, contradictory network of attitudes and practice emerged, 3 encompassing both officers who were overtly hostile to ethnic diversity and also examples of inspirational officers committed to reforming the policing of minority ethnic communities. Having described policing in Greenfield, I conclude by discussing the wider ramifications for police legitimacy and democracy in Britain, arguing that until greater emphasis is placed on ensuring that the police support the equitable principles of democracy, the police in Greenfield and other areas will continue to fail the marginalised people who most need their services.

British Pakistani Muslim women of Bradford inhabit a highly mediatised space where contested discourses of gender, ethnicity, culture and nationality take shape. This ethnographic study looks into the ways British Pakistani women in Bradford use television to negotiate and manage identities and identifications (Hall, 1996) in the context of everyday life. Electronic media, especially television, become central to the manifestation of conflicting discourses of belonging to national and transnational communities. The tensions associated with national and transnational identities are negotiated and renewed in the context of everyday life and as women move between the domestic, the ‘community’ and the national sphere. Through an ethnographic lens and an empirical study that took place in a community centre and four households, the discussion unravels these women’s attempts to exercise agency within the intensively restrictive socio-cultural framework where their lives unfold. Most relevant to this thesis is the use of electronic media, especially television. This thesis explores the role of television in three parallel realms: the home, the ‘community’ and the nation. Participants were found to engage with television narratives in their homes, not as passive viewers but as active audiences creating new meanings. Communal spaces were re-imagined through women’s participation in social events and by employing ‘women-oriented’ religious media. Subsequently the women approached their belonging in the national context by contesting their portrayals in mainstream media and by reinterpreting the cultural norms of their parents through the narratives of television. By underlining the importance of Bradford’s locally specific culture and the ways this culture has been influenced by the systemic alienation of working-class ethnic minority families, I argue that women and their narratives of identity and belonging have been radically curtailed. However, active agency and persistent structural negotiations have led many participants to reinvent ethnicity’, thus creating ‘new [rooted, local and yet supra-national] ethnicities’ (Hall, 1996, emphasis mine). The space around television – in its consumption and media talk – provides a platform for engaging with hegemonic discourses of ethnicity, religion, gender and nationality and for reflecting on the limits of these discourses, as well as on the limits of their identities. A strong shared sense of belonging to a community provides the framework to manage these contradictory realities of the socially situated gendered identities. I argue that the role of television is cyclical, in that the meanings created at home ripple into the nation and back via the ‘community’. Media are central to diasporic life and the crises that explicate migrant life are reflected in their media consumption. Within unsettling narratives of being a migrant, the participants seek belonging among the familiar within the mediatised world that surrounds the diasporic life. In this space, identities and identifications are seemingly new, but are born out of the ashes of the old and familiar.

The thesis studies the dynamics of urban residential redevelopment programmes in Seoul and Beijing that have been effectively transforming dilapidated neighbourhoods in recent decades. The policy review shows that neighbourhood renewal programmes saw difficulties in ensuring cost-recovery and replicability in both cities, and that this has led to the formation of residential redevelopment programmes that depend heavily on the participation of real estate developers in spite of social, economic and political differences between the cities of Seoul and Beijing. Based on research data collected from a series of area-based field research visits in Seoul and Beijing between 2002 and 2003, the thesis examines how developer-led partnerships in urban redevelopment take place in different urban settings, what contributions are made by participating actors and how redevelopment benefits are shared among the existing and potential residents in redevelopment neighbourhoods. The main arguments in this thesis are as follows. Firstly, the emergence of profit-making opportunities in dilapidated neighbourhoods forms the basis of developer-led partnership among property-related interests that include the local government, professional developers and property owners. Poor owner-occupiers and tenants in both Seoul and Beijing assume a more passive role. Secondly, local authorities intervene to ensure that the partnership framework works, but this is carried out largely in favour of professional developers and absentee landlords whose material contributions are significant. Thirdly, redevelopment benefits are shared among existing residents in differentiated ways. The most affected in negative ways are the marginalised population whose social and economic status is increasingly threatened by the market risks in times of globalisation, urban growth and redevelopment in the 1990s. This thesis concludes that partnerships in neighbourhood redevelopment do not have benign outcomes for all. Stronger government intervention is necessary in order to safeguard the interests of existing residents in dilapidated neighbourhoods, ensure their participation, and in particular, increase the protection of those increasingly marginalised by the process of redevelopment.

Framed within the context of growing economic changes generated by globalisation in Europe and of the transition towards an increasingly service-based economy and therefore labour market restructuring, the present study investigates the intersecting lived experiences of work, family and belonging of intra-European migrant workers and their families in Rome and London. In particular the comparative examination focuses on the dynamics of mobility and work which Romanian women and men are embedded in and enact within the transnational geo-political space of the enlarged EU, as well as on the mechanisms and processes influencing their transnational mobilities. The analysis, based on a longitudinal multi-sited fieldwork conducted in two European locations – Rome and London - develops within three key institutional sites of migration: labour market, family and “community”/belonging. Within each of these, a specific process of migration is then explored: access to and participation in the labour market, transnational family formation and activities, formation and meanings of belonging/“community” in the two cities. The overall aim is to compare and provide an in-depth account of the various dimensions of Romanian migrants’ experiences in the context of different national and supranational policies, labour market realities, and socio-cultural institutions. Furthermore, the in-depth exploration, which combines narrative interviews and participant observation, provides empirically grounded insights into the existence of variables such as nationality, gender, class, historical experiences and long term individual or collective/family goals, which, together with social and immigration policies, labour market demands, work permit systems, and new geo-political openings of the European Union, are involved in and effectively influence migratory and settlement decisions and practices. As such, the study provides a valuable contribution to the empirical and theoretical advancement of studies on transnationalism in the current evolving space of the EU.

The thesis focuses on the response of the population of the Piedmontese city of Turin to the rise of Fascism and to the regime’s attempts to fascistize Italian society. Key concepts discussed in this thesis include regionalism, identity, local myths, forms of individual and group loyalty, passive resistance, and social mobilization – all factors often mentioned by historians looking at Turin but that have not yet been subject of a methodical study. This thesis also contributes to the ongoing historiographical debate on the nature of Fascist power by arguing that the dictatorship did not manage to fulfill its totalitarian aspirations and that the regime ultimately remained an authoritarian one. Moreover, this thesis highlights the overlooked concept of passive resistance and the way in which this limited the local consensus for the Fascist regime. In order to offer a discussion of the extent to which Turinese society was fascistized, this thesis looks at numerous local social groups, at their attitude towards the regime, and at how the rise of Fascism changed their internal dynamics. The thesis begins with a discussion of the Turinese press, which works as an introduction to the climate of the city during the Fascist period and as a study of local media. The focus then shifts to the traditionalist institutions present in Turin and the way in which these came to terms - or locked horns – with the Fascist regime: the second chapter deals with the royal family and its Piedmontese origins, the third is dedicated to the Catholic Church, and the fourth is a case-study of the two expositions (in 1931 and 1933) of the Holy Shroud (a Catholic relic belonging to the royal family). Lastly, the fifth chapter studies the city’s progressive forces, comparing the ways in which anti-fascist working class and intellectual networks opposed the regime.

This study seeks to understand the implications of the global network of cities for the development of peripheral cities in peripheral regions (D cities) such as Lagos through the growth and expansion of their firms, by comparing the geography of this network with the geography of Lagos firms’ global interactions. A first phase drew a sample of corporate location data spanning 1,625 cities to construct a graph of the global network, subdivided into seven regions and 11 industrial sectors. This was analysed with both visual and computational methods. A second phase involved fieldwork in which senior staff at 20 Lagos firms were interviewed about their firms’ global and regional interactions. The location data thus obtained were used to construct a graph of the network centred on Lagos and spanning 219 cities, analysed in the same way. While intrafirm ties remain important for describing the geography of the global network towards its core, interfirm ties may be increasingly important for describing its geography towards its periphery. Lagos’ interfirm ties reveal that core cities in peripheral regions such as Johannesburg (C cities) play a weaker role than Friedmann’s (1986) “world city hypothesis” suggests, while peripheral cities in core regions (B cities) play a stronger role. Lagos acts like a funnel, taking the products and knowledge developed in B cities and bringing them to market in other D cities. A theoretical framework is constructed, which suggests that rather than seek further ties to the existing core of the network, firms in D cities such as Lagos should broaden their connections amongst other peripheral cities (both B and D cities). This effectively puts their cities at the core of new components within the wider global network, a proposition which resonates with sociologist Immanuel Wallerstein’s (1984) theories of “economic worlds” and with urbanist Jane Jacob’s (1984) argument that “backward cities need one another”.