Jürgen Habermas’ The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere has been described as outdated and incompatible with 21st century democracies. Among other things, Habermas’ initial formulation excluded the state from the public sphere. Recently, a revised model of the public sphere has emerged that positions the state and other law-making bodies at its centre. Although some theorists have embraced this revised model, others continue to exclude the state or oversimplify its role. While some research has examined how parliaments fit into this revised model, no research has been published on this in a Canadian context. This thesis attempts to fill this gap by answering the research question: Does the Canadian House of Commons constitute a form of the public sphere? To answer this question, the Canadian House of Commons is explored along three dimensions of the public sphere – structure, representation, and interaction. This system of classification conforms to the essential function and institutional criteria of classical theory and also accounts for revised models of the public sphere. Ultimately, this work argues that the Canadian House of Commons satisfies the structural and representational dimensions of the public sphere. Its interactional dimension, however, is found to be inconsistent with public sphere theory due to a lack of real deliberation and the pervasiveness of party politics.

The issue of the rising Claremont water rates has been a heated topic of debate over the last couple of years. This study is part of a larger body of literature that seeks to determine the extent to which a location-specific amenity or dis-amenity is capitalized into housing values, and specifically aims to examine the relationship between water rates and home prices in Claremont. To do this, it uses houses in La Verne, where water rates have not been rising as rapidly, as a control group. Specifically, the regression model looks at whether the differences in the water bills between Claremont and La Verne are associated with the differences in the house prices between Claremont and La Verne. In doing so, it also provides an estimate of the price discount faced by houses in Claremont due to the water rate.

In his last book, Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community? Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. wrote about the “world house.” This thesis explores the development of King’s ideas about the relationship between the struggle for civil and human rights in the U.S. and global contests like decolonization in Africa and Asia and the war in Vietnam, which ultimately brought him to the notion of a world house and to forthright opposition to U.S. militarism and neocolonialism. Although the relationship between the U.S. civil rights struggle and U.S. foreign affairs has attracted more interest by scholars in recent years, the tracking of King’s global vision throughout his civil rights career shows how he shifted from a global framework to a national and back to a global perspective. King’s shifts raises important questions about the place of the U.S. in the world and its trajectory of global hegemony.

In his last book, Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community? Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. wrote about the “world house.” This thesis explores the development of King’s ideas about the relationship between the struggle for civil and human rights in the U.S. and global contests like decolonization in Africa and Asia and the war in Vietnam, which ultimately brought him to the notion of a world house and to forthright opposition to U.S. militarism and neocolonialism. This thesis looks at King’s changing understanding and shift of focus of the role of the U.S. government in the nation and the world as he articulated a final global vision of a “world house” of peace, human rights, and economic justice. King’s shifts raises important questions about the place of the U.S. in the world and its trajectory of global hegemony.

A sharp rise in house prices became a political issue in Korea in the late 1980's. It opened a heated debate among scholars and experts on the causes of house price rises. In the debate, a common belief was that high land prices had been one of the main causes of high house prices. In fact, the proportion of land cost in new house prices has steadily increased as the latter has risen in Korea during the past two decades. This research calls into question the notion underlying that common belief that land prices exist independently of housing development. Most policy measures are sought on the basis of this notion. This research argues that land prices are an outcome of conflicts between landowners and developers in the process of housing development. In exploring the idea that the determination of land cost for housing is a result of conflicts between landowners and developers, the research came to the question of what the source of conflicts is, a question of why and how the two actors enter into conflictive relations. It was a suggestion of Marx's concept of rent that surplus profits are the material source of conflicts; the ability of developers to create higher surplus profits provides possibility of landowners to demand more payments for their land; landowners' appropriation of increasingly larger portions of surplus profits then conditions the way developers produce housing; thus both enter into a conflictive and contradictory relationship. It was thus hypothesised that the rising land cost for housing has been primarily a result of that conflicting and contradictory interaction, which is permanently operating in housing development. However, how far and in what forms the conflict affects housing development and the determination of land cost are affected by social mediation of the interaction. Thus the research, the test of the above hypothesis, comprises two parts: the identification of the material aspect of the process by which landowners and developers entered into conflicting relations resulting in increasing land prices for housing as suggested in Marx's concept of rent; and the examination of political and economic circumstances in which social relations between the two actors were conditioned to leave that material process unregulated. This hypothesis was tested with reference to the case of housing development in Seoul during the 1970's and 1980's. The empirical examination disclosed that the rising land cost for housing in Korea has been due to the conflictive nature of the relationship between landowners and developers. Developers have created large surplus profits by exploiting rapidly growing speculative demand for housing and government housing programmes relying on private development; this have provided room for landowners to raise land prices such that increasingly larger portions of new house prices have been allocated to land cost; increasing government intervention have been unsuccessful in controlling this conflictive and contradictory process and the consequent spiral rises in land cost and house prices because of its inability to break from its self-financing housing development strategy; this inability has been due to historical circumstances which, characterised by strong state and weak labour relations and the subordination of finance to industrial capital, have conditioned housing development to be driven by the private appropriation of development gains.

The research methodology comprises theoretical, empirical and evaluation stages.  The theoretical stage provides evidence that substantiates the need for the study and outlines possible ways to address spatial elements in hedonic price modelling.  The empirical stage illustrates the application of GIS and spatial statistics in the estimation of hedonic models for housing markets in Glasgow, Scotland, using 2,715 house prices for 2002 and 61 independent variables.  GIS is used in this study to construct spatial variables including detailed accessibility measures, to help detect the hedonic problems of heteroscedasticity and spatial autocorrelation, and for visualisation.  Spatial statistics are used to test formally and model explicitly the spatial autocorrelation.  The evaluation stage assesses 46 hedonic models, using OLS and spatial hedonic, for <i>a priori </i>segmentations involving the spatial, structural and nested sub-markets.  It also draws general conclusions about the importance of detailed accessibility measures and spatial statistics in sub-market modelling. This study finds that the nested sub-market modelling using a spatial hedonic approach is most effective, followed by the spatial and structural sub-markets.  The OLS sub-market modelling generally reduces spatial autocorrelation but does not eliminate it.  There is a greater incidence of spatial autocorrelation when the market size, with measured by geographical area or density of dwellings is larger.  The spatial hedonic modelling improves the performance of the individual OLS models and the three segmentation approaches, although the relative performance of the latter remains unchanged.  Nevertheless, will the spatial hedonic, the entire market model outperforms the OLS model of structural sub-markets.  <i>Flat</i>-based OLS sub-market models benefit substantially from the spatial hedonic.  The results also suggest that an individual accessibility measure is more significant than the zonal measure because it is able to capture the micro effect of location on price.  Further, spatial statistics produce more accurate, robust and reliable estimates of implicit prices.

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This study demonstrates how the density of a neighbourhood affects its energy demand, metabolism (energy and material flows) and its ability to produce its own energy. Single-family detached houses and row townhouses were each modeled using passive solar housing guidelines with the DesignBuilder building energy simulation software. Energy demand is then modeled within neighbourhoods at two densities based on south facing windows fully un-shaded at 9:00 am, and 12:00 pm solar time on Dec. 21. The neighbourhood metabolisms were then calculated based on location and density. The potential energy supply was evaluated from the spatial characteristics of the neighbourhood (for solar) and the metabolism (municipal solid waste and wastewater flows.) The potential energy demand and supply are then compared for the varying building types and densities to determine the sensitivity of the energy supply and demand relationships.

This study demonstrates how the density of a neighbourhood affects its energy demand, metabolism (energy and material flows) and its ability to produce its own energy. Single-family detached houses and row townhouses were each modeled using passive solar housing guidelines with the DesignBuilder building energy simulation software. Energy demand is then modeled within neighbourhoods at two densities based on south facing windows fully un-shaded at 9:00 am, and 12:00 pm solar time on Dec. 21. The neighbourhood metabolisms were then calculated based on location and density. The potential energy supply was evaluated from the spatial characteristics of the neighbourhood (for solar) and the metabolism (municipal solid waste and wastewater flows.) The potential energy demand and supply are then compared for the varying building types and densities to determine the sensitivity of the energy supply and demand relationships.

国立情報学研究所で電子化したコンテンツを使用している。