La planification stratégique correspond à une méthode de planification urbaine moins centralisée que celle de la phase fordiste, adoptée par de nombreuses métropoles afin de s’adapter à la nouvelle donne de la mondialisation, notamment grâce à la circulation de consultants, de rapports et de modèles urbains (comme celui de Barcelone). A Lille, son influence se retrouve dans l’opération emblématique Euralille, dans les stratégies événementielles autour de la culture et dans les principaux documents urbains. A Recife, la planification stratégique a moins bénéficié de mises en œuvre concrètes, faute de financements, mais elle a commandé des opérations d’ampleur, liées notamment à la culture et au tourisme en centre-ville. Dans les deux villes, priorité a été donnée aux développements de pôles économiques, tertiaires et industriels. Les dirigeants locaux ont adapté les recommandations stratégiques, en développant des formes de gouvernance spécifiques et participatives : on décèle dans les deux villes la mise en place d’une double échelle de planification, stratégique, d’un côté, participative, de l’autre, Recife exprimant cette séparation de façon très aboutie. Les effets de la planification stratégique ne sont pas homogènes. Ils ne se réduisent pas à une organisation de la ville par le marché, puisque des municipalités de gauche en ont tiré profit pour enrayer leur déclin urbain sans s’aliéner leur population. Pour autant, les effets sur la ségrégation socio-spatiale semblent plus nuancés, les métropoles lilloise et recifense présentant des tendances au renforcement de la fragmentation socio-spatiale. / Strategic urban planning is a method, less centralized than in the Fordist phase, chosen by many cities to adapt themselves to the new situation of globalization. It has spread around the world particularly through the circulation of consultants, reports and urban models (like Barcelona). In Lille, its influence is reflected in the Euralille iconic operation, through great cultural events and in major urban documents. In Recife, although strategic planning lacked of concrete implementations because of resources shortage it allowed large-scale operations, particularly related to culture and tourism to be ordered in the city center. In both cities, priority was given to the development of tertiary or industrial clusters. Local leaders adapted the “strategic“ recommendations. In particular, they developed specific and participatory forms of governance. In both cities, the introduction of a double-scale planning can be highlighted, strategic on one hand, participatory on the other. Recife has gone futher in this direction. The effects of strategic urban planning are not homogeneous. They cannot be reduced to a market-oriented city planning as left-wing municipalities have taken advantage of it to stop their urban decline without alienating the population. However, the effects on the socio-spatial segregation appear to be more nuanced, as we can observe stregthening trends of the socio-spatial fragmentation in both cities.

Philosophiae Doctor - PhD / This thesis undertakes an analysis of how six published works by the South African writer Ivan Vladislavić form the perspective of writing the city – Johannesburg – into being. Beginning from the basis that Vladislavić’s writing constitutes what I have coined dialogic postcolonialism, the thesis engages with both broader contemporary urban and postcolonial theory in order to show the liminal imaginative space that the author occupies in his narrations of Johannesburg. Underlining the notion of postcolonialism being a “work in progress” my thesis problematises the issue of representation of the postcolonial city through different aspects like space, urbanity, identity and the self, and thus locates each of the texts under consideration at a particular locus in Vladislavić’s representational continuum of the continually transforming city of Johannesburg. Until the recent appearance of Mariginal Spaces – Reading Vladislavić (2011) the extant critical literature and research on the writing of Ivan Vladislavić has, as far as I can tell, not engaged with his work as a body of creative consideration and close analysis of the city of Johannesburg. Even this latest text largely consists of previously published reviews and articles by disparate critics and academics. The trend has therefore largely been to analyse the texts separately, without treating them as the building blocks to an ongoing and perhaps unending project of imaginatively bringing the city into being. Such readings have thus been unable to decipher and characterise the threads which have emerged over the period of the writer’s literary engagement with and representation of Johannesburg. I suggest that, as individual texts and as a collection or body of work, Ivan Vladislavić’s Missing Persons (1989), The Folly (1993), Propaganda by Monuments and Other Stories (1996), The Restless Supermarket (2006 – first published in 2001), The Exploded View (2004) and Portrait with Keys: Joburg & what-what (2006), are engaged in framing representations of the postcolonial city, representations which can in my view best be analysed through the prism of deconstructive engagement. To this end, the thesis examines contemporary South African urbanity or the post-apartheid metropolitan space (as epitomised by the fictive Johannesburg) and how it is represented in literature as changing, and in the process of becoming. As a consequence, the main conclusion I arrive at is on how the irresolvable nature of the city is reflected in the totality of Ivan Vladislavić’s writing. In that way, it was possible to treat every text in its own right (rather than forcing it to conform to an overarching thesis). This central insight allowed for the effective application of urban theory to the close readings of the texts.

This study is concerned with how illiteracy impact consumers when navigating through the market place to have their needs met.These effects are researched in the Kumasi metropolis in the Ashanti Region of Ghana. The overall goal of the thesis is to investigate the problems that functionally illiterate consumers encounter when navigating through the Marketplace.The results show that functionally illiterate consumers at the Kumasi metropolis do face problems when navigating through the market place and that these problems are related to the retail marketing mix such as product, price, place, people, promotion and process.

Este trabalho teve por objetivo analisar a percepção sobre saúde e meio ambiente de moradores do município de São Paulo. A pesquisa foi desenvolvida na região da Capela do Socorro, bairro da periferia da zona sul da cidade, emarcada pela Lei de Proteção aos Mananciais em virtude da localização, na área, dos reservatórios Billings e Guarapiranga, que abastecem a região metropolitana de São Paulo. A metodologia utilizada foi qualitativa, baseada na coleta de entrevistas junto aos moradores da Capela do Socorro, tendo em vista captar as suas percepções sobre o tema. As categorias de análise, que aparecem nos resultados deste trabalho, foram estabelecidas a partir dos estudos previamente desenvolvidos e das diversas referências contidas nos depoimentos. Os resultados indicaram, também, que esses moradores apresentam uma concepção própria, coletiva, sobre as questões de saúde e ambiente, referenciadas em suas condições concretas de vida. A pesquisa buscou captar o quê pensa o morador da periferia da região metropolitana de São Paulo a respeito da produção social da saúde e do meio ambiente. / This master dissertation has the aim of analysing the self-perception over health and environment relationship by the inhabitants from Capela do Socorro neighborhood, São Paulo, Brazil. The region is protected by Water Source Protection Law, due the location of both Billings and Guarapiranga reservoirs. The research was done using qualitative methods throughout the answers given to the researcher by the area residents. The results have appointed a very unique perception over the teme based on their own way of life, showing an overview about the thoughts of the area residents regarding social production of health and environment.

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The main goal of this thesis was to design and implement a tool that would be able to classify the sequences of the 16S rRNA gene into taxonomic categories using the properties of the 16S rRNA gene. The created tool analyzes all input sequences simultaneously, which differs from common classification approaches, which classify input sequences individually. This tool relies on the fact that bacteria contain several copies of the 16S rRNA gene, which may differ in sequence. The main contribution of this work is design, implementation and evaluation of the capabilities of this tool. Experiments have shown that the proposed tool is able to identify the corresponding bacteria for smaller datasets and determine the correct ratios of their abundances. However, with larger datasets, the state space becomes very large and fragmented, which requires further improvements in order for it to search the state space in an efficient way.

This thesis investigates dierent types of Monte Carlo estimators for use in computationof chemical system, mainly to be used in calculating surface growthand evolution of SiC. Monte Carlo methods are a class of algorithms using randomsampling to numerical solve problems and are used in many cases. Threedierent types of Monte Carlo methods are studied, a simple Monte Carlo estimatorand two types of Markov chain Monte Carlo Metropolis algorithm MonteCarlo and kinetic Monte Carlo. The mathematical background is given for allmethods and they are tested both on smaller system, with known results tocheck their mathematical and chemical soundness and on larger surface systemas an example on how they could be used

Rare events play a crucial role in our society and a great effort has been dedicated to numerically study them in different contexts. This thesis proposes a numerical methodology based on Monte Carlo Metropolis-Hastings algorithm to efficiently sample rare events in chaotic systems. It starts by reviewing the relevance of rare events in chaotic systems, focusing in two types of rare events: states in closed systems with rare chaoticities, characterised by a finite-time Lyapunov exponent on a tail of its distribution, and states in transiently chaotic systems, characterised by a escape time on the tail of its distribution. This thesis argues that these two problems can be interpreted as a traditional problem of statistical physics: sampling exponentially rare states in the phase-space - states in the tail of the density of states - with an increasing parameter - the system size. This is used as the starting point to review Metropolis-Hastings algorithm, a traditional and flexible methodology of importance sampling in statistical physics. By an analytical argument, it is shown that the chaoticity of the system hinders direct application of Metropolis-Hastings techniques to efficiently sample these states because the acceptance is low. It is argued that a crucial step to overcome low acceptance rate is to construct a proposal distribution that uses information about the system to bound the acceptance rate. Using generic properties of chaotic systems, such as exponential divergence of initial conditions and fractals embedded in their phase-spaces, a proposal distribution that guarantees a bounded acceptance rate is derived for each type of rare events. This proposal is numerically tested in simple chaotic systems, and the efficiency of the resulting algorithm is measured in numerous examples in both types of rare events. The results confirm the dramatic improvement of using Monte Carlo importance sampling with the derived proposals against traditional methodologies: the number of samples required to sample an exponentially rare state increases polynomially, as opposed to an exponential increase observed in uniform sampling. This thesis then analyses the sub-optimal (polynomial) efficiency of this algorithm in a simple system and shows analytically how the correlations induced by the proposal distribution can be detrimental to the efficiency of the algorithm. This thesis also analyses the effect of high-dimensional chaos in the proposal distribution and concludes that an anisotropic proposal that takes advantage of the different rates of expansion along the different unstable directions, is able to efficiently find rare states. The applicability of this methodology is also discussed to sample rare states in non-hyperbolic systems, with focus on three systems: the logistic map, the Pomeau-Manneville map, and the standard map. Here, it is argued that the different origins of non-hyperbolicity require different proposal distributions. Overall, the results show that by incorporating specific information about the system in the proposal distribution of Metropolis-Hastings algorithm, it is possible to efficiently find and sample rare events of chaotic systems. This improved methodology should be useful to a large class of problems where the numerical characterisation of rare events is important.

Michael Daugherty has created his niche in the music world by composing works inspired by icons of American popular culture. Red Cape Tango is the final movement of his Metropolis Symphony, a work inspired by the life and times of the comic book character Superman. This movement in particular deals with the death of the superhero through the use of musical elements, most notably the Latin Sequence of the Mass for the Dead, Dies irae. Daugherty's ingenuity in blending profoundly dark subjects with humor is particularly evident in this work. Death is personified as a temptress and lures Superman through the power of a seductive tango. This study concentrates on Daugherty's compositional style and its impact in musical circles. A transcription for wind orchestra was created by another composer/conductor precisely because of the need to bring such an important work to another medium, thus making it accessible to a wider audience. In addition, this study looks at the changes in instrumentation necessary to create a second, equally formidable version of the work.

Congestion charging has drawn considerable attention of transport analysts and policymakers as a mean of relieving urban traffic congestion. Proper prediction of the impacts of charging is necessary for policy makers to take right decisions. A European project named SILVERPOLIS have been introduced in this connection to describe state-of-practice in modelling effects of congestion charging and to identify features of transport models that are crucial for reliable forecasting of effects of congestion charging. This master thesis is a part of the SILVERPOLIS project, where Stockholm congestion charging scheme has been analysed using two different types of dynamic simulators: METROPOLIS and SILVESTER. The simulations are based on traffic data collected before and after the Stockholm congestion charging trial performed in spring 2006. The result of simulation suggests that METROPOLIS, which has been used for predicting effects of congestion charging in Ile-de-France, manages well to forecast the consequences of congestion charging for Stockholm. Comparison with SILVESTER model disclosed that, although calibration results of the two models differs in some respect, both models give similar results regarding impacts of congestion charging. The different modelling features and assumptions have been described for the two models. Despite the fact that the two models vary a lot in their assumptions and modelling style, both of them has proved to be good at describing the effect of congestion charging.