As an increasing proportion of the world’s population travels ever-longer distances between their home and place of work, urban mobility networks have had to cope with this dramatic increase in movement. These networks not only occupy escalating amounts of undeveloped land, but also work to re-shape the public spaces and landscapes of the urban realm. The City of Toronto’s mobility (or increasing lack thereof) has an enormous influence on its culture and urban development; the car and its attendant infrastructures heavily govern the city’s growth by supporting urban sprawl. In order to redevelop public space, equalize access to mobility, and improve the way we move through the city, a new system of infrastructure is required; one that can negotiate through an asphalt-dominated landscape while creating a sustainable transport alternative. This thesis proposes new mobility networks as strategies of intensification through a repositioning of the bicycle and by prioritizing its supporting infrastructure along existing underutilized service lands in the City of Toronto. By further developing both the rail and hydro corridors as a city-wide network of mobility paths, and eventually phasing them into a series of linear parkways, distant parts of the city would become accessible for long-haul trips. The second design component is a series of bicycle hubs located at, and tailored to, strategic locations throughout the city’s existing corridors and transit lines. These new civic amenities have the potential to enrich urban placemaking, while acting as social centres that anchor newly connected communities.

Limited mobility of mobile ground robots in highly unstructured environments is a problem that inhibits the use of such robots in applications with irregular terrain. Furthermore, applications with hazardous environments are good candidates for the use of robotics to reduce the risk of harm to people. Urban search and rescue (USAR) is an application where the environment is irregular, highly unstructured and hazardous to rescuers and survivors. Consequently, it is of interest to effectively use ground robots in applications such as USAR, by employing mobility enhancement techniques, which stem from the robot’s mechanical design. In this case, a robot may go over an obstacle rather than around it. In this thesis the Reconfigurable Robot Team of Mobile Modules with Manipulators (R2TM3) is proposed as a solution to limited mobility in unstructured terrains, specifically aimed at USAR. In this work the conceptualization, mechatronic development, controls, implementation and testing of the system are given. The R2TM3 employs a mobile modular system in which each module is highly functional: self mobile and capable of manipulation with a five degree of freedom (5-DOF) serial manipulator. The manipulator configuration, the docking system and cooperative strategy between the manipulators and track drives enable a system that can perform severe obstacle climbing and also remain highly manoeuvrable. By utilizing modularity, the system may emulate that of a larger robot when the modules are docking to climb obstacles, but may also get into smaller confined spaces by using single robot modules. The use of the 5-DOF manipulator as the docking device allows for module docking that can cope with severe misalignments and offsets – a critical first step in cooperative obstacle management in rough terrain. The system’s concept rationale is outlined, which has been formulated based on a literature review of mobility enhanced systems. Based on the concept, the realization of a low cost prototype is described in detail. Single robot and cooperative robot control methods are given and implemented. Finally, a variety of experiments are conducted with the concept prototype which shows that the intended performance of the concept has been met: mobility enhancement and manoeuvrability.

Mobility on a global scale as a product of increased interconnectivity has been a subject of interest for writers working within various disciplines in the social sciences and beyond. Few accounts, however, examine how mobility is performed by the operations of international airports. Through data acquired in interviews conducted with the management of an international airport administration, this project adds to existing accounts of mobility with an examination of the strategies, techniques, and performances that allow an international airport to operate, and which in turn, enable transportation worldwide. To analyse an airport as an organisation, this project employs a model advocated in John Law's (1994) influential study Organizing Modernity. Law's (1994) framework focuses attention on the often hidden performances within organisations that strain towards governance, regulation, durability, and routine. Incorporating Law's (1994) framework, this project illuminates aspects of an airport's operation in four thematic chapters, 'Ordering'; 'Communication'; 'Materials'; and 'Space'. Overall, this project depicts the international airport as a complex socio-technical assemblage that requires multiple, varied, and interwoven ordering performances to operate effectively.

As China develops and progresses as a nation, unique patterns of social mobility are emerging. For many years a centrally planned economy, the country is now a hybrid economy characterised by its authoritative political structure while allowing its entrepreneurs to experiment with innovative ways to accumulate wealth and ‘get ahead’. The research is particularly interested and aims in understanding how a specific group of people, namely the home-grown entrepreneurs, have been able to achieve social mobility within the contemporary Chinese economy. It focuses on the city of Suzhou in Jiangsu Province. Suzhou was chosen as the research setting because, since the beginning of the 1980s, it has been rapidly transformed into a business and industrial centre by implementation of economic reforms shaped by Deng Xiaoping and the production of infrastructure, such as the Economic and Technological Development Zones, from Communist Party initiatives. Home-grown entrepreneurs were ready to take advantage of the booming business opportunities by using their personal resources and networks afforded by the economic reforms that introduced foreign direct investment to coincide with private business reform. Specifically, it examines how the economic reforms have fostered conditions that allowed home-grown entrepreneurs to emerge and prosper and, in turn, how these entrepreneurs cultivate and utilise their social capital to form strategies to create pathways leading to social mobility. Qualitative research uncovers the social mobility of these entrepreneurs by interviewing in-depth a total of 50 home-grown entrepreneurs from different generations currently operating in Suzhou. The research reveals that while the economic reforms did provide a favourable environment for conducting private businesses, it has been equally important for each generation of home-grown entrepreneurs to take specific risks and seize opportunities to acquire various forms of social capital and to adjust personal values and imposed goals to reflect the complex social and political dynamics of their times. They had to make appropriate decisions to consolidate their businesses through careful consideration and manipulation of a variety of social capital. While social mobility may seem more accessible under the new hybrid economy, business failures and growing social inequalities have not been uncommon. Data analysis provides insights to conclude that the research may construct a new normative theory about a value driven society with economic aspirations within social controls constructed by authoritarian capitalism. As home-grown entrepreneurs begin to dominate, they are not only redefining how various forms of social capital should be linked to trajectories for social mobility, increasingly they are also transforming the social landscapes of China’s business world.

As China develops and progresses as a nation, unique patterns of social mobility are emerging. For many years a centrally planned economy, the country is now a hybrid economy characterised by its authoritative political structure while allowing its entrepreneurs to experiment with innovative ways to accumulate wealth and ‘get ahead’. The research is particularly interested and aims in understanding how a specific group of people, namely the home-grown entrepreneurs, have been able to achieve social mobility within the contemporary Chinese economy. It focuses on the city of Suzhou in Jiangsu Province. Suzhou was chosen as the research setting because, since the beginning of the 1980s, it has been rapidly transformed into a business and industrial centre by implementation of economic reforms shaped by Deng Xiaoping and the production of infrastructure, such as the Economic and Technological Development Zones, from Communist Party initiatives. Home-grown entrepreneurs were ready to take advantage of the booming business opportunities by using their personal resources and networks afforded by the economic reforms that introduced foreign direct investment to coincide with private business reform. Specifically, it examines how the economic reforms have fostered conditions that allowed home-grown entrepreneurs to emerge and prosper and, in turn, how these entrepreneurs cultivate and utilise their social capital to form strategies to create pathways leading to social mobility. Qualitative research uncovers the social mobility of these entrepreneurs by interviewing in-depth a total of 50 home-grown entrepreneurs from different generations currently operating in Suzhou. The research reveals that while the economic reforms did provide a favourable environment for conducting private businesses, it has been equally important for each generation of home-grown entrepreneurs to take specific risks and seize opportunities to acquire various forms of social capital and to adjust personal values and imposed goals to reflect the complex social and political dynamics of their times. They had to make appropriate decisions to consolidate their businesses through careful consideration and manipulation of a variety of social capital. While social mobility may seem more accessible under the new hybrid economy, business failures and growing social inequalities have not been uncommon. Data analysis provides insights to conclude that the research may construct a new normative theory about a value driven society with economic aspirations within social controls constructed by authoritarian capitalism. As home-grown entrepreneurs begin to dominate, they are not only redefining how various forms of social capital should be linked to trajectories for social mobility, increasingly they are also transforming the social landscapes of China’s business world.

Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.) / The buzzword of this decade has been convergence: the convergence of telecommunications, Internet, entertainment, and information technologies for the seamless provisioning of multimedia services across different network types. Thus the future Next Generation Mobile Network (NGMN) can be envisioned as a group of co-existing heterogeneous mobile data networking technologies sharing a common Internet Protocol (IP) based backbone. In such all-IP based heterogeneous networking environments, ongoing sessions from roaming users are subjected to frequent vertical handoffs across network boundaries. Therefore, ensuring uninterrupted service continuity during session handoffs requires successful mobility and session management mechanisms to be implemented in these participating access networks. Therefore, it is essential for a common interworking framework to be in place for ensuring seamless service continuity over dissimilar networks to enable a potential user to freely roam from one network to another. For the best of our knowledge, the need for a suitable unified mobility and session management framework for the NGMN has not been successfully addressed as yet. This can be seen as the primary motivation of this research. Therefore, the key objectives of this thesis can be stated as:  To propose a mobility-aware novel architecture for interworking between heterogeneous mobile data networks  To propose a framework for facilitating unified real-time session management (inclusive of session establishment and seamless session handoff) across these different networks. In order to achieve the above goals, an interworking architecture is designed by incorporating the IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS) as the coupling mediator between dissipate mobile data networking technologies. Subsequently, two different mobility management frameworks are proposed and implemented over the initial interworking architectural design. The first mobility management framework is fully handled by the IMS at the Application Layer. This framework is primarily dependant on the IMS’s default session management protocol, which is the Session Initiation Protocol (SIP). The second framework is a combined method based on SIP and the Mobile IP (MIP) protocols, which is essentially operated at the Network Layer. An analytical model is derived for evaluating the proposed scheme for analyzing the network Quality of Service (QoS) metrics and measures involved in session mobility management for the proposed mobility management frameworks. More precisely, these analyzed QoS metrics include vertical handoff delay, transient packet loss, jitter, and signaling overhead/cost. The results of the QoS analysis indicates that a MIP-SIP based mobility management framework performs better than its predecessor, the Pure-SIP based mobility management method. Also, the analysis results indicate that the QoS performances for the investigated parameters are within acceptable levels for real-time VoIP conversations. An OPNET based simulation platform is also used for modeling the proposed mobility management frameworks. All simulated scenarios prove to be capable of performing successful VoIP session handoffs between dissimilar networks whilst maintaining acceptable QoS levels. Lastly, based on the findings, the contributions made by this thesis can be summarized as:  The development of a novel framework for interworked heterogeneous mobile data networks in a NGMN environment.  The final design conveniently enables 3G cellular technologies (such as the Universal Mobile Telecommunications Systems (UMTS) or Code Division Multiple Access 2000 (CDMA2000) type systems), Wireless Local Area Networking (WLAN) technologies, and Wireless Metropolitan Area Networking (WMAN) technologies (e.g., Broadband Wireless Access (BWA) systems such as WiMAX) to interwork under a common signaling platform.  The introduction of a novel unified/centralized mobility and session management platform by exploiting the IMS as a universal coupling mediator for real-time session negotiation and management.  This enables a roaming user to seamlessly handoff sessions between different heterogeneous networks.  As secondary outcomes of this thesis, an analytical framework and an OPNET simulation framework are developed for analyzing vertical handoff performance. This OPNET simulation platform is suitable for commercial use.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, 1990. / Vita. Abstract. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 189-200). Also available via the Internet

Thesis (M.A.). / Written for the Dept. of Political Science. Title from title page of PDF (viewed 2008/01/14). Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (M.U.R.P.)--Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, 1992. / Vita. Abstract. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 193-200). Also available via the Internet.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Princeton University, 1980. / In English, with facsim. texts in Chinese. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 374-390). Also issued in print.