Yogyakarta and Surakarta are two cities on the island of Java, Indonesia, which are considered as the centres of Javanese culture. That identity has resulted from the existence of the royal court or kraton in each of them. Both cities have shared a similar history as descendants of the Mataram kingdom, the greatest kingdom in Java, which was divided into two in 1755. Both also share a similar physical layout of the palace, shown not only in the layout of the kraton compounds, which consist of seven hierarchical courtyards, but also in the names and the functions of the courtyards and buildings. They also share similar city layouts in which the palace located at the centre, two squares each at the northern and southern end of the kraton compounds, and a royal road, create a north-south axis which is claimed to be cosmological. However, the kratons have suffered different fates in the modern era. Since Indonesian Independence in 1945, Yogyakarta has been considered to be a ‘special region’, with its territory awarded a status equivalent to a province. Also the king is automatically appointed governor, while Surakarta is only recognised as a city, which is a part of the province of Central Java. While the kraton of Yogyakarta holds importance in Yogyakarta, with the acknowledgement of territory and the king’s political role as governor, the kraton of Surakarta has no influence in the city of Surakarta. The mayor of Surakarta city is elected by the people, and even in the 2010 election a candidate from the royal family of the kraton of Surakarta lost 10:90 to a non-kraton-related candidate. The kraton of Yogyakarta has its land and property acknowledged by the state, while the kraton of Surakarta has its land and properties appropriated by the state, except the palace and some of its noble houses. The description above shows that there is a difference in power levels between both kratons. This thesis examines the background process of power, particularly those related to architecture and the built environment including arts, rituals, and culture integrated with them. Based on Bourdieu’s theory of structure/agency, I focused myself on the silent ideology of the built environment, which embodies a power structure in people’s unconsciousness through experience, in order to find out why differences in power levels occurred in two places that share a similar history and physical layouts. Using a comparative analysis, I examine in detail the silent ideology in terms of landscape, in both urban and architectural context. This silent ideology, with the support of cosmological narratives and colonial discourses, together with the accumulation of history in each of them, has a determining role in reproducing the existing power structure and continuous effort as this silent ideology helps to make sure that the existing power structures last.

<div> <div> <div> <p>Building upon and extending a historical narrative composed by Allan Bérubé in 1984, this dissertation interrogates the relationship between physical space and sexual practice by engaging in a historiography of gay bathhouses and by comparing representations of these spaces in the past with contemporary narratives available online. An introduction and conclusion bracket three central chapters, each of which presents findings from a major component of the larger project: The first investigates Bérubé’s sources, methods and underlying political philosophies. The second engages in a case-study of the Bulldog Baths (1979-1982), a popular but short-lived establishment in San Francisco, CA. The third presents findings from a content analysis of contemporary bathhouse websites. Throughout, attention is paid to the active role of physical spaces in sexual encounters taking place in bathhouse settings, as well as to the spatial politics of the urban settings in which these establishments have historically operated. </p> </div> </div> </div>

Cities no longer face top down governance where the local or state officials dictate the plans and create goals of a city, but instead are seeking input and involvement from the local citizens (Ghose, 2005). As local citizens are increasingly involved in local planning efforts, their voice becomes vital to [re]writing the local landscape. In this research, I examine the ways suburban cities like Marietta, Georgia, implement redevelopment efforts and the ways in which citizens of Marietta express their values for change in the public involvement process. I argue that the spatial values of citizens state that they desire to maintain their neighborhood’s character, while the city wants new people with high social class and money to move to Marietta to help improve the Marietta landscape. In the end, both the citizens’ and city’s values are materialized in the landscape and reflect an urban (middle class) spatial imaginary.

In September 2002 citizenship education became a compulsory element of the secondary school curriculum in England. This policy development launches new interest in the spatial politics of childhood and youth. With increased focus on teenage apathy and declining civic engagement, citizenship education centres upon creating future responsible citizens. Using questionnaire surveys, group discussions, photography, diary completion, as well as more innovative techniques such as a teenage-centred radio phone-in discussion and web-based media, this thesis focuses on a case study of 600 teenagers, aged thirteen to sixteen, living in a variety of rural communities in an area of Southern England. Within many representations of rurality, teenagers are situated between a 'natural, innocent childhood' in idyllic, close-knit communities and threatening and 'out-of place' youths. Such representations foster complex experiences of citizenship. This study, therefore, sets about examining themes of socio-spatial exclusion and political engagement. For some, the deficit of meaningful spaces of citizenship results in frustrated relations with key decision-makers. Others are engaged in their own practices of citizenship, devising creative ways in which to carve out and reconstruct everyday spaces and identities. Contributing to new geographical knowledge(s), this thesis concludes by calling for schools and (rural) communities to support and respect teenagers' own interests, needs, aspirations and current acts of citizenship in their own diverse spaces. Furthermore, it is argued that teenagers, as 'citizen s-i n-th e-p resent' should be provided with the opportunity to engage meaningfully with decision-makers as an integral facet of the political mainstream.

This thesis explores the theory and practice of sovereignty. I begin with a conceptual analysis of sovereignty, examining its theological roots in contrast with its later influence in contestations over political authority. Theological debates surrounding God’s sovereignty dealt not with the question of legitimacy, which would become important for political sovereignty, but instead with the limits of his ability. Read as an ontological capacity, sovereignty is coterminous with an existent’s activity in the world. As lived, this capacity is regularly limited by the ways in which space is produced via its representations, its symbols, and its practices. All collective appropriations of space have a nomos that characterizes their practice. Foucault’s account of “biopolitics” provides an account of how contemporary materiality is distributed, an account that can be supplemented by sociological typologies of how city space is typically produced. The collective biopolitical distribution of space expands the range of practices that representationally legibilize activity in the world, thereby expanding the conceptual limits of existents and what it means for them to act up to the borders of their capacity, i.e., to practice sovereignty. The desire for total authorial capacity expresses itself in relations of domination and subordination that never erase the fundamental precarity of subjects, even as these expressions seek to disguise it. I conclude with a close reading of narratives recounting the lives of residents in Chicago’s Englewood, reading their activity as practices of sovereignty which manifest variously as they master and produce space. / Master of Arts / Political philosophy has long been concerned with what makes political rule legitimate. Why should we be governed by others? In what ways should we be governed? Why is it that humankind is “everywhere in chains” despite being born free, as Rousseau asks? This thesis explores these questions through the concept of sovereignty. Political sovereignty expresses the idea of rule by the “highest” authority. This concept was initially rooted in a theological worldview that is no longer as dominant as it was in early modernity. Political philosophers from Hobbes to Kant turned instead to reason, which was supposed to determine who could rightfully rule. However, the question of what “rightfully” means in a political era where the state governs who is able to live a good life and who instead will live a life of poverty is increasingly tenuous. What allegiance do those who live in situations of dire need have to a distributional system that has only perpetuated their immiseration? John Locke argued that those who are oppressed have a right to “appeal to heaven,” i.e., to the highest power: the true sovereign. In a world where God’s sovereignty no longer undergirds political thought and practice as its final guarantor, the state as a form of rule seems to be groundless. Consequently, subjects regularly take matters into their own hands. This thesis explores how they enact their sovereignty in the world, using a This American Life podcast as an example through which to explore the theory and practice of sovereignty.

This dissertation explores the entangled territorialities of charitable fundraising, redressing the under-theorisation of the praxis as a social construct and a transformative spatial process. It approaches fundraising from an etiological perspective, drawing on French continental theory, particularly the work of Michel Serres and of Deleuze and Guattari, as well as concepts arising from literature in relational geographies and in business studies. Unlike many scholarly accounts, which obscure the fact that this property-challenged, property-desiring practice relies on the hospitality of others in order to extract and transfer resources, this study argues that the trait of interloping is crucial to fundraising’s expansive colonisation of urban space. Seizing on the notions of minor architecture and itinerant territoriality, it thinks through fundraising’s habits, inhabitations and habitats. By doing so, it reveals a form of nomadic war machine specialised in crafting parasitic architectures that invade urban territories to constitute a territory of its own. That this state-authorised territory has become an obligatory passage point within contemporary networked societies says much about how power is forged through the intersection of political, moral-economic and socio-affective parameters. Moreover, in uncovering a hint of revanchism against the property-owning classes, this research points to the usual affective politics emerging at a time of state metamorphosis and protracted economic uncertainty. This conceptual work provides entry for an ethnographic exploration of the charitabilisation of urban life within the context of austerity in contemporary Paris. Evidence collected from interviews, participant observation, video, photography, maps, drawings and extant literature is used to illuminate fundraising’s polydimensional strategies and widespread yet minimally disruptive appropriations and expropriations. While other authors have documented the movement of fundraising in France from utter marginalisation to mainstream to strategic importance, this study traces the political and territorial machinations of the powerful Parisian network of non-profit leaders, association executives, heads of fundraising agencies, management consultants, lawyers, and government officials who lead the push for a more generous France. The continuities, tensions, and contradictions between this group’s production of space and the realities of on-the-street fundraising are explored through a series of case studies. The views presented highlight ways in which fundraisers induce and take advantage of breaches in prevailing articulations of space, time and citizen-bodies to fortify more-than-capitalist urban logics. Collectively, they render visible the temporalities, hotspots, technologies, imaginaries, schemes, and hypocrisies informing an aggressive incrementalism. The new view of Paris imparted foregrounds the enterprising, contested and geographically uneven process of cultivating the habit of ceding property, both in the sense of subjectivities and of material rights. This dissertation’s conceptual and empirical strands make it possible to apprehend how minoritarian actors become dominant. Extending the minoritarian’s right to temporally hold power and property is shown to involve continuously testing and exploiting the affordances of relations. Displayed and analysed are the contamination of ideals and the breaking of pacts within fundraising’s moral pursuit of wealth transference. Such promiscuities ought to be regarded as, this study emphasizes, a form of preparedness for the city to come.