Existing studies of urban riots, violent protest and other instances of contentious politics in urban settings have largely tended to be either event- or time-specific in their scope. The present thesis offers a spatial reading of such politics of contention in the city of Athens, Greece. Tracing the pattern of the occurrence of these instances through time, the research scope of the thesis spans across Greece’s post-dictatorial era (i.e. post-1974, the Greek Metapolitefsi), concluding shortly after the first loan agreement between the country’s national government and the so-called ‘troika’ of lenders (IMF/ECB/EU). The thesis includes a critical overview of literature on riots in a historical and geographical context; questions on methodology and ethics in researching urban riots; a discourse analysis of violence concentration in Exarcheia; ethnographic accounts on everyday life in the neighbourhood and a ‘rhythmanalysis’ of the Exarcheia contention concentration during the period of research. Seeking to explain this concentration the thesis introduces the notion of the 'spatial contract': rather than signalling a type of discord, the concentration of mass violence in Exarcheia through time is hereby conceived as the spatial articulation of a certain form of consensus between Greek authorities and their subjects. In this way, the thesis places the concentration of urban violence in Exarcheia solidly within the social and political context of the country’s postdictatorial era. The thesis suggests that it would be beneficial for future human geographical research to trace such concentration patterns of urban riots. By exercising a crossscale reading, it would then possible to place these and other forms of contentious politics within a social equilibrium that is far more complex and often much more consensual than it might appear to be.

This thesis critically questions, through in-depth qualitative research, the senses of connection, giving, care, and relatedness felt by blood donors and recipients, given the institutional setting of therapeutic blood exchange in the UK. In it, I use a multi-sited auto-ethnographic approach to examine five blood donor-/recipient-participant views on blood donation and transfusion. Specifically, I blend theoretical and empirical research to iterate between the meanings and realities associated with therapeutic blood exchange, exploring and examining the following things. First, I explore how blood can be treated as material culture: what it is as both biological tissue and as social/cultural metaphor. Second, I examine how gift giving and caring feed into and out of blood exchange, and whether this fosters a sense of connectedness for the anonymous others at the end of the blood pack. Third, I roll out the theme of connectedness to look at (the geographies of) relatedness where I examine the changing nature of kinship and its evolution into the concept of relatedness. Here, I examine how both relating through ‘things’ and at different scales could perhaps more usefully describe the connection/relationship between donors and recipients...or not. Finally, I draw this together, examining how the institutional framework of the National Blood Service can be said to either foster or not, the senses of connectedness and/or relatedness, gift giving and care between its donors and recipients.

The number of single person households in global cities such as London and New York has increased dramatically since the 1990s, with significant impacts for development patterns in these cities. The trend has been particularly prominent in South Korea's capital, Seoul, where whose 854,606 single person households represent 23.9% of total households as of 2010 and even more now in 2015. The increase has been mainly driven by the significant increases in young single households aged in their 20s and 30s. The government has been striving to keep pace with the rapid increases in the single person households by supplying residential dwelling types for them such as 'Urban Lifestyle Housing'. However, initial commentary highlights that the resulting housing environment exhibits numerous shortcomings. In this context, there is a need for research to understand the nature of the city living experience for young single person households, their aspirations and the implications for future design and planning approaches in the city. This research aims to address this gap and to provide a basis for recommending potential alternatives in the development and design of new housing for Seoul's changing population, approaching the issue with three perspectives: 'Human relationships', 'Housing design', and 'Economic issues'.

Recent studies have identified a fundamental change in the character of much international migration. Skilled migrants have become a major component of most population flows and a majority in some cases. New forms of international labour migration and new historical and geographical contexts of international skill transfer, therefore require new frameworks for analysis. The main thrust of this research is to apply, extend and adapt a `migration channels' framework within the specific geographical context of Scotland's skilled international migration system. The concept of migration channels is founded on the observation that fewer and fewer international migrants themselves directly obtain jobs, work permits or residence visas. Increasingly, international skill transfers are regulated and manipulated by intermediary agencies. Identification and analysis of migration channels is therefore important since they play a key role in explaining firstly, which persons from the large pool of potential migrants are selected for migration, and, secondly, how a highly skilled international migration system is controlled and directed. A main aim of this research is to identify and understand the international migration processes operating in the Scottish context of skilled international migration. These processes are examined in relation to the differential selectivity and `control' each represents, with regard to the characteristics of the migrants involved with them, and the characteristics of their migration history. The importance of the concept of career and career advancement for explanation of skilled international migration is examined, in relation to respondents involved with each channel.

Economies of scale in infrastructure are a recognised factor in urban agglomeration. Less recognised is the effect of distribution or access costs. Infrastructure can be classified as: (a) Area-type (e.g. utilities); or (b) Point-type (e.g. hospitals). The former involves distribution costs, the latter access costs. Taking water supply as an example of Area-type infrastructure, the interaction between production costs and distribution costs at settlement level is investigated using data from England & Wales and the USA. Plant level economies of scale in water production are confirmed, and quantified. Water distribution costs are analysed using a new measure of water distribution output (which combines volume and distance), and modelling distribution areas as monocentric settlements. Unit distribution costs are shown to be characterised by scale economies with respect to volume but diseconomies with respect to average distance to properties. It follows that higher settlement densities reduce unit distribution costs, while lower densities raise them. The interaction with production costs then means that (a) higher urban density (“Densification”) is characterised by economies of scale in both production and distribution; (b) more spread out settlement (“Dispersion”) leads to diseconomies in distribution; (c) “Suburbanisation” (expansion into lower density peripheral areas) lies in between, with roughly constant returns to scale, taking production and distribution together; and (d) “Constant density” expansion leads to small economies of scale. Keeping (per capita) water supply costs low thus appears to depend as much on density as size. Tentative generalisation suggests similar effects with other Area-type infrastructure (sewerage, electricity supply, telecommunications); and with Point-type infrastructure (such as hospitals), viewing access costs as distribution costs in reverse. It follows that the presumption in urban economics that such services are always characterised by economies of scale and therefore conducive to agglomeration may not be correct.

There is still some ambiguity about what is sustainable development. From an economic point of view it involves maintaining a stock of assets for posterity that is equal to or greater than the stock of assets of the current generation. This is the basis of the capital approach to sustainable development. To measure how sustainable an economy is, based on the capital basis of sustainable development, multilateral institutions such as the World Bank use wealth accounting combined with the genuine savings approach to measure how well economies are saving for the future, net of current asset depreciation. These measures are useful for telling policy makers how their policies are contributing to sustainability and whether their economies are on a sustainable development path. Although these measures tell which assets are being depleted and the level of savings required, they do not tell why inadequate savings or inadequate investments might be occurring and how these assets are distributed among income groups within the economy. These measures are also not linked explicitly with the development prospects of the country and the needs of the current generation. This thesis attempts to assess if distributional outcomes affect how much countries save and therefore whether this has any impact on sustainability. To examine the impact of distribution on sustainability, a case study of Trinidad and Tobago (T&T) is conducted. T&T has had a negative genuine savings rate for most of the last two decades, primarily due to the excessive exploitation of its natural resources (oil and natural gas) without sufficient savings or reinvestment of the revenues from these resources. Has the distribution of these resource rents had any impact on saving outcomes? An attempt is made to answer these questions by assessing how government expenditure is distributed and who benefits most from the exploitation of the natural resources. The analyses contained within the thesis show that expenditure on energy subsidies, the distribution of human capital and the overall distributions of rents are all regressively distributed.

In this thesis I argue that 'critical theorists', and the left in general, have paid insufficient attention to the psychological and pathological dimensions of the problems of modernity, including its environmental predicaments. To address this theoretical lacuna, I critically examine the conceptions of 'collective pathology' and 'higher sanity' as articulated in the relatively neglected work of Theodore Roszak and Ken Wilber, my position being that these two thinkers offer the most sophisticated readings of modernity and its 'ecological crises' in terms of pathology currently available. I also demonstrate a number of crucially significant implications of their work for contemporary critical theory. Consequently, the thesis is organized in two parts: in Part One I examine the work of Roszak and Wilber; in Part Two I explore major, critical implications of their work. The thesis begins with a critical examination of the concepts of 'pathology' and 'higher sanity' in Roszak and Wilber. I subsequently show how a critique in terms of these concepts alerts us to specific legimating tropes in ecocritical theory which have deligitimized competing discursive practices, and how such conceptions address and illuminate an ecological 'blind spot' in contemporary historical theorizing: no such study has been previously attempted. I then argue that conceptions of 'pathology' and 'higher sanity' indicate that debates between eco-centric notions of nature as 'real' and postmodernist notions of nature as a 'social construction' represent a double-bind; a false problem caused by specific unconscious and/or unacknowledged presuppositions. I go on to demonstrate how this double-bind can be overcome by, for example, exploring the psychology of Derridean deconstruction. In its examination of the critical implications of 'pathology' and 'higher sanity', this thesis can be read overall as a way of regrounding a radical ecological critique that is fully 'postmodem' - in the sense of aporetic - yet 'transcendent' at the same time. Consequently, this study is offered as an original resource for radical environmental activists who consider that the 'grounding' of their critique is undermined by postmodern and/or deconstructionist anti-foundationalism; I argue that such fears are 'groundless'.

This dissertation develops a critical examination of the Arab Diaspora culture as creative space in the field of the visual arts. Specifically, it examines the concept of diaspora as applied to the Arab experience, particularly its potential application as a creative space for Arab artists who live and work outside their countries of origin in Europe or America. It explores questions about the type of space for creation that is provided to an Arab immigrant artist within actual existing diaspora communities and the relation of that space to theoretical formulations of the diaspora position that postcolonial theorists developed in the 1990s. It also asks what the uses and limitations of these different models of diaspora might be for my own practice. To answer these questions, the dissertation takes a qualitative analytical approach meant to bring elements of cultural theory and criticism into interaction with my reflective practice as an artistic practitioner. It deploys a number of research methods including reviews of the existing literature, the use of interviews and questionnaires,a "study case" method, and the use of action research in the studio. As a result, the specificities of the history of Arab migration are highlighted. The sixty years of modern history in the Arab world and its Diaspora have produced a complex structure of Arab communities existing outside their place of origin. Two study cases of artists Hamdi Attia and Al Fadhil are used to represent “extreme cases” in which the Arab Diaspora position as a creative space is rejected outright. An analysis of the position and strategies of these artists demonstrates the conflicts inherent to conceptions of Diaspora culture as a model for individual artwork. Finally, the dissertation discusses specific artistic projects that I the researcher developed around the phenomenon of migration, and reflection upon their success and shortcomings as commentary on the reality of cultural displacement. All together, these cases suggest that Diaspora as a position (rather than a theory) does not provide a viable space for creative production for migrant artists.

No description available.

The research aimed to explore the regulatory and socio-cultural responses to retail foreign direct investment (FDI) in a third-wave, transition country- Vietnam. A combined qualitative and quantitative methodology together with documentary research was utilised to collect a wide range of secondary data from governmental and industry sources, much of which has not been utilised in western academic research in the field given the challenges of access to such information and of translating source material into English. This was supplemented by primary survey data from consumers and key stakeholders in the supply chain of two products, namely morning glory and fish sauce in three supermarket chains: Metro, Big C and lntimex, and used to analyse the transformation of the retail structure in Vietnam. Research findings suggest that the process of change in the Vietnamese food retail sector has been affected by the slow but progressive penetration of market liberalisation in which, as late as 2008, a foreign partner could hold no more than 49% of capital in a joint venture. While the Vietnamese retail market has transformed radically since the 1990s, with this shift has emerged a consumer society that is usually more discerning and demanding than before. Changing societal composition plays a crucial role in consumers becoming more conscious and conspicuous. The findings also reveal a complex layering of regulations, some of which are a hangover from the pre-2007 period and some of which have occurred since the accession of the World Trade Organization, in the form of the controversial economic needs test (ENT).