The rural cemetery was a European creation first introduced in the nineteenth century. Relocated outside the commercial city sector the cemetery was promoted as a diversion to the confusion and complexity of urban life. Applying picturesque ideas to traditional burial grounds rural cemeteries became symbolic landscapes for the city and country. The aesthetic nature of its design became an inspiration and eventual model for North American cemeteries. As a cultural institution, the cemetery is constantly in flux. Centuries of interaction between society and the cemetery have resulted in substantial changes that have shaped the present landscape. Although traditionally in public-trust, cemeteries have become largely privatized, operated, managed and developed as businesses for-profit. The commercially-driven practices of these institutions have had significant impacts on the present cemetery landscape. Toronto’s Mount Pleasant Cemetery is a good example of a cemetery experiencing this extensive commercial restructuring. A review of pertinent literature outlined recent transformations within the cemetery landscape citing concerns over the emerging private-enterprise cemetery and its impacts on the burial landscape. My fieldwork examined site-transformations specific to Mount Pleasant through an in-depth analysis of the present cemetery landscape. Concepts of commercialization, commodification and heritage tourism framed my analysis of the architecture, landscaped environment and new developments in light of the rising ‘cemetery business’. My findings revealed that by expanding into a multi-purpose cemetery Mount Pleasant is learning to do business in the twenty-first century. Increasingly run as a private enterprise Mount Pleasant Cemetery remains a historical landmark in crisis, unsure how to remain competitive in the commercial industry of the present, while preserving the integrity and traditions of the past. / Thesis (Master, Geography) -- Queen's University, 2007-12-04 14:36:36.972

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“We are neither living nor dying, we are something in between” Since the beginning of history, the living and the dead have been separated. This has made it almost im- possible to co-live together under one roof. We, ‘the living’, have even created “deathscapes” which have set a clear boundary between us and them, ‘the dead’. In every society, with its own cultural norms and rituals, they act with the dead in their own way - some are buried, others are burnt, but what is common across all societies is that they are not evident in our lives anymore. Looking at it from an urban perspective, the dead occupy a big patch of land in every city. This acts as a burden, as it makes “forbidden spaces” where the living is not able to be part of it. However, in each topic, there is a lesson that can be learned from it. In this case, it’s a 6km stretch informally and formally built, with a rich history and poor squatters who have no choice except to dwell with the dead. This is City of the Dead, located in Cairo, Egypt. The extreme lack of housing has pushed a part of society to live informally in cemeteries, where they have learned to co-live in the same room as the dead; they’ve embraced the idea of sleeping next to the dead, working and playing on those deathscapes. But ever since the government announced that they will demolish those deathscapes as a part of demolishing all informal settlements in Cairo, the time has come to make a stand against this decision, instead learning from their “life hack” and applying it throughout the City of the Dead – creating a society where the dead and living are not separated, maximizing the lost potentials in cases such as City of the Dead and making them not looked down upon and marginalized. This thesis aims to design the city and improve the lives of people living in these cemeteries, dealing with each case with care and compassion.

The repatriation of the human remains of Indigenous peoples collected within a colonial context has been the subject of debate within UK museums over the last 30 years, with many museums now having returned human remains to their countries of origin. Although the repatriation of human remains is often characterised as the 'journey home', there has been a lack of consideration of the physical presence and mobility of the remains and the meanings created as they move through different spaces. This study uses the repatriations from The Royal College of Surgeons of England (RCS) to Australia, New Zealand and Hawaii as case studies to consider three key areas: (i) the impact of repatriation on museum landscapes; (ii) the journey of the repatriated remains and how this mobility intersects with wider discussions about restitution, sovereignty, identity, relatedness, memory and memorialisation; and (iii) the repatriation archives, how they are thought about by the institutions that hold them and their future potential and meaning within a post-colonial context. Taking a more-than-representational approach and engaging with the materiality, mobility and agency of the repatriated remains and the documentation that relates to them, this study bridges the gap between research considering the approach of museums to repatriation, and ethnographic studies on the meanings of the return of ancestral remains to individual communities. Combining work on museum geographies, deathscapes and absence opens up new ways of theorising and discussing repatriation through understanding the process in terms of the tension between absence and presence, and human remains as being in or out of place. Through engaging with the materiality and agency of the remains and viewing repatriation through a spatial lens, this thesis deals with aspects of the process that have received little attention in previous studies, foregrounding the challenging nature of repatriation for communities, the issues around unprovenanced remains, and discussions about the control, management and meaning of information and data, identifying that a significant legacy of repatriation for RCS is the documentation the museum continues to hold. What the journey of the ancestral remains repatriated by RCS illustrates is the emotive materiality of the remains, and agency that they and the distributed repatriation archive have as actors within social networks. It is therefore proposed that the concept of repatriation as having problematised human remains collections within UK museums is replaced with a nuanced and contextually sensitive understanding that recognises the role of the human remains in social interactions that impact on the emotional geographies of museum practice, and that rather than framing repatriation as post-colonial act that is either political or therapeutic, the return of ancestral remains be understood as part of a process of decolonisation in which there is space for discussion, disagreement and debate amongst all stakeholders.