The literature on the effects of race and ethnicity on informal caregiving is sparse and incomplete. Furthermore, most caregiving studies do not control for immigrant status. In the few studies that have analyzed the impact of ethnicity on informal care, ethnicity was categorized as African American, Hispanic, or non-Hispanic White. In Canada, the relationship between informal care and immigrant status and ethnicity needs to be better understood as the country has a growing population of immigrants and individuals who will require informal care in the future. This thesis aims to understand how immigrant status and ethnicity affects the propensity and intensity of care received by using probit and ordinary least squares models. Throughout the thesis, immigrant status was measured as binary variable (0/1) and as year of immigration and region of origin.

The literature on the effects of race and ethnicity on informal caregiving is sparse and incomplete. Furthermore, most caregiving studies do not control for immigrant status. In the few studies that have analyzed the impact of ethnicity on informal care, ethnicity was categorized as African American, Hispanic, or non-Hispanic White. In Canada, the relationship between informal care and immigrant status and ethnicity needs to be better understood as the country has a growing population of immigrants and individuals who will require informal care in the future. This thesis aims to understand how immigrant status and ethnicity affects the propensity and intensity of care received by using probit and ordinary least squares models. Throughout the thesis, immigrant status was measured as binary variable (0/1) and as year of immigration and region of origin.

The decrease in hospital recovery time created a transition to more care being performed in the home. There is a need to balance care needs from both demand and supply characteristics. This research sets out to address how the presence or absence of informal caregiver(s) impacts on resource allocation decisions made by home and community care case managers. This research used a mixed methodologies approach employing both semi-structured interviews with frontline workers and secondary data analysis of the Central and Toronto Central LIHN Resident Assessment Instrument for Home Care (RAI-HC). Overall total average hours of formal services did not differ between care recipients depending on the presence or absence of a caregiver. It is evident from the responses provided by the participants that street-level bureaucracy plays a large role in service allocation decisions. That is, decisions are being made based on diverse idiosyncratic observations, opinions and feelings.

This three-paper dissertation explores how broader (and often unchallenged) changes to political economy at multiple geographic and economic scales impact long-standing ‘informal’ practices of waste recovery and recycling in Hanoi, Vietnam. This research is based on a survey of 575 informal waste collectors and 264 waste intermediaries as well as 73 in-depth interviews. Paper I engages in a critique of methodological disclosure in current academic writings on informal waste-recovery activities and discusses the methodological difficulties of researching informal populations. My aim in this paper is to highlight that the lack of methodological disclosure in waste-recovery literature is problematic because it compromises the academic rigour of this field and impedes the reliability of researchers’ policy recommendations as well as to initiate a dialogue with the aim of improving methodological rigour in waste-recovery literature. Paper II examines urbanization processes in contemporary Vietnam and how these changing spaces accommodate labour, and in turn support livelihoods. I argue that Vietnam’s globalizing economy and urban transition have been a catalyst for the growth of the informal waste collector population in Hanoi, as well as a partial player in the gendering of the industry. Paper III explores how one particular segment of the informal waste-recovery trade, waste intermediaries, is impacted by Hanoi’s rapid urban change. I demonstrate in this paper that 1) waste intermediaries simultaneously gain and lose as a result of Hanoi’s urban transition; and 2) the underlying forces of urban spatial change in different areas of the city are quite distinct, which will have an impact on the future of waste-recovery in Hanoi. The key findings of this dissertation are: 1)A more thorough engagement with methods and a broader approach to understanding waste-recovery actors (through an engagement with political economy at multiple geographic and economic scales) will produce a more context-appropriate and compassionate understanding of this group of urban actors. 2)The livelihoods of informal waste-recovery workers are both directly and indirectly impacted by shifts in political economy, albeit in Hanoi these impacts (both positive and negative) vary by sex and sub-occupation (with respect to waste collectors), and scale of business and location in the city (with respect to waste intermediaries).

This thesis investigates a unique type of migrant housing in Beijing: underground hostels retrofitted from civil air defence basements. The core of this study consists of field research conducted from 2005-2006. Personal narratives, photographs, maps, and illustrations drawn from first-person experience construct an account of a neglected layer of the city. Political and economic reforms since the late 1970s initiated the formation of a new subaltern class in contemporary Chinese cities known as the floating population. Millions of migrants have flowed through China’s uneven economic landscape in pursuit of the Chinese Dream. There is an estimated 4 million migrants actively contributing to the construction of new Beijing, yet the subalterns are excluded from official State representations that focus on the monumental. Without proper household registration (hukou) status, rural migrants have little to no access to social welfare including subsidized housing. Migrants have, of necessity, developed unconventional habitats in the capital city. In the absence of officially sanctioned space, migrants seek shelter within cracks and fissures of the formal system. Just as the city is being shaped by the flow of capital, the inflow of the floating population shapes an alternative urban geography that remains largely invisible. Sanctioned yet unofficial, the migrants’ creative appropriation of space contributes to the development of an emergent urban vernacular. Portraits from below reveal furtive portions of Beijing: marginal, banal, and hidden stages upon which life unfolds.

In Learning from Las Vegas, Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown, and Steven Izenour approach the city without preconceived opinions because they believe there is something to be learned from every aspect of the built environment. Inspired by their research methods, I walked around Toronto’s Chinatown and observed its unique spatial character, paying particular attention to how it was formed by the nature of its bottom-up socio-cultural and economic patterns. Toronto’s Chinatown first emerged 150 years ago as a place of convergence for the Chinese diaspora. In response to the struggles faced by new immigrants in becoming established in a foreign context, kinship systems of support and exchange emerged, bridging old- and new-world cultures. The resilience and tenacity of their desire to establish a foothold in a new city and build for future generations is the foundation for the unique characteristics of today’s Chinatown—both in how it is enmeshed in the local context within the urban core, and also how it is a distinct space with its own internal set of social and economic networks. The core of this study consists of extensive field research, visualized through maps, photographs, diagrams, and illustrations based on personal experience. A key lesson to be learned from Chinatown concerns the intelligence and innovation of immigrants who adapted their cultural habits to a different environment in order to maintain a self-sustainable, affordable, and resilient neighbourhood.

The study describes the labour conditions for migrants in Sweden and aims at examining who is to benefit from increased labour migration. The qualitative method with a literature review is complemented with an interview in order to incorporate undocumented migrants’ perspective. Labour migration is discussed with the possible progress towards circular migration and thereafter incorporated in analyse with the dual labour market theory. The results show that it is foremost Swedes and migrants from inside the EU/EEA region that benefit from labour migration while migrants from outside the region will have to follow employers’ needs. This has lead to labour permits in low wage sectors were migrants supplement to structural inflation. The demand for cheap labour has also led to the exploitation of undocumented migrants who are paid starvation salaries. If these services are increasingly requested, serious employers might find it difficult to stand against decreasing minimum salaries and the welfare will decrease for more groups of employers. Meanwhile, changing demography is predicted to necessitate increased migration to sustain an economical growth in Sweden. This would also suggest that Sweden receives the main benefit from increased labour migration.

This thesis investigates a unique type of migrant housing in Beijing: underground hostels retrofitted from civil air defence basements. The core of this study consists of field research conducted from 2005-2006. Personal narratives, photographs, maps, and illustrations drawn from first-person experience construct an account of a neglected layer of the city. Political and economic reforms since the late 1970s initiated the formation of a new subaltern class in contemporary Chinese cities known as the floating population. Millions of migrants have flowed through China’s uneven economic landscape in pursuit of the Chinese Dream. There is an estimated 4 million migrants actively contributing to the construction of new Beijing, yet the subalterns are excluded from official State representations that focus on the monumental. Without proper household registration (hukou) status, rural migrants have little to no access to social welfare including subsidized housing. Migrants have, of necessity, developed unconventional habitats in the capital city. In the absence of officially sanctioned space, migrants seek shelter within cracks and fissures of the formal system. Just as the city is being shaped by the flow of capital, the inflow of the floating population shapes an alternative urban geography that remains largely invisible. Sanctioned yet unofficial, the migrants’ creative appropriation of space contributes to the development of an emergent urban vernacular. Portraits from below reveal furtive portions of Beijing: marginal, banal, and hidden stages upon which life unfolds.

During the decade of 1950s, the intensive rural to urban migration, in search for new job opportunities, created a high housing demand that was partially solved by the dictatorial government of Marcos Perez Jimenez. However, in the absence of effective public policy and failed housing projects, the population started to create solutions of their own to satisfy their housing needs, settling themselves in an improvised way around the urbanized areas and constituting what we know today as informal settlements or barrios. By 1957, around 35% of the population of Caracas lived in barrios. During the past decade, Venezuela has experienced a series of changes that have modified the economic, political and social model that governed the country. During Chavez's government, there have been many policy changes regarding property, land, economic and social organization, in search for solutions to the housing problem that integrate the marginalized sector of the population. However, a different pattern of informal settlements has emerged. Some organized communities have started to invade not only vacant land in the city peripheries; they are now invading buildings that are inserted in the center of the city, contrasting to the formal systems already existing in the city. There is now a new interpretation of what is legal and what is not. We are experiencing the changes and understanding the consequences of their implementation. The purpose of this research is to understand the current processes of housing production and acquisition in formal and informal communities in Caracas through a review of existing literature and qualitative studies of the relationships between stakeholders. I analyze the new policies and the current housing production organization system and contrast it to what is actually happening in practice. I also investigated how incremental changes in existing practices can contribute to the development of safe and legible housing production processes. My recommendations are the result of hybrid systems that consider different actors and perspectives of the same reality in order to find a healthier and more sustainable building culture in Caracas. / text

In addition to labor market factors, the informal economy in Latin America is explained as a product of a weak state capacity to enforce regulation and a networked and resourceful community that enables self-sustained economic activities. Theoretically,informal self-employment flourishes where these conditions prevail. However, as urban renewal advances and business chains expand thorough the city, street trade, one of the most typical informal occupations is persecuted more aggressively, questioning its legitimacy as a spatial practice and source of employment for the urban poor. This dissertation examines the changes in the conception of street trade as a subject of policy, by analyzing closely how current transformations in the urban structure, ideologies of urban development and planning have impacted in the way policy makers intervene in public space and have redefined practices of street trade. It compares the cities of Bogotá and Lima, contributing respectively, to the understanding of progressive and neoliberal styles of urban planning. Using a mixed methods research design, it articulates citywide trends with local conditions and individual experiences, following three stages of analysis: (1) A comparative policy analysis based on a descriptive analysis of its evolution across scales and a spatial analysis of the local variability of enforcement patterns, identifying not only vendors’ agglomeration factors but also where enforcement matches the expansion of large retailers; (2) a comparative analysis based on public officials interviews of current rationales behind placemaking strategies at the city and local level; and (3) a comparative analysis of street vendors spatial practices as well as economic and political choices given the different city policy frameworks and their exposure to distinctive enforcement patterns as identified in the spatial analysis. The findings of this study provide a baseline for further theorization of the role of spatial dimension as it relates to the informal sector. The systematic comprehension of the relationship between city regulation of space and its actual use aims to contribute to a more integrative approach to policy making seeking to ensure that regulation and commercial growth complement and do not burden opportunities for self-employment among the urban poor. / text