Magister Artium - MA / South Africa has a growing economy with about 19 million of people going to work and looking for work every day (Ahmed 2004). The majority of people in South Africa use public transport in order to get to work. According to Ahmed (2004), 65 % of the people who use public transport, make use of the minibus taxis. The minibus taxis established themselves during late Apartheid as a solution to transporting poor, black people to and from work. Over the years during Apartheid and after, the minibus taxi industry has grown from a few, small scale businesses to a nationwide structured organisation (McCaul 1999). In 2007, the National Department of Transport created the Public Transport Strategy and Action Plan that would look at reorganising the transport system in South Africa. The main idea of restructuring the public transport system was to introduce a scheduled bus system which was reliable. In 2008, the City of Cape Town decided to begin plan and implement a new Bus Rapid Transport system (BRT system). This new transport system would be regulated and scheduled in order to make commuters movements around the city easier. (Ahmed 2004, 2-3) The BRT can be seen through the lens of competitive cities (Huchzemeyer), a notion intimately tied to neo-liberal and high modernist world views. Neoliberalism fosters competition between countries and companies across the world. Countries who want to be competitive and attract foreign direct investment adopt the neoliberal policies in order to make investing, trading and profit making easier and more attractive for businesses, especially international investors. The City of Cape Town follows neoliberal thought in the sense of adopting policies aimed at creating a city that can compete on an international level with other cities (Integrated Development Plan 2012-2017). The Integrated Development Plan (IDP) provides the City of Cape Town with a strategic framework on how to create sustainable development and growth so that the City may grow and develop economically as well as socially. This entails creating a city that is capable of supporting and aiding business expansion and development in all sectors as well as ensuring that Cape Town remains a prime tourist destination in order to attract international and local investment (Integrated Development Plan 2012-2017). In addition to a neo-liberal flavour, competitive cities invoke the high-handedness of modernist planning that Scott (1998) identifies in, 'Seeing like a State'. The theory explains how the state wants to create progress to improve the lives of the people by creating order out of the organic chaos that has emerged from the community/city over time. The outcome is that the State implements policy that eradicates the unique informal design and replaces it with a formal structure which can have a negative impact on the poor. This simplification is also often the reason why many historical social and economic practises are lost and replaces with order and simplicity – loss of unique identity (Scott 1998). These elements of the ideal competitive city are manifested in the BRT idea too. The City of Cape Town is in the process of trying to simplify and re-organise the transport system in the City in order to ensure that Cape Town fits into the mould of a competitive city. This new bus service will in effect eradicate the ‘organic chaos’ of the taxi industry as the taxis are replaced with MyCiti. The City of Cape Town used the process of public participation to consult with the taxi associations and owners. The City used 'invited spaces' (Cornwall 2002), to engage with the affected taxi parties and "sell" the idea of the BRT system. The City did use public participation; however, they only consulted the elites (Taxi owners and associations) in the taxi industry. Once the elites were satisfied that they would receive compensation for the loss of their business, they bought into the BRT system often at the expense of their voiceless employees. In Imizamo Yethu, Hout Bay, the Hout Bay taxi association and Hout Bay Cape Town associations used invented spaces, namely protests, to engage with the City about MyCiti. These associations believe that the implementation of the BRT system has affected their livelihoods in a negative way and that the City did not consult them about the implementation of the MyCiti bus service. There are also other conflicts that have arisen because of the implementation of the MyCiti bus service which has impacted negatively on the community. The result from the implementation of the BRT system is mixed. On one hand it would seem that the City of Cape Town has turned towards creating a competitive city and away from effects on the parlous lives of the poor. The City in conjunction with the ODA (full trading name), have tried to minimise the impact of the BRT system on the taxi micro-economy. However, those whose business was only partially affected have been left to fend for themselves. The problem, according to the City of Cape Town, is that there are limits to how much compensation they can give. Unfortunately, those left without compensation and loss of business are the victims of a society which favours straight lines compared to organic unique chaos.

Oppression of voice has continued for displaced Syrians, beyond the ‘kingdom ofsilence’ under the Assad dictatorship, in the form of dominant media narratives, oftennegative, which fail to represent their lived realities. This case study explored the waysin which storytelling, within the program #MeWeSyria, creates a space for Syrianvoices in southeast Turkey and how this space could be transformative. The researchfocused on the process of storytelling, as a process of voice (Couldry, 2010) rather thanthe stories themselves as media products. Eleven semi-structured interviews wereconducted with members of the #MeWeSyria community, from three different levels:participants, facilitators and staff. Analysis considered the characteristics of the#MeWeSyria space, in relation to providing a space for the process of voice to flourish,in light of Wheeler et al.’s (2018) ‘transformative storywork’, and demonstrated theways in which this space could be transformative on personal, interpersonal and broadercommunity-societal levels. This research suggests that #MeWeSyria creates a space forSyrian voices by operating as a Syrian-led, participatory, community space whichcreates the conditions for the process of voice to flourish. In this space, personal andcollective consciousness and a sense of agency is developed, which are revealed as thestarting point for engagement in action for further change, on interpersonal, communityand societal levels. #MeWeSyria is shown to defend, at its core, voice as value(Couldry, 2010), the right of each person to tell their own story and the principle thatevery voice matters.

Collaborative planning is an often-debated approach in conjunction with attaining more sustainable cities. Many models were theorized to help implement a more collaborative planning process, such as when municipalities employ densification to grow the city sustainably. However, not all planning processes that are collaborative are also rational. Hence, this thesis is interested in comprehending Västerås Municipality’s planning process through performing a case study regarding DP-1858. To that end, this thesis will follow Innes & Booher (2018) Collaborative rationality theory and use its DIAD model as a lens to understand the positions of the stakeholders involved in the DP-1858 case. In the same vein, to probe for how the collaborative planning process regarding DP-1858 resonates with the DIAD model of Collaborative rationality.Nevertheless, the reaction of the Hammarby-residents raises the need for framing to understand if a concept such as insurgent citizenship is sensible to norms. Thus, it is essential to know how insurgent citizenship manifests itself in a Swedish context. The method used to collect primary data was semi-structured interviews with elite respondents. Among other conclusions, this study found enough evidence suggesting that the planning process in conjunction with DP-1858, even though having embedded collaborative mechanisms, has critical shortcomings when contrasted with the collaborative rationality DIAD model. In the same vein, insurgent citizenship can occur even when laws were respected while norms were not.

This thesis project is an act of solidarity research with the Berlin based Latin American women’s organization Xochicuicatl. Along the idea that research should be based on the interests and needs of oppressed groups, the research design was developed in cooperation with the organization. The study centers on migration movements between Latin America and the Caribbean and Germany. Moreover, it investigates the dynamics of inner-outer interplay between the organization the beneficiaries and the overall migrant group. The main method isa qualitative content analysis of documents out of the organization’s archive. The organization’s response to transformations is thereby analyzed through action within invited (coping) and invented (resistance) spaces of citizenship. In this regard, the organization’s space is understoodas a subaltern counterpublic which enables a connection between coping and resistance.