The thesis is devoted to analysing the EU's communication with Southern Neighbours (SNs), namely Morocco, Tunisia and Algeria. The purpose of the study is to identify what the EU's communications disclose about its role as Hard, Soft, Normative or Transformative Power in the region. The literature describes the actorness of the EU in the world by all four forms of power. However, the competition between these concepts inside the official discourse of the EU Delegations (EUDs) has been less investigated. Data for the current research comes from the content of the country-specific statements and press releases that appeared on the EUDs' websites from June 2016 to March 2021. The methodology is a combination of quantitative and qualitative content analysis. The work reveals that the EU appeals to its Transformative Power more often in comparison to the other concepts of power in its communications to the three SNs in focus. Moreover, the thesis critically assesses external perceptions of the EU based on 2016 and 2020 opinion polls. It unfolds the problems of the current communication strategy of the EU with SNs. This review is followed by recommendations for possible improvement of the efficiency of the EU's power representation on the international stage. The thesis attempts to add to the discussion...

Work shows a possible strategy to deal with the mass housing estates in the Czech Republic. That static and monotonous settlement can be flexible structure. Strategy shows one approach to transforming the settlement structure. It is a return to traditional town morphology and thereby achieve urban character and utilization of housing benefits that this structure offers. The settlement becomes readable by adding city-forming element such as streets, squares and city blocks.

Since the first warnings on the limits of planet Earth, 50 years ago, policies havenot been sufficient and fast enough to create a more sustainable world, which is todayillustrated by climate change, an increase in resource scarcity, and tremendousbiodiversity loss. Cities have been playing an important role in those environmentalconsequences, today accounting for 60% of greenhouse gases. However, citiesare designed by urban planners, who have a great influence on their projects inthe early planning phases. Thus, there is an urge to provide urban planners witheffective decision support tools that allow them to have in-depth knowledge of theenvironmental consequences of their choices.This is the goal of the ”Energy Carbon District”(ECD) methodology implementedin the Urban Print software, a project launched in 2017 by the FrenchAgency for Ecological Transition (ADEME). This tool sets out the first methodologicalchoices for carrying out life cycle analyses at the district level, right fromthe first stages of planning.The goal of this master thesis was to understand the strength and weaknessesof the ECD methodology and Urban Print software, and conduct a district LCAanalysis on a residential neighbourhood in order to get lessons on the most impactingdistricts’ elements, and on the best strategies to reduce those impacts.In this context, the study first provides an extensive literature review on the LCAmethodology, construction products LCA, buildings LCA, and districts LCA. Then,multiple district LCA are conducted on a generic new residential neighbourhoodlocated in Bayonne (France), using different parameters, and different weightingmethodologies.Our case study showed that energy, mobility, and construction products & equipmentare successively the three main contributors to districts’ impacts in a Businessas-usual scenario. ”Energy efficiency” and ”low impacting energy production” werethe two most effective leverages of urban planners to reduce environmental impacts,reducing the total weighed impacts by 21% to 34.6% compared to the Businessas-usual scenario. Once those leverages were activated, mobility and constructionproducts & equipment became the two first contributors, but very few leveragescould be used to reduce those impacts.In the end, the literature review and case study, allowed to highlight the strengthsand weaknesses of the ECD methodology, and the next challenges for district LCAstandardization. One challenge that stands out is the development of tools able toquantify mobility-related impacts based on more district parameters than just thelocation.

In this paper we study a complex real-world workforce scheduling problem. We propose a method of splitting the problem into smaller parts and solving each part using exhaustive search. These smaller parts comprise a combination of choosing a method to select a task to be scheduled and a method to allocate resources, including time, to the selected task. We use reduced Variable Neighbourhood Search (rVNS) and hyperheuristic approaches to decide which sub problems to tackle. The resulting methods are compared to local search and Genetic Algorithm approaches. Parallelisation is used to perform nearly one CPU-year of experiments. The results show that the new methods can produce results fitter than the Genetic Algorithm in less time and that they are far superior to any of their component techniques. The method used to split up the problem is generalisable and could be applied to a wide range of optimisation problems.

Despite its imprecision, social capital is a powerful tool for examining how and why particular forms of social interaction lead to the health and well-being of communities, organisations, and even businesses. Community cohesion as a policy prescription emerged in the UK, following the social disturbances in certain northern cities and towns in the summer of 2001. The official reports into these disturbances identified lack of social interaction between different ethnic groups as a principal cause. Furthermore, social housing was seen as a key factor that could be used to prevent future disturbances. Accordingly, this research focuses on how the assets and forms of social capital act as good predictors of community cohesion, in the context of the New Labour government¿s aim to use social housing to build cohesive communities. Unless otherwise specified, references to ¿the government¿ throughout this thesis apply to the New Labour administration that came to power in the UK on 2nd May 1997 and ended with the Coalition administration led by the Conservatives on 11th May 2010. This thesis makes use of the linearity between the goals of social capital and the policy aims of community cohesion to match forms of social capital to specific forms of social interaction, in six selected social housing schemes in Bradford. Bradford was one of the cities affected by the disturbances in 2001. Analysis of the forms of social interaction in the case study housing schemes shows that bridging and linking forms of social capital, which could lead to enduring cohesive communities, were mainly latent in the schemes. This suggests that the peaceful co-existence in the case study housing schemes today is, possibly, postponed social conflict in the long term.

This report fulfills the requirements of Geography 4C6. / This research report focuses on explaining the attitudinal and behavioral relationship toward public facilities. This relationship is founded from two bodies of theory; public facility location theory and the theory of attitude formation. Empirical results for testing the relationship were obtained through a survey of the Downsview community's attitudes toward Toronto's proposed dome stadium. It was found that the relationship between attitudes and behaviour can stem from the perceived impacts that a facility may generate on one's neighborhood as well as one's perceived effect or influence creating a change in the planning process. / Thesis / Bachelor of Arts (BA)

While research has been conducted on how to strengthen collective efficacy, there is a scarcity of knowledge regarding practical solutions. The aim of this study is to investigate how residents in a negatively stigmatized neighborhood engage in practical measures to enhance collective efficacy, while also exploring their perceptions of the measures requiredto improve the functionality of their neighborhood through collective efficacy. By utilizing participant observations, in depth interviews, and a partly theory-driven thematic analysis, this study sheds light on how neighborhood social structures play an important role in controlling disruptive behavior. The empirical findings of this study revealed that the mothers are utilizing various practical measures to enhance collective efficacy within Rinkeby, including visible presence, expressing solicitude to residents, organizing activities, and partaking in weekly meetings with the police. This study also concludes that the critical components in facilitating the development of a widespread willingness among resident in Rinkeby to partake in collective crime prevention is through establishment of organized meeting places, reduce of negative neighborhood stigma, expressing solicitude towards residents, and stronger cooperation between residents and the police. These components are also vital to overcome perceived barriers, improve the functionality of Rinkeby through collective efficacy, but also to ensure the sustainability to maintain and drive residents' attitudes toward direct intervention. It is essential to ensure that personal cost, and time- and language barriers of participating in collective crime prevention initiatives are not solely borne by residents, but rather shared by the government. Keywords: Collective efficacy, Collective crime prevention, Neighborhood, Night wandering Mothers, Rinkeby, Stigmatization

The European Union uses different means of power to exert its influence on the direct Neighbours of the polity.  One of the most influential and widely used means in the EU's foreign policy is soft-power and the value diffusion process. The process differs from harsh “imposition” of the norms and values, it rather creates the norms which are desirable to be achieved by others. The discourses used in the process of norm diffusion reinforce Union’s normative identity, but different types of powers intersect and interact with each other depending on the sector of cooperation. What is happening in the “People-to-People: Culture and Education” dimension of European Neighbourhood policy is described in the thesis, by analysing modes of external governance, tracing their biopolitical nature and determining the role of culture in the wider context of the relationship between EU and the Neighboring East.           This thesis is going to analyse grant applications in the framework of currently ongoing EU4Culture project , which aims to support the preparation of Cultural Development Strategies in non-capital cities and towns of Eastern Partnership countries (EaP). The project’s main objective is to promote Culture and Creativity as an engine for economic growth and social development. It is currently being held in five EaP countries: Armenia, Azerbaijan, Georgia and the Republic of Moldova.

The European Neighbourhood policy is the union’s joint foreign policy framework for themajority of the nations in the Caucasus, Eastern European, Middle eastern and North african regions, which are divided into an eastern, and a southern region. One of the main goals of the policy is to foster democratic progress in the regions involved. This task has, however, proven to be a complex and difficult one which has seen mixed results. This study uses a frameworkbased on the theory of soft power to examine what strategy the union utilizes to achieve democratization in these regions. The use of a comparative approach allows the drawing of conclusions about the subject matter based on differences in the approach between the regions. The study found that a top-down strategy of democratization was utilized in the eastern region, while a grassroot, bottom-up approach was more prevalent in the southern.This study is thus a useful addition to the plentiful research regarding the Neighbourhood policy as its findings offer opportunities for further comparative study by highlighting that there are indeed relevant differences in the relationship of the EU to the two regions.

Workforce scheduling is widely used within most industries. A well-outlined and efficient schedule gives cost savings, such as reduced number of overtime hours, increases overall utilization, and facilitates meeting demands. A large and complex schedule, for example, scheduling of a health care workforce, needs to consider many parameters when constructed; it is essential to account for all critical constraints regarding who can dispense a particular medicine, laws restricting the health care system, etcetera. This thesis evaluates two different methods for implementing a workforce scheduling system for one of Linköping’s most well-known restaurants and bars for students, using mixed integer programming and heuristics. Flamman Pub & Disco recruits new employees prior to every semester. Usually, the workforce consists of around 100 employees, and the vast majority of them work either in the bar or in the kitchen. Historically, the scheduling process has been handled manually using Excel. This does, however, take up much time for the operations manager, something considered frowned upon. Therefore, this thesis suggests an automated scheme for future scheduling processes. Because Flamman is a student organization, they do not hold the capital to invest in expensive licensed optimization software. However, literature studies have shown that heuristics such as large neighborhood search can generate sufficient performance, and therefore the investigation of free-of-charge software using a heuristic approach is conducted. The constructed framework uses a mixed integer programming model, which also lays the cornerstone for the two heuristics: a reverse constructive heuristic and a large neighborhood search. The results retrieved from the analysis prove that a heuristic can be a helpful tool for upcoming recruitment periods. There are, however, recommended areas for improvement regarding the current state of the heuristic.