This thesis explores the impact that legislative changes have had on African Caribbeans competing in Birmingham’s market situations. It also assesses the extent to which educational and labour market success or failure might have influenced their contemporary spatial locations. A mixed methods approach is utilised to examine how the social class position, and spatial patterns, of the city’s African Caribbean population have changed since the early 1980s. The research provides a contemporary update of aspects of Rex and Tomlinson’s (1979) survey, and also Ratcliffe’s (1981) work, which was conducted in 1970s Handsworth. Despite successive anti-discrimination legislation, passed between 1965 and 2010, racist practices in the education, employment and housing markets have persisted. African Caribbean social and spatial mobility are examined in the context of social, political and ideological changes influencing the equality agenda, particularly where racial inequality is concerned. Shifts in the educational and labour market status of Black Caribbeans are articulated using Marxian, Weberian and Bourdieusian notions of social classes: as position, as situation and as disposition, respectively. Social mobility is measured according to the progress African Caribbeans have made in their efforts to obtain higher educational capital, and the extent to which they have exchanged them for occupations in the upper tiers of the labour market. African Caribbean spatial mobility is mapped between 1991 and 2011 and the movement of Birmingham’s Black population, from high to low deprivation urban spaces, is examined. Changes from renting to homeownership, are also analysed as indicators of improvement in Black Caribbean housing tenure. The critical race perspective, of interest convergence, is used to argue that the free market can be appropriated to ameliorate racism. However, it is also acknowledged that African Caribbean community organisations, and those sharing the same focal concerns, must pool their resources to achieve the aim of racial equity.

This study focuses on the experiences of older people living in a UK purpose-built retirement community – Denham Garden Village (DGV). The aim was to understand more about everyday life in this particular environmental context including how the environment and organisation of the village related to residents’ everyday experiences. Using a mixed methods approach, the study draws on quantitative survey data from the Longitudinal study of Ageing in a Retirement Community (LARC) and combines this with 20 in-depth qualitative interviews with residents living in DGV. Data analysis combined descriptive statistics for the quantitative data with qualitative themes. The dimensions of work-leisure, solitary-social, and community integration were used as a framework to explore how aspects of the environment and individual circumstances, attitudes and beliefs shape patterns of everyday life. The study found that decisions to move were frequently preceded by changes in personal situations. The social and spatial separation of DGV from the wider community maintained the village as an almost exclusively age-segregated environment. Opportunities for social contact were widespread, but levels of loneliness were no lower than in the general population. The diversity in residents’ situations, resources and experiences contrasted with shared community stories of the village as a community of ‘choice’. In addition, norms and expectations about levels of activity and engagement served, in some cases, to prompt feelings of obligation and guilt among residents. Findings suggest a need for more emphasis on the individuality of residents’ experiences of everyday life – both in terms of representing such diversity in publicity and marketing materials, and in working towards an ethos of respect, tolerance and acceptance within communities like DGV. It is suggested that future research could focus on ways to reduce the age-segregated nature of existing developments like DGV, enabling them to function as integrated parts of the wider community.

This thesis investigates how objectives of integrating urban planning, city design and transport policies have been pursued in key case study cities as part of a compact city agenda since the early 1990s. Focusing on the underlying institutional arrangements, it examines how urban policymakers, professionals and stakeholders have worked across disciplinary silos, geographic scales and different time horizons to facilitate more compact and connected urban development. The thesis draws on empirical evidence from two critical cases, London and Berlin, established through a mixed method approach of expert interviews, examination of policy and planning documents, and review of key literature. Four main groups of integration mechanisms were identified and analysed: those related to (1) governance structures, (2) processes of planning and policymaking, (3) more specific instruments, and (4) enabling conditions. Based on having identified converging trends as part of the institutional changes that facilitated planning and policy integration in the case study cities, this thesis presents three main findings. First, rather than building on either more hierarchical or networked forms of integration, integrative outcomes are linked to a hybrid model of integration that combines hierarchy and networks. Second, while institutional change itself can lead to greater integration, continuous adjustment of related mechanisms is more effective in achieving this than disruptive, one-off ‘integration fixes’. Third, integrated governance facilitating compact urban growth represents a form of privileged integration, which centrally involves and even relies on the prioritisation of certain links between sectoral policy and geographic scales over others. Integrating urban planning, city design and transport policy at the city and metropolitan level, this thesis concludes, is essentially a prioritisation, which the compact city model implies and helps to justify.

The thesis draws from examples of practice as a means to find new ways of enhancing the resilience of cities through urban design and planning. Literature reviews of urban design and governance provide the study with a theoretical base, whilst investigations of resilience connect and ground these earlier understandings. Accordingly, urban design is identified as a ‘transdisciplinary space' for an ongoing socio-spatial process, governance provides integration and collaboration, and resilience is increasingly understood as simultaneously a theory, practice and tool for analysing systems response to disruptive challenge. It is thus contended that successful implementation of resilience initiatives requires a ‘joined-up’ approach to design and governance, with decision making enacted in a holistic and integrated manner. Utilising an inductive, case study based approach, the foundation of the study is the contention that resilience can be enhanced thorough understanding and responding to earlier failures. Drawing from an analysis of urban incident case studies, the concepts of design weakness and maladaptation are used to conceptualise these failures in design, governance and ongoing management. Conversely, there is also consensus that building ‘adaptive capacity’ is another path to enhanced resilience. A similar rationale was used to consider the Nottingham case study, which revealed the primacy of economic concerns in local decision making with a corresponding failure to consider risks in an integrated manner, underpinned by new policies of rescaling, austerity and ill-considered national policy directives. Further investigation of individual design projects uncovered multiple maladaptations and inadequacies, as well as highlighting the difficulties of implementing institutional changes and the emergence of an ‘implementation gap’ between policy rhetorics and urban design practice. The study concludes with some wider reflections and principles for ‘resilient urbanism’, whilst an exploration of resilient design implementation outlines an iterative process for more resilient cities through ongoing learning, innovation and transformative practice.

In Britain today, as well as in all the developed Western countries, more than ever immigration discourse occupies priority space in society, politics, and media. The concern with immigration, the Diaspora of the Other, has reached such a point of shrill and racist political discourse, the public political fora have managed to gain substantial support for this cause from their voting citizens. In this game of socio-political power the entire discourse is mainly focused around economic migrants. All migrants, here, are lumped under the exclusionary and racist discourse ignoring completely the myriad complexities of migrants’ background, the structural reasons for their migration, and the substantial economic contribution they make to the countries where they settle down. Lacking political and media power to counter or influence these hostile discourses, immigrants, as minorities, are victims of racist, xenophobic, and exclusionary political practices and, in their own turn, have desperate recourse to their past in order to construct a global minority identity. Against such a discursive background, my research among the South Asian immigrants in South Wales in UK has provided an alternative and delicately nuanced way of understanding migration in general and migration to UK in particular. The narratives based on the individual and collective memories of British India Partition in 1947 and its aftermath, the many routes which their migration took, and the experiences of their settling down in South Wales offer a very unique glimpse into their migratory experience and eventual identity evolution. Given the historical role Great Britain as the colonial power played in their migration I argue that Britain owes its immigrant citizens the respect they deserve, value their forebears’ contribution in its colonial and global wars and post-war economic rebuilding, and their continued, creative contribution to British economy, society, culture and its own multicultural identity.

This thesis presents an in-depth case study of a superdiverse neighbourhood in Glasgow where long-term white and ethnic minority communities reside alongside Roma migrants, asylum seekers and refugees, young professionals and other recent arrivals in traditional tenement housing. It focuses on the nature and extent of social contact and trust and on the role of context in shaping social relations. Employing the concepts of social milieu and intersectionality to identify social differences the research examines the relationships between five broad groupings of residents in the neighbourhood: Nostalgic Working Class, Scottish Asian, Liberal Homeowners, Kinship-sited Roma and Global Migrants. Ethnographic fieldwork was carried out in contexts within the neighbourhood, theorised as being potential sites for intergroup contact. Three types of interactions were examined: Group-based Interactions, Neighbour Interactions and Street Interactions. The data comprised documentary evidence, participant and direct observations, in-depth qualitative and walk-along interviews with residents and local organisations. Findings show that rather than individualising and isolating residents, superdiversity can stimulate community activism, yet there remains a preference for interaction within one’s own social milieu. The research has found that the concentration of poverty and material conditions has a more profound effect on social relations than historical diversity and the extent to which diversity is normalised within local discourses. Trust judgements in a superdiverse context may rely more on shared interests, moral outlook and assessments of the context rather than the extent of social contact. The quasi-private spaces of shared residential spaces and community activities can facilitate encounters with the potential to build trust, yet for this to occur cooperation through shared activities may not be sufficient. Interactions may need to move beyond co-presence and conviviality to increased understanding and empathy through dialogue. At an aggregate level, the extent to which superdiversity contributes to social contact and trust within the neighbourhood is strongly influenced by contextual factors and wider economic processes influencing housing tenure mix, private renting, property maintenance, residential churn and environmental conditions. Through examining different types of social contacts, the dynamics of trust as well as contextual influences, this thesis offers insights into the causal processes and factors that influence social relations at a local level.

This thesis explores men’s perceptions and experiences of fathering and fatherhood in China. It is informed by a growing body of theoretical and empirical research regarding fathers and fatherhood and also draws upon research that has made linkages between masculine identities and men’s identities as fathers. However, little research has investigated men’s experiences of fathering and fatherhood in China. Thus, employing the principles of social constructionism and a qualitative research design, this study comprised a total of thirty-one in-depth interviews with Chinese fathers. These men were split into two groups; one group of relatively younger fathers and another group of relatively older fathers. The findings show the complex inter-relationships between fathering and China’s rapidly changing social, economic and political context, including the One Child Policy. The thesis also focuses on aspects of ‘traditional’ fatherhood defined in terms of fathers’ roles as moral guardians, disciplinarians and educators. Finally, the thesis explores aspects of contemporary fathering in China, including the apparent shift to an increasingly involved fathering and the ways in which men reconcile their changing identities as fathers and their identities as men.

This thesis conceptually explores the becoming of transnational subjects. Critical interventions into disciplinary modes of knowledge production on such subjects have long problematised uni-dimensional, essentialist and identitarian approaches, but have had a limited impact on the mainstream(s) they address. In a postdisciplinary move, this thesis reads the literatures on transnational social spaces in migration studies, poststructuralist and new materialist insights on subject formation, intersectional approaches in gender studies and queer theory through one another to propose a queer intersectional approach to transnational subjects. Shifting the focus to the spaces transnationality takes place in rather than normatively defined ethnic and national communities, and interrogating intersectionality’s tendency to mark out particularly gendered and racialised bodies for intersectional analysis allows for exploring heterogeneity and multiplicity within transnational spaces. The queering of intersectionality disrupts the reliance on binary variables of much transnational migration research, towards a situated analysis of the becoming of subjects in and through the transnational space. In doing so, it not only complicates the here/there binarism transnational studies have relied on, but calls heteronormative assumptions underlying gender and transnational migration research into question, and draws attention to the relationship between transnationality, gender, sexualities and the (non-)normative alignments across those and other axes of difference. In an illustrative case study, this queer intersectional approach to the becoming of transnational subjects is then put into critical dialogue with the British South Asian transnational space through an analysis of scholarly representations of British Asians, the Channel 4 dramas Britz and Second Generation, and a Tumblr blog.

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This thesis crosses the research fields of cultural policy and urban design, and examines the policies and political contexts of a new globally significant experiment in creative city development: the Seoul Digital Media City (DMC). The DMC is a newly built urban district, intentionally structured as a creative cluster. This research investigation opens by considering the concept of 'creativity', and the way it has recently animated national policies for urban, economic, as well as cultural, development. Throughout this thesis, the ever-present conundrum of 'East-West' cultural interchange persists, and the thesis attends to the challenges for research in understanding how major Western policy trends (like 'creative city' and 'creative cluster') are received, adapted and implemented, all the while subject to the specific requiremenets of national Asian policy aspirations. The thesis traces the developmental trajectory of the DMC project, and in the context of explaining its rationale, it conveys the various ways in which the DMC articulates a confluence of political ideals. It presents the main discursive influences of the Creative City trend on South Korea and particularly the municipal government of its capital, Seoul. It explains the political and economic contexts on which Creative City discourse has gained traction, along with the significance of the subsequent 'Korean Wave' phenomenon. Largely from an engagement with the literature of the creative city discourse, this thesis articulates fresh criteria for an empirical analysis of the DMC, suitably contextualized by observations on the local contexts of Seoul city urban development and planning. These criteria are used in a case analysis examination of the DMC, which in turn generate further discussion on the implications for adapting Western Creative City policies. The central dimension of the case analysis concerns the assessment of the 'creative' content of the DMC, and the terms by which we can define the DMC as creative. The case analysis, however, demonstrates that 'creativity' in the DMC is both compromised and fraught with conceptual paradoxes, particularly with regard the issues of authenticity and identity. Nonetheless, the thesis suggests ways in which a substantive role for arts and culture could provide pathways for development.