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Migration is becoming a major political and social issue in a global context. However, while immigrants’ integration into the hosting society and cities has sparked research investigations, there have been few studies focusing on how their presence affects the urban fabric, especially their use of public open spaces and even less is known about how, and in what way, such spaces have an impact on the immigrants themselves. The scope of this research is to gain a better understanding of how immigrants use, perceive and experience public open spaces. The research focuses on the case study of public open spaces in Lisbon, the capital of Portugal. The thesis centres on the experience of first generation immigrants from the three largest immigrant communities living in Portugal, namely, from Brazil, Cape Verde and Ukraine. These immigrants not only represent different waves of migration but also communities from very different geographic origins and socio-cultural backgrounds. David Canter’s ‘Theory of Place’ (Canter, 1977) is used as the theoretical framework for the study, whereby place is understood to be the locus for the juxtaposition of activities that people engage in, their perceptions of it and the physical attributes of space. The key research aim is to explore immigrants’ attitudes, preferences, perceptions, uses and ‘place attachment’ in relation to public open spaces in Lisbon. A mixed-method approach is used to gather information from these three immigrant communities and to establish the relationship between them and public open spaces in the host country. The qualitative methods comprise focus-group discussions and ‘go-along’ interviews, while the quantitative methods include questionnaires. The key findings from the analysis of the cross-cultural experiences show that ‘frequency of use’ is likely to be affected by immigrants’ national and cultural identity. The analysis also reveals the particular meaning that ‘being close to water’ has for the three immigrant groups, especially in terms of its connection with the sea and going to the beach, as well as the importance to them of music being played outdoors and their need for more places to have barbecues. The findings also highlight the importance of public open spaces to immigrants’ lives, particularly in terms of how they evoke different memories (childhood and adult) and how some immigrants have already developed memories in relation to certain places and features in Lisbon. ‘Place attachment’, thus, is shown to serve as an anchor for people and it creates links between the homeland and host country, giving a sense of continuity to immigrants’ lives.

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In order to improve the general quality of low-cost housing in Brazil, a research project was conducted to identify the existing conflicts in the interactions between residents and dwellings. The conceptual framework is that architectural spaces have their origin in the interactive process occurring between social forms and physical forms. Whenever architectural situations do not match cultural patterns, conflicts are likely to arise between performers and objects and spaces. Conflicts can be provoked by architectural elements that either have not been provided or are inadequate. Performing his activities, man endows spaces with significance. Thus, architectural spaces are always meaningful and can be approached as a text to be read, decoded and interpreted. A fieldwork study was conducted to survey about 175 low cost houses in &10 Horizonte, Brazil, by READING SPACES in order to identify existing conflicts. The fieldwork methodology consisted of a SYSTEMATICOBSERVATIONof the interactions between residents and houses, describing them by means of architectural tools: annotated sketches, pictures and reports on people's comments. Nineteen conflicts have been identified, characterised and analysed in comparison to the vernacular architecture and technical literature. The conclusions may constitute_a theoretical guide-line for further projects of a similar context.

This thesis describes various forms of metric spaces and establishes some of the properties of functions defined on metric spaces. No attempt is made in this paper to examine a particular type of function in detail. Instead, some of properties of several kinds of functions will be observed as the functions are defined on various forms of metric spaces such as connected spaces, compact spaces, complete spaces, etc.

The purpose of this paper is to develop some properties of uniformly locally compact spaces. The terminology and symbology used are the same as those used in General Topology, by J. L. Kelley.

In the study of groups and topological spaces, the properties of both are often encountered in one system. The following are common examples: groups with discrete topologies, the complex numbers with the usual topology, and matrix groups with metric topologies. The need for a study of how algebraic properties and topological properties affect one another when united and interrelated in one system soon becomes evident. Thus the purpose of this thesis is to study the interrelated group and topological space, the topological group.

This thesis investigates the properties and applications of derivatives of functions whose domain and range are Banach spaces.