published_or_final_version / Chinese / Master / Master of Philosophy

published_or_final_version / Architecture / Master / Master of Landscape Architecture

This dissertation looks into the processes by which neoliberalism is mutating with various local and global discourses in order to transform urban space for marginalized street hawkers in the Global South, specifically Delhi, India. Following the current engagements in geographic literature on neoliberalism that focus on the contextually embedded character and the path-dependent process of the spread of free market ideas, I make free market advocacy think tanks--a rather unknown and under-investigated accomplice to this process--my main entry point. Corporate funded think tanks are often found advocating a neoliberal doctrine of free markets, minimal government intervention, and privatization. A self-professed civil society organization, the Center for Civil Society (CCS) in Delhi is one of the first neoliberal, national and foreign corporation funded, advocacy think tanks in India and one of its many agendas is to counter the popular belief that neoliberalism is harmful for the urban poor such as street hawkers. Various NGOs, social workers, scholars, academicians, and think tanks including CCS came together to form the National Policy of Street Vendors, 2009 (NPSV), one of the first policy proposals in modern India to tackle the problems of urban spaces of street vending. Through my investigations I wish to highlight the neoliberal attitudes that are concealed in this policy regarding street hawkers. By bringing these neoliberal undertones to the forefront, this dissertation discusses how this so called “pro-hawking” policy that is being pushed to be implemented in the majority of Indian cities is in fact hostile to hawkers. I demonstrate this fact by explaining that NPSV and its proponents view space as a capitalist commodity and are attempting to transform the rich social spaces of Indian city streets into hollow container spaces of capitalist production and consumption. In this way, this dissertation connects macro spaces of governance such as city streets to the micro spaces of governmentality such as think tanks like CCS.

This dissertation study examined and gave voice to the experiences of a group of street involved youth, those who had received special education support and services during their school years. They are not spoken about in the literature. Special education is complex, diverse, and encompasses many exceptional pupils for whom services and supports are provided in the school system. Many street youth belong to this group with exceptionalities such as learning disability, mild intellectual disability or behaviour. Using narrative analysis and structuration theory frameworks, the life history narratives of fifteen street youth who were in special education classes were co-constructed and analysed. In addition, a survey question gathered how many new in-takes at a drop-in for street youth self-identify as youth who were in special education. Furthermore, data was gathered from service providers in education and social services through semi-structured interviews and two focus groups. Youth participants considered citizenship in special education as exclusionary and actively resisted it because of the social connotations such as ‘being stupid’ which were attached to it. Youth emphasized that teachers and support staff seemed unaware of the complex environmental factors that impacted on their ability to be successful in school. They reported that once they were formally identified and placed in special education, they were put in a holding pattern that often did not lead to graduation. Special education was focused on classifications according to deficit discourses rather than engaging these students in learning or in having their identified learning needs met. Although study participants dropped out of school a number of times, they kept returning either to complete secondary school or enroll in college, mostly without special education designation and supports. Service providers, educators and special services staff should mentor such youth, provide opportunities for addressing learning problems, and deliver quality instruction for students with identified learning difficulties and needs. There is a dearth of alternative and transitional post-secondary programs to meet the specific needs of these students.

Google Street View projektas buvo pradėtas Jungtinėse Amerikos Valstijose, kur įstatymai, skirti reguliuoti nuotraukų ir vaizdo įrašų darymą viešose vietose yra daug liberalesni negu Europos privatumo įstatymai. Todėl plečiant projektą Europoje, Google susidūrė su daugybe kritikos tiek iš privačių asmenų, tie iš Europos Sąjungos institucijų atstovų pusės. Europos Komisijos pateikti reikalavimai 2010 m. netgi lėmė viešus Google svarstymus dėl galimo Google Street View projekto nutraukimo Europoje. Pagrindinė priežastis, dėl kurios išsiskyrė JAV ir Europos požiūris į Google Street View projektą, slypi skirtingame istoriniame Jungtinių Amerikos Valstijų bei Europos požiūryje į laisvės ir privatumo teisių apsaugą. Jungtinėse Amerikos Valstijose privatumo apsaugos principą iš esmės galima apibūdinti kaip „teisę būti paliktam ramybėje“ („right to be left alone“). Tradiciškai susiklostė įsitikinimas, kad asmens teisė į privatų gyvenimą gali būti užtikrinta tik jeigu į jį nesikiš vyriausybė. Privačiam sektoriui taikomi įstatymai iš esmės tik numato, kokiu būdu turi būti renkami, tvarkomi privačių asmenų duomenys, yra numatytas draudimas informaciją apie savo klientus atskleisti trečiosioms šalis. Visa kita palikta įmonių savireguliacijai. Europos požiūris į asmens privatumo apsaugą yra skirtingas negu Jungtinėse Amerikos Valstijose. Pagrindinė vertybė, kurią siekiama apsaugoti leidžiant teisės aktus privatumo apsaugos srityje – asmens orumas. Asmuo, išeidamas į viešumą, negali... [toliau žr. visą tekstą] / „Recent inventions and business methods call attention to the next step which must be taken for the protection of the person, and for securing to the individual what Judge Cooley calls the right "to be let alone" This idea of one‘s right to privacy was presented by two United States lawyers S. Warrend and L. Brandeis in 1890. The authors felt threatened by the growing number of tabloid press and new snap cameras. They were the first to publicly express the need to safeguard personal rights, such as a right to one’s image, a right to privacy, a right to be left alone. Today portable photo cameras are old news, but new technologies still seem to challenge our law systems. Such a novelty technology is definitely Google Street View, project, which enables to wander the streets of various cities all around the world without leaving the comfort if our homes. Today Street View is available on all the continents, including Antarctica. Google Street View was introduced in the United States in 2007, where law regarding privacy is not as sophisticated as the one in European Union. This was the reason why Google faced so many challenges, which were not an issue in the United States, once it launched the program in various European countries. This thesis examines two different approaches to protect personal rights, the one in the United States and the one in European Union. Research also includes examples of various cases against Street view and short history of the evolution of the right... [to full text]

Little research has focused on street-involved youths’ social relationships. As some scholars have suggested that leisure is inherently social, my research sought to understand whether participation in structured and/or unstructured leisure activities influence street-involved youths’ social relationships with other street-involved youths as well with members of the mainstream community. Written in the publishable paper format, this thesis is comprised of two papers, both of which utilize Foucauldian theory. In the first paper, I examine the impacts of street-involved youths’ participation in Health Matters, a leisure program for street-involved youths in Ottawa, Canada. In the second paper, I examine street involved youths’ unstructured leisure activities (e.g., leisure in non-programmed settings) and their subsequent social impacts. Based on my findings, I argue that street-involved youths use both structured and unstructured leisure to form crucial social connections to make their lives more bearable.

If there is anything that challenges a discussion about architecture, it would be defining architecture. It is too broad a subject to construct any particular opinion and follow on, even while attempting to create an understanding of it at the level within graduate program. For me, in a way, architecture has constantly re-constructed its character and impression, and that by itself becomes its permanent trait vis-a-vis a given place and time. But, it also subtly shifts its prominence from being an object to being an experience, from being permanent to being ephemeral or from being a summation to being a subtraction. At this moment, my pursuit of understanding architecture lies in its subtraction or absence from a collage of variables that compose everyday life.Revisiting Bombay's busy streets after spending a considerable amount of time in the United States was a familiar experience for me, but it quickly helped me recognize and acknowledge constituents of my everyday living (associated with the events of the city) that were immediately subtracted while living in the West. An everyday experienceassociated with the city, like the vending stalls, convenience stores, songs, noise, people, etc. could not be found in cities I visited in the U.S. All these experiences such as eating at food stalls and having a cup of tea on the street-side, buying electronics and latest music albums from a make-shift stall assembled from pieces of wooden planks; or simply walking on the street-side as if it were never a side walk but a festival of attainable consumerism - collectively form an event that is embedded in Bombay's urbanism. Herein, I chose to get up-close with the actors and their created spaces and interview them in order to gain insights into the totality of making a living on the street-side. Additionally, in order to extend my knowledge of architecture, I designed a vending stall that both acknowledges the worlds of the street-side and vendors, even as it is informed by my training as an architect.I am challenged as a graduate student to consider architecture within the context of my everyday life. A whole new dimension of space (of ad-hoc and tactical nature) that has always been there, gradually and randomly shaping my relationship with the city's streets while challenging the order of the city. Although invisibly present all the time, this study has made me more aware of its influence. Hence, I have tried to readdress everyday life on the street-sides within the local and global settings of Bombay, studying events and people associated with it. Looking for a probable architecture on the street-sides of Bombay within the boundaries of the quotidian and the modem realities becomes my thesis. / Department of Architecture

This paper examines the National Child Labor Movement in America at the turn of the 20th century and how it affected collective American social consciousness and civic engagement. One of the first and most important social movements of the Progressive Era led by the National Child Labor Committee, reformers sought to use multiple focal points to unite the American public around the issue of children and the greater good of the nation’s future. In doing so, the movement embedded a new urban social awareness in which Americans finally caught a glimpse into the lives of their fellow citizens, of all classes and backgrounds, and began to develop empathetic practices to initiate social change. Ultimately, this had a significant effect on the future of urban social reform.

Studies on market trader activism in Africa routinely approach traders' claims-making practices from the perspective of the state's regime of signifying order, in relation to which opposition simply seeks to render itself “legible” (Scott 1998). In contrast, this dissertation contends that one must pay close attention to the multiple significations of order and disorder that exist in any social situation and which, through their continuous permeation, fuel transformations of normative plausibilities and, by extension, of the grounds for claims. With a grounding in the theory of the social and political quality of time, I show how the idea of coeval temporalities sensitises observers to the multiple sources of significations of order and disorder – particularly, with regard to subjects' relation to authority – and their creative adaptation in the moment of temporal convergence. The central marketplace of Accra, the capital of Ghana, provides the context for this study. My empirical analysis of this social arena that is closely connected to global flows of people, capital, consumer items and, inevitably, ideas, including those related to order and associated grounds of entitlement adds to the underappreciated theoretical strand the actor-centred process of translation that engenders creative adaptations between converging coeval temporalities.

Title: Competency profile of a Street Dance coach Objectives: The aim of this work is to find the key competencies and needs for the profile of a Street dance coach. The competencies are discovered through questions given to dance students and trainers.The benefit of this work should be seen during the selection of the dance trainers. Methods: The research is made from quantitative methods and interviews. The interviews of the dance students and trainers were made through an electronic questionnaire. The respondents were addressed on the social media. The theoretical part of the thesis comes from the studied professional literature, internet sites and personal experience. Results: We found out which are the key competencies that a trainer should have. Based on the results of the research we choose the 12 most important competencies of a street dance trainer, which were valorised thanks to the weighted average and split by importance. Keywords: Dance, Street Dance, Coach, Competence