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This study inspects how an urban place is made in HafenCity, Hamburg, currently one of Europe’s largest urban development projects. This process is illustrated as a co-production of residential initiative and planners' facilitation in developing a nascent urban district into a self-sustained community. The qualitative approach draws on interviews with 55 residents, interviews with planning agents and participant observation. Planners' agendas and policies are set in relation to residents' local activities, to display how physical engineering and social appropriation are moments conjoined in urban place-making. Newly-built riverside developments have commonly been characterised as enclaves of private affluence with weak attachments of their residents to the local area. Middle class professionals enjoy a ready-made lifestyle marked by private consumption and domestic services that enable them to socially disengage from their surrounding neighbourhood. HafenCity bucks this trend in regard to its dynamic neighbourhood life unfolding among its residents. It is argued that the situation of first-time occupation of a neighbourhood spurs the development of residential relationships and their intensification more readily than in established neighbourhoods. An initial merely aesthetic identification of incoming residents with the lures of their chosen destination is a precondition for the generation of farther reaching identifications, epitomised in engagements with place as something valorised in its own right. The facilitation of such associations is grounded in the intersection of two important factors. As a residential site, HafenCity selectively attracts educated middle class cohorts, implying that cultural capital concentrates within a very confined geographical setting that characterised HafenCity at its earliest stage. The personal identification of many incomers with HafenCity as a place of desire and their resulting optimism after arrival translates into a shared positive sense of place among individuals feeling similarly. This 'community in the mind' facilitates familiarisation among residents and the transition of neighbourly interactions into more meaningful voluntary associations serving needs of sociability, cultural indulgence, economic wellbeing, and most prominently, political engagement seeking to make HafenCity's official planning policy more foreseeable and accountable. In essence, the abundance of cultural capital at the neighbourhood scale acts as a favourable condition for its conversion into social capital for the advancement of a new area into a community of strong residential ties marked by attentiveness to one another's needs. The spatial situation of 'under-construction' encourages residents to voluntary engagement in HafenCity’s development policy. While the planning authority itself stimulates such participative mechanisms, they are at the same time concessions made to legitimise and reinforce the power held by this authority. As a consequence, participation in the development process becomes an ambiguous amalgam of volunteering and institutional intervention. While participation facilitates dialogical structures between residents and planners, it does not increase residents’ actual influence in urban policy making. Through their facilitation of residents' place-making, planners can credit themselves with treating the issue of planning in a foresighted way that refutes notions of technocratic blindness to human needs. Such active promotion of residents' attachments to their place however has its limits. While planners have a vested interest in an active residential community they can showcase as a testimonial to the reasonability of their agenda, they are unable to resolve conflicts of interests among residents that thwart the project of joint place-making. The scope of planners in collaborative place-making is circumscribed by the competencies of an authority that de-legitimises the actual engineering of interpersonal relationships at the neighbourhood level.

This PhD by publication draws on a range of publications from the last five years. These books, papers and chapters explore tourist motivation and experiences in a range of contemporary contexts. The body of work moves from mainstream discussion around sustainability and slow tourism in the tourist decision making process to the use of visual media to explore, understand and co-create tourist spaces, investigating related tourist subcultures and counter-cultural destinations. In particular the work focuses on Urban Exploration and, later, on cold war sites. My papers consider both tourist decision making in relation to planned visits, and the subsequent publication of images of places which have been visited. The work considers authenticity and visuality as components of the dissatisfaction with modern tourism, and the experiences it offers, I argue that this dissatisfaction is driving tourists to understand, engage with and experience tourist sites in new ways, seeking liminality and embodiment within the tourist experience. The study will develop this analysis through four key areas:  A clarification of the role of tourism within advanced societies and as a multidisciplinary field of research.  An evaluation of authenticity, visuality and urban exploration  A critical review of tourist consumption, prosumption and co-creation  A review of the methodologies adopted through the papers submitted for this PhD by publication to explore the mixed-method approaches to data collection and the centrality of visual methodologies and discourses in understanding tourism and tourism geography. An exploration of the role of real and virtual experiences in deconstructing and reconstructing urban tourist experiences to evaluate the factors which influence and inform tourist decision making.

The study proposes to operationalise sustainable development within an urban environment and at a variety of scales - strategic to neighbourhood. The study examines the convergence of ideas within urbanity and sustainability, identifying inconsistencies and contradictions within current thematic research. It proposes a consensual approach to understanding the linked substantive, analytical and procedural attributes underlying a developing chronology of concepts relating to sustainability. This chronology of ideas provides the basis for a systems-based framework that recognises the complexity of urban areas. The study advocates and introduces an adaptive framework of spatial indicators of urbanism to simplify and communicate an holistic overview of attributes of sustainability. This interpretation of holism is based on thematic (qualitative / quantitative) and scalar (strategic / local) based integration on a consistent (spatial) basis. This adaptive framework is designed to be suitable for locality specific subjective interpretations of sustainability. It is linked to a non-expert methodological 'toolkit' that places an emphasis on currently undervalued qualitative and spatial data collection methods. This is a mixed and multi- method approach to understanding spatial (urban) systems that complements empirical data sets. A series of case studies are used to test and refine qualitative collection from primary and secondary sources and spatialisation methods. Sample material is then used to test the utility and ease of use of GIS for data manipulation, analysis and modelling. Two detailed and complementary applications of the adaptive framework, the data inventory / collection methods and the use of GIS based digital spatial databases are used to illustrate the potential range of applications and highlight problems of use. A number of possible future developments of the study are suggested for maximising the utility of the conceptual approach and a developed spatial database for a variety of agents, exploring additional dimensions of the urban system.

In the post-war period a heterogeneous group of photographers articulate a new photographic approach to the city as motive in a photographic language that combines intense formalism with subjective vision. This paper analyses the photobook Fragments of a City published in 1960 by Danish photographer Keld Helmer-Petersen. The book is a pioneering example of this post-war tendency and yet it has not been analysed or presented academically before. In the paper I examine how the book forms a new mode of representation that balances between abstraction and realism and how this has an influence on both questions of representation and perception.

One of the major questions that both urban and non-urban public school districts are faced with is the relationship between the predictors of school climate, student behavior, staff perceptions and the influence these variables have on school climate. School districts are under public scrutiny to produce positive achievement results for all students. Much research suggests that schools that are considered urban are generally considered unsafe, unproductive and unable to produce students that are competitive in a 21st century global economy. In the major urban centers, student populations are decreasing, flooding the first-ring school districts. First-ring school districts are the individual school districts that immediately border major urban school centers. What are left in the major urban districts are families that are unable to improve their situation and move out of the school districts that are generally considered a failure. One area that has been generally targeted as a method to improve student achievement is the area of school climate. Various programs in the public school setting have been instituted to positively influence school climate. Inside the school setting, there are diverse variables that can affect the efficient running of a school building: school climate, student population, discipline occurrences in a school, specific positive behavior support programs (PBS), at-risk behavior intervention programs for students, academic intervention programs, staff morale and standardized testing results for a specific school district. These predictors, along with individual human development and behavior, influence school climate. It is essential to understand how these characteristics can impact school climate in an urban and non-urban setting; what policies or procedures can positively impact climate at the building level; and how can these factors can influence staff perceptions towards student achievement. Educators have yet to determine the exact interplay of the factors that predict school climate and their influence upon student achievement. Among other variables, the topic of school climate has had profound implications upon staff retention, school discipline and student academic achievement. The purpose of this study is to assess the impact of positive behavior supports on school climate, specifically in relation to teacher perceptions and feelings towards positive behavior support programming; to identify the awareness of specific positive behavior supports used within a school setting; to determine the impact of these supports on school climate by measuring teacher attitude and perception about student achievement; and ultimately, to determine is there a statistical significance in staff perception of school climate relative to the school setting of an urban and non-urban school. Two-hundred and six educators were surveyed from four school district in Northeast and Northwest Ohio. Results demonstrated that working in a urban setting or non-urban setting was statistically significant in terms of the impact on teacher attitude, collegiality, achievement perceptions and awareness with regards to the tested factors that influence school climate. It was found that there were statistically significant differences between teachers working in either an urban or a non-urban setting in relation to teacher attitude, collegiality, achievement perceptions and awareness, as related to school climate. However, the effect sizes were low demonstrating that the differences were not large enough to be of a practical concern.

Urban public open spaces mirror the complex processes of urban societies and embed themselves deep within the character of a city. The quality and character of these spaces have an effect on people’s experience of urbanity (Montgomery, 1998). The concept of urbanity in its simplest form is the experience of urban life, this experience is made up of different spatial and social components that combine to provide a person with a certain type of experience. Drawing on public life study data gathered through observation methods, this research examines the urban design and urbanity qualities of public open spaces and attempts to provide design recommendations at both a low budget and high budget scale that can enhance the experience of urbanity for the user, exemplified in this research through a case study of Addington, Christchurch. The discussion advances theory around designing for urbanity and the use of low budget design solutions to test urban design ideas before permanent solutions are implemented, creating a successional urban design process. This urban design process has the potential to assist urban designers, landscape architects and property developers in sourcing solutions to urban design problems through low budget means in today’s austere economic conditions.

An archaeology of social space, a sifting through the accumulated debris of modernity, provides me with a frame to make visible the everyday tactics of space-making through which a modern religion emerged in Vrindavan, the primary pilgrimage site in north India where the god Krishna is said to have spent his youth. Displacing post-Enlightenment dichotomies such as faith/ideology and secular/religious, I show how spatio-visual practices were central in the making of subjectivities in 19th and 20th-century India. In my narrative, the space of religion - both real and metaphoric - becomes a key liminal socio-political arena where religious and visual practices coincide in resisting the epistemological duality of (western) modernity and (nationalist) tradition. By reading together purportedly discrete practices such as temple building and anti-colonial political movements, cartography and theological texts, photography and road-making projects, "In The Name of Krishna" offers an understanding of modern religiosity and its spatial strategies. In its localized forms, the new strategies of space-making articulated in this small north Indian pilgrimage town made possible subjectivities, desires, and imperatives that went beyond the tyranny of modernity and its claim to the universal. My dissertation, then, is an attempt to rethink the terrains of these localized practices - insidious, minute, and fragmentary.