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In seeking to shift municipal waste policy towards sustainability, policy-makers at European, national and local levels are facing the challenge of how to engage householders in reducing, reusing and recycling their waste. This in turn means engaging with the arena within which day to day waste management activities are practiced – the home. In view of this critical relationship between waste policy and household practices, this research project1 has sought to examine:\ud • the ways in which new infrastructures for managing waste are being ‘designed in’ to new housing developments and renovated kitchens in the UK and Europe;\ud • the barriers identified by key actors in the as impending the pursuit of a more integrated approach to housing design and waste management and how these might be overcome;\ud • examples of best practice currently being developed in the UK and their applicability in the context of the North-East of England.

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This report is based on the findings of a four-year PhD study undertaken at the University of Durham. The principle aims of the research were to explore visible communities‟ use and perceptions of the English National Parks. The report concentrates on policy recommendations (section III), constructed from an overarching analysis of the relevant academic literature, review of previous and current initiatives involving visible communities in the National Parks, and empirical fieldwork consisting of quantitative and qualitative research. However, the policy suggestions draw particularly from that part of the research carried out with people from visible community backgrounds.\ud \ud Two interim reports were produced, which focused on visible community responses to questionnaire and interview surveys. Summaries of the interim reports can be found in section II of this report. This Executive Summary concentrates on policy recommendations, and addresses three aspects of policy:\ud \ud - the need for specific policy shifts regarding visible community visitors;\ud - overarching approaches to such policy suggested by the research; and\ud - specific proposals for action.

A new field of “public geographies” is taking shape (Fuller 2008) in geography’s mainstream journals. While much is “traditional”, with intellectuals disseminating academic research via non-academic outlets (Castree 2006; Mitchell 2008; Oslender 2007), less visible is the “organic” work and its “more involved intellectualizing, pursued through working with area based or single-interest groups, in which the process itself may be the outcome” (Ward 2006:499; see Fuller and Askins 2010). A number of well-known projects exist where research has been “done not merely for the people we write about but with them” (Gregory 2005:188; see also Cahill 2004; Johnston and Pratt 2010). However, collaborative writing of academic publications which gives research participants authorial credit is unusual (mrs kinpainsby 2008; although see Sangtin Writers and Nagar 2006). This paper is about an organic public geographies project called “Making the connection”. It is written by a diverse collection of (non-)academic participants who contributed to the project before it had started, as it was undertaken, and/or after it had finished. This is a “messy”, process-oriented text (Cook et al. 2007)working through the threads (partially) connecting the activities of its main collaborators, including a referee who helped get the paper to publication. Refereed/Peer-reviewed

This thesis explores the production of DIY punk alternative cultures, communities and identities as activism. Based on an ethnographic study of DIY punk in North East England, it combines and integrates the disciplinary approaches of sociology, cultural studies and geography. Using an interpretivist epistemology, the research focuses on DIY punk participants’ subjective realities and experiences, through participant observation, of punk events and shows, and interviews. Carried out by a researcher who was both embedded in the scene, as a punk participant, and outside it, as an academic PhD student, it enhances methodological and epistemological debates about the ‘insider/outsider’ research stance and subjectivities.\ud \ud This thesis promotes DIY punk as a relevant and rich area for scholarship. It theorises DIY punk participation as cultural production (Moore, 2007), existing within a framework of activism, as participants attempt to bring into being ‘hoped-for futures’ (Chatterton & Pickerill, 2010) using a multitude of tactics. Identifying multi-layered and multi-scalar acts of resistance, the narrowness of the concept of activism in the literature is critiqued. A more inclusive conceptualisation of activism, as more than oppositional, is proposed.\ud \ud A DIY ethic is theorised as anti-capitalist and interconnected with other complexly interwoven ideologies and politics. The everyday challenges that participants face, in negotiating a DIY punk ethic, and the interface between DIY punk culture and ‘mainstream’ society, are examined. Participants narratively construct DIY punk through ongoing negotiations, which affect how participants produce and interact with and in DIY punk spaces.\ud \ud The research contributes to scholarship on punk and community by arguing that DIY punk cultural production is strengthened by notions of community. It has wider relevance by exploring the meaning of community in a unique cultural context. It offers a definition of community that recognises DIY punk communities as imagined (Anderson, 1991) but sensitive to the significance of place.