The meaning and method of urban capacity and urban capacity studies

This thesis focuses on the question 'What is meant by "urban capacity"?' This is an increasingly important question as the government claims that the concept, through its technical study -the urban capacity study- is central to the planning for housing process, with this new technical study forming the foundation on which local authorities and regional authorities will increasingly develop their housing policy. However, the concept of 'urban capacity' is relatively new, and is still evolving. Therefore the meaning of urban capacity is important for processes of planning; but it is also a key idea driving development policy, ultimately determining where houses are built, the form they are likely to take, and the way that people in the future are likely to live. The urban capacity literature suggested that the concept had moved from being linked primarily to environmental capacity to being linked primarily to planning for housing provision, establishing the need to investigate the concept's evolution in meaning. To investigate this evolution, two descriptive concept-models were developed, and the research identified three windows that gave insight into the construction of the concept of urban capacity and its usage. These three windows were: firstly, government texts to explore how urban capacity was argued; secondly, a survey of urban capacity studies to investigate how urban capacity was assessed and the implications of the methods on the meaning of the concept; thirdly, a case study of South Tyneside Metropolitan Borough Council, the co-sponsor to this research, to investigate how the concept and urban capacity studies were used at the local level. This thesis concludes that the concept of urban capacity has indeed evolved; but that this evolution is more complicated than it may at first appear, and that this is likely to have implications for future policy-makers.EThOS - Electronic Theses Online ServiceESRC : South Tyneside Metropolitan Borough CouncilGBUnited Kingdo

THE MATERIALITY AND SPATIALITY OF GRAVES AND GRAVE MARKERS IN THE BORDER REGION BETWEEN LUXEMBOURG AND GERMANY

This PhD thesis is the partial result of the research project entitled "Material Culture and Spaces of Remembrance – A Study of Cemeteries in Luxembourg in the Context of the Greater Region", under the coordination and supervision of Dr. Thomas Kolnberger and Associate Professor Sonja Kmec at the University of Luxembourg, and funded by the Fonds National de la Recherche (FNR). Building on prior, seminal research, this thesis aims to address the following questions concerning a specific, predefined region between Luxembourg and Germany, and selected cemeteries: • Does the research approach demonstrated from Anglo-American literature also apply to the sample in the border region between Luxembourg and Germany? • Does the analysis of materiality within its spatial context provide indications of a neighbouring effect, i.e. do material characteristics appear in spatial clusters? • With regards to the materiality that can be observed at the selected cemeteries, what might explain the specific appearance of, especially, graves and grave markers; i.e. what factors, such as cemetery regulations or stonemasons, might have had an influence? Based on a pilot project at Walferdange (Luxembourg) cemetery, as well as a specifically developed and designed data collection approach and tool, the author of this thesis collected the data from full populations of grave and grave marker material culture at three additional, selected cemeteries in Luxembourg and Germany, i.e. Wormeldange, Wincheringen and Konz, in order to allow an analysis of the present assemblage, reaching back into the late 19th century. The data gained thus were analysed using statistical and geo-spatial methods. The results of this data collection and analysis indicate the following: similar methods compared to, for example, work in the Anglo-American context, can generally be applied; since materiality of funeral culture shows a certain level of fluctuation and volatility over time in this specific research context, the researcher has to be careful in order to ensure appropriate dating; results in a chronologically limited data set in which also accurate spatiality cannot be ensured. Whileclusters of materiality can be identified visually, they do not in all instances produce stable results during statistical testing. Thus, a neighbouring effect cannot in all cases be supported and needs to be critically questioned in the face of different tactical confidence intervals. Moreover, potential cultural differences and differences in cemetery management, manifested for example in cemetery regulations, are not enough to explain the actual materiality and spatiality that can be found on the researched cemeteries. The author uses additional literature from business studies and economics in order to highlight a different approach in historical archaeological research in understanding grave monument genesis, their explanatory power and studying related phenomena in the future, hypothesizing about business related aspects in the interrelationship between stonemasons and their customers

Annual report of the town officers of Merrimack, New Hampshire for the fiscal year ending June 30, 1997.

This is an annual report containing vital statistics for a town/city in the state of New Hampshire

Elements of the Byronic Hero in Captain Ahab

This study of the elements of the Byronic hero in Herman Melville's Captain Ahab includes a look at the Byronic hero and Byron himself, the Byronic hero and the Gothic tradition, the Byronic hero and his "humanities," and the Byronic hero and Prometheus-Lucifer

Georgic Political Economy: Emergent Forms of Order and Liberal Statecraft in Eighteenth-Century British Poetry

Eighteenth-century, British, georgic poems participate in the work of the new discipline of political economy of naturalizing economic and political liberalism. Georgics indirectly communicate a moral philosophy amenable to the system of natural laws and rights in John Locke’s Two Treatises of Government (1689). In light of the groundbreaking economic science of François Quesnay which Adam Smith revised in his more historically-informed, open-ended analysis, states were increasingly regarded as serving rather than served by their subjects, who now best fulfilled their natural law-based obligation to thrive by freely pursuing their rational self-interests. Georgic poems primarily undermine a conception of state government as a locus of moral authority and social order by presenting alternative, nominally natural sources of socio-economic stability. James Thomson’s The Seasons (1730) moralizes personal industry and innovation while veering from detailed examples of natural phenomena, to vast ecological networks, to nature’s determinative, physical and moral laws. William Mason’s The English Garden (1782) asserts that proprietors possessing enough wealth and taste to landscape their estates in a naturalistic style thereby could prove their fitness to participate in liberal government. Scientist-poet Erasmus Darwin’s The Temple of Nature (1803) rigorously argues for emergent order by presenting a physiological model in which a universal pleasure principle drives all organisms to imitate and synthesize ideas which enable innovation and self-transformation. He defines liberty as immanent to organisms\u27 volitional capacity and locates potential progress in his model’s innate operations. In Darwin, as elsewhere, government becomes an imperfect, refinable technology subservient to a nation’s economy