A description of the work (Abstract): «Exploring a potential vision of the common good for London’s economic centres, this dissertation asks why and how economic democracy should be enacted at the scale of the high street. While COVID-19 has exacerbated inequalities along many lines, evolving values around community, wellbeing and public space also pose an opportunity for re-imagining fairer economic trajectories through a focus on place. Often magnifying wider economic issues, the long-run decline of British high streets has been well documented. While commonly focusing on curation and design as a way to ‘activate’ these once public spaces, their complexity has given way to an equally diverse discourse lacking a consistent framework for guiding planning, interventions and policy. While current high street rhetoric offers a growing focus on social value and ‘community-led development’, economic power and equity implications are frequently overlooked. This thesis suggests, given the accessible and inclusive nature of high streets, the potential for situating a framework of economic development that considers a more radical restructuring of social and economic power. Placing the principles of economic democracy within an everyday site helps to foreground people and place. Through repurposing urban space for inclusive, collective and participatory workspaces, services or social centres, high streets can play a role in reformulating value concepts. Developing an analytical framework that considers rights, ownership and deliberation, through iterative empirical analysis, this thesis will address practices that could re-frame high streets to better serve their communities. SHORT: study asking why and how should a framework of economic democracy be used to re-shape london’s high streets, for the redistribution of economic power and the promotion of the common good.

With less than a decade left to deliver the Sustainable Development Goal of universal access to water and sanitation, innovative and inclusive new approaches are needed to address the ongoing challenge of urban Water Supply and Sanitation (WSS). WSS has long been misrecognised as a technical issue of facilities and infrastructure, obscuring the complex socio-political drivers that shape distributional injustices in service provision. Furthermore, marginalised groups disproportionately suffering WSS injustices, such as informal settlement residents, are typically excluded from the WSS decision-making that could alleviate their struggles. The co-production of knowledge through partnerships with informal settlement residents is gaining interest as a potentially transformative method to address WSS injustices through improving recognition of the multifaceted and heterogeneous realities within informal settlements and empowering the political participation of informal settlement residents. Despite widespread academic enthusiasm, much of the literature remains broadly conceptual. This dissertation contributes to the debate by examining how knowledge co-production can help alleviate WSS service provision injustices through the specific case of the Centre for Community Initiative’s activities in the informal settlements of Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. The combined theoretical lenses of environmental justice and Feminist Political Ecology deliver a nuanced perspective on knowledge co-production that emphasises the importance of local context, heterogeneity within and between informal settlements and the complexity of ‘transformative change’.