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.

This study looks into the responses to the COVID-19 pandemic in the favelas of Rio de Janeiro. The main objective of this study is to enable an understanding of a favela as a capable urban governance institution. This rationale is made possible through the case study of local initiatives that surged in Rio during the crisis, by making use of Byrne’s (2005) complexity framework applied to social sciences. Through the analysis of this case, it becomes clear that three institutional conditions allowed local organisations to advance urban equality throughout the pandemic. First, a condition of formal government institution’s failure. Second, a condition of inadequate access to health and sanitation. Third, a structural inequality that portray favelas as a threat to be perceived by formal institutions as something that must be fixed. This understanding leads to a contribution to the academic and societal understanding of urban settings in Brazil. This paper contains important implications for future work in favelas, although its finding are somewhat limited to the specific context of favelas in Rio de Janeiro.

Low employment statistics of adults with autism spectrum disorder in the UK, the low number of academic studies about supporting autistic library staff in Library and Information Studies academic literature and the indication within the relevant literature that autistic library staff may face barriers to receiving support because of the lack of understanding and negative stigma associated with autism, has prompted this investigation into whether libraries in the UK are providing effective support for autistic library staff. A mixed methods approach was employed to gather quantitative and qualitive data to represent the thoughts and opinions of autistic library staff about the support offered in their workplace. Two surveys were sent out to various library staff listservs, networks and social media groups and a few survey respondents were invited to take part in follow-up interviews which were provided in different formats. Results from both surveys and the interviews indicated that there were issues with disclosure, masking/hiding autistic traits, discrimination due to lack of understanding about autism by some line managers and staff, barriers to requesting reasonable adjustments at work and during job interviews, lack of provision of support services in UK libraries and the lack of provision of autism awareness training. Results have also positively indicated that some autistic library staff have certain traits and skills which enable them to carry out their library work. Although some of the participants have indicated that they have some level of support and face less discrimination in their workplaces, there is still more that can be done in UK libraries to support autistic library staff. Further recommendations are made about different types of support and providing special training for library managers and non-autistic staff to improve understanding about adjustments that autistic library staff may need. Further studies would be useful to understand about prevalence of autism in different sectors and understand the needs of staff working in different library sectors.