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.

In an era of globalised inter-urban competition, cities are competing internationally for Child Friendly City’ status. A Child Friendly City is one supported by a local governance systemcommitted to fulfilling children’s rights and entrenching their needs into the urban fabric. The design of public realm that is accessible and inclusive of children is a criteria status that has been almost entirely neglected both in practical planning and design policies, and in academic literature. In light of this, through the lens of the community-led movement ;Playing Out;this research project will examine the evolving social and political relationship between the child and their built environment. Highlighting the significant barriers that urban children and the momentum of the Playing Out movement face from both the traditional planning system and common attitudes held by society. Through participant observations at a play street event and semi-structured interviews with professionals whom hold expertise knowledge on children in the City, this research aims to critically examine and contribute towards an evidence base that promotes an important social and cultural shift in ensuring the public realm becomes more welcoming and accessible to all urban citizens, in particular to children.

This is a dissertation project completed as part of the MSc Space Syntax: Architecture and Cities course at the Bartlett School of Architecture, which explores the urban morphological implications of the motorway in the city centre. The study takes the Westway motorway as an example of a Modernist approach to urban transport infrastructure and analyses its long-term impact on the hierarchy of centrality in the neighbourhood. Relations between change in spatial configurations and building attributes such as land use diversity and density are statistically examined. Finally, the study discusses to what extent the impact of top-down urban design manifested in urban growth would implicate community severance.

This dissertation focuses on the social sustainability of high-rise and high-density developments.