The aim of this thesis is to examine the properties of the municipalities in Sweden that influence the choice of being a certified Fairtrade city. The independent variables which are used in the statistical analysis are municipal governance, local tax rate, whether there is an university and/or university college in the municipality, average income and higher education in the municipality. The variables are examined by logistic regression. Since there are no statistical data on ethical procurement, this exogenous variable isn?t included in the regression.

In a suburb of Stockholm, local polititians descide to close down an elemantary school. Because of its shortage of pupils, the polititians claim they can not guarantee the quality of the school and the public requreiments of equal education. The school-employed teachers and parents of the pupils are all unhapy with the descision, but first and foremost dissatisfaied with how the descision was communicated.Using qualitative methods; interviews and content analisys, this thesis aimes to determine how the involved parties, in regards to the termination of the school, view the concepts of freedom of choice, equal education and quality. Interviews have been made with decision-makers, employees of the school, the school leader, one civil servant and parents; all with the goal of understanding how the involved parties view the events leading to the termination of the school and what causes they see. Furthermore, the thesis analyses if and why the involved parties experience the decision as legitimate..

Climate changing is a growing problem for many countries and communities over the world. The cities has a huge work to deal with in their reforcements of their cities to be resilient ones. This thesis makes an effort to investigate and illuminate some of the problem the cities has to solve related to flooding, hazards, erosions, rising sea levels and crotches. This thesis will help to find solutions that international and national efforts has produced and handed out to each other. A lot of communities are charing their excellent tools that works for them.

This thesis aimed to investigate how a rising sea level would affect the livable area of the island Fongafale, Tuvalu. Through the IPCC stabilization scenarios it was examined which areas of the island that would be affected by flooding. The local population?s perceptions of the effects of climate change were studied to see how the consequences of a world-wide problem such as global warming affect people's lives. The paper clarified the Tuvaluans place in the discussion of climate refugees, explained IPCC's work and described the results of previous studies concerning people in Fongafales perceptions and concerns about climate-related changes.

The aim of this thesis is to illustrate the principal problem of the study of national self-images and by questioning the congruent existence of one in the case of Sweden. Through the use of qualitative method and semi-structured interviews the ambition of the study is to compare and to understand the national self-images portrayed in a major Swedish town, Stockholm and to that of a smaller town on the countryside, Sjöbo. A social constructionist approach in co-operation with key temporal and spasial dimensions are used to penetrate the interviews at hand. The main conclusions drawn from this study highlights the difficulties in addressing the concept of a congruent national self-image. Several major discrepancies appear in the analysed material, mainly in the past and the external dimensions, both from a regional approach, but also very much within the local entities themselves..

In the year of 2006 I moved to South Africa for a year, a land that has fascinated me because of its history. During the time of my stay I became very surprised how strongly apartheid permeates the community where the white South Africans today are building walls around themselves. Through media we get surrounded with pictures that media creates and to find information regarding what?s happening in the world this is, most often, the primary source. Therefore I believe it?s interesting to explore how two different local newspapers from the county of Kalmar, with two different ideologies, present pictures of the same event, namely the revolt of Soweto in 1976 and how these two newspapers relates to racial policies.

This essay seeks to analyze the consequences of modern information and communication technology for collective action within the framework of social movements. With references to the protests in Seattle 1999, the essay argues that the emergence of distributed collective action is closely related to the use of technology, for example cell phones and Internet. This distributed collective action can be characterized by its decentralized and self-organizing features, forming a global pattern emerging from local interactions. Whereas contemporary theories of collective action can be ´stretched´ to fit these aspects, they lack analytical tools to describe and analyze such systems. Further, their rejection of classical crowd theory is problematic, since it contains valuable insights.

The purpose of this BA-thesis was to study how three daily Swedish newspapers use a specific type of exemplars, which are recognized by a number of attributes. A photograph of the person that is interviewed always illustrates this type of exemplars and at least two persons are asked the same question.    The three newspapers that have been compared in this study each represent one of the major types of Swedish newspapers: morning press, tabloids and local press. By using a quantitative content analysis, one month was examined in all three newspapers in the year of 1997 and 2007.  Two of the theories that have been central in the thesis are Colin Sparks model of tabloidization, which demonstrates the process of tabloidization and McQuail?s description of commercialization.

Det här är resultatet av kandidatarbetet, skrivet under kursen kandidatarbete 15 p vårterminen 2010 på programmet för fysisk planering vid Blekinge Tekniska Högskola. Arbetet är det avslutande examensarbetet efter 3 års studier i fysisk planering på grundläggande nivå. Arbetet handlar om funktionsomvandlingar i staden. Hur ett flexibelt byggande kan underlätta i städer, där behovet av byggnader förändras snabbare än en byggnads livstid. Kandidatarbetet har dels inneburit studier av en funktionsomvandling som gjorts på Stumholmen i Karlskrona och dels inneburit ett försök till en liknande omvandling på ön Kungsholmen i Karlskronas skärgård där en funktionsomvandling är aktuell idag år 2010.

Ronneby kommun har år 2009 antagit en ny profil, Den moderna kurorten, som ska förtydliga vad kommunen har att erbjuda och vilka mål den sätter för framtiden. Detta arbete syftar till att söka svar på om denna nyantagna profil och vad den står för har speglat av sig i kommunens fysiska planering. Detta görs genom att söka upp kommunala dokument med uttalade kopplingar till denna profil. Profilens betydelse kommer sedan att analyseras för att sedan jämföras med fallstudiernas åtgärder. På så sätt kan arbetet hitta kopplingar mellan den aktuella fysiska planeringen och kommunens profil och därmed avgöra om Den moderna kurorten har satt spår i planeringen. Arbetet kommer även undersöka fallstudiernas möjlighet, grundat i forskning, som fungerande komponenter i Ronneby kommuns marknadsföring.

Helsingborg has the intention to build a train tunnel south of Knutpunkten. This report investigates the hydro geological aspects of the project. Questions at issue that will be answered: 1. Which parameters affect the groundwater level? 2. How will these parameters change within 100 years considering climate changes and what will be the consequences on the groundwater level. According to SMHI climate analysis the climate can change causing increasing precipitation, temperature, and a rising sea level.

Several scenarios point toward a future where we are far more people on Earth than today, where most of those people will live in cities and where oil no longer dominates in the transport systems and in agriculture as an energy source and where less energy will be available to us. The report investigates what areas in traditional ecological knowledge that can contribute to the transition that follows a future with less energy and establishes three areas with the potential of becoming important: areaspecific biological knowledge in societies that are more dependent upon its surrounding environment and its natural prerequisitesthe local management of these biological resources, which often means a fair sharing and sustainable handling of the resources and which has been observed in Nobel price awarded Elinor Ostrom?s researchthe world views that lie behind how the environment is considered and managed, world views that can inspire and point toward how we in the future should formulate world views that do not give the destructive modern management of the environment It is also noted that the magnitude of the city living in the future is a historical news and that very little research has been done in how traditional knowledge can be transferred into this kind of living..

This master thesis deals with steel girders subjected to patch loading caused by concentrated moments. There exist no good methods to calculate by hand the ultimate resistance for this load case. In ?tunnplåtshandboken?, (Handbook for sheet metal, which is published by SSAB), one calculation method is presented. It?s however fairly difficult to use, because of many calculation steps and many graphs.

How do the police prevention methods work against juvenile delinquency? The purpose of this study is to see how the police work to prevent juvenile delinquency in two municipalities in Stockholm, Södertälje and Sundbyberg. Additionally, the purpose of this study is also to find out if there are any similarities or differences between the police methods the police use in these two municipalities. We have used qualitative method in which we have interviewed the police and young people from the communities. We interviewed young people to see their attitudes to the police and the area to find their perception of police work in the fields as well as the police forces attitude toward the young people.

People are given better opportunities to participate in polity today. Democratic equality entails that all individuals are equal and therefore they should be included in the process of making the decisions. How can participation be defined and does it mean that having the possibility to participate means that people can influence the process of making the decisions in polity process?This paper focuses on participation and influence in polity and examine the relationship between having the possibility to participate and having the possibility to actually influence polity process on more local level. Therefore I have been examining the citizens? participation and influence in Helsingborg which is my case study.