This study examines the connection between social capital and urban and rural areas. The study divides the environments into two categories; metropolises and rural areas. Metropolises are defined as any of Swedens largest cities Stockholm, Gothenburg or Malmö. The study also examines if there is a difference between these groups in how high social trust they have to people living in the same areas as themselves versus people who live in other areas. The studie also focuses on the urbanization that the world is going through, where people move from rural areas into the cities for work and education.

This thesis is about the bookmobile service in Sweden of today. The purpose is to examine how the staff motivate the existence of the bookmobile. Other purposes are to study the goals of the service, to describe ?daily life? of the bookmobile, examine the changes of the service during the years and discuss possible changes in the future. The study is based on interviews with thirteen staff members from six Swedish communities, of both rural and urban character.

The Swedish public library was founded in the years when the society in Sweden went from being a society of agriculture to industrialism. Modernism was sweeping over the country, everything was possible, which influenced the new society that was built. Now Sweden was going to be a true democracy with responsible and empathic citizens. One of the main tools in this process was to educate people, to get them to read and write and the public library fitted very well into these new ideas. It represented a place, free of charge, where everyone could go to take part of the knowledge and cultural learning that they needed in order to become the citizen that the society required.

Syftet med denna uppsats är att studera rätten till det offentliga rummet och hur denna rätt manifesteras i en urban park som Skinnarviksberget i Stockholm. Fokus läggs huvudsakligen på denkonflikt som uppstått mellan de boende intill parken och besökare som vissa menar använder parken på ett felaktigt sätt. Vidare diskuteras vilka konsekvenser denna konflikt får i form avbegränsningar i rätten till det offentliga rummet. Studiens empiriska del består av tjugo enkäter och fem kvalitativa intervjuer. Studien genomförs företrädesvis med hjälp av ett humanistisktvetenskapsteoretiskt perspektiv då fokus läggs på enskilda personers upplevelser och åsikter om parken.

This essay revolves around partnerships established between local authorities and civil society to promote integration in segregated urban areas. The main focus is on who is active in formulating the local integration policy in these partnerships. The analysis is based on qualitative interviews with representatives from the local public administration and from different parts of civil society in Rosengård and Södra innerstaden in Malmö. The conclusion is that local authorities to a large extent decide the content of integration policy. The authorities, in having the major responsibility of the integration projects, decide what parts of civil society to involve and what projects will promote integration.

The aim with this Master's thesis is to study the debate that takes place in the local community when a public library branch is threatened by closedown through the local newspapers. Through this it is our aim to understand why the debate takes place, and why so many people gets concerned with it. By relating this debate to contemporary research of library- and information science, and the discussion in three major Swedish library journals, we have found the answers to these questions. By studying the debate, we found six subjects that where essential for this study. These were Politics and economics, Urban and rural districts, Democracy and accessibility, The service of the library, The meeting place and To replace a closed down library.

This is a bachelor thesis about arable land in Varberg, from sustainability and it?s relation to local government and management. Arable land has become more important as a natural resource from a global point of view and in concerns of higher demands of food supply, as a result of population growth, higher consumption worldwide and climate change. But the arable land in Sweden is being exploited an increasingly rapid pace and the arable land in Varberg is not an exception of this development. The issue is most topical and the discussion holds questions about a declining agricultural sector, the formal and administrative protection of arable land and because other interests of land use often is given higher priority in community development and planning.

Large-scale land investments is not a new phenomenon, but increasing prices on food and agrofuels have inflated prices on land and has led to an enhanced interest in landinvestments from a range of different actors. The ProSavana project in the Nacala corridor in the Nampula province, northern Mozambique is a large-scale land investment with the purpose of establishing intensive commercial agriculture and is planned to be implemented this year (2013). The project is financed by Brazil and Japan in collaboration with the government of Mozambique. It is not quite clear how large-scale land investments affect the areas they are implemented in and how they can affect the possibilities for sustainable development in these areas. Both opportunities and problems can be observed within the social, economic and ecological dimensions of sustainable development.

During the last decade of the twentieth century both ?manhood? and gender studies seems to have undergone changes. With the field of masculinity and the critical studies of men, added as ?subsections? of broader gender studies, new knowledge has been produced to better grasp the production of gender and power relations of patriarchy. During the same decade as the ?metrosexual? first appeared of the urban stage, acts of homophobia and attitudes towards ?manhood? seems to have changed.

This thesis is about informal seatings, those which are planned to merge into the city core environment and to supply a flexible public space. The thesis discusses how a diverse range of elements could result in different functions and social meanings. These are illustrated with visual examples and conceptual drawings. The position of the seating in a small public place is important, as well as its location in the city. Furthermore, the detail design of the seating, such as the form and dimensions have to be considered in order to create an informal seating appropriate for the user. This leads to the broad scope of this thesis which deals with the small scale - how the seatings can create a good environment in a small place; and the big scale - how a site can influence the city. This thesis suggests the physical design of some informal seatings and also investigates how these seatings can strengthen the place through their function and how they relate to their surroundings.

This study consists of a literature study and a survey in Tamil Nadu, India. The aim of the study was to get an understanding of horse feeding in tropical climates and what kind of feeding related problems that could occur because of the fodder. Information and data were collected from eight different stables and from Tamil Nadu University of Agriculture in the region of Tamil Nadu in March-April 2009. The horses in Tamil Nadu were given rice straw, unknown grass, Cynodon dactylon, lucerne, maize, Pennisetum glaucum x Pennisetum purpureum hybrid and Chloris gayana as roughage. As concentrates, the horses were given wheat bran, oats, barley, soybean meal, maize, carrots, coconut cake, peanut cake, horse gram and chick pea.

The Swedish traffic system is congested, especially in the urban areas; travellers face daily growing traffic jams and delays in public transport. In a congested traffic system, travellers need support to make smart and sustainable decisions and one such tool is traffic information.One issue today is that too few travellers use traffic information in support of their travel. Research shows that travellers would see great value in receiving the information; however current systems do not meet their requirements. This is a problem since the society would benefit greatly from a well functioning traffic information system.In this report, a number of channels that can be applicable for providing traffic information will be explored, with particular emphasis on interference information.The information channels are analyzed based upon the needs and requirements of the society and the traveller. The thesis of the report is: the more of these needs and requirements are met in a channel; the better is the channel to use for traffic information.

Syftet med detta arbete är att studera ur olika synvinklar vad som gör en plats attraktiv och tillgänglig. Arbetet utgår från en fallstudie av det planerade kajstråket Borgmästarebryggan i Karlskrona. Genom analyser av resultaten från inventeringar, observationsstudier, intervjuer, dokumentsanalyser och beprövad praktik undersöks de bakomliggande faktorerna till Borgmästarebryggan, planens överensstämmelse med kommunens mål för att skapa en attraktiv och tillgänglig plats. Därefter kommer en kritisk läsning av planförslaget att utföras med grund i forskning och teorier om attraktivitet och tillgänglighet. Borgmästarebryggans tänkta utformning skapar många goda förutsättningar för att bli en attraktiv och tillgänglig plats för allmänheten.

This report studies how the divergence between men and women is manifested in the physical space and how the representation of room recreates this divergence. Spaces are coded and women have traditionally been associated with private space and men with public space, leading to that the home is encoded as female space and public squares as male space. Thereby women lack a natural place in public space. The National Board of Housing, Building and Planning (Boverket) wants to change this situation by enforcing safety-creating measures based on gender equality theories.I have studied what potential risks the project initiated by Boverket as well as discuss the potential problems with representation. Can representation be used without freezing the space? I also search for methods for working with a gender perspective without reproducing gender stereotypes and roles and avoiding encoding the private as female and public as male? Also I use a public seminar with urban planners, artists and architects to retrieve how we work with these issues today.I conclude that city planning needs to incorporate new strategies of thought that does not divide space, e.g.

Sewage sludge contains plant nutrients and has earlier been utilised as fertilizer to cropland. Unfortunately not only plant nutrients but also heavy metals, pathogens and organic contaminants tend to accumulate in sludge. The suitability to use sewage sludge in agriculture has therefore been subject to several discussions over the years. The Swedish food industry does no longer accept sludge as fertiliser for Swedish producers. In 1999 the Swedish parliament accepted several objectives for environmental protection. In order to prevent environmental pollution and further exploitation of the earth crust, one of these objectives confirm that phosphorous from sewage shall be recirculated to arable land.