Edinburgh Napier University

  This submission for PhD by publication aims to capture, reflect upon, analyse and offer critical insights into how the use of land and exchange of property can help serve the search for sustainable urban development (SUD).

This aim is subsequently met by:

• hypothesising how the applicant’s publications provide a representation of SUD able to get beyond the state-of-the-art and offer a conceptual framework capable of uncovering the positive role land and property can play in sustaining urban development;
• reviewing the research undertaken by the applicant to define SUD and develop a framework for analysis, set of protocols and directory of assessment methods to evaluate the sustainability of urban development;
• highlighting the possibility there is for the valuation methodologies and investment appraisal techniques underlying the use of land and exchange of property, to be constructive in terms of the relationship their corporate strategies and financial instruments have to the environment;
• illustrating how it is possible to compute the informational basis of property management and draw upon the intelligence this offers cities to develop electronically-enhanced services underpinned by e-learning platforms, knowledge management systems and digital libraries, capable of supporting environmental improvements;
• showing how the environmental improvements that surface from such developments in turn support the community-based approach to urban regeneration which underlies the UK government’s socially-inclusive and participatory venture into ecological modernisation and democratic renewal;
• providing examples of where the management of property by cities is intelligent, not only because the environmental improvement supporting their community-based approach to urban regeneration are socially-inclusive and participatory, but for the reason the ecological modernisation and process of democratic renewal underlying these developments meet the sustainability requirement;
• reflecting on the contribution this representation of SUD as informational, intelligent, socially-inclusive, participatory, community-based, regenerative, ecological and democratic, makes to what is known and understood about the subject.

Together these positive, analytical and constructive examinations of SUD augment into the informational basis of property management and surface as the corporate strategies and financial instruments of the electronically-enhanced service models needed for cities to be intelligent. In particular, the strategies, instruments and eGov(ernment) service models, cities need to be intelligent in valuing the environment and accounting for the socially-inclusive, participatory, community-based, regenerative, ecological and democratic qualities underlying their improvement programmes.