Belfast, the emerging city:1850-1914

This explores the rich social, cultural and economic life of Belfast at the point when it was emerging as Ireland's largest city and a key player in the British industrial and commercial landscape. Drawing on the research of established and emerging scholars this provides a series of snapshots of many aspects of the city's devlopment and its people at this pivotal time in its history

Road traffic congestion and public information - An experimental investigation

This paper reports laboratory experiments designed to study the impact of public information about past departure rates on congestion levels and travel costs. Our design is based on a discrete version of Arnott et al.'s (1990) bottleneck model. In all treatments, congestion occurs and the observed travel costs are quite similar to the predicted ones. Subjects' capacity to coordinate is not affected by the availability of public information on past departure rates, by the number of drivers or by the relative cost of delay. This seemingly absence of treatment effects is confirmed by our finding that a parameter-free reinforcement learning model best characterises individual behaviour.

The City as Laboratory and the Urban-Rural Divide: the Revival of Private Property and its Limits in Post-Mao China

This paper focuses on the revival of private property and its limits in urban China. It explores the emergence of urban property markets; urban property-holding in relation to the complexity of urban governance; “minor property rights apartments” that form a de facto real estate market and cross over the urban-rural divide; the “grey areas” of blurring legal and administrative boundaries in modern China; and recent changes to the rural land system and the rural-urban divide. The conclusion flags the theme of the city as laboratory with regard to the blurring legal and governmental urban-rural distinction.

Strategies for Effective Management of Health and Safety in Confined Site Construction

The overall aim of this research is to identify and catalogue the numerous managerial strategies for effective management of health and safety on a confined, urban, construction site. A mixed methods methodology was adopted using interviews and focus group discussions on three selected case studies of confined construction sites. In addition to these, a questionnaire survey was used based on the findings from the interviews and the focus group discussions. The top five key strategies include (1) Employ safe system of work plans to mitigate personnel health and safety issues; (2) Inform personnel, before starting on-site, of the potential issues using site inductions; (3) Effective communication among site personnel; (4) Draft and implement an effective design site layout prior to starting on-site; and (5) Use of banksman (traffic co-ordinator) to segregate personnel from vehicular traffic. The construction sector is one of the leading industries in accident causation and with the continued development and regeneration of our urban centres, confined site construction is quickly becoming the norm - an environment which only fuels accident creation within the construction sector. This research aids on-site management that requires direction and assistance in the identification and implementation of key strategies for the management of health and safety, particularly in confined construction site environments.