This dissertation examines the place-specific patterns that fuel the economization of precarious urban living in today’s culture-driven tourism industries and conversely initiate alternative approaches to urban knowledge production ‘beyond’ the tourist city. I show how the first set of patterns is highly dependent on the generation of ‘Southern’ urban imaginaries targeting the economic value-extraction of ’urban forms of life’, whereas I attribute the latter to the surge of resident-oriented ...
Geographically uneven development represents a significantly complex challenge to the sustainable and just transition of peripheral places and regions. Several grand societal challenges and uneven development outcomes have long affected peripheral places, and continue hampering opportunities for pathbreaking and path creation. Peripheral areas nonetheless have experienced a wide array of resistance practices that experiment with initiatives and themes around housing, employment, and services....
A remarkable phenomenon that Bose-Einstein condensates (BECs) exhibit is superfluidity. A classical way to experimentally probe this phenomenon consists in studying the response of a BEC to a moving impurity. In this case, superfluidity manifests in the existence of a critical velocity below which the impurity can move without exchanging energy or momentum with the fluid.
In the present thesis we use a simple but effective mathematical model to investigate this phenomenon. It is based on the...
The low-temperature behavior of spin systems with a continuous symmetry is expected to be governed by Gaussian fluctuations around the ground state, known as spin waves. For classical models this picture has been rigorously established by Bricmont-Fontaine-Lebowitz-Lieb-Spencer (1982) for the O(2) model and, more recently, by Giuliani-Ott (2025) for general O(N) systems. In the quantum setting, however, the situation is more subtle: the low-energy
behavior arises from a nontrivial interplay ...
This dissertation contributes to the empirical literature on job quality. The first chapter introduces the broader debate and presents the overall structure of the thesis. The second chapter examines the implications of agglomeration for job quality using an urban–rural comparative approach across multiple indicators. The results show that rural workers are better off in terms of work intensity and job satisfaction, while urban workers benefit from stronger job-match opportunities. Overall, t...
The Lorentz gas is an important model in kinetic theory where one seeks to under- stand the behavior of a single particle interacting with a fixed environment. In certain scaling regimes, the complicated microscopic behavior of the particle can be well-approximated by an effective equation or stochastic process. A description of the effective behavior usually does not rely on all details of the microscopic dynamics. When the interactions are quantum mechanical, the model is referred to as the...
Ecological communities are high-dimensional interacting systems whose stability emerges from the structure of their interaction networks. This thesis applies tools from the statistical mechanics of disordered systems to study the equilibrium properties of large ecosystems modeled by generalized Lotka–Volterra (gLV) equations with sparse and symmetric interactions. Moving beyond the traditional fully-connected (mean-field) setting, we analyze systems on locally tree-like random graphs using th...
In today's world, the frequency and impact of disruptive events, such as extreme natural disasters, the enduring effects of the Covid-19 pandemic, wars, and societal polarisation, have highlighted the necessity for communities to be better prepared for these challenges. Attention has increasingly turned to social processes, including social cohesion and capital, as vital tools for enhancing community resilience. Concurrently, research and policy-making recognise the importance of culture and ...
This thesis explores the multi-faceted and promising science of gravitational waves (GWs) from compact binary coalescences (CBCs), focusing on the information they provide and how we can extract it. Central to our work is the question: What is the data content of the GW signals from CBCs, and how can we effectively analyze it to enhance our understanding of the Universe? This study addresses current detector networks and next-generation (XG) instruments, linking data analysis with multi-messe...
We are increasingly surrounded by systems connecting us with the digital world and facilitating our lives by supporting our work, leisure, activities at home, health, etc. These systems are pressed by two forces. On the one side, they operate in environments that are increasingly challenging due to uncertainty and uncontrollability. On the other side, they need to evolve, often in a continuous fashion, to meet changing needs, to offer new functionalities, or also to fix emerging failures. To ...