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Transmission Channels and Macroeconomic Trade-Offs in Brazilian Monetary Policy: A TVP-SVAR-SV Analysis of the Exchange Rate and Commodity Price Effects
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Town Centre Development in Practice: The Town Centre as a Strategic Arena - Strategy, Actors and Collaboration in a Danish Provincial Town
No full textRetail decline and diminishing urban life in provincial town centres pose strategic and organisational challenges for local actors in Denmark and beyond. This thesis investigates how key stakeholders address these challenges and explores strategic initiatives that may enhance the function and attractiveness of town centres. Drawing on a qualitative case study of Hjørring Municipality in Denmark, the study combines semi-structured interviews, a citizen survey, and a semi-systematic literature review. It applies “the Context-Specific Strategic Town Centre Model (KSB-model)” as an analytical framework, grounded in Strategy as Practice, Network Level Strategy and stakeholder theory. The analysis highlights fragmented actor constellations, varying strategic capacities, and the limited integration of citizen perspectives. Nonetheless, emerging practices of cross-sector collaboration, local narrative-building, and context-sensitive planning demonstrate potential for renewal. Through the further development and application of the KSB-model, the thesis offers a reflective tool for understanding and strengthening strategic cooperation in urban regeneration. This model underscores that place-based coordination, emergent strategy, and relational capacity-building are essential to reversing decline and fostering resilient town centres.<br/
Constructing the Parallel Society: Political Discourse, Spatial Governance, and Racialized Exclusion in Denmark
No full textThis thesis offers a critical investigation into how Danish political discourse constructsimmigrant communities as cultural outsiders and spatial threats, with a particular focus on the“Ghetto Package” of 2018 and its subsequent discursive reframing in the 2021 “Parallel SocietyAgreement”. While officially aimed at promoting integration and social cohesion, these policiesdisproportionately target racialized urban areas through mechanisms such as forced relocation,ethnic quotas, and spatial reclassification. Rather than assessing policy efficacy, this studyinterrogates how language operates as a tool of governance, producing and legitimizingstructural exclusion under the guise of neutrality and pragmatism.Grounded in Critical Discourse Studies (CDS), the thesis draws on Norman Fairclough’s three-dimensional model and Teun van Dijk’s socio-cognitive approach to examine the interplaybetween text, discursive practice, and social structure. By analyzing a comprehensive empiricaldataset that includes political speeches, policy documents, party platforms, and parliamentarydebates, the thesis uncovers how dominant narratives about “ghettos”, “parallel societies”, and“non-Western immigrants” mobilize civilizational binaries, moralized belonging, and racializedspatial imaginaries. These discursive strategies contribute to a broader ideological project thatredefines national identity in exclusionary terms, aligning integration with cultural conformityand ideological loyalty.To enhance the explanatory power of CDS, the study incorporates theoretical insights frompostcolonial theory (Said, Bhabha), urban sociology (Wacquant), and critical race studies(Bonilla-Silva). This interdisciplinary framework foregrounds the racialized and colonialdimensions of Danish integration discourse, revealing how systemic discrimination is naturalizedthrough bureaucratic language, statistical classifications, and spatial metaphors. The thesis alsoengages the 2025 legal opinion of Advocate General Tamara Ćapeta in case C-417/23, whichdeclared key aspects of Denmark’s housing legislation to constitute direct ethnic discrimination.This intervention underscores the urgent need to critically examine how policy languageconstructs categories of deviance and belonging, and how such constructions acquire legal andinstitutional force.Ultimately, the study shows how political discourse functions as both a mirror and a mechanismof structural power, shaping not only how immigrant communities are perceived but also howthey are governed. By revealing the ideological work performed by concepts like “parallelsocieties”, the thesis contributes to scholarly and public debates about race, democracy, and therole of language in contemporary welfare states. Beyond the Danish context, it offers insightsinto broader European dynamics where integration has become a battleground for competingvisions of nationhood, belonging, and pluralism
Exploring the design of a Human-Centered safety-focused navigation application for solo-women travellers
No full textThe purpose of the research is to understand how a human-centered safe navigation application can be designed for the needs of solo women travellers to support them in their travel journeys, and how safety-data can be integrated in a useful and desirable way. The research starts with a literature review that revealed the gap of existing safety applications for solo women travellers, being based on the actual needs of the user group. The research then follows a design thinking process, starting with empathising with the users with semi-structured interviews to understand their safety needs, concerns and strategies in various travel scenarios, their perceptions on data-types and the communication and usage of those. It then uses thematic analysis and journey maps to analyse the data, leading to user insights presented in themes, and three travel journeys with insights, covering different scenarios. The following sections cover the formulation of a problem statement, opportunity identification, and the ideation and design concept creation of a safe navigation application, that will be tested with users from the target group. The main findings show users' main needs and pain points when it comes to safety, particularly around planning and taking confident decisions, their strong preferences for women-generated reviews, and their various opinions and preferences for the display, interaction and communication of crime-data
Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence Enabled Failure Prediction for Maritime Propulsion Systems
No full textThis thesis investigates the application of machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence(AI) techniques for failure prediction in maritime propulsion systems, with a focus on twocritical failures observed in MAN Energy Solutions’ engines: accumulator membrane fail-ure in sequential two-stroke engines and pipe damage during methanol fuel changeover indual-fuel systems. The thesis explores the feasibility of predictive maintenance throughdata-driven approaches, leveraging time series data collected from operational vessels andcontrolled test engines. A comprehensive feature engineering pipeline is developed to ad-dress challenges related to high dimensionality, feature redundancy, and class imbalance.Feature selection methods are applied to construct interpretable and task-relevant fea-ture subsets, resulting in insights into system behavior leading up to failure. Multiple MLand AI models, including Random Forests, 1D Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs),and Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) networks, are implemented and evaluated forboth binary failure classification and remaining useful life (RUL) regression tasks, fordifferent reading window (RW) and prediction window (PW) sizes. Here SMOTE andDTW-SMOTE has been used to augment data, increasing the data variance in training.Results demonstrate that methanol changeover failures are highly predictable, with Ran-dom Forest and 1D CNN models achieving strong performance with an accuracy of 91%for changeover classification and an R2 of 0.826 for changeover RUL prediction. In con-trast, accumulator failure prediction proves more challenging due to limited failure dataand lower signal resolution with the 1D CNN providing the greatest accuracy of 71%.The findings highlight the importance of model selection, task-specific window sizing, andfeature interpretability in predictive maintenance applications. The thesis concludes thatML and AI can be used for predicting pipe damage during methanol fuel changeover,while providing valuable insight into the system and the failure through feature engineer-ing. This task is slightly harder for accumulator membrane failure in sequential two-strokeengines, and further work is required to develop high performing and robust models forthis purpose.<br/
