REGIONAL & AREA PLANNING

This book explores cities and intra-regional relational dynamics to challenge common representations of urban development ‘success’ and ‘failure’. It provides innovative alternative relations and development strategies that reimagine the subordinate status of secondary cities.

Phil Allmendinger takes a critical approach to the role of ‘smart’ in future cities and the relationship with city development. Considering how technology can support active citizenship, he challenges the commercial drivers of big tech and warns that these, not developments for ‘social good’, may dominate.

Winner of the 2022 Urban Affairs Association Best Book Award. City visions represent shared, and often desirable, expectations about our urban futures. This book explores the history and evolution of city visions, placing them in the wider context of art, culture, science, foresight and urban theory.

Why do businesses still value urban life over the suburbs or countryside? This accessible book makes the case for Face-to-Face contact, still considered crucial to many 21st century economies, and provides tools for thinking about the future of places from market towns to World Cities.

Ren examines the making of art spaces in Beijing and Berlin to engage with comparative urbanism as a framework for doing research. Across vastly different contexts where universal theories of modernity or development seem increasingly misplaced, the concept of aspiration provides an alternative lens to understand the nature of urban change.

Marshall examines the ideological structuring of current planning models and the interplay of political interests. He analyses attempts at planning reform by recent governments to show how we can generate more effective political engagements for common gain.

This book provides crucial insight into the fight back against austerity by local authorities through emerging forms of municipal entrepreneurialism in housing delivery, examines what this means for the changing relationship between local and central government and provides new ways of thinking about meeting housing need within and beyond the UK.

Written by two distinguished housing economists, this ambitious book tackles one of the most important socio-economic issues facing households today. Drawing from theoretical and empirical frameworks, the authors challenge conventional wisdoms in housing economics and policy and offer innovative recommendations to improve housing affordability.

Hearne contextualises the Irish housing crisis within its broader global context and examines its origins in terms of the extension of neoliberalism, marketisation and financialisation in housing. Using real voices and stories, he shows how the crisis is having profound impacts on equality, wellbeing and health.

Spanning multiple countries across South America, Europe and Africa, this book uses an international comparative perspective to investigate the phenomenon of self-building for low- and middle-income groups in urban areas, examining the tensions between regulation and self-regulatory initiatives.

The complex and self-serving nexus behind the UK’s housing crisis is laid bare in this passionate book from Bob Colenutt. Investigating the network of landowners, house-builders, financial backers and politicians, he reveals how we have been forced to accept the cycle of low supply and high prices, and proposes solutions to the housing emergency.

Providing new research and thinking about cities, their governance and planning reform, this book compares the UK with multiple international examples in order to examine cutting-edge experimentation and innovation in new models of governance and urban policy in response to today's increasing global social and environmental challenges.