Urban & municipal planning

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.

This book addresses questions of pluralism in a time of increasing ethnic, religious and cultural diversity in the public and private spaces of our cities. It analyses different types of regulation — property rights, municipal ordinances and urban planning — and their role in protecting and supporting diversity.

Using Detroit as a case study, this important book argues that cycles of neoliberal policy-led expansion and contraction created hollow shells of once vibrant industrial centres, and explores the potential for large scale cooperative networks to promote urban regeneration and sustain local economies

In the context of widespread precarity and ongoing crises, ruins have captured much attention in recent years. This book is about a troubling new kind of space for consumer society: the retail ruin. Drawing on the author’s own fieldnotes and photographs, this book takes a hauntological approach to these ‘new’ ruins in the urban landscape.

Drawing from case studies across the globe, this book explores how the pandemic and the policies it has prompted have caused changes in the ways cities function. The contributors examine the advancing social inequality brought on by the pandemic and suggest policies intended to contain contagion whilst managing the economy in these circumstances.

This international volume explores the transformations of public space and public transport in response to COVID-19, both those resulting from official governmental regulations and from everyday practices of urban citizens. The contributors discuss how the virus made urban inequalities clearer, and redefined public spaces in the “new normal”.

Contributions to this volume engage directly with different urban communities around the world. They give voice to those who experience poverty, discrimination and marginalisation in order to put them in the front and centre of planning, policy and political debates that make and shape cities.

This new book explores Britain's intensely urban and increasingly global communities as interlocking pieces of a complex jigsaw; they are hard to see apart yet they are deeply unequal. 

Jigsaw Cities examines these issues using Birmingham, Britain's second city, as a model of pioneering urban order and as a victim of brutal Modernist planning.

This important book engages critically with Lefebvre’s spatial theories and challenges recent thinking about the nature of urban space. Research in three iconic post-industrial cities in the UK and North America, explains how urban public spaces, including differential space are socially produced.

Using a unique archive spanning the lifetime of twenty council estates in the UK, this book examines what we can learn from council housing’s failings and successes for building sustainable communities in the future.

Focusing on the history and theory of community in urban policy, and including a unique set of case studies that draw on artistic and cultural community work, After urban regeneration engages with debates on how urban policy has changed and continues to change following the financial crash of 2008

Drawing on ethnographic research in urban growing projects in Glasgow, this book explores community dynamics and asks who benefits from such projects. A timely consideration of localism and community empowerment, the book sheds light on key issues of light on key issues of urban land use, the right to the city and the value of social connection.