Urban & municipal planning

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.

The factors that make some cities more successful has become an increasingly important policy issue. This book is the first to explore facets of competitiveness in a systematic way that combines theory, evidence and policy implications. Bringing together experts on urban economic performance, it provides a new look at urban competitiveness.

Using a wide-range of interdisciplinary perspectives which examine the diverse issues of urban policy, regeneration and economic and social change, this book explores the transition of Glasgow from a de-industrial to a post-industrial city.

The report presents the conclusions of a major research programme on strategic, city-wide urban regeneration. Building on case studies in Birmingham, Glasgow and Edinburgh, it proposes an agenda of organisational innovation for the 21st century. Innovations include a long-term process of neighbourhood visioning as a right of all citizens.

International contributors from academia, research, policy and practice use their experience and knowledge to explore on-going efforts to improve spatial resilience across the globe and predict future trends.

A deep exploration on how questions of time and its organisation affect planning practice, this book questions ‘project speed’: where time to think, deliberate and plan has been squeezed. The authors demonstrate the many benefits of slow planning for the key participants, multiple interests and planning system overall.

This text makes sense of the multiple ways in which urban issues and problems have been addressed in different places at different times. From initiatives that focus on social tensions within the urban realm, to those which seek to develop cities as economic entities, it provides an accessible discussion and critique of some key approaches.

This fully updated short guide discusses the planning system, processes, legal constructs and approaches, taking into account the recent regulatory changes within the UK nations. It explores the interactions of government and society with the planning system, encouraging the reader to adopt a reflective and inquisitive outlook.

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.

This collection adds weight to an emerging argument that policies to make cities better are inextricably linked to an attempt to pacify and regulate crime and disorder. It provides discussions from a range of scholars examining policy connections that can be traced between social, urban and crime policy and the wider processes of regeneration.

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.

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.