ARCHITECTURE / Urban & Land Use Planning

In this provocative book, journalist Peter Hetherington argues that Britain, particularly England, needs an active land policy to protect against record land price increases that threaten food security and housing provision for Britain’s expanding population.

Presenting the complexities of doing planning work, with its moral and practical dilemmas, this rich ethnographic study analyses today’s planning scene through the stories of four diverse working environments.

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.

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 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 book provides new insights into popular understandings of urbanism that emanate from European and North American cities. Myers uses a wide range of case studies from lesser studied cities across the Global South and Global North to present evidence for the need to reconstruct our understanding of ‘good’ urban environments.

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.

Contrasting London with Hong Kong, this book tells the story of the two cities’ public and private sector forms of public space governance. The authors consider the challenges and impacts that different forms of provision have on those with a stake in them, and on the cities as a whole.

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.

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 topical book offers an analysis of the current state of the planning system in England and an evidence-based review of over a decade of change. With a critique of ongoing UK planning reforms, the book argues that the planning system is often blamed for a range of issues that are in fact the fault of ineffective policymaking.