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Focusing on material and social forms of infrastructure, this edited collection draws on rich empirical details from cities across the global North and South. The book asks the reader to think through the different ways in which infrastructure comes to be present in cities and its co-constitutive relationships with urban inhabitants and wider processes of urbanization.
Considering the climate emergency, economic transformation, public health crises and racialized inequality, the book argues that paying attention to infrastructures’ past, present and future allows us to understand and respond to the current urban condition.
This book addresses the social, political and economic turbulence in which the UK is embroiled. Drawing on Cultural Studies, it explores proliferating crises and conflicts, from the multiplying varieties of social dissent through the stagnation of rentier capitalism to the looming climate catastrophe.
Examining arguments about Brexit, class and ‘race’, and the changing character of the state, the book is underpinned by a transnational and relational conception of the UK. It traces the entangled dynamics of time and space that have shaped the current conjuncture.
Questioning whether increasingly anti-democratic and authoritarian strategies can provide a resolution to these troubles, it explores how the accumulating crises and conflicts have produced a deepening ‘crisis of authority’ that forms the terrain of the Battle for Britain.
EPDF and EPUB available Open Access under CC-BY-NC-ND licence.
Offering a unique introduction to the study of justice in the European, North American and Russian Arctic, this collection considers the responsibilities and failures of justice for environment and society in the region.
Inspired by key thinkers in justice, this book highlights the real and practical consequences of postcolonial legacies, climate change and the regions’ incorporation into the international political economy. The chapters feature liberal, cosmopolitan, feminist, as well as critical justice perspectives from experts with decades of research experience in the Arctic. Moving from a critique of current failures, the collection champions an ethical and sustainable future for Arctic development and governance.
Despite frequent claims that waste is being reduced, consumer-reliant economies, everyday consumption and the waste industry continue to produce and demand more waste.
Combining a lucid style with robust empirical and theoretical research, this book examines the root causes of the global waste problem, rather than simply the symptoms. It challenges existing waste policies, highlighting what needs to change if we are to get serious in tackling this global problem. It concludes with policy implications for shifting waste from an ‘end-of-pipe’ concern to being at the heart of the debate over decarbonization.
Bringing together the voices of local scholars in the Philippines, this book offers critical insights into one of the world’s most disaster-prone regions.
The Asia-Pacific region is one of the most vulnerable regions in the world, with the effects of climate change contributing to rising sea levels and increasingly frequent typhoons and floods. Case studies in this book examine such disasters, including the aftermath of 2013 super typhoon Haiyan. Discussions are centred around four themes: women and empowerment, economics and recovery, community and resilience, and religion and spirituality.
Through its analysis, the book demonstrates the scopes, inequities and inefficiencies of policies and responses, as well as forms of empowerment and resilience, in meeting challenges in disaster-afflicted communities in the Philippines. Its conclusions provide a more nuanced and grounded perspective of policies, practices and approaches in the sociology of disasters today.
Often portrayed as an apolitical space, this book demonstrates that home is in fact a highly political concept, with a range of groups in society excluded from a ‘right to home’ under current UK policies.
Drawing on resident interviews and analysis of political and media attitudes across three case studies – the criminalisation of squatting, the bedroom tax, and family homelessness – it explores the ways in which legislative and policy changes dismantle people’s rights to secure, decent and affordable housing by framing them as undeserving. The book includes practical lessons for housing academics, activists and policymakers.
In the context of widespread precarity and ongoing crises, it is no surprise ruins have captured much attention in recent years. This book is about a new kind of space, one that is deeply troubling for consumer society: the retail ruin.
Jacob C. Miller bridges human geography, archaeology and critical urban studies to offer a starting point for conceptualizing retail ruins. Drawing on fieldnotes and photographs, Miller crafts a hauntological approach informed by the theories of Walter Benjamin and Jacques Derrida to more recent thinking on assemblage, spectacle and the politics of urban space.
Why is finance so important? How do stock markets work and what do they really do? Most importantly, what might finance be and what could we expect from it?
Exploring contemporary finance via the development of stock exchanges, markets and the links with states, Roscoe mingles historical and technical detail with humorous anecdotes and lively portraits of market participants.
Deftly combining research and autobiographical vignettes, he offers a cautionary tale about the drive of financial markets towards expropriation, capture and exclusion. Positioning financial markets as central devices in the organisation of the global economy, he includes contemporary concerns over inequality, climate emergency and (de)colonialism and concludes by wondering, in the market’s own angst-filled voice, what the future for finance might be, and how we might get there.
Rejecting the assumption that housing and cities are separate from nature, David Clapham advances a new research framework that integrates housing with the rest of the natural world. Demonstrating the wider context of human lives and the impact of housing on the non-human environment, the author considers the impact of current inhabitation practices on climate change and biodiversity.
Showcasing the significant contribution that housing policy can make in mitigating environmental problems, this book will stimulate debate amongst housing researchers and policy makers.
Based on qualitative interviews with sustainability-oriented parents of young children, this book describes what happens when people make interventions into mundane and easy-to-overlook aspects of everyday life to bring the way they get things done into alignment with their environmental values. Because the ability to make changes is constrained by their culture and capitalist society, there are negative consequences and trade-offs involved in these household-level sustainability practices.
The households described in this book shed light on the full extent of the trade-offs involved in promoting sustainability at the household level as a solution to environmental problems.
