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Escape is an enticing idea in contemporary cities across the world. Austerity, climate breakdown and spatial stigma have led to retreatist behaviours such as gated communities, enclave urbanism and white flight. By contrast, urban community growing projects are often considered by practitioners and commentators as communal havens in a stressful cityscape.
Drawing on ethnographic research in urban growing projects in Glasgow, this book explores the spatial politics and dynamics of community, asking who benefits from such projects and how they relate to the wider city. A timely consideration of localism and community empowerment, the book sheds light on key issues of urban land use, the right to the city and the value of social connection.
A buoyant, creative economy can be seen as the saviour of many cities, but behind such ‘urban makeovers’ lie serious problems such as widening inequalities, job precarity, gentrification and environmental issues. In light of the pandemic and climate crisis, how well are city economies, based largely on culture, nightlife and tourism, meeting basic societal needs?
Blending lively case studies of alternative cultural practices and spaces with broader theoretical debates, this book explores the opportunities for a more just and sustainable urban future.
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.
ePDF and ePUB available Open Access under CC-BY-NC-ND licence.
Condominium and comparable legal architectures make vertical urban growth possible, but do we really understand the social implications of restructuring city land ownership in this way?
In this book geographer and architect Nethercote enters the condo tower to explore the hidden social and territorial dynamics of private vertical communities. Informed by residents’ accounts of Australian high-rise living, this book shows how legal and physical architectures fuse in ways that jeopardise residents’ experience of home and stigmatise renters.
As cities sprawl skywards and private renting expands, this compelling geographic analysis of property identifies high-rise development’s overlooked hand in social segregation and urban fragmentation, and raises bold questions about the condominium’s prospects.
In this important contribution to urban studies, Juliet Davis makes the case for a more ethical and humane approach to city development and management.
With a range of illustrative case studies, the book challenges the conventional and neoliberal thinking of urban planners and academics, and explores new ways to correct problems of inequality and exclusion. It shows how a philosophy of caring can improve both city environments and communities.
This is an original and powerful theory of urban care that can promote the wellbeing of our cities’ many inhabitants.
Giving voice to the lived experiences of people with dementia across the globe, including Australia, Canada, Sweden and the UK, this critical and evidence-based collection engages with the realities of life for people living with dementia at home and within their neighbourhoods.
This insightful text addresses the fundamental social aspects of environment, including place attachment, belonging and connectivity. The chapters reveal the potential and expose the challenges for practitioners and researchers as dementia care shifts to a neighbourhood setting.
The unique ‘neighbourhood-centred’ perspective provides an innovative guide for policy and practice and calls for a new place-based culture of care and support in the neighbourhood.
This book provides an innovative perspective to consider contemporary urban challenges through the lens of urban vacancy.
Centering urban vacancy as a core feature of urbanization, the contributors coalesce new empirical insights on the impacts of recent contestations over the re-use of vacant spaces in post-crisis cities across the globe.
Using international case studies from the Global North and Global South, it sheds important new light on the complexity of forces and processes shaping urban vacancy and its re-use, exploring these areas as both lived spaces and sites of political antagonism. It explores what has and hasn’t worked in re-purposing vacant sites and provides sustainable blueprints for future development.
Supported by the Independent Transport Commission (ITC): a registered charity
Why travel? What motivations underpin the journeys we make? And how can we make decisions that improve our travel experiences?
Arguing that the desire to move is a purpose in itself, this book brings together leading experts to provide insights from multiple viewpoints across the sciences, arts and humanities. Together, they examine key travel motivations, including the importance of travel for human wellbeing, and how these can be reconciled with challenges such as reducing our carbon footprint, adapting new mobility technologies, and improving the quality of our journeys.
The book shows how our travel choices are shaped by a wide range of social, physical, psychological and cultural factors, which have profound implications for the design of future transport policies.
Offering thought-provoking and practical new perspectives, this fascinating book will be essential for all those who have ever wondered why we travel and how it relates to our fundamental needs.
How well do the places where we live support the wellbeing of older adults?
The Canadian population is growing older and is reshaping the nation’s economic, social and cultural future. However, the built and social environments of many communities, neighbourhoods and cities have not been designed to help Canadians age well.
Bringing together academic research, practitioner reflections and personal narratives from older adults across Canada, this cutting-edge text provides a rare spotlight on the local implications of aging in Canadian cities and communities. It explores employment, housing, transportation, cultural safety, health, planning and more, to provide a wide-ranging and comprehensive discussion of how to build supportive communities for Canadians of all ages.
What makes a great city? Why do people and businesses still value urban life and buildings over a quiet life in the suburbs or countryside? Now might seem a difficult time to make the case for social contact in urban areas – so why is face-to-face contact still considered crucial to many 21st-century economies?
In a look back over a century’s-worth of thinking about cities, business and office locations, this accessible book explains their ongoing importance as places that thrive on face-to-face meetings, and in negotiating uncertainty and ‘sealing the deal’.
Using interviews with business leaders and staff from knowledge-intensive, innovation-rich industries, it argues for the continuing value of the ‘right’ location despite the information revolution, the penetration of artificial intelligence (AI), and the COVID-19 pandemic. It also explores why digital systems have transformed businesses in cities and towns, but in fact have changed surprisingly little about the challenges of business life.
This timely book gives readers, including developers, investors, policy-makers and students of planning or geography, essential tools for thinking about the future of places ranging from market towns to great World Cities.
