Browse

You are looking at 1 - 10 of 28 items for :

  • Urban Studies x
  • Urban Studies x
  • Planning and Housing x
  • Cities and Communities x
Clear All Modify Search
Commercialisation, Professionalism and the Public Interest in the UK

Spatial planning is at a crossroads, with government reform undermining the traditional vision of state-employed planners making decisions about urban development in a unified public interest. Nearly half of UK planners are now employed in the private sector, with complex inter-relations between the sectors including supplying outsourced services to local authorities struggling with centrally-imposed budget cuts.

Drawing on new empirical data from a major research project, ‘Working in the Public Interest’, this book reveals what it’s like to be a UK planner in the early 21st century, and how the profession can fulfil its potential for the benefit of society and the environment.

Restricted access
Dilemmas and Lessons from London and Hong Kong

Increasingly, public space provision and management are being transferred from the public sector to real estate developers, private sector organisations, voluntary groups and community bodies. Contrasting the more historical, horizontal character of London with the intense street life of high-rise Hong Kong, this book tells the story of the two cities’ relationships with non-traditional forms of public space governance.

The authors consider the implications for the ‘publicness’ of these complex spaces and the challenges and impacts that different forms of provision have on those with a stake in them, and on the cities as a whole.

Restricted access
Reforming Spatial Governance in England

This topical, edited collection analyses the state of the planning system in England and offers a robust, evidence-based review of over a decade of change since the Conservatives came into power. With a critique of ongoing planning reforms by the UK government, the book argues that the planning system is often blamed for a range of issues caused by ineffective policymaking by government.

Including chapters on housing, localism, design, zoning, and the consequences of Brexit for environmental planning, the contributors unpick a complicated set of recent reforms and counter the claims of the think-tank-led assault on democratic planning.

Restricted access
Knowledge, Care, Legitimacy
Author:

The past three decades have seen an international ‘turn to participation’ – letting those who will be affected by neighbourhood planning outcomes play an active role in decision-making – but there is widespread dissatisfaction with actual instances of citizen-state engagement.

This innovative analysis brings theory, research and practice together and gives insights into how and why citizen voices either become effective or get excluded. Using ethnographic data to illustrate a wide range of participatory and localist governance practices and social movements, the book concludes with recommendations to re-invigorate community involvement in planning.

Restricted access
The Politics of Remaking Cities

EPDF and EPUB available Open Access under CC-BY-NC-ND licence.

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.

Open access
Experiences of Social Exclusion in Rural Britain

Poverty is perceived as an urban problem, yet many in rural Britain also experience hardship. This book explores how and why people in rural areas experience and negotiate poverty and social exclusion. It examines the role of societal processes, individual circumstances, sources of support (markets; state; voluntary organisations; family and friends) and the role of place.

It concludes that the UK’s welfare system is poorly adapted to rural areas, with the COVID-19 pandemic, Brexit and cutbacks exacerbating pressures. Voluntary organisations increasingly fill gaps in support left by the state. Invaluable to those in policy and practice, the book recommends a combination of person-based and place-based approaches to tackle rural poverty.

Restricted access
Exploring Planning Practices and the Public Interest through Workplace Ethnographies

Presenting the complexities of doing planning work, with all its attendant moral and practical dilemmas, this rich ethnographic study analyses how places are made through stories of four diverse public and private sector working environments.

The book provides a unique insight for educators, students and researchers into the everyday lives of planners and those in associated built environment occupations. This exceptional account of the micro-politics of a knowledge-intensive profession also provides an excellent resource for sociologists of contemporary work. The authors use team ethnography to push the methodological frontiers of planning research and to advance organisational ethnography into new areas.

Restricted access
Securing Home in Vertical Cities

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.

Open access
A Practitioner Guide to the Urban Governance of the Night-Time Economy

This accessible guide provides a stimulating analysis of the governance of the night-time economy in cities for practitioners and newcomers alike.

Drawing on a wide range of case studies of after dark activity in cities around the world, it reviews labour, environmental services, healthcare, the role of leaders including night mayors, managers and commissioners, and the influence of both public and private sectors.

Offering invaluable insights for the future of night-time governance during the COVID-19 pandemic and beyond, this book deepens our understanding of the benefits, challenges and impacts of a neglected aspect of the economy.

Restricted access
Vacancy, Urban Politics and International Experiments in the Post-crisis City

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.

Restricted access