Research
You will find a complete range of our peer-reviewed monographs, multi-authored and edited works, including original scholarly research across the social sciences and aligned disciplines. We publish long and short form research and you can browse the Bristol University Press and Policy Press archive.
Policy Press also publishes policy reviews and polemic work which aim to challenge policy and practice in certain fields. These books have a practitioner in mind and are practical, accessible in style, as well as being academically sound and referenced.
Books: Research
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This book examines the specific manifestations and causes of housing precarity across a diverse range of geographic settings and housing types.
Housing has been in crisis across the globe for decades. Precarious housing is defined as that which fails to provide an adequate standard of living to enable health and wellbeing for a person and their family. This book argues that, while causes are often structural, the forms of housing precarity need to be deeply and specifically understood in order to propose solutions.
Bringing together contributions from diverse academics across different geographies in the global north and south, chapters offer fresh insights into how housing affects wellbeing in terms of physical and mental health, identity and participation in communities.
The context for transportation planning worldwide—including social change, technology, and politics—has moved the goalposts for mobility and placemaking. Researchers explore new methodological landscapes of techniques for working with big data and storytelling for imagined futures. Practitioners seek ethical applications of emerging approaches. Advanced students look for guides that connect traditional toolsets with a changing world. Transport Truths provides a forward-looking guide to re-consider the nature and aims of transportation planning through in-depth (from Texas and The Republic of The Gambia) and secondary research from around the globe.
Transport Truths shows the ‘other side’ of how knowledge is constructed for transportation planning decisions, whether the reader comes from a background in engineering, the social sciences, or other fields. Assuming educated but non-specialist readers, the book shows how disciplinary training leaves gaps in how researchers and practitioners understand and communicate the issues while relying on interesting and critical cases to show how and why an interdisciplinary or transdisciplinary approach can result in better planning decisions. As cities often grow, shrink, and re-organize with access provided by transport infrastructure, this book centers normative values and ethics to create lasting, positive impacts on society and the environment.
What will the world be like in 2050? This book explores possible future worlds through eight hard science fiction stories. Taking in automation, big data, climate catastrophe and government dysfunction, each tale looks at the world through the eyes of people whose lives have been influenced by the societies they live in and the transport systems they live with.
Asking important questions about our values and role of transport in society, this book will encourage planners, policy makers, researchers and anyone interested in a positive future for public mobility to take the steps to ensure we get there.
Social housing continues to decline as existing tenanted homes are sold to their occupiers and run-down council estates are demolished. Demonstrating the value of the ‘Housing Plus’ approach –investment beyond “bricks and mortar” – this book outlines the role social landlords can play in tackling community problems. By investing in estate renewal, helping to house the vulnerable, offering a wide range of tenures and encouraging community housing, this approach builds links between housing design and a wider social value agenda.
With the voices of tenants and frontline staff at the forefront, Anne Power demonstrates how policy and practice can shift the bias against social housing in favour of its re-expansion.
Pluralism – and the connected questions of toleration – is today a crucial theoretical and practical problem in need of critical discussion. Differently from what is usually done, such discussion must take urban space into serious consideration, not only because many of the issues of pluralism that we deal with daily are most forcefully manifest in cities, but also because the articulation of space has a close connection with the conflicts generated by diversity. Against this background, the book analyses the complex relation between pluralism (understood as the coexistence of many diverse conceptions of the good) and different types of public and private space (streets, parks, public squares, restaurants, shopping malls, homeowners associations and so on), with a specific focus on the rules that govern such spaces. Accordingly, it deals with toleration as a matter of public ethics: that is, how and why the state should act in relation to particular problems. Indeed, the purpose of the book is to identify the limits within which acceptable public measures to spatially regulate diversity may lie. It does so by adopting a framework in which pluralism is seen as a pivotal value of contemporary democracies that must be protected and supported.
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.
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.
This collection pays unique attention to the highly challenging problems of addressing inequality within decarbonisation – particularly under-explored aspects, such as high consumption, degrowth approaches and perverse outcomes.
Contributors point out means and possibilities of the transition from high carbon inequalities to post-carbon inclusion. They apply a variety of conceptual and methodological approaches in all-inclusive ways to diverse challenges, such as urban heating and retrofitting.
Richly illustrated with case studies from the city to the household, this book critically examines ‘just transitions’ to achieve sustainable societies in the future.
A deep exploration on how questions of time and its organisation affect planning practice, this book is aimed at public and private planning practitioners, national and local politicians and policymakers involved in planning, academics and students studying planning and related disciplines.
It presents time as a pervasive form of power that is used to shape democratic practices, and 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 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.
