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
You are looking at 1 - 10 of 59 items for :
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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.
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.
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.
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.
This book analyses the strategies used by public authorities to expand the UK aviation industry in relation to growing political opposition and the negative impact of flying on local communities and climate change.
Its genealogical investigations show how governmental practices and technologies designed to depoliticise aviation and expand airports have generally failed to constitute an effective political will to counter community resistance and environmental protest. Criticising the dominant logics of UK airport expansion, the authors promote a radical rethinking of our attitudes to aviation in terms of sufficiency, degrowth and alternative hedonism, laying the ground for a more sustainable future.
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.
Deepening inequalities and wider processes of demographic, economic and social change are altering how people across the Global North move between homes and neighbourhoods over the lifespan.
This book presents a life course framework for understanding how the changing dynamics of people’s family, education, employment and health experiences are deeply intertwined with ongoing shifts in housing behaviour and residential pathways. Particular attention is paid to how these processes help to drive uneven patterns of population change within and across neighbourhoods and localities.
Integrating the latest research from multiple disciplines, the author shows how housing and life course dynamics are together reshaping 21st-century inequalities in ways that demand greater attention from scholars and public policymakers.
