Research
You will find a complete range of our monographs, muti-authored and edited works including peer-reviewed, original scholarly research across the social sciences and aligned disciplines. We publish long and short form research and you can browse the complete 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 - 8 of 8 items for :
- Type: Book x
- Environment and the City x
- Access: All content x
The concept of smart cities holds environmental promises: that digital technologies will reduce carbon emissions, air pollution and waste, and help address climate change.
Drawing on academic scholarship and two case studies from Manchester and Helsinki, this timely and accessible book examines what happens when these promises are broken, as they prioritise technological innovation rather than environmental care. The book reveals that smart cities’ vision of sustainable digital future obfuscates the environmental harms and social injustices that digitisation inflicts. The framework of “broken promises”, coined by the authors, centres environmental questions in analysing imaginaries and practices of smart cities.
This is a must read for anyone interested in the connections between digital technologies and environment justice.
This collection presents critical and action-oriented approaches to addressing food systems challenges across places, spaces, and scales. With case studies from around the globe, Radical Food Geographies explores interconnections between power structures and the social and ecological dynamics that bring food from the land and water to our plates. Through themes of scale, spatial imaginaries, and human and more-than-human relationships, the authors explore ongoing efforts to co-construct more equitable and sustainable food systems for all.
Advancing a radical food geographies praxis, the book reveals multiple forms of resistance and resurgence, and offers examples of co-creating food systems transformation through scholarship, action, and geography.
Available open access digitally under CC-BY-NC-ND licence.
Bringing together interdisciplinary climate change scholarship and grassroots activism, this book considers the possibilities of planetary justice across human difference, generations, species, and the concept of life and non-life. Writing amidst bushfires, cyclones, global climate strikes and a global pandemic, contributors from the Earth Unbound Collective share stories from India, Australia, Canada and Scotland. Chapters draw on Indigenous, Black, Southern, ecosocialist and ecofeminist perspectives to call for more radical and interconnected ideas of justice and solidarity.
This accessible book features diverse voices that speak with the planet in the face of climate change, biodiversity loss and extinction. It explores the politics and practices of working towards a future where the planet thrives.
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.
This book addresses the policing and social control of eco–justice movements during the COVID-19 pandemic, as well as activist practices of resistance during the same period. It is based on extensive ethnographic fieldwork in Trento, Italy, focusing on two eco–justice groups opposing a high-speed railway and the containment of wild bears.
Rooted in critical, green, cultural and sensory approaches within criminology, the book discusses the intensification of policing strategies against eco–justice protesters during the pandemic and their increased exclusion from urban centres. Highlighting activists’ radical and transformative practices of resistance, the book identifies directions for future critical and green criminological research in the area.
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.
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.
This accessible critique of urban construction reimagines city development and life in an era of unprecedented building.
Exploring the proliferation of building and construction, Imrie sets out its many degrading impacts on both people and the environment. Using examples from around the world, he illustrates how construction is motivated by economic and political ideologies rather than actual need, and calls for a more sensitive, humane and nature-focused culture of construction.
This compelling book calls for radical changes to city living and environments by building less, but better.
