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 183 items for :
- Type: Book x
- Goal 11: Sustainable Cities and Communities x
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The devastating effects of climate change are undeniable. Fires rage and waters rise in every corner of the globe. In light of these changes to our planet, the issue of social and environmental wellbeing has gained prominent attention from both academia and policy makers. Scholarly research on the interaction between social and employment policy domains has flourished. Academics now reflect on the different aspects of environmental and social protection, ecological and social risks, and the costs of climate change, sustainable welfare and new social movements prompted by green transitions.
This book provides a vital contribution to the emerging research agenda. It brings together scholars from interconnected disciplines to discuss the eco-social debate, providing a critical overview on extant scholarship and reflecting on future research pathways on the eco-social nexus from a variety of analytical perspectives.
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.
Available open access digitally under CC-BY licence.
Development and environmental challenges are often framed at the global or planetary scale, but in a vague or apolitical manner. This book develops a theoretically rigorous and politicized concept of the planetary to intervene in contemporary debates on global development, and to enhance our critical understanding of development as we approach the second quarter of the twenty-first century.
Chapters explore key themes and processes including urbanization, demographic change, health, financialization, and infrastructure development. Referencing diverse cases and examples drawn from across the world, the book argues that the futures of global development are inseparable from environmental challenges and transformations.
In a world facing multiple intersecting crises, the push for healthier, more resilient societies has never been more urgent. This timely book reveals how empowered and organised communities can lead this change. It offers policy makers, academics and activists research-driven insights, decolonial perspectives and real-world examples of organising and collective actions from across the global North and South.
By centring on the power of community development, participation and social movements, the book delivers actionable frameworks to tackle inequality and advance the right to health, making it an essential resource for anyone committed to health justice and for building equitable and sustainable health systems worldwide.
The Gated City offers a comprehensive analysis of the proliferation of gated communities, urban fragmentation, and the privatisation of public life in the Latin American context from a policy and practice perspective. The book engages with global debates about the increasingly locked-down, securitised, and elite nature of much city life and the possible ‘death of public life’ that many have suggested is occurring in cities today. It draws on original, in-depth research in one of the largest gated communities in the world, a comminity that exemplifies the tensions and conflicts that make it harder for planning professionals to provide more inclusive urban spaces. The argument comes from the different and sometimes contrasting experiences obtained through the author’s academic and personal planning practice in Mexico. The discussion offers valuable insights into policy and planning practices that are relevant worldwide under the current conditions of uncertainty, fear, and increased social inequality. The book provides elements of analysis for university students, policy makers, researchers, and urban studies instructors interested in better understanding exclusionary spaces. The Mexican case provides methodological tools for scholars and practitioners researching and presenting planning and policy-making alternatives against exclusion in cities and social inequalities.
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.
“Banal warfare” describes the ways in which the vision of the city perpetually ridden with conflicts, terrorist attacks, and disease infuses everyday urban life to the point of becoming invisible or taken for granted. The book is situated within decolonial urbanism as, to understand the urban geopolitical struggles in western Europe, it employs the conceptual framework developed in relation to cities conventionally considered war cities in the global east and south. In “reversing the gaze” on urban warfare, the focus is on the impact of framing different public emergencies and incidents of violence in Paris and Brussels as acts of war and how this contributes to the normalization of militarism within urban contexts traditionally viewed as “non-war zones.” From lockdowns to states of emergency, the book addresses how this process shapes urban governance agendas, constructs the notion of the “enemy within,” and conditions the everyday affective atmospheres of urban dwellers in Paris and Brussels. These citizens are not presented as passive victims of military urbanism, but as active subjects in the doing and undoing of notions of cities at war. The book highlights the politics of affective atmospheres in an effort to “make feminist sense” of urban warfare, drawing attention to the processes that sustain social inequalities and deepen urban geographies of exclusion while, at the same time, rethinking notions of urban peace.
Available Open Access digitally under CC-BY-NC-ND licence.
Pathways to Sustainable Welfare critically examines how cities can address the dual challenges of climate change and sustainability while ensuring the welfare of their populations.
Focused on three Swedish cities, it explores the integration of environmental and welfare concerns in local policies, urban movements and public opinions. Based on theories of inertia, emergence and transformation, it identifies factors driving or obstructing sustainable welfare advancements.
This book is a crucial resource for scholars interested in sustainable transformation, urban governance and social policy. It offers frameworks and empirical evidence relevant to academics, policymakers and practitioners seeking to understand and engage in urban sustainable welfare development.
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.
The platform economy, powered by companies like Airbnb, Uber and Deliveroo, promised to revolutionize the way we work and live. But what are the actual benefits to our society and economy?
This book interrogates the ‘sharing economy’, showing how platform capitalism is not only shaped by business decisions, but is a result of struggles involving social movements, consumer politics and state interventions. It focuses in particular on the controversial tactics used by platform giants to avoid regulation.
Drawing on cutting-edge research and analysis, this book provides a critical overview of this important topic, and imagines the different possible futures of the platform economy.
