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
This chapter asks the question, what does this unthinking mean for current anthropogenic climate change policies? This is answered in two ways. First, the concept of urban demand is discussed in its current manifestation as the product of a global Advertising-Big Data-Social Media complex. Second, the mechanisms behind the immensity of Chinese urban growth in recent decades are described. In their different, but intertwined, ways these two expressions of today’s modernity are pointing irrevocably towards terminal consumption. The only means to stop this happening appears to a reinvention of the city, creating an urban demand for stewarding nature for future generations, a posterity city
This chapter provides a description of Jane Jacobs’ legacy beyond her famous intervention into city planning. Five aspects of her work are highlighted. First and foremost she was a knowledge builder, harnessing a voracious curiosity to understand the complexity of the human condition. The most auspicious outcome has been her revision of economics identifying city economies as the loci of economic growth. She made further unusual forays into history – contesting power to eliminate complexity – and politics where her bottom-up approach had drawn admiration from both the right and left. She brought this altogether towards the end of her life as a new understanding of economics as ecology. The chapter concludes with a critical appraisal of her treatment of urban demand – crucial to the argument of this book – and links Jacob’s oeuvre to the work of multiple other radical scholars to aid the process of unthinking.
This urgent book brings our cities to the fore in understanding the human input into climate change. The demands we are making on nature by living in cities has reached a crisis point and unless we make significant changes to address it, the prognosis is terminal consumption.
Providing a radical new argument that integrates global understandings of making nature and making cities, the authors move beyond current policies of mitigation and adaption and pose the challenge of urban stewardship to tackle the crisis.
Their new way of thinking re-orients possibilities for environmental policy and calls for us to reinvent our cities as spaces for activism.
This chapter takes the failure of current climate change policy as a given and seeks explanations and ways forward. Policy-making should be firmly grounded in the essential nature of anthropogenic climate change – a complex problem and an existential threat. It is found wanting in three fundamental aspects. International relations with its competitive preposition is found to be not fit for purpose as decision-making arena. The scientific input for decision-making underplays the ‘anthropo’ bit of climate change and therefore is found unfit for purpose. And social science contributions are found not fit for purpose because of their innate state-centric bias. To overcome the resulting impasse requires critical unthinking. The work of Jane Jacobs is chosen as guide to unthinking thereby foregrounding cities. An invitation is issued for others to provide alternate unthinking.
This is the first chapter on unthinking, specifically unthinking modernity. It takes the form of 14 statements that are presented as basic modern theses, and which are countered by antitheses, alternative positions wherein urban demand is central to the argument. This thesis/antithesis device is used to broach three broad areas. First, the relationship between cities and states are considered with the former identified as constituting social development. Second, the role of cities in that social development is used to undermine modern time and spatial framings of change. Third, these contrarian ideas are brought to bear on the study of anthropogenic climate change, inserting cities as mass demand mechanisms. All this unthinking is intended to foster a fundamental mindscape break pointing towards transmodern sensibilities..
This is the second chapter on unthinking, specifically building a new narrative to show anthropogenic climate change is not a result of modern industrial society rather it has a much deeper pedigree as essentially urban in nature. The narrative has been constructed by matching Jane Jacobs’ ideas on the power of cities from their initial invention of agriculture to William F. Ruddiman’s revision of the sequence of greenhouse gases generating anthropogenic climate change. There are two initial outcomes: first a critical reassessment of the importance of cities in geographical imaginings of the past, and second a critical intervention into the dating of the Anthropocene pushing it back many thousands of years.
This chapter begins by reviewing air pollution and health, then establishes the connections between air pollution and climate change. Research into deprivation, spatial distribution and air quality reveals a general picture in which those who typically produce the least pollution suffer the greatest consequences. Reducing waste through water metering makes environmental sense, yet the risks to the poorest are real and exacerbated by the profit motive of water companies. However, the research also draws attention to complexities that warn us against overly simplistic interventions. For instance, we should relate air to discussions of rights, ownership and control, something which demands a regulatory approach so long as this makes markets the servants of well-defined social and ecological objectives. This implies types of long-term planning, regulation and investment – and the prioritsation of social and ecological ends – for which our economic liberal assumptions and habits appear particularly ill-suited.
An analysis of the capabilities approach which argues it risks a certain indeterminacy and slipperiness. Resources like income and wealth should not be undervalued because they are social relations of power which significantly enable and constrain doings and beings. Poverty is a ‘poverty of capabilities’ in so far as this denotes a deficiency in the meta-capabilities which make capabilities possible. Therefore, we ought to focus upon the socionatural conditions underpinning the multiple dimensions of poverty. A poverty of capabilities implies deprivations in those resources central to both ecological and human-centred systems: socionatural resources. Thus, an ecosocial understanding of poverty defines it as the deprivations resulting from an inadequate distribution of, and participative access to, those resources which are essential to both natural and social environments.
Available Open Access under CC-BY-NC licence. Climate change is the main challenge facing developed countries in the 21st century. To what extent does this agenda converge with issues of poverty and social exclusion? Climate change and poverty offers a timely new perspective on the ‘ecosocial’ understanding of the causes and symptoms of, and solutions to, poverty and applies this to recent developments across a number of areas, including fuel poverty, food poverty, housing, transport and air pollution. Unlike any other publication, the book therefore establishes a new agenda for both environmental and social policies which has cross-national relevance. It will appeal to students in social policy, public policy, applied social studies and politics and will also be of interest to those studying international development, economics and geography
A conclusion to the book which offers a final definition and conceptualisation of ecosocial poverty. It reiterates the book's main thesis: the ecologically excessive, careless and destructive use of key socionatural resources is connected to the social deprivations that characterize that usage for millions of those on low incomes.
