Social Geography and Urban Studies

This book presents a lively challenge to the existing thinking on community development, and proposes ways forward for community building.

"Disadvantaged by where you live?" offers a major contribution to academic debates on the neighbourhood both as a sphere of governance and as a point of public service delivery under New Labour since 1997.

This book is about the practices, roles and impacts of directly elected mayors in the cities that they govern. The volume draws on recent, original research evidence, to locate the debates on directly elected mayors in context in Europe, the US, and Australasia.

This important book looks beyond the Millennium Development Goals to highlight 12 major public policy conversations about the continent post-2015, arguing that Africa as a continent must work on developing a society that is socially, economically and politically inclusive.

Throughout the developed world governments have invested substantial sums in local and regional economic development. This is the first book to provide a cross-national comparison and evaluation of regional development strategies, institutions and agencies.

In 1998, following a sobering report by the Coalfields Task Force, New Labour unveiled a £350 million package of measures to remedy coalfield deprivation and social exclusion. This book examines the impact of this investment in Warsop Vale, a village which has starkly emphasised the negative consequences of coalfield decline.

Using Detroit as a case study, this important book argues that cycles of neoliberal policy-led expansion and contraction created hollow shells of once vibrant industrial centres, and explores the potential for large scale cooperative networks to promote urban regeneration and sustain local economies

The book offers a detailed analysis of the design and implementation of prostitution policy at the local level.

Giving voice to the lived experiences of people with dementia across the globe, this text highlights the challenges presented as dementia care shifts to a community setting. Contributors address the social aspects of environment and, using a unique 'neighbourhood-centred’ perspective, provide an innovative guide for policy and practice.

This original book explores the importance of geographical processes for policies and professional practices related to childhood and youth. Contributors from a wide range of disciplinary backgrounds explore how concepts such as place, scale, mobility and boundary-making are important for policies and practices in diverse contexts.

In this engaging and original book, John Clarke is in conversation with twelve leading individual scholars about the dynamics of critical thinking in the social sciences, and he reflects on the necessity of thinking collaboratively and dialogically.

The creative citizen unbound explores the potential of civically-minded creative individuals in the era of social media and in the context of an expanding creative economy. Contributors examine creative citizenship's contribution to civic life and to social capital and its economic and cultural definitions of value.