Policy Press

Cities and communities

Our publishing on key issues around urbanisation - including housing, inadequate and overburdened services, pollution, overcrowded or inaccessible public transport - addresses many of the challenges posed in the UN Sustainable Development Goal 11: Sustainable Cities and Communities.

We acknowledge that, with Asia and Africa set to have the largest and fastest increase in urbanisation by 2050 the Global South is a critical area for study accompanying and informing work on the Global North.

The Urban Policy, Planning and the Built Environment series looks in particular at the contested nature of government intervention in the urban land and housing market, and how urban governance, planning and design processes respond to increasing social complexity, socio-spatial diversity and the goal of democratic renewal.

Bristol University Press and Policy Press are signed up to the UN SDG Publishers Compact. In Cities and communities, we aim to address the following goal:

SDG Publishers compact logoSDG 11: Sustainable cities and communities

Showing 73-84 of 254 items.

Tomorrow’s Communities

Lessons for Community-based Transformation in the Age of Global Crises

Edited by Henry Tam

This book sets out how people’s lives can be positively transformed through diverse forms of community involvement. It shows how communities can become more collaborative and resilient in dealing with the problems they face and provides a guide to what a holistic policy agenda for community-based transformation should encompass.

Policy Press

Volume 1: Community and Society

Contributions to this volume engage directly with different urban communities around the world. They give voice to those who experience poverty, discrimination and marginalisation in order to put them in the front and centre of planning, policy and political debates that make and shape cities.

Bristol Uni Press

Volume 3: Public Space and Mobility

This international volume explores the transformations of public space and public transport in response to COVID-19, both those resulting from official governmental regulations and from everyday practices of urban citizens. The contributors discuss how the virus made urban inequalities clearer, and redefined public spaces in the “new normal”.

Bristol Uni Press

Volume 4: Policy and Planning

Drawing from case studies across the globe, this book explores how the pandemic and the policies it has prompted have caused changes in the ways cities function. The contributors examine the advancing social inequality brought on by the pandemic and suggest policies intended to contain contagion whilst managing the economy in these circumstances.

Bristol Uni Press

Volume 2: Housing and Home

This book casts light on how the virus has impacted the experience of home and housing through the lens of wider urban processes around transportation, land use, planning policy, racism and inequality, and offers crucial insights for reforming cities to be more resilient to future crises.

Bristol Uni Press

Arts, Culture and Community Development

Edited by Rosie Meade and Mae Shaw

Drawing on international examples, this book interrogates the relationship between the arts, culture and community development. Contributors from six continents, reimagine community development as they consider how aesthetic arts contribute to processes of peacebuilding, youth empowerment, participatory planning and environmental regeneration.

Policy Press

The Politics of Cycling Infrastructure

Spaces and (In)Equality

Edited by Peter Cox and Till Koglin

This book examines existing cycling structures and the current policies and practices used to promote cycling. Its interdisciplinary analysis considers the cultural politics of infrastructural provision and connects this to questions of sustainability, citizenship and justice in cities.

Policy Press

Why Travel?

Understanding our Need to Move and How it Shapes our Lives

This book brings together leading experts to show how our travel choices are shaped by a wide range of social, physical, psychological and cultural factors, which have profound implications for the design of future transport policies.

Bristol Uni Press

Secondary Cities

Exploring Uneven Development in Dynamic Urban Regions of the Global North

This book explores cities and intra-regional relational dynamics to challenge common representations of urban development ‘success’ and ‘failure’. It provides innovative alternative relations and development strategies that reimagine the subordinate status of secondary cities.

Bristol Uni Press

Urban Futures

Planning for City Foresight and City Visions

Winner of the 2022 Urban Affairs Association Best Book Award. City visions represent shared, and often desirable, expectations about our urban futures. This book explores the history and evolution of city visions, placing them in the wider context of art, culture, science, foresight and urban theory.

Policy Press

Hope Under Neoliberal Austerity

Responses from Civil Society and Civic Universities

This book explores the ways in which communities are responding today’s society as government policies are increasingly promoting privatisation, deregulation and individualisation of responsibilities, providing insights into the efficacy of these approaches through key policy issues including access to food, education and health.

Policy Press