Urban and regional policy

This engaging book argues that imaginative place-based leadership can enable citizens to shape the urban future while advancing social justice, promoting care for the environment and bolstering community empowerment.

This new book explores Britain's intensely urban and increasingly global communities as interlocking pieces of a complex jigsaw; they are hard to see apart yet they are deeply unequal. 

Jigsaw Cities examines these issues using Birmingham, Britain's second city, as a model of pioneering urban order and as a victim of brutal Modernist planning.

Written in an engaging and accessible style, How to save our town centres asks whether the internet has killed our high streets and how the relationship between people and places is changing, how business is done and who benefits, and how the use and ownership of land affects us all.

Focusing on house building and conservation politics in England, Spiers uses his considerable experience and extensive research to demonstrate why the current model doesn’t work, and why there needs to be both planning reform and a more active role for the state, including local government.

Home zones (areas where cars travel slowly and space has been created for children and environmental improvement) are a common feature of the urban landscape. This handbook explains how to plan and design a home zone in an existing street or as part of a new residential area, including advice and illustrations derived from recent home zone schemes.

This is the first published research from the UK to address the neglected topic of the increasing settlement of Gypsies and Travellers in conventional housing. It highlights the complex and emergent tensions and dynamics inherent when policy and popular discourse combine to frame ethnic populations within a narrative of movement.

This comprehensive book uses a rich array of case studies from cities in Asia, Latin America, Africa, Southern Europe, and beyond to highlight the intensifying global struggle over urban space and underline gentrification as a growing and important battleground in the contemporary world.

Lisa Mckenzie lived on the notorious St Ann’s estate in Nottingham for more than 20 years. Her ‘insider’ status enables us to hear the stories of its residents, often wary of outsiders, to give a unique account of life in poor communities in contemporary Britain.

An up-to-date assessment by prominent scholars of the impacts of recent changes on key areas of urban planning, including housing, transport, and the environment, and core areas for future research.

Using a unique archive spanning the lifetime of twenty council estates in the UK, this book examines what we can learn from council housing’s failings and successes for building sustainable communities in the future.

This important book engages critically with Lefebvre’s spatial theories and challenges recent thinking about the nature of urban space. Research in three iconic post-industrial cities in the UK and North America, explains how urban public spaces, including differential space are socially produced.

An analysis of the aspirations of different groups living in East London and the strategies they have used to improve their status.