Urban Studies - All titles

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.

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.

Phil Allmendinger takes a critical approach to the role of ‘smart’ in future cities and the relationship with city development. Considering how technology can support active citizenship, he challenges the commercial drivers of big tech and warns that these, not developments for ‘social good’, may dominate.

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.

Leading governance theorist Jonathan S. Davies develops a rich comparative analysis of austerity governance and resistance in eight cities, to establish a conjunctural perspective on the rolling crises of neoliberal globalism.

Why do businesses still value urban life over the suburbs or countryside? This accessible book makes the case for Face-to-Face contact, still considered crucial to many 21st century economies, and provides tools for thinking about the future of places from market towns to World Cities.

Ren examines the making of art spaces in Beijing and Berlin to engage with comparative urbanism as a framework for doing research. Across vastly different contexts where universal theories of modernity or development seem increasingly misplaced, the concept of aspiration provides an alternative lens to understand the nature of urban change.

Drawing on a decade of research, an internationally renowned expert explains how cities and communities can develop recovery strategies following the COVID-19 pandemic that promote social, economic and environmental justice.

Hearne contextualises the Irish housing crisis within its broader global context and examines its origins in terms of the extension of neoliberalism, marketisation and financialisation in housing. Using real voices and stories, he shows how the crisis is having profound impacts on equality, wellbeing and health.

Available Open Access under CC-BY-NC licence. Reports on the innovative, transdisciplinary co-production on sustainable urbanisation undertaken by Mistra Urban Futures, a highly influential research centre based in Sweden (2010-19), this book makes a significant contribution to evolving theory about comparative urban research.

Unless we make drastic changes, the climate damage that we are causing by living in cities will result in 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 towards making cities spaces for activism.

Providing new research and thinking about cities, their governance and planning reform, this book compares the UK with multiple international examples in order to examine cutting-edge experimentation and innovation in new models of governance and urban policy in response to today's increasing global social and environmental challenges.