Urban Studies - Shorts

This book addresses questions of pluralism in a time of increasing ethnic, religious and cultural diversity in the public and private spaces of our cities. It analyses different types of regulation — property rights, municipal ordinances and urban planning — and their role in protecting and supporting diversity.

Pathways to Sustainable Welfare critically examines how cities can address the dual challenges of climate change and sustainability while ensuring the welfare of their populations. Focused on three Swedish cities, it explores the integration of environmental and welfare concerns in local policies, urban movements and public opinions.

Examining the environmental impacts of digitalisation in smart cities, this book asks how we can reconcile the adoption of smart technologies into sustainable projects.

It traces the material and environmental costs of daily realities for smart cities and asks how promises are broken when cities become ‘smart.’

In the context of widespread precarity and ongoing crises, ruins have captured much attention in recent years. This book is about a troubling new kind of space for consumer society: the retail ruin. Drawing on the author’s own fieldnotes and photographs, this book takes a hauntological approach to these ‘new’ ruins in the urban landscape.

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.

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”.

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.

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.

The COVID-19 pandemic, Brexit and the US-China trade dispute have heightened interest in the geopolitics and security of modern ports.

Applying a multidisciplinary lens to the political economy of port security, this book presents a unique outlook on the social, economic and political factors that shape organised crime and governance.

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.

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.