Architecture

The book tells the story of the proliferation of gated communities and the privatisation of public life and public space in Mexico over the last three decades. Drawing on research from Lomas de Angelópolis in Puebla, one of the largest gated communities in the world, Emma R. Morales explores why such fortified spaces have proved popular with middle class households.

Weaving together the multiple influences of housing policy, predatory financial markets and an increased fear of crime, the book sets out how policy makers and planners can improve decision-making and provide non-gated solutions to urban anxiety.

Presenting the complexities of doing planning work, with all its attendant moral and practical dilemmas, this rich ethnographic study analyses how places are made through stories of four diverse public and private sector working environments. The book provides a unique insight for educators, students and researchers into the everyday lives of planners and those in associated built environment occupations. This exceptional account of the micro-politics of a knowledge-intensive profession also provides an excellent resource for sociologists of contemporary work. The authors use team ethnography to push the methodological frontiers of planning research and to advance organisational ethnography into new areas.

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.

It highlights and critically reviews examples of city visions from around the world, contrasting their development and outlining the key benefits and challenges in planning such visions.

The authors show how important it is to think about the future of cities in objective and strategic ways, engaging with a range of stakeholders – something more important than ever as we look to visions of a sustainable future beyond the COVID-19 crisis.

Using a broad international comparative perspective spanning multiple countries across South America, Europe and Africa, contributors explore resident-led self-building for low- and middle-income groups in urban areas. Although social, economic and urban prosperity differs across these contexts, there exists a recurring, cross-continental, tension between formal governance and self-regulation. Contributors examine the multifaceted regulation dilemmas of self-building under the conditions of modernisation and consider alternative methods of institutionalisation, place-making and urban design, reconceptualising the moral and managerial ownership of the city. Innovative in scope, this book provides an array of globalised solutions for navigating regulatory tensions in order to optimise sustainable development for the future.

Planning is a battleground of ideas and interests, perhaps more visibly and continuously than ever before in the UK. These battles play out nationally and at every level, from cities to the smallest neighbourhoods. Marshall goes to the root of current planning models and exposes who is acting for what purposes across these battlegrounds. He examines the ideological structuring of planning and the interplay of political forces which act out conflicting interest positions. This book discusses how structures of planning can be improved and explores how we can generate more effective political engagements in the future.

Drawing on a unique archive spanning the lifetime of twenty council estate projects in the UK and using hundreds of resident voices, this book reveals the secrets of council housing’s failures and successes, and the reasons for them.

Bringing to light the complex variety of the lived experiences of residents, it shows how estate pathways were predetermined by factors such as location, design and date, as well as by their local and national social, economic and political contexts. The book highlights what can be learned from some of the successes of less successful housing projects and provides lessons for building sustainable communities in the twenty-first century.

In this accessible and passionately argued book, Bob Colenutt goes to the roots of the long-term crisis in housing and planning in the UK.

Providing a much needed, in depth critique of the nexus of power of landowners, house builders, financial backers and politicians that makes up the property lobby, this radical book reveals how this complex, self-serving and intimidating network perpetuates a cycle of low supply, high prices and poor building which has resulted in one of the biggest social and economic challenges of our time. With radical ideas for solutions, this is essential reading for anyone with an interest in housing, planning and social justice.

Given the rapid urbanisation of the world’s population, the converse phenomenon of shrinking cities is often overlooked and little understood. Yet with almost one in ten post-industrial US cities shrinking in recent years, efforts by government and anchor institutions to regenerate these cities is gaining policy urgency, with the availability and siting of affordable housing being a key concern. This is the first book to look at the reasons for the failure (and success) of affordable housing experiences in the fastest shrinking cities in the US. Applying quantitative and GIS analysis using data from the US Department of Housing and Urban Development, the authors make recommendations for future place-based siting practices, stressing its importance for ensuring more equitable urban revitalisation. The book will be a valuable resource for academic researchers and students in urban studies, housing and inequality, as well as policy makers.