Since the 2010s, populism and illiberal politics have been on the rise. Demagogue leaders preach simplified rhetoric to vilify the powerless, polarising city and rural areas and sparking such shocking events as the US insurrection on 6th January 2021.This interdisciplinary book argues for a politics of representativity and accountability to help transform people’s experiences, showing that where they live matters and, therefore, so do they.This book demonstrates how place-b...

From parks and libraries to pubs and schools, social infrastructures are the everyday places that bring people together, support community life, and foster connection. As interest in the concept grows, this timely and accessible edited collection offers a comprehensive overview of social infrastructure—its origins, development, and practical impact.Packed with innovative case studies from the UK, Europe, Australia, and the US, it highlights how these shared spaces can shape urban l...

Actors and institutions in localities and regions across the world are seeking prosperity and well-being amidst tumultuous and disruptive shifts and transitions generated by: an increasingly globalised, knowledge-intensive capitalism; global financial instability, volatility and crisis; concerns about economic, social and ecological sustainability, climate change and resource shortages; new multi-actor and multi-level systems of government and governance and a re-ordering of the i...

Infrastructure systems provide the services we all rely upon for our day-to-day lives. Through new conceptual work and fresh empirical analysis, this book investigates how financialisation engages with city governance and infrastructure provision, identifying its wider and longer-term implications for urban and regional development, politics and policy.Proposing a more people-oriented approach to answering the question of 'What kind of urban infrastructure, and for whom?', this boo...

Planning Practice: Critical Perspectives from the UK provides the only comprehensive overview of contemporary planning practice in the UK. Drawing on contributions from leading researchers in the field, it examines the tools, contexts and outcomes of planning practice. Part I examines planning processes and tools, and the extent to which theory and practice diverge, covering plan-making, Development Management, planning gain, public engagement and place-making. Part II examines th...

The UK has now joined a Europe-wide trend towards more devolved forms of government (e.g. Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland Assemblies). In the context of this general trend towards regionalizm as a focus for public policy and as a source of cultural and political identity, an interdisciplinary team from Newcastle University combine to analyze how this affects the North East of England. There has been comparatively little published on the contemporary development of English Regions and ...

The vision of the original arhitects of the European Community was to create a Europe of economic prosperity and social harmony. Economic integration has come ever closer, but sustained growth and a reduction in social disparities seen as far away as ever. This book examines the prospects for the real cohesion in Europe and find that, far from promroting it, many of the Community's current policies are divisive. The neo-liberal philosophy at the moment is producing policies which favour re...

This book explores the making, unmaking and remaking of social infrastructure in ‘left-behind places’. Such places, typically once flourishing industrial communities that have been excluded from recent economic growth, now attract academic and policy attention as sites of a political backlash against globalisation and liberal democracy. The book focuses on the role of social infrastructure as a key component of this story.Seeking to move beyond a narrowly economistic of reading ‘le...

Austerity has left local government struggling to meet the demands for local services. In this context, this book asks ‘what are the fundamental principles that should guide decision-making by local councillors and officers?’ It seeks to move the agenda from ‘what works?’ to ‘what should local government do?’ and ‘how will its policies impact on social justice and local democracy?'.Reclaiming local democracy examines the politics of human need and argues that local government shoul...

Traditionally in International Relations, power and authority were considered to rest with states. But recently, in the light of changes associated with globalisation, this has come under scrutiny both empirically and theoretically. This book analyses the continuing but changing role of states in the international arena, and their relationships with a wide range of non-state actors, which possess increasingly salient capabilities to structure global politics and economics.

′A broad-ranging and highly intelligent account of key recent developments internationally which skillfully updates the public management and governance literatures′ - Ewan Ferlie, Royal Holloway′Public management has been radically changed and reformed... this book gives students a fine introduction to these changes and to the theories dealing with them′ - Jørgen Grønnegaard Christensen, University of AarhusAn introduction and guide to the dramati...

Singapore is changing. The consensus that the PAP government has constructed and maintained over five decades is fraying. The assumptions that underpin Singaporean exceptionalism are no longer accepted as easily and readily as before. Among these are the ideas that the country is uniquely vulnerable, that this vulnerability limits its policy and political options, that good governance demands a degree of political consensus that ordinary democratic arrangements cannot produce, and that the...