COVID-19 is an invisible threat that has hugely impacted cities and their inhabitants. Yet its impact is very visible, perhaps most so in urban public spaces and spaces of mobility.This international volume explores the transformations of public space and public transport in response to COVID-19 across the world, both those resulting from official governmental regulations and from everyday practices of urban citizens. The contributors discuss how the virus made urban inequalities s...

Based on more than 30 case studies in eight different countries, this book explores the governance dynamics of local social innovations in the field of poverty reduction. The diverse team of contributors reflects on the trajectory of social innovation in European governance. They illustrate how different governance dynamics and welfare mixes enable or hinder poverty reduction strategies and analyse how such dynamics involve a diversity of actors, instruments and resources at different spat...

This book engages with the thorny question of global urban political agency. It critically assesses the now popular statement that in the context of paralysed and failing nation state governments, cities can and will provide leadership in addressing global challenges.Cities can act politically on the global scale, but the analysis of global urban political agency needs to be firmly embedded in the field of urban studies. Collectively, the chapters in this volume contextualize urban...

How do people deal with diversity in deprived and mixed urban neighbourhoods? This edited collection provides a comparative international perspective on superdiversity in cities, with explicit attention given to social inequality and social exclusion on a neighbourhood level.Although public discourses on urban diversity are often negative, this book focuses on how residents actively and creatively come and live together through micro-level interactions. By deliberately taking an in...

This book brings together a number of highly innovative and thought provoking contributions from European researchers in territorial governance-related fields such as human geography, planning studies, sociology, and management studies. The contributions share the ambition of highlighting troubling contemporary tendencies where spatial planning and territorial governance can be seen to circumscribe or subvert ‘due democratic practice’ and the democratic ethos. The book also functions as an...

In many countries, particularly in the Global North, established forms of solidarity within communities are said to be challenged by the increasing ethnic and cultural diversity of the population. Against the backdrop of renewed geopolitical tensions – which inflate and exploit ethno-cultural, rather than political-economic cleavages – concerns are raised that ethnic and cultural diversity challenge both the formal mechanisms of redistribution and informal acts of charity, reciprocity and ...

Strategic Spatial Projects presents four years of case study research and theoretical discussions on strategic spatial projects in Europe and North America. It takes the position that planning is not well equipped to take on its current challenges if it is considered as only a regulatory and administrative activity. There is an urgent need to develop a mode of planning that aims to innovate in spatial as well as social terms.This timely, important book is for spatial plann...