RGS-IBG book series

How Cities Learn: Tracing Bus Rapid Transit in South Africa

Astrid Wood

In 2006, South African policymakers were captivated by a new concept. Bus rapid transit (BRT) promised to be a quick, cost-effective and efficient method of urban transportation that combines the speed and quality of rail with the flexibility of a bus system. Three years later, Johannesburg’s Rea Vaya opened as the first BRT system in Africa, with Cape Town’s MyCiTi becoming operational two years later. Since then, Ekurhuleni, eThekwini, Nelson Mandela Bay, Rustenburg and Tshwane also launched BRT. While these South African systems are unmistakably modeled after the pioneering qualities of BRT in Bogotá, the process through which South African policymakers learned of and implemented BRT remains unexplored. In tracing this learning process, How Cities Learn considers how and why policymakers adopt best practices. This book is essential reading for scholars of geography, politics, sociology and transportation as well as urban planners and practitioners.

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Defensible Space on the Move: Mobilisation in English Housing Policy and Practice

Loretta Lees & Elanor Warwick

The geographical concept Defensible Space, influential in designing out crime to date, has been applied to housing estates in the UK, North America, Europe, and beyond. Fellow urbanists Loretta Lees and Elanor Warwick critically examine the movement/mobility/mobilisation of defensible space from the US to the UK and into English housing policy and practice. Drawing on extensive archival research, oral histories and in-depth interviews, they explore the multiple ways the concept of defensible space was interpreted and implemented as it circulated from national to local level and within particular English housing estates, especially in London. Critiquing, and pushing forwards, work on policy mobilities they illustrate for the first time how the transfer mechanisms for this complex spatial concept worked at both a policy and practitioner level.

This important book reveals defensible space to be ambiguous, uncertain in nature, neither proven or disproven scientifically. The idea remains a cluster of significant but disputed elements. Built environment professionals continue to espouse the concept, but the detailed evidence presented in this book, and its reflections on the future role of shared space post the Covid-19 pandemic, should urge them to think again.

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Geomorphology and the Carbon Cycle

Martin Evans

Geomorphology and the Carbon Cycle is the first systematic examination of the role of geomorphological processes in the cycling of carbon through the terrestrial system. Through a systematic analysis of the sediment cascade it argues that knowledge of geomorphological processes is fundamental to understanding the ways in which carbon is stored and recycled in the terrestrial environment. The book integrates classical geomorphological theory with understanding of microbial processes controlling the decomposition of organic matter to develop an interdisciplinary research agenda for the analysis of the terrestrial carbon cycle. The book develops a conceptual framework based on geomorphological understanding, and informed by work in ecology, microbiology and biogeochemistry, in order to analyse spatial and temporal patterns of terrestrial carbon cycling at the landscape scale. It also considers the ways in which, as Humanity enters the Anthropocene, the application of this science has the potential to manage the terrestrial carbon cycle to limit increases in atmospheric carbon.

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The Unsettling Outdoors: Environmental Estrangement in Everyday Life

Russell Hitchings

How is it that, in the course of everyday life, people are drawn away from greenspace experiences that are often good for them? By attending to the apparently idle talk of those who are living them out, this book shows us why we should attend to the processes involved. It develops an original perspective on how greenspace benefits are promoted, and shows how greenspace experiences can unsettle the practices of everyday life. It draws on several years of field research and over 180 interviews, making new links between geographies of nature and the study of social practices. It also adopts a focus on social practices to reimagine the research intervies and offers a wealth of suggestions for future researchers in this field.

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Respatialising Finance: Power, Politics and Offshore Renminbi Market Making in London

Sarah Hall

Respatialising Finance is one of the first detailed empirical studies of how and why London became the leading western financial centre within the wider Chinese economic and political project of internationalising its currency, the renminbi (RMB). This in-depth volume examines how political authorities in both London and Beijing identified the potential value of London’s international financial centre in facilitating and legitimising RMB internationalisation, and how they sought to operationalise this potential through a range of market-making activities.

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Bodies, Affects, Politics: The Clash of Bodily Regimes

Steve Pile

This book seeks to understand the coexistence of bodily regimes and the politics that emerge from the clash between them. It presents a novel conceptual model for understanding the relationship between bodies and affects, and reworks Rancière's notions of the distribution of the sensible and the aesthetic unconscious. It also establishes a dynamic and multiple understanding of the repressive, distributive and communicative unconscious by rethinking Freudian psychoanalysis, utilising a variety of empirical materials, from Hollywood movies to Freud's case studies. Finally, it sets its argument about politics within the context of significant social events to ensure its conceptual and empirical material is relevant to the contemporary political moment.

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Home SOS: Gender, Violence, and Survival in Crisis Ordinary Cambodia

Katherine Brickell

Drawing on 15 years of fieldwork and over 300 interviews, Home SOS argues that the home is central to the violence and gendered contingency of existence in crisis ordinary Cambodia. It provides an original book-length study which brings domestic violence and forced eviction into twin view, and ffers relational insights between different violences to build an integrated understanding of women’s experiences of home life.

The book positions domestic violence and forced eviction as manifestations of intimate war against women’s homes and bodies located inside and outside of the traditional purview of war. It also reaffirms and reprioritises the home as a political entity which is foundational to the concerns of human geography.

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Geographies of Anticolonialism: Political Networks Across and Beyond South India, c. 1900-1930

Andrew Davies

A fresh approach to scholarship on the diverse nature of Indian anticolonial processes. The book brings together a varied selection of literature to explore Indian anticolonialism in new ways, and offers a different perspective to geographers seeking to understand political resistance to colonialism. It addresses contemporary studies that argue nationalism was joined by other political processes, such as revolutionary and anarchist ideologies, to shape the Indian independence movement, and includes a focus on a specific anticolonial group, the 'Pondicherry Gang', and investigates their significant impact which went beyond South India.

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