Afterlives of Urban Cosmopolitanism charts the history of these communities in Muslim Asia and explores their migratory trajectories. Rather than emphasising the declining significance of non-Muslims to the region, however, this unique book illuminates how even in the context of diaspora many communities have continued to maintain relations with their countries of origin and with Muslims from them living in the diaspora. The book is informed by in-depth fieldwork conducted in Muslim Asia and amongst the region’s diasporas in contexts as diverse as Bukhara, Samarkand, Tashkent, Aleppo, Kabul, and London, New York and Vienna.

The post Afterlives of Urban Cosmopolitanism appeared first on UCL Press.

This book explores the fertile tension between these poles. Around the world, governments now regulate for beauty, planners and designers are tasked with delivering it, and communities increasingly demand it. But how do we pursue something that resists clear definition?

Structured in four parts across eight chapters, the book traces beauty’s rise as a public mission, probes its contested meaning, investigates what people prefer in their built environments and reports on innovative experiments that have sought to test out the delivery of a beauty agenda. Six guiding questions shape the journey, culminating in a seventh: can the unknowable ever be made knowable? Rather than offering one final answer, the book maps a rich and unsettled terrain, showing why urban beauty matters, and how it might guide the creation of more humane cities.

The post Urban Beauty appeared first on UCL Press.

Moving from theory to practice, the book unpacks the political economy behind these projects: value capture tools, density bonuses, long-term ground leases, negotiated obligations and creative public–private–non-profit partnerships. It looks closely at ownership and management arrangements, conflicts over access and costs and the shifting ‘publicness’ of spaces that function as urban commons. Rather than celebrating verticality uncritically, the volume foregrounds questions of equity, exclusion and asks who really benefits when public services are interwoven with private development. For planners, urban designers, lawyers, policymakers and scholars, it offers a rare comparative framework, conceptual language and concrete design and governance lessons for making vertically mixed cities more just, legible and accessible.

The post Planning Public Space in the Vertical City appeared first on UCL Press.

City-Heat breaks with temperature-based understandings of heat and delves into a richer, more emic exploration of its socio-cultural and sensory dimensions. The chapters cover a range of topics explored through interactions with a diverse group of interlocutors in the Kenyan city of Nakuru, spanning from the daily struggles of hustling youths to the work of geothermal engineers, spiritual warfare, pervasive issues of toxicity and pollution confronted by herbalists, and the medicinal practices to which the interlocutors turned in their efforts to forge more viable pathways into the future.

Through these ethnographic terrains, the book traces how the interlocutors sense, and make sense of, what remains viable in a city undergoing rapid change across infrastructural, spiritual, metabolic and moral registers. Nick Rahier argues that hotter conditions shape how people move, work, relate and forge viable pathways toward ‘cooler’ horizons.

The post City-Heat appeared first on UCL Press.

Rethinking Urban Entrepreneurialism challenges the conventional understanding of urban entrepreneurialism and argues that Chinese urban governance comprises two interrelated aspects: entrepreneurial governance and innovative statecraft. The first refers to the deployment of market-based approaches to urban development, and the second refers to versatile techniques. Urban entrepreneurialism encompasses both market-oriented approaches and administrative innovations. The state upholds its strategic and extra-economic objectives by deploying and mobilising the market and society. Urban entrepreneurialism also demonstrates a strong state intentionality rather than following the market logic. The book reveals the challenges to urban entrepreneurialism, the limits of entrepreneurial governance, and multiple managerial practices in China.

By examining entrepreneurial urban development and governance experiments, it paints a comprehensive picture of contemporary urban governance in China. It transcends the binary view of authoritarianism versus urban entrepreneurialism, showcasing a wide spectrum of entrepreneurial and managerial governance features. To rethink urban entrepreneurialism, the book suggests that it extends public-private partnerships into a broader form of statecraft known as ‘state entrepreneurialism’.

The post Rethinking Urban Entrepreneurialism appeared first on UCL Press.

Urban Violence and Marginalised Communities presents a nuanced and revealing picture of how urban violence manifests and operates in multiple and unprecedented ways, challenging the common conception of urban violence solely as criminal physical acts performed by predictable perpetrators. This volume blurs geographical borders through an equitable and representative synthesis of Global South and North interpretations, focusing on a range of marginalised communities. The chapters are inventively crafted as local-meets-global case studies, with a broad regional sweep from Brazil, US, UK and Ukraine to India, South Africa and Palestine. This is mirrored in the volume’s multidisciplinary diversity of topical themes including migration and politics, policing, law and order, built environment/architecture, film, media and performing arts.

The post Urban Violence and Marginalised Communities appeared first on UCL Press.

Having been part of UCL’s Bartlett School of Architecture since 2013, the Survey of London is uniquely placed to offer the first comprehensive account of the university’s buildings and the evolution of its historic Bloomsbury campus. This monograph, published in 2026 to coincide with the bicentenary of UCL’s foundation, provides a new understanding of this significant estate in central London, bringing to light a complex and engaging architectural story with many facets that have been previously overlooked or neglected. It charts a progression in UCL’s architecture from the Greek Revival classicism of the early nineteenth century, through Victorian experimentation and inter-war Neo-Georgian, to post-war Brutalism and today to the high-tech, energy efficient and adaptable buildings expected of a modern university.

Based on original documentary research and site investigation, and generously illustrated with more than 270 photographs, maps and drawings, many of them specially commissioned, the Survey’s monograph provides a valuable record and analysis of UCL’s Bloomsbury campus for the future.

The post University College London appeared first on UCL Press.

Relying on more than a decade of empirical research, the book also interrogates the concept of ‘spatial dialectics’ proposed by Henri Lefebvre. Through deep insight into the practices and experiences of everyday life, Lindsay Blair Howe shows how cities and regions like greater Johannesburg are more than just a sum of their parts. Individuals, and the collectives they forge, influence processes of urbanization and capital accumulation. Extra/ordinary Johannesburg reveals how Lefebvre’s assertions about the production of space remain relevant today, but also where they reach their limits, and how theories on the production of space can be further developed by a stronger understanding of this African urban region. What we can learn from how people are able to navigate the urban fabric of centralities, peripheries, and the spaces between matter greatly in productively reimagining ways to encounter urban Africa.

The post Extra/ordinary Johannesburg appeared first on UCL Press.

Over time, experiences of co-production have generated critical insights about the opportunities and limits of such partnership strategies. Co-production of Knowledge in Action engages with this critique from the perspective of practice. It examines how co-production is articulated and deployed in cities such as Lima, Freetown, Kampala, Dar es Salaam and Delhi, and explores ongoing experiences of co-production-inspired action, mapping the different aspirations that inform co-production practices and the impacts on urban communities.

While the volume recognises the limitations of co-production, and the ways it can serve to reproduce power structures if emptied of its political, transformatory intent, the authors also seek to understand the emancipatory potential of co-production as an incremental strategy that has the power to transform urban planning practices.

The post Co-production of Knowledge in Action appeared first on UCL Press.

While ‘unplanned urbanisation’ has been a key discourse in the production of urban periphery in the Global South, Informational Peripheries argues that the coming of an informational age destabilises the geographic location of the urban periphery. Informational peripheries capture the complexities of digital, material and social dispersal and fragmentation that emerge from informational extraction, redlining, manipulation and bypassing. Exclusions are marked by both geographic and informational distance from the state. It includes subjects who are uncountable, as well as territories that are digitally, socially and materially unmappable. This approach provides an important vantage point for interrogating the political and technological apparatuses that are reconfiguring the notion of the urban in a digital age.

The post Informational Peripheries appeared first on UCL Press.