Publications

Applied Spatial Analysis and Policy: Contemporary Applications for Spatially Integrated Social Science 14(3) pp 449-472 In response to changing consumer habits driven by the advance of online services and mobile apps, substantial reductions in the provision of bank branches have been widely documented over the last decade. Such closures have economic consequences for the sustainability of…

Welsh Government policy establishes town centres as central places of community activity and local prosperity, recognising the positive impact towns have on the local economy and the well-being and cohesion felt amongst local communities. In light of this, recent declines in the usage of town centres are a major cause for concern. These have not…

Regional and Federal Studies 2022 Forthcoming This article introduces a new dataset on regionalist actors’ territorial demands and frames in Europe. The FraTerr dataset advances on existing datasets by proposing a more fine-grained understanding of regionalist actors’ territorial demands, and is the first to provide comparative data on how these are framed. Methodologically, it develops an…

Eurasian Geography and Economics, 2021, ahead-of-print, 1-3 This is a valuable, informative, and timely book. The historical period it considers, 1956–1991, was one in which the communist parties of Central and Eastern Europe ruled, apparently as passive satellite instruments of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. The Communist International (Comintern) was dissolved by Stalin in 1943…

This report, based on 42 interviews with workers, trade unionists and other stakeholders, examines the phenomena of low-paid and precarious work in Sheffield. It focuses on the factors driving the prevalence of such work (including the links with welfare reform), the experiences of workers in seven distinct employment sectors, as well as trade union responses…

Population, Space and Place, 2021, ahead-of-print So-called “left behind” regions have gained infamy for working-class discontent. Yet a concurrent phenomenon has gone unremarked: middle-class lifestyles in peripheral places. This article examines how middle-class migrants (defined by economic, social, and cultural capital) to peripheral regions envisage and enact their aspirations. Against presumed migration trajectories to growing…

In this paper, we consider the implications of applying the city region concept to a medium-sized city and whether such an application of a spatial and governmental policy is appropriate when the central city in question is also not necessarily economically dominant or connected to its wider city-region. This gives a deeper understanding to the…

Decision-makers, planners and administrators involved in different policy domains at different governance levels face the important challenge of fostering more balanced, sustainable and territorially integrated development. Well-designed, multi-level, multi-sector and multi-actor governance arrangements can play a key role in this process through orchestrating the interplay between different spheres, activities, actors and interests. In this paper,…

Territory, Politics, Governance 2022 Forthcoming Regions remain in flux. Their status as primary sites of governance and government is an ongoing negotiation between multiple endogenous and exogenous actors. The role of regions as drivers of economic activity and containers of socio-political identities and processes has waxed and waned in academic and policy discourse, most recently hybridized in…

LSE Blog Article The relationship between rural areas and Brexit has been neglected in a preoccupation with the urban geographies of the ‘left behind’ and the political arguments about culture wars. How might the patterns of the 2016 referendum vote be interrogated to provide insights about social and economic changes in rural places and wider…