Shaping Places

Shaping Places explains how towns and cities can turn real estate development to their advantage to create the kind of places where people want to live, work, relax and invest. It contends that the production of quality places which enhance economic prosperity, social cohesion and environmental sustainability require a transformation of market outcomes. The core of the book explores why this is essential, and how it can be delivered, by linking a clear vision for the future with the necessary means to achieve it. Crucially, the book argues that public authorities should seek to shape, regulate and stimulate real estate development so that developers, landowners and funders see real benefit in creating better places.

Key to this is seeing planners as market actors, whose potential to shape the built environment depends on their capacity to understand and transform the embedded attitudes and practices of other market actors. This requires planners to be skilled in understanding the political economy of real estate development and successful in changing its outcomes through smart intervention. Drawing on a strong theoretical framework, the book reveals how the future of places will come to be shaped through constant interaction between State and market power.

Filled with international examples, essential case studies, colour diagrams and photographs, this is essential reading for undergraduate and graduate students taking planning, property, real estate or urban design courses as well as for social science students more widely who wish to know how the shaping of place really occurs.

David Adams holds the Ian Mactaggart Chair of Property and Urban Studies at the University of Glasgow, where Steve Tiesdell was Senior Lecturer in Public Policy until his death in 2011. They worked together for over a decade, first at the University of Aberdeen and then at Glasgow, sharing a mutual interest in state-market relations in land and property, and applying this to research and teaching on planning, public policy, real estate development, urban design and urban regeneration. Before moving to Aberdeen, Steve worked at the Universities of Nottingham and Sheffield, while David was previously at the Universities of Reading and Manchester. Shaping Places represents the culmination of their mutual endeavour and builds on previous joint publications, including their edited book Urban Design in the Real Estate Development Process (2011).

David and Steve have each researched and published widely in their respective fields. Steve’s previous books include Revitalising Historic Urban Quarters (co-author 1996), Public Places – Urban Spaces: The Dimensions of Urban Design (co-author 2003 and 2010) and The Urban Design Reader (co-editor 2006). David’s previous books include Urban Planning and the Development Process (author 1994), Greenfields, Brownfields and Housing Development (co-author 2002) and Planning, Public Policy and Property Markets (co-editor 2005).