Yasmin Ali

The core of  Shaping Places: Urban Planning, Design and Development 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.

The premise of the main thesis is the requirement for 21^st century town planners and civic leaders 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.

Shaping Places is a well-considered textbook that explains how cities can work with the real estate development framework and cycle to help create attractive and prosperous places to live and work. It relates the role of market outcomes and economics to quality of life and therefore place, and economic outcomes as a vehicle and precursor to successful and sustained urban regeneration and development.

This is a cross-sectoral publication that bridges interrelated fields of Urban Design and Policy, Property and Real Estate Practice Management, and City Planning and regeneration. This is a correlation well-established in the University where the authors originate, with dual stream degree programmes with curricula overlapping content from City Planning and Real Estate Development, as well as a unique Masters’ programme accredited by both the RTPI and RICS. The book is aimed at students and career professionals and academics of these subjects, and is well illustrated with colour diagrams and photographs. The text is contextualised by a range of case studies, including international examples.

// Shaping Places: Urban Planning, Design and Development, Routledge, RRP £30.99 paperback