Place-Based Transformations ─ Case Studies in Sustainable Community Development

Place-Based Transformations offers critical insights into sustainable community development and analyses the masterplans, development options and design codes which underpin these processes. Focusing on four ‘bottom up’ case studies: Chicago, Vancouver, Birmingham and Edinburgh, it provides much needed insight into transformations currently underway within these cities and reflects on their success in sustaining the development of communities.

Mark Deakin presents case-studies of low income communities subject to the poverty and social exclusion of area-based deprivation. These communities are being rebuilt from the bottom up, pulling themselves up by their own bootstraps, and enabling them to sustain this development. Unlike conventional accounts of place-based transformations, this book celebrates the socially-constructive nature of boot-strap theory, the scaffolding which this erects and action-based research that it supports, as the basis for communities to defy the gravity of the situation they confront.

Place-Based Transformations demonstrates how a research led understanding of place-based transformation is inspiring practice whilst advancing the theoretically informed and institutionally grounded knowledge of sustainable community development. This book is an invaluable resource for practitioners and students wanting to gain a critical insight into the subject.

As Professor of Built Environment at Edinburgh Napier University, Mark Deakin has published 12 textbooks and over 60 peer reviewed journal papers on sustainable urban development, sustainable community development and place-based transformations. He has also directed research programmers on sustainable community development for the European Commission, Economic and Social Research Council and Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council in the UK.