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The Townscapes Project

The Townscapes project offers a deep analysis of how towns are faring across the regions of Britain and elsewhere. It showcases the merits of a more granular and regionally rooted perspective for our understanding of geographical inequalities and the kinds of policy needed to address them.

The declining economic fortunes of many towns, and the chasm that divides the experiences and outlooks of many of their inhabitants from the metropolitan centres where wealth and power have become concentrated, are issues of growing interest in political life and public policy.

In the UK, the preponderance of support for Brexit among town-dwellers, and the countervailing values of many young urbanites, has sparked a deep debate about how and why towns are locked out of the circuits of growth in the modern economy, and how the inequalities associated with economic geography can be more effectively tackled.

Our Townscapes project offers a deeper analysis of how towns are faring across the regions of Britain and elsewhere. It aims to step away from the generalisations and dogmas that infuse much of the contemporary policy debate and offer instead a more finely grained picture of how different towns relate to their wider regions and nations, as well as to their nearest cities. It showcases the merits of a more granular and regionally rooted perspective for our understanding of geographical inequalities and the kinds of policy needed to address them.

The Townscapes Project looks to explore:

How town-dwellers are excluded from certain aspects of the political economy
The ways that long-term demographic and economic shifts are continuing to impact different towns
How towns relate to their wider economic contexts – both regionally and nationally
Effective policy responses to the developing spatial inequalities between towns and other places

Publications

Related People

Professor Michael Kenny

Inaugural Director of the Bennett Institute for Public Policy

Biography Before he arrived in Cambridge, Michael held positions at: Queen’s University, Belfast; the University of Sheffield, where he was appointed Head of the Department of Politics; and Queen Mary...