Why am I passionate about this?
I've been fascinated by city life since I studied Geography at high school. After twenty five years of teaching and researching urban geography, I am Professor of Urban Futures at a UK university. I now have a better sense of the challenges we face and what we can do about them. I spend my time supporting activists, campaigners, students, policymakers, and politicians about the urgency for change and what kind of ideas and examples they can use to tackle what I call the triple emergencies of climate breakdown, social inequality, and nature loss.
Paul's book list on helping us save the city
Why did Paul love this book?
This is one of the defining books that has helped a generation of researchers name an important tendency – that capitalism isn’t all-dominant and there are always alternatives to it.
I use this book often with campaigners and city policymakers to help them understand that if you really take a closer look at our modern-day economy you will see all sorts of activity – co-operatives, family labour, barter, gift exchange.
I love the idea of postcapitalism as it really asks us to think about what should, or ought to, come next. This broader understanding of our economies as diverse entities opens up the possibility of supercharging more community-focused economies.
1 author picked A Postcapitalist Politics as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.
Is there life after capitalism? In this creatively argued follow-up to their book The End of Capitalism (As We Knew It), J. K. Gibson-Graham offer already existing alternatives to a global capitalist order and outline strategies for building alternative economies.
A Postcapitalist Politics reveals a prolific landscape of economic diversity-one that is not exclusively or predominantly capitalist-and examines the challenges and successes of alternative economic interventions. Gibson-Graham bring together political economy, feminist poststructuralism, and economic activism to foreground the ethical decisions, as opposed to structural imperatives, that construct economic "development" pathways. Marshalling empirical evidence from local economic projects and action…