Professor Rowland Atkinson

Department of Urban Studies and Planning

Research Chair in Inclusive Societies

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rowland.atkinson@sheffield.ac.uk

Full contact details

Professor Rowland Atkinson
Department of Urban Studies and Planning
Room F12
Geography and Planning Building
Winter Street
Sheffield
S3 7ND
Profile

Rowland’s work crosses the disciplinary boundaries of urban and housing studies, sociology, geography and criminology. At the core of his work is an interest in how forms of poverty and exclusion are related to the choices and actions of more advantaged groups in cities. These interests have led him to conduct pioneering working on gentrification and displacement, gated communities and their wider social effects, social mix and public housing estates and, most recently, the impact of the super-rich on urban life.

Through his work Rowland has sought to understand the spatial form of social inequalities in cities. Such spatialised inequalities may be seen the examples of the material wealth disparities that drive gentrification, the displacement of crime by gated communities, or the hoarding of housing resources by the wealthy. He is the author of Alpha City: How the Super-Rich Captured London (Verso), Urban Criminology (with Gareth Millington) and Domestic Fortress: Fear and the New Home Front (with Sarah Blandy).

From 1997 Rowland worked at the Department of Urban Studies, at the University of Glasgow, where he looked at issues of social exclusion and area effects (the compounding force of disadvantage faced by poorer residents in poorer areas). It was here that he also took an interest in the rise of gated communities in the UK, leading the first UK study and beginning to further consider the role of the middle-classes and higher income households in shaping social outcomes more broadly across the city. Rowland is currently working a suite of research projects as part of the Global Alpha NETwork, or GANET. This includes work on offshore investment in urban spaces and its links to crime, the capture of city contexts by the super-rich and a historical analysis of wealth elites in the urban north of England.

Professor Rowland Atkinson talks about teaching in the Department of Urban Studies and Planning at the University of Sheffield
Qualifications

From 2005 I directed the Housing and Community Research Unit, University of Tasmania, Australia, where a very different urban context and issues of indigenous health and housing influenced my thinking. My work here continued to focus on issues of gentrification, public housing and state-led strategies of social mixing to create more sustainable communities and I worked on a series of initiatives designed to generate more interest in these issues from policy-makers nationally.

From 2009 I moved back to the UK to the University of York where I became Reader in Urban Studies and Criminology and my work became more focused on questions of social harm and crime in urban contexts (a book on Urban Criminology, with Gareth Millington, is now in print with Routledge).

Research interests
  • Gentrification and displacement
  • Cities and crime
  • Wealth
  • Poverty and exclusion
  • Segregation and urban security
  • Gated communities and fortress homes

Research projects

Professor Rowland Atkinson talks about his research
Publications

Books

  • Atkinson R (2020) FOREWORD: CLIMAX CULTURE. RIS download Bibtex download
  • (2017) Building better societies. Bristol University Press. RIS download Bibtex download
  • Atkinson R & Blandy S (2016) Domestic fortress: Fear and the new home front. Manchester: Manchester University Press. RIS download Bibtex download
  • Atkinson R & Jacobs K (2016) House, Home and Society. London: Palgrave Macmillan. RIS download Bibtex download

Edited books

Journal articles

Chapters

Book reviews

Conference proceedings papers

  • Morales ER, Atkinson R & Higgins K (2022) Road - gate - enclosure: elite securityscapes in London and Mexico City. JOURNAL OF PLANNING LITERATURE, Vol. 37(4) (pp 650-650) RIS download Bibtex download
  • (2020) Humanity under duress. Humanity Under Duress. Sheffield, 2019 - 2019. RIS download Bibtex download
  • Morales García de Alba E & Atkinson R (2019) Defragmenting public space : a guide for policymakers. Defragmenting Public Space: A Guide for Policymakers, 2019 - 2019. RIS download Bibtex download
  • Flint J, Atkinson R, Ferrari E, Gore T & Lever J (2016) Loic Wacquant Commentaries. People, Place and Policy, Vol. 10(2) (pp 174-184) RIS download Bibtex download
  • Atkinson R & Smith O (2012) An economy of false securities? An analysis of murders inside gated residential developments in the United States. Crime, Media, Culture: An International Journal, Vol. 8(2) (pp 161-172) RIS download Bibtex download
  • Atkinson R & Jacobs K (2009) The Social Forces and Politics of Housing Research: Reflections from within the Academy. Housing, Theory and Society, Vol. 26(4) (pp 233-247) RIS download Bibtex download
  • Atkinson R (2008) Between practice, policy and academia: The difficult space of the housing researcher. Reshaping Australasian Housing Research: Refereed Papers and Presentations from the 2nd Australasian Housing Researchers' Conference 2007, AHRC 2007 RIS download Bibtex download
  • (2008) Introduction (pp 1-11) RIS download Bibtex download
  • Atkinson R, Picken F & Tranter B (2006) Second homes in Australia: Charting the growth of holiday homeownership and its community impacts. Australasian Housing Researchers Conference RIS download Bibtex download

Reports

  • Atkinson R, Wulff M, Reynolds M & Spinney A (2011) Gentrification and displacement: The household impacts of neighbourhood change RIS download Bibtex download
  • Atkinson R (2008) Housing policies, social mix and community outcomes RIS download Bibtex download

Dictionary/encyclopaedia entries

  • Atkinson R (2012) Gentrification. In International Encyclopedia of Housing and Home Elsevier. RIS download Bibtex download
  • Atkinson R & Blandy S (2012) Gated communities. In International Encyclopedia of Housing and Home Elsevier. RIS download Bibtex download
  • Atkinson R (2012) Domicide. In International Encyclopedia of Housing and Home Elsevier. RIS download Bibtex download
  • Atkinson R & Blandy S (2011) Gated Communities. In International Encyclopedia of Housing and Home. RIS download Bibtex download
  • (2004) Snowball Sampling Sage Publications, Inc.. RIS download Bibtex download
  • Atkinson R & Flint J (2003) Snowball Sampling. In The A to Z of Social Research. London: Sage. RIS download Bibtex download

Other

  • Thomson H, Atkinson R, Petticrew M & Kearns A (2005) Do national urban regeneration programmes impact on health and the socio-economic determinants of health? A systematic review of UK regeneration programmes (1980-2004). EUROPEAN JOURNAL OF PUBLIC HEALTH, 15, 119-119. RIS download Bibtex download
Research group

PhD supervision

I am primary supervisor for the following students:

  • Dario Ferrazzi, Crime, criminality and urban space
  • Yixin Liu, Gated communities in China

Interested in PhD study?

I welcome enquiries from prospective PhD students who have interests in the following areas:

  • urban patterns of wealth, inequality and segregation
  • crime and disorder
  • gated communities
Teaching activities

I currently teach on the following modules: