Brian Robson
Professor Emeritus
MA, PhD (Cambridge), MA (Manchester).
Room Number: 1.036 [Arthur Lewis Building]
Tel: +44(0)161 275 3639
Fax: +44(0)161 275 7878
Email: brian.robson@manchester.ac.uk
Fellow, Royal Geographical Society; Honorary Fellow, Royal Town Planning Institute.
Member, Town and Country Planning Association; Academician, Academy of Learned Societies for the Social Sciences.
Member of Lord Rogers’ Urban Task Force; Member of the government’s Urban Sounding Board.
Awarded the Founder's Gold Medal by the Royal Geographical Society in 2000 for his work on policy evaluation.
Employment
1964-7 Lecturer, UCW, Aberystwyth
1967-8 Harkness Fellowship, based at the Center for Urban Studies, University of Chicago
1967-77 Lecturer in Geography, Cambridge
1967-77 Fellow and Admissions Tutor, Fitzwilliam College, Cambridge
1977- Professor of Geography, Manchester
Selected publications
1969 Urban analysis, Cambridge University Press 302pp
1973 Urban growth, Methuen, 202pp
1975 Urban social areas, Oxford University Press, 64pp
1987 (editor) Managing the city, Croom Helm, 220pp.
1988 Those inner cities, OUP, Oxford, 243pp.
1994 (with M. Parkinson and others) Assessing the impact of urban policy, HMSO, London, 450pp.
1995 (with Michael Bradford) The index of local conditions, HMSO, London, 230pp.
1998 (with Michael Bradford and Iain Deas) The impact of Urban Development Corporations in Leeds, Bristol and CentralManchester, DETR, London, 160pp.
2000 (with M. Parkinson, M. Boddy and D. Maclennan) The state ofEnglish cities, DETR, London.
2000 (with Deas, I.. and Bradford, M.G.) `Rethinking the Urban Development Corporation “Experiment”: The Case of Central Manchester, Leeds and Bristol', Progress in Planning 54, 1-72.
2000 (with Jamie Peck and Adam Holden) Regional agencies and area-based regeneration, The Policy Press, Bristol .
2000 'Renewing urban areas' Axis, 55, 1, 12-13.
2000 (with Adam Holden) 'The regional genie is out of the bottle' New Start, 2, 62, 12-13
2001 ‘Regional regeneration’ The Stakeholder, 5,2, 13-14
2001 ‘Slim pickings for the cities of the north’ Town and Country Planning, 70,126-8
2002 Filling the doughnut, The Guardian, 30 October
2002 Mancunian ways: the politics of regeneration, in Jamie Peck and Kevin Ward (eds) City of revolution: restructuring Manchester , Manchester University Press, 34-49.
2002 ‘Manchester’ in Melvin Ember and Carol R. Ember (eds) Encyclopedia of urban cultures, Grolier, Danbury Connecticut, vol 3, pp 116-24.
2002 (with Richard Thomas et al.) ‘State-event relations among indicators of susceptibility to mental distress in Wythenshawe in the UK ’, Social Science and Medicine, 55, 921-35
2003 ‘Sustainable communities: more action plan than strategy’ Town and Country Planning, 72, 98.
2003 (with Iain Deas, Cecilia Wong and Michael Bradford) ‘Measuring neighbourhood deprivation: a critique of the Index of Multiple Deprivation’, Environment and Planning, C, 21, 883-903.
2004 ‘Forward to the Victorians’, City Regions Special Report, Parliamentary Brief, 9, no.2 23-5.
2004 ‘Priorities, priorities: rebalancing the country’, Town and Country Planning, 73, 78.
2004 ‘Culture and the city: a view from the ‘ Athens of the North’’, Built Environment , 30, 246-55.
2004 (with Elizabeth Shove) ‘Geography and public policy: a political turn’, in Unifying geography: common heritage, shared future , John Matthews and David Herbert (eds), Routledge, London , pp353-66.
2004 ‘Area based policy evaluation’ in Local Economic and Employment Development, Evaluating local economic and employment development: how to assess what works among programmes and policies , OECD, Paris, pp199-220.
2005 ‘Towards a Randstad of the North’, Town and Country Planning , 74,18-19.
2006 (with S. Marvin and A. Harding) A framework for city regions, ODPM, London.