Free (nook/Kindle/Kobo/DRM-free) People, Places, & Policy [Academic Wales Geography]

[ATDrake]

People, Places and Policy: Knowing contemporary Wales through new localities edited by Martin Jones, Scott Orford, & Victoria Macfarlane is a dense and thorough guide to the social and political geography of modern-day Wales, free courtesy of publisher Taylor & Francis' academic Routledge imprint, in their Regions and Cities series.

This is another new addition to their Open Access series which is made available for free under a Creative Commons license, for which you can see previous offerings (matched in many of the usual retail stores) on their dedicated webpage here.

Currently free @ B&N (also UK), Amazon (available to Canadians & in the UK), Kobo & iTunes & Google Play (all available to Canadians), and directly @ the publisher's website (DRM-free PDF available worldwide.

And this has been the (late!) selected 3rd (non-repeat) free ebook thread of the day.

Because it's always nice to get some more academic freebies, and I do rather like Wales, what with the dragon on their flag and their spirited revival of their adorable keyboardsmash-looking language*.

Enjoy!

Description
Set within the context of UK devolution and constitutional change, People, Places and Policy offers important and interesting insights into ‘place-making’ and ‘locality-making’ in contemporary Wales. Combining policy research with policy-maker and stakeholder interviews at various spatial scales (local, regional, national), it examines the historical processes and working practices that have produced the complex political geography of Wales.

This book looks at the economic, social and political geographies of Wales, which in the context of devolution and public service governance are hotly debated. It offers a novel ‘new localities’ theoretical framework for capturing the dynamics of locality-making, to go beyond the obsession with boundaries and coterminous geographies expressed by policy-makers and politicians. Three localities – Heads of the Valleys (north of Cardiff), central and west coast regions (Ceredigion, Pembrokeshire and the former district of Montgomeryshire in Powys) and the A55 corridor (from Wrexham to Holyhead) – are discussed in detail to illustrate this and also reveal the geographical tensions of devolution in contemporary Wales.

This book is an original statement on the making of contemporary Wales from the Wales Institute of Social and Economic Research, Data and Methods (WISERD) researchers. It deploys a novel ‘new localities’ theoretical framework and innovative mapping techniques to represent spatial patterns in data. This allows the timely uncovering of both unbounded and fuzzy relational policy geographies, and the more bounded administrative concerns, which come together to produce and reproduce over time Wales’ regional geography.

* Obligatory Scandinavia and the World cartoon linkage.