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Migration, Community and Identity analyses experiences of migration to rural Wales from 1965 to 1980. It focuses on people who were part of the era's counterculture, looking for an escape from mainstream society. Using original interviews, the book shows why people moved and how the move shaped their lives and identities. Drawing together geographical and historical research, this book explores the significance of this migration phenomenon. It provides a unique insight into late-twentieth-century Welsh society and shines a new light on the counterculture itself. Through analysing the experience of life in Wales and ongoing developments in the migrants'sense of identity, it argues that rather than being a uniform group, the counterculture encompassed a diverse range of beliefs and aspirations. The book will be suitable for upper-level undergraduates and above. The broad range of themes covered in this book is relevant not only to rural and historical geographers and migration researchers but also to those interested in sociology, anthropology, and the modern history of Britain and Wales. The theories and concepts discussed have global appeal and will be of interest to those studying similar migration phenomena elsewhere.

Comparative Approaches to Informal Housing Around the Globe brings together historians, anthropologists, political scientists, sociologists, urban planners and political activists to break new ground in the globalisation of knowledge about informal housing. Providing both methodological reflections and practical examples, they compare informal settlements, unauthorised occupation of flats, illegal housing construction and political squatting in different regions of the world. Subjects covered include squatter settlements in Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan, squatting activism in Brazil and Spain, right-wing squatting in Germany, planning laws and informality across countries in the Global North, and squatting in post-Second World War UK and Australia.The volume's global approach is found not only in the variety of topics but in the origins of its authors, who between them contribute specialist knowledge from Africa, Asia, Australia, the Middle East, North and South America, and Eastern and Western Europe. Bringing together such a wide range of authors and subjects demonstrates the power of comparative research to open up new perspectives. By comparing, for example, toleration of informal housing in Hong Kong and Paris, squatting in the Netherlands and communist East Germany, or slums in nineteenth-century Europe and twentieth-century Africa, the chapters connect different contexts in path-breaking fashion.Praise for Comparative Approaches to Informal Housing Around the Globe'The various contributions on cities in Western, Eastern and Southern Europe, Central Asia, the Middle East, South America, Africa and Australia impressively show the worldwide spread of the supposedly peripheral phenomenon of informal living...The anthology offers a well-founded starting point for further analyses of informal living as a process and result of global urbanisation.'Soziopolis‘[Brings] major contributions... to the debate around housing informality.'International Journal of Urban and Regional Research

This book outlines the history of squatting in Sweden and analyzes the conditions under which squatting has intensified and declined in the country between 1968 and 2017. With close attention to the relationship between civil society and the state in the Swedish context, and the manner in which this relationship, together with attendant political, media and movement-based discourses, shapes the possibilities that exist for collective action, the author draws on two key concepts – those of the narrative of consensus and discourse – to present an analysis of squatting as a form of contentious politics and the “successful” story of civil society development as decisive for its emergence and development in the country. A study of the way in which confrontational actors question both the property relations inherent in capitalism and the authority of the welfare state and its institutions, Contentious Politics and the Welfare State will appeal to social scientists with interests in urban studies, political sociology, squatting, social movements and the relationship between the welfare state and contentious social actors.