Leadership is often hailed as an antidote to a range of place-based problems. Yet it continues to be a slippery, highly political and deeply uneven practice, and area of study. At a time of authoritarian leadership renewal, this article troubles the tangled relationship between the constructions of leadership, race and gender, which leaves traces in our geographical imagination of places and people. Advancing place-based leadership studies, it brings forward an agenda to centre feminist, intersectional, postcolonial and decolonial thinking to deepen geographies of leadership. Leadership is a future-orientated practice, yet certain futures being foreclosed in unequal practices and thinking.

This paper aims to reinscribe an ethics of care in planning through a conceptual framework which connects the ethics of being caring with the politics of practicing care . We argue that planning’s limited attention to care is an unfortunate legacy of positivist views and their alignment with rationalist moral theories in which care is demoted to the private-domestic sphere and ‘feminine’ emotions while justice is elevated to the public-political sphere and ‘masculine’ reason. The perceived universality, objectivity and rationality of justice seems to have eclipsed the particularity, subjectivity and relationality of care. We suggest that a moral vision is needed in planning that integrates care and justice on both pragmatic and ethical grounds.

Regional development is ‘man-shaped’. This article calls for more engagement with the feminist concept of futurity by bringing together and troubling masculine-coded understandings of regional development, leadership and power over time and space. It argues that continuing to neglect feminist politics and practices in regional studies stifles conceptual and practical advances in subnational development. Drawing on the example of the UK at a time the government seeks to ‘level-up’ longstanding geographical inequalities, the article highlights and troubles the construction of a masculine gaze of development over time, and how this limits the becoming of ‘otherwise’ regional futures.

The recent wave of populism has focused attention on ‘left behind’ places as hotspots of discontent. Seeking to remedy their neglect in urban and regional studies, the aim of this paper is to engage with the problems of ‘left behind’ places and to stimulate fresh thinking about alternative approaches. Reflecting the complex and inter-connected issues facing such places, it argues that a new conception is required to address issues of belonging and attachment. The paper outlines the basis of an expanded neo-endogenous development approach, identifying the foundational economy, income and livelihoods, social infrastructures and social innovation as key policy concerns.

Davoudi and Ormerod talks about hope and despair at the time of pandemic. On Mar 11, 2020, the World Health Organization declared the COVID-19 pandemic, stressing that we're in this together. The trope, which is often elevated at the time of crisis, evokes different emotions and serves different purposes. On the one hand, it is an expression of solidarity and a call for global cooperation. On the other hand, it is an invocation of the parity of sufferings and sacrifices. In the context of the pandemic, it is used to suggest that the virus does not discriminate and can affect porters and cleaners as well as princes and prime ministers. However, this narrative overlooks the profoundly unequal health, social and economic impacts of the pandemic. More importantly, unlike the virus itself, which is novel and unknown, its uneven health, social and economic impacts are neither new nor unexpected.

Ormerod and Davoudi talks about governing the pandemic on democracy at the time of emergency. The UK, like many other countries across the world, is currently in a state of emergency as the government scrabbles to deal with the consequences of the COVID-19, pandemic. The notion of emergency, unlike that of crisis, doesn't surest a critical turning point, with a direct and immanent solution. It is instead a moment that occurs between an event and an outcome, where the future is still emerging and is subject to a course of action. But this pandemic comes at a time when more apparently secure democracies are also under threat. And democracies may also die, not only at the hands of military coups, or sudden and clear power grabs by authoritarians, but through less visible and gradual erosion.

Alongside the emergence of various populisms, Brexit and other contemporary geopolitical events have been presented as symptomatic of a generalising and intensifying sense of uncertainty in the midst of a crisis of (neo)liberalism. In this paper we describe what kind of event Brexit became in the impasse between the UK’s EU referendum in 2016 and its anticipated exit from the EU in 2019. Based on 108 interviews with people in the North‐East of England, we trace how Brexit was variously enacted and felt as an end, advent, a harbinger of worse to come, non‐event, disaster, and betrayed promise. By following how these incommensurate versions of Brexit took form and co‐exist, we supplement explanatory and predictive approaches to the geographies of Brexit and exemplify an approach that traces what such geopolitical events become. Specifically, we use the concept of “modes of uncertainty” as a way of discerning patterns in how present uncertainties are lived. A “mode of uncertainty” is a shared set of practices animated by a distinctive mood through which futures are made present and felt. Rather than treat uncertainty as a static, explanatory context, we thus follow how different versions of Brexit are constituted through specific “modes of (un)certainty” – negative hope, national optimisms, apprehensive hopefulness and fantasies of action – that differentiate within a seemingly singular, shared sense of uncertainty.

In this paper, we examine how to understand housing as a relational process. Drawing on research in three diverse cities, we stage an unlikely dialogue that brings together narratives of housing across the global North-South divide. In doing so, we are concerned with thinking housing relationally in two broad senses: first, housing as a relational composite of economy, space, politics, legality and materials, structured by particular relations of power and resource inequality. Second, housing as a space of learning through comparison, which connects geographically and culturally in distinct cities. What do we learn about relational thinking with regards to housing when we compare it across the global North-South divide? In response, we explore a dialogue between a set of cities often off-the-map in debates on housing and urban research: Gateshead (UK), Kampala (Uganda) and Tirana (Albania). In comparing how housing is produced, distributed and inhabited, we seek to contribute to a wider understanding of the relationalities of housing.

This paper considers how dominant narratives of the housing crisis, since the 2008 banking crisis in England, have been created and what actions taken in its name. The paper deconstructs the term "crisis", highlighting that its meaning has evolved from a critical moment to a protracted narrative which must be understood historically. Through discourse analysis into housing and party political policy, media and think tank reports, we argue that the employment of housing crisis by the government and others perceives it as an outcome of housing supply constraints and over-regulation-narratives that have justified subsequent policy actions aimed at propping up the housing and financial systems, opening new avenues for housing commodification, deregulation and financialisation and reproducing crisis anew. However, we note that these narratives can also break down and space can be created for the articulation of new narratives which refocus housing crises as emerging from inequality and class divisions.

This paper argues that geographical research needs to pay greater attention to political parties and their relationship to local governing. In returning to, and updating the concept of the local state, analysis of local socio-spatial and political relations reveals the quieter registers of political power in local governing, and in turn what this means for the condition of local democracy. The long-term housing regeneration of a neighbourhood in Gateshead, North East England is used here as an optic to do just that. Through moments of housing activism, the social and political relations between and within a local Labour Party and local state are considered. A local manifestation of a growing trend that questions the representation of mature structures of power that the Labour Party holds in deindustrialised areas of the UK is considered through struggles over decision-making, belonging, representation and legitimacy. Such accounts of the local scale are critical in relation to global political trends; where apathy, cynicism, lack of expectation and representation and insurgent populist parties are increasingly framed as potential political crises of mature western democracies.

This article contends that the de-politicizing tendencies in urban planning that are often interpreted through a post-political frame of analysis might alternatively be investigated via the analytical lens of a transforming local state. Examining the formation of entrepreneurial municipal housing strategies in Gateshead, northeast England, the article reveals a recent history of community consensus being manipulated, a technocratic steering of participatory planning and a de-amplifying of dissenting voices. Amid protracted conditions of austerity, the more recent strategy sees Gateshead municipal authority assuming an increasingly ‘promotional’ role, essentially as a housing developer. Placing critical decisions over housing futures within Gateshead Regeneration Partnership, a potentially rough road towards attaining democratic legitimacy is actively being smoothed. These are all trends that are emblematic of a post-political repertoire. However, a more forensic examination reveals how these anti-democratic processes might be more appropriately understood as political accomplishments on the part of those who have been newly incorporated into a local state in transition. The article thereby offers a conceptual antidote to the post-political narrative.