University of Sheffield, United Kingdom
Rowland is Chair in Inclusive Societies. His work focuses on urban inequalities, addressing issues of exclusion and social injustice. This work is approached in a distinctive way, by examining the relationship between affluent groups and social outcomes more broadly in city settings. This framing of social inequality as both an urban-spatial and political issue has underpinned his pioneering working on gentrification and displacement, gated communities, social mix and public housing estates, and the impact of the super-rich on urban life. The thread connecting this body of work is an important question – how do social inequalities find spatial expression in cities? This work is situated sociologically, with an eye to the kinds of globalised, capitalist and financialised societies that are today producing new winners, and complex forms of spatial inequality and exclusion in cities.
Rowland’s books include 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) and a large series of edited collections in the areas of housing studies, urban studies and criminology. His most recent books are Elite Spaces: Social prestige, spatial obscurity and political risk, and How to be An Anticapitalist City (with Beth Perry and Jon Silver) which looks at small efforts that might help cities to be more liveable, less alienating and less driven by profit and accumulation.