Professor Rowland Atkinson

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. 

From 1997 Rowland began work as a researcher in the Department of Urban Studies, at the University of Glasgow, where he looked at issues of housing conditions and so-called ‘area effects’ (the compounding force of disadvantage faced by poorer residents in poorer areas). It was while conducting research on deprived public housing estates that he began to develop an interest in elite spaces and groups, and to consider how certain social classes and spaces might be related to housing poverty and exclusion. This interest led to the first UK study of gated communities which began a more detailed consideration of how middle-class and higher income households were shaping social outcomes across cities. 

Since starting work at the University of Sheffield in 2014 (after working in the departments of sociology at both the University of Tasmania, Australia, and then the University of York) his work has involved a linked suite of research projects under the title of the Global Alpha NETwork, or GANET. This has included funded projects on alpha territoriality in London, and Hong Kong, empty homes in the UK (working with Action on Empty Homes), projects on offshore investment and illicit finance in urban spaces and its links to crime (focused on in his book Alpha City: How London was captured by the super-rich), and an emerging analysis of the historical contribution of wealth elites in the urban north of England. He is currently working on a book on social fragmentation and decline.