Professor Paul Burton

BA (Hons) Town Planning, South Bank; PhD (Bristol)Professor Paul Burton

Chair of Urban Management and Planning

Contact details for Professor Paul Burton

Research Expertise

 My research interests and experience span a number of fields:

  • Planning ethnographies: becoming and being a planner & the role of planning education
  • Theory and practice of public participation and community engagement: how to develop and apply more robust measures of the costs and benefits of engagement
  • Gold Coast urbanisation: the emergence of a distinctive form of urbanisation and related planning regime
  • Planning and climate change adaptation: relations between citizens and local political institutions
  • Policy research: how research informs policy processes & how we understand and explain policymaking
  • Evaluation theory and methodologies: developing robust and focussed evaluation designs
  • Local government and local politics: the relations between citizens and their representatives, the challenges of civic leadership, new practices of local democracy
  • Spaces for democracy: how interior and exterior spaces shape the practices of democratic politics

Current Teaching (2009)

  • Honours program for final year planning students 
  • Community engagement and public participation

Selected Publications 

  • 2006 ‘Modern policymaking: making policy research more significant’, Policy Studies, vol 27 no 3, pp 173-195
  • 2006 ‘How would we know what works? Context and complexity in the evaluation of community involvement’ (Burton, Goodlad and Croft) Evaluation vol 12 no 3, pp 294-312
  • 2005 What works in community involvement in area-based initiatives?  A systematic review of the literature, (Burton, Goodlad, Croft et al) Home Office Online Report 53/04
  • 2005 Crossing the housing and care divide: a guide for practitioners (A Marsh, A Cameron & P Burton), Coventry: Chartered Institute of Housing, ISBN 1 905018 05 3
  • 2005 ‘Effectiveness at what?  The processes and impact of community involvement in area-based initiatives’, (Goodlad, Burton and Croft) Environment and Planning C: Government and Policy, vol 23, pp 923-938
  • 2004 ‘Power to the people: how to judge public participation’, Local Economy, vol 19 no 3, pp 193-198


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