Books, edited volumes and major publications
This page gathers my publication activity, with a focus on books, edited collections and open-access resources on spatial justice, public goods, informal urbanisation, planning education and just urban transitions.
Spatial Justice:
The Basics
ROBERTO ROCCO — ROUTLEDGE, 2025
Spatial Justice: The Basics offers a concise and accessible introduction to Spatial Justice as both a theoretical framework and a practical agenda for urban transformation. It examines how urban space is produced, contested, and governed, and how it is implicated in broader dynamics of inequality, recognition, and participation.
Drawing on Lefebvre, Fraser, Young, Soja, and Fainstein, the book articulates spatial justice through its distributive, procedural, and recognitional dimensions. Real-world examples from Colombia, Brazil, the US, the UK, the Netherlands and more illustrate how spatial justice is negotiated in practice.
Designed for upper-level undergraduates, postgraduates, and early-career professionals in planning, geography, architecture, and related fields — including a detailed glossary of key terms, visual diagrams, and analytical tables.
The Routledge Handbook
on Informal Urbanisation
EDITED BY ROBERTO ROCCO & JAN VAN BALLEGOOIJEN — ROUTLEDGE, 2019
Informal settlements are routinely framed as technical problems of housing, infrastructure or land administration. The Routledge Handbook on Informal Urbanisation starts from a different premise: informality is fundamentally political, produced through struggles over land, citizenship and recognition.
The volume is organised around 25 chapters and 24 cities across the Global South, each written by an independent author or author team, tracing how urbanisation processes are bound up with specific political struggles across different socio-political settings.
The companion site hosts a full chapter-by-chapter Atlas with a thematic filter and seminar-ready reading clusters, built for researchers, students and practitioners working on informality, citizenship and the right to the city.
Insurgent Planning
Practice
EDITED BY ROBERTO ROCCO & GABRIEL SILVESTRE — AGENDA PUBLISHING / EDINBURGH UNIVERSITY PRESS, 2024
Insurgent Planning Practice asks how planning practice can counteract technocratic, market-led and exclusionary forms of city-making. It starts from the tension between planning as an orderly, technical and institutionally loyal field, and insurgency as disruption, contestation and refusal.
The book investigates insurgent planning as a set of concrete practices rather than a theoretical position or individual virtue. Its chapters examine how planners, communities, activists and academics challenge neoliberal governance, technocratic planning and exclusionary urban development through participation, inclusion, transgressive action, feminist practice, academic engagement, community planning and claims to the right to the city.
The cases move across Antwerp, Taipei, Jakarta, Beirut, Rio de Janeiro, Buenos Aires, Makassar, Belo Horizonte, Turkey and Belfast. Together, they show that insurgency does not have a single heroic form: sometimes it appears as protest, sometimes as negotiation, sometimes as institutional persistence, and sometimes as careful professional work that quietly shifts the terms of what planning can do.
A Spatial Planning Guide
to Public Goods
ROBERTO ROCCO — PALGRAVE MACMILLAN, 2026
The book opens with a question Leilani Farha, then UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Housing, put to an online event organised by the Centre for the Just City : if someone cannot afford housing, should they be allowed to live in the city? I use this question to show how quickly debates about public goods collapse into debates about who gets to be a citizen at all.
Across eleven chapters, the book moves from the economic theory of non-excludability and non-rivalry, through legal traditions such as German Gemeinwohl and French intérêt général, to governance, environmental and urban development case studies spanning London’s Docklands, Lagos’s bus rapid transit system and New York’s Hudson Yards.
The companion site offers chapter-by-chapter guiding questions and exercises, a working glossary, and module-planning resources for instructors building an eleven- or six-week course.
02 — Open access resources
Teaching, manifestos and public scholarship
The Spatial Justice Handbook
Rocco, R., Gonçalves, J. E., Lopez, H., & Dąbrowski, M. 2025. The Spatial Justice Handbook. TU Delft.
A Manifesto for the Just City
Rocco, R., Newton, C. & Gonçalves, J. (Eds.). 2025. A Manifesto for the Just City, Volumes 1–4. TU Delft OPEN.
Teaching Design for Values
Rocco, R., Thomas, A., & Novas Ferradas, M. (Eds.). 2022. Teaching Design for Values: Concepts, Tools & Practices. TU Delft OPEN.
Teaching, Learning & Researching Spatial Planning
Rocco, R., Bracken, G., Newton, C., & Dąbrowski, M. (Eds.). 2022. Teaching, Learning & Researching Spatial Planning. TU Delft OPEN.
Ensenar, aprender e investigar la Planificacion Territorial
Rocco, R., Bracken, G., Newton, C., & Dąbrowski, M. (Eds.). 2023. Enseñar, aprender e investigar la Planificación Territorial. TU Delft OPEN.
03 — Informal urbanisation
Publications on informal urbanisation
My work on informal urbanisation has culminated in several internationally recognised publications, most notably the Routledge Handbook on Informal Urbanisation, co-edited with Jan van Ballegooijen (Rocco & Ballegooijen, 2019). Bringing together contributions from 24 cities across the Global South, the volume has become a key reference for scholars and practitioners interested in the political, social and spatial dimensions of urban informality. It helped consolidate an international network of researchers working on informal urbanisation, governance, spatial justice and sustainable urban development.
I have extensively researched and published on informal urbanisation in the Global South, specifically investigating how informal institutions shape and influence planning practices at the local level, including two key publications: The Routledge Handbook on Informal Urbanisation (2019) and Insurgent Planning Practice (2024).
04 — Selected list
Selected books and major publications
- Rocco, R. 2026. Spatial Justice: The Basics. London: Routledge.
- Rocco, R. 2026. A Planner’s Guide to Public Goods. Palgrave Macmillan.
- Rocco, R., Gonçalves, J., & Lopez, H. 2025. The Spatial Justice Handbook. TU Delft OPEN.
- Rocco, R. (Ed.), Newton, C. (Ed.) & Gonçalves, J. (Ed.). 2025. A Manifesto for the Just City, Volumes 1–4. TU Delft OPEN.
- Rocco, R., & Silvestre, G. (Eds.). 2024. Insurgent Planning Practice. Newcastle upon Tyne: Agenda Publishing.
- Rocco, R., Thomas, A., & Novas Ferradas, M. (Eds.). 2022. Teaching Design for Values: Concepts, Tools & Practices. TU Delft OPEN.
- Rocco, R., Bracken, G., Newton, C., & Dąbrowski, M. (Eds.). 2022. Teaching, Learning & Researching Spatial Planning. TU Delft OPEN.
- Rocco, R., & Van Ballegooijen, J. (Eds.). 2019. The Routledge Handbook on Informal Urbanisation. London & New York: Routledge.
- Rocco, R., & Silva, S. da (Eds.). 2018. Cities and Citizenship in Latin America and the Caribbean. Delft: TU Delft OPEN.
- Rocco, R. (Ed.). 2018. Jane Jacobs is Still Here: Jane Jacobs 100, Her Legacy and Relevance in the 21st Century. Delft: TU Delft OPEN.