Urban Worlds

The urban geographical research in the department aims to understand the ways in which urban worlds are produced, governed, contested and transformed. We are interested in contemporary and historical urbanism(s), including the techniques through which cities are governed, the domains through which urban life is lived and reformulated, and the prospects of different forms of urban justices.

A key question for us is how to conceptualise and research the changing relations between urbanism and space. For example, this could consider the everyday life of neighbourhoods and street politics, the (re)making of and maintaining of existing and new socio-technical and ecological infrastructures, or the politics of encounters.

We ask how we might understand urban spatio-temporalities and seek to excavate the different ways in which we might think of the world as becoming urban. We ask how a diversity of urban experiences and theoretical histories pluralise the ways in which we understand and research urban worlds.

Cluster Members

Name	Position	Research Interests
Professor Ben Anderson	Professor	Theories of affect and emotion; affective politics; neoliberalism and populism; events; futures; non-representational theories
Professor Harriet Bulkeley	Professor	Environmental governance; climate change; urban infrastructure; urban sustainability; nature and biodiversity; energy transitions; socio-technical systems; sustainable finance; urban political ecology; governmentality
Professor Mike Crang	Professor	Cultural geography; memory; identity; heritage; tourism; waste and the borders of commodification
Dr Jonathan Darling	Associate Professor	Asylum; refugees; political geography; migration; borders; urban politics
Dr Meghan Kelly	Assistant Professor	Feminist mapping, Critical GIS, cartography, feminist digital geographies, visual storytelling, design justice
Dr Sarah Knuth	Associate Professor	Political and cultural economy; political ecology; green economy; energy and climate justice; urban built environments and infrastructure; financial geographies; technology and industrial policy; fiscal politics and the state; value and devaluation
Dr Karen Lai	Associate Professor	Finance, financial centres, fintech, global cities, political economy, cultural economy, knowledge, producer services, advanced business services, Asia
Dr Noam Leshem	Associate Professor	Political geography; war & violent conflict; displacement; creative practice; political theory; testimony and witnessing; cultural history; settler colonial & decolonial geographies;
Dr Andrés Luque-Ayala	Associate Professor	Urban geography; infrastructure; computational cities; digital geographies; Latin America; postcolonial and decolonial theory; digital natures; anthropocene;
Professor Colin McFarlane	Professor	Cities; urban politics; urban theory; poverty and inequality; infrastructure; density; urban knowledge
Dr Marijn Nieuwenhuis	Assistant Professor	Elemental geographies; creative methods; Chinese geographies; poetics; arts; breathing; weathers; political geographies; phenomenologies
Professor Joe Painter	Professor	Political geography; state theory; citizenship; urban and regional politics and governance; theories of territory; social innovation; localism, local governance and community action; politics of everyday life; art, creativity and urban politics;
Professor Marcus Power	Professor	Development; geopolitics; energy; infrastructure; visual geographies and methodologies; China-Africa; decolonisation; subaltern geographies; decolonial and postcolonial theory
Dr Helen F. Wilson	Associate Professor	Encounter; encounterable life; difference; cities; urban politics; multiculture; avian geographies; conflict management; postcolonial theory; environmental humanities