Executive Director
Email: joe.shaw@urbanstudiesfoundation.org
Joe is Executive Director of the USF, where he is responsible for the Foundation’s management, grant-making, governance, scholarly infrastructure, and long-term strategic development in liaison with the Board of Trustees. Since joining in 2018, Joe has overseen several iterations of the core USF grant schemes, and the award of over one hundred new grants—including over fifty International Fellowships for scholars from the Global South, over twenty three-year Postdoctoral Fellowships, twenty-five Seminar Series programmes, and a range of other grants in the areas of pandemics and cities, knowledge mobilisation, and awardee support. Together, this represents over £6.5m of active investment in urban studies research and education. Alongside strengthening the USF’s data collection, reporting, governance, research metadata, and grant-identification practices, Joe contributes to wider scholarly communications infrastructure, including as a member of Crossref’s Funder Advisory Group.
Joe originally trained as an architect, working in practice for five years, including as part of the team delivering the Co-operative Group’s Manchester headquarters, before turning his attention to human geography and urban studies via a research master’s supported by a bursary from the London School of Economics and Political Science. After conducting postgraduate research around the volunteer-led recovery after Hurricane Sandy in New York City, he later worked as a senior analyst at Human Digital, an M&C Saatchi group company working at the intersection of social data, digital analytics, public opinion, and online harms. This led to an interest in the role of digital platforms and data analytics in reconfiguring urban development and real estate investment practices, via a PhD at the University of Oxford. Joe has published on the right to the city, real estate data analytics, platform urbanism, and the gig economy. He also supports the dissemination of academic research on these topics for more general audiences through co-founding the publisher Meatspace Press (recent books include Eaten by the Internet, Fake AI, Data Justice and COVID-19, and How to Run a City Like Amazon and Other Fables).