York University, Canada
I am a political scientist working on local, urban and regional politics and I have made my intellectual home predominantly in urban geography and urban studies. My substantive research areas are urban political ecology, cities and infectious disease and global suburbanization. Governance and politics remain the connecting tissue between these areas. A founding director of York University’s City Institute (CITY) (2006-13), I also held a York Research Chair in Global Sub/Urban Studies from 2015-9. I have held the title Distinguished Research Professor at York University since 2024.
From 2010-2019, I led a large international project on “Global Suburbanisms: Governance, Land and Infrastructure in the 21st Century”, which produced a book series and the monograph Suburban Planet. I co-edited After Suburbia (2022), and collaborated on the related phenomenon of “Peripheral Centralities”.
The relationship of urbanization and infectious disease has been a main interest from SARS in 2003 to the COVID-19 pandemic. I co-edited Networked Disease (2009) and co-authored Pandemic Urbanism (2022), a comprehensive discussion on cities and infectious disease. Recently, I have worked with colleagues in Chicago, Johannesburg, and Toronto on post-pandemic governance in those cities.
In a third area of research, I published the collection Turning Up the Heat: Urban Political Ecology for a Climate Emergency. A special issue of the journal Urban Political Ecology is dedicated to my work.
In April 2023 I was named a Fellow of the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research (CIFAR) in their program Humanity’s Urban Future.