Patrick Le Galès, Patrick Le Galès, is CNRS Research Professor of Sociology and Politics, at Sciences Po Paris, Centre d’études européennes and he chairs the “cities are back in town” research group. He is a corresponding Fellow of the British Academy, a former editor of the International Journal of Urban and regional Research, a past president of SASE (Society for Advanced Socio economics), a trustee of the Foundation for Urban and Regional Research. Patrick was educated at Sciences Po Paris, Nuffield College Oxford (M.litt.) and the University of Paris X Nanterre. He was a visiting professor or researcher Scholar in particular at King’s College London, Oxford, and the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Society in Cologne, The Universities of Milan Bicocca, Venise and UCLA.
His research deals with large metropolis and also European cities (middle classes, governance, urban conflicts, mobility, and economic development), Economic sociology/political economy – the making of a market society with a special interest for the UK, Comparative Public policy, and sociology of the state, the sociology of Europe. He currently develops a project comparing modes of governance and urban development in Paris, London, Sao Paolo, Mexico and Istanbul.
He published or edited Regions in Europe the paradox of power (ed.with C.Lequesne, Routledge, 1997), Politiques urbaines et développement local en France et UK (L’Harmattan, 1993) ; Les réseaux de l'action publique (ed.with M.Thatcher, Paris, L’Harmattan 1995) ; Cities in contemporary Europe (ed. with A.Bagnasco), CUP 2000, ; Local industrial systems in Europe, rise or demise ? (with C.Crouch and al., OUP, 2002) ; The changing governance of local economies in Europe (with C.Crouch and al.. OUP, 2004) ; European Cities, social conflicts and governance (OUP, 2002), Developments in French Politics 3 and 4 (eds with J.Levy and A.Cole, Palgrave, 2005, 2008) ; Gouverner par les instruments (with P.Lascoumes Presses de Sciences Po 2004) ; Sociologie de l’action publique (with P.Lascoumes Colin, 2008, second edition 2012 , The New Labour experiment (with Florence Faucher King, Standford University Press 2010). His next research monograph Globalising European urban bourgeoisies ?(with Alberta Andreotti and Javier Moreno Fuentes) will appear with Wiley/ Blackwell in 2014.
Professor John Agnew (Ph.D., Ohio State University, 1976) is Distinguished Professor of Geography with research interests in Political Geography, International Political Economy, European Urbanization, and Italy. John was educated at the Universities of Exeter and Liverpool in England and Ohio State in the United States. Agnew is currently Distinguished Professor of Geography at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) where he teaches courses in Political and European Geography the history of geography, European cities, and the Mediterranean World. He is also a Professor in UCLA's Department of Italian and Visiting Professor of Political Geography at Queen's University, Belfast, 2012-14 and is Editor-in-Chief, for the Regional Studies Associations’ journal ‘Territory, Politics, Governance’.
He has written widely on questions of territory, place, and political power. He has also worked on issues of "science" in geography and how knowledge is created and circulates in and across places. He is best known for his work completely reinventing "geopolitics" as a field of study and for his theoretical and empirical efforts at showing how national politics is best understood in terms of the geographical dynamics of "places" and how they are made out of both local and long-distance determinants. One of his best known books is "Place and Politics" (1987). Another is "Geopolitics: Re-Visioning World.
Recent books include: Making Political Geography (Second Edition 2012, with Luca Muscarà), Globalization and Sovereignty (2009), and The Sage Handbook of Geographical Knowledge (2011, with David N. Livingstone).
Professor Michael Storper is a Professor of Economic Geography at the London School of Economics. He joined the Department in October 2000 as LSE Centennial Professor of Economic Geography. He is also affiliated with the Centre de Sociologie des Organisations at Sciences-Po in Paris, and the Department of Urban Planning in the School of Public Affairs at UCLA. His research and teaching interests fall into five, closely linked, areas: economic geography, globalization, technology, regions, especially city regions and economic development. Beyond his core disciplinary skills in economic geography, his work on occasion draws on, and has links to, economics, sociology and urban studies. In 2012 Professor Storper was elected as a Corresponding Fellow by the British Academy, and also received the Regional Studies Association's Sir Peter Hall Prize for overall contribution to the field.
He is an internationally recognised scholar and author, particularly well known for his books which include The Capitalist Imperative: Territory, Technology and Industrial Growth (with R. Walker; Blackwell, 1989), Pathways to Industrialization and Regional Development (with A. Scott; Routledge, 1992), Worlds of Production: The Action Frameworks of the Economy (with Robert Salais, Harvard Univ. Press, 1997), The Regional World: Territorial Development in a Global Economy (Guildford Press, 1997), and Latecomers in the Global Economy (editor with L. Tsipouri and S. Thmodakis; Routledge, 1998).
His latest book, Keys to the City: How Economics, Institutions, Social Interaction, and Politics Shape Development, is published by Princeton University Press.
Michael is currently completing a five-year research project on the divergent economic development of the Los Angeles and San Francisco Bay Area economies since 1970, which is the subject of his next book.
Professor Richard Florida is the Director of the Martin Prosperity Institute at the University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management, Global Research Professor at New York University, and the founder of the Creative Class Group, which works closely with governments and companies worldwide, Richard Florida is perhaps the world’s leading urbanist, “as close to a household name as it is possible for an urban theorist to be in America,” according to The Economist. Esquire has included him on its annual list of “The Best and the Brightest,” and Fast Company dubbed him an “intellectual rock star.”
Florida is the author of several global best sellers, including the award-winning The Rise of the Creative Class (“one of the best business books of all time”—800-CEO-READ), and is a senior editor for The Atlantic, where he co-founded and serves as Editor-at-Large for Atlantic Cities, the world's leading media site devoted to cities and urban affairs. Florida appears regularly on CNN and other news broadcasts and is a regular contributor to the op ed pages of major newspapers and magazines. TIME magazine recognized his Twitter feed as one of the 140 most influential in the world.
Florida previously taught at Carnegie Mellon and George Mason University, and has been a visiting professor at Harvard and MIT. He earned his Bachelor's degree from Rutgers College and his Ph.D. from Columbia University.
Professor Ananya Roy is Professor of City and Regional Planning and Distinguished Chair in Global Poverty and Practice at the University of California, Berkeley. She previously held the Friesen Chair in Urban Studies. She teaches in the fields of urban studies and international development. She also serves as Education Director of the Blum Center for Developing Economies. From 2009 to 2012 she served as co-director of the Global Metropolitan Studies Center and from 2005 to 2009 she served as Associate Dean of International and Area Studies.
She holds a B.A. (1992) in Comparative Urban Studies from Mills College, a M.C.P. (1994) and a Ph.D. (1999) from the Department of City and Regional Planning at the University of California at Berkeley. She is the author of City Requiem, Calcutta: Gender and the Politics of Poverty (University of Minnesota Press, 2003), co-editor of Urban Informality: Transnational Perspectives from the Middle East, South Asia, and Latin America (Lexington Books, 2004) and co-editor of The Practice of International Health (Oxford University Press, 2008). Her book, Poverty Capital: Microfinance and the Making of Development (Routledge, 2010), was made possible through research supported by the National Science Foundation. This book is the recipient of the 2011 Paul Davidoff Book Award of the Association of Collegiate Schools of Planning, a book award for research that advances social justice. Roy has recently completed an edited book (with Aihwa Ong) titled Worlding Cities: Asian Experiments and the Art of Being Global (Blackwell, 2011).
Professor Roy teaches both undergraduate and graduate courses and supervises doctoral students in departments ranging from City and Regional Planning to Geography to Education. In 2006, Roy was awarded the Distinguished Teaching Award, the highest teaching honour UC Berkeley bestows on its faculty. Also in 2006, Roy was awarded the Distinguished Faculty Mentors award, a recognition bestowed by the Graduate Assembly of the University of California at Berkeley. In 2008, she was the recipient of the Golden Apple Teaching award, the only teaching award given by the student body. She was the 2009 California Professor of the Year by CASE/ Carnegie Foundation. Most recently, she has received the 2011 Excellence in Achievement Award of the California Alumni Association, lifetime achievement recognition.
Roy is currently involved in three collaborative projects of research and practice: Urban Revolutions in the Age of Global Urbanism (with Eric Sheppard, Helga Leitner, Vinay Gidwani, Michael Goldman, Anant Maringanti, and Jo Santoso); The 21st Century Indian City: Setting New Agendas for Policy (with Raka Ray, Pranab Bardhan, and Ashok Bardhan); and Territories of Poverty: Rethinking Poverty Scholarship (with Emma Shaw Crane). She also serves on the editorial boards of Public Culture, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research (and the Studies in Urban and Social Change book series), Planning Theory, Planning Theory and Practice, and the Regional Studies Associations’ journal ‘ Territory, Politics, and Governance’.
Professor Danny Dorling was educated at The University of Newcastle upon Tyne in Geography, Mathematics and Statistics leading to a PhD in the Visualization of Spatial Social Structure (1991). He continued studying in Social Science at Newcastle as a Joseph Rowntree Foundation and British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow before moving to the University of Bristol to teach Geography there, next, being appointed to a Chair of Quantitative Human Geography at the University of Leeds.
Since 2003 he has been a Professor of Human Geography in the University of Sheffield. He is also Adjunct Professor in the Department of Geography, University of Canterbury, NZ, and Visiting Professor in the Department of Social Medicine, University of Bristol, UK. In 2003 Danny was appointed an Academician of the Academy of the Learned Societies in the Social Sciences.
Danny’s research interests focus on tying to understand and map the changing social, political and medical geographies of Britain and further afield, concentrating on social and spatial inequalities to life chances and how these may be narrowed. His research tries to show how far understanding the patterns to people's lives can be enhanced using statistics about the population. Part of this research involves developing new techniques to analyse and popularise quantitative information about Human Geography. In particular, introducing the use of novel cartographic techniques into geographical research. The substantive side of this concern is with how the fortunes of people living in Britain are distributed and are changing. This work has been supported through a number of sponsored projects.