Alex Schafran - Contested Cities

School of Geography, University of Leeds, UK

Alex Schafran is Lecturer in Geography at the University of Leeds. He holds a doctorate in City & Regional Planning from the University of California, Berkeley and an MA in Urban Planning from Hunter College, City University of New York. His primary research focus to date has been an attempt to build a more urban and regional understanding of the foreclosure crisis in California, focusing on the longer arc of neoliberal-era suburbanization and megaregional scale race, class and economic restructuring. Current projects include work on the suburban retrofit in the United States, a comparative examination of the French banlieue and the American suburb, the impacts of restructuring and the death of regionalism on Northern England, and the “urbanness” of social movements. Longer term projects on transportation infrastructure and social justice throughout the world are in the works. He is an active writer for thepolisblog.org, a longtime member of Planners Network, and an inveterate conference organizer. He believes Lefebvre was right (and is attempting to prove it), and thus that the urban needs to be the center of our collective politics.

Él habla y lee español mucho mejor de lo que escribe. Il parle et lit Français beaucoup mieux que il l’écrit, et c’est triste mais son Français est un peu mieux que son español. Seu Português é realmente espanhola com um mau acento Brazialero.

Latest publications

2013 (in press) [with Oscar Sosa Lopez and June Gin]
Politics and possibility in postsuburbia: Scale, social movements and the suburbanization of poverty, Environment and Planning A

2013
Rethinking Megaregions: Subregional Politics in a Fragmented Metropolis, Regional Studies, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00343404.2013.834043

2013 [with Newman K]
Assessing the Foreclosure Crisis From the Ground Up INTRODUCTION, HOUSING POLICY DEBATE, 23, pp.1-4. doi: 10.1080/10511482.2013.755318. Link. PDF

Book Chapters

2013
Exurbs : Les nouvelles frontières politiques de la baie de San Francisco, In: Douzet F; Giblin B (Ed) Des frontières indépassables? Des frontières d’État aux frontières urbaines, Armand Colin.

2013
Black, Brown, White, and Green: Race, Land Use, and Environmental Politics in a Changing Richmond, In: Neidt C (Ed) Social Justice in Diverse Suburbs, Temple University Press.