What Faculty do you work in?
Science and Engineering
What is your main area of research?
My research focuses on global cities, the business of cities, the future of cities, and on the application of continental philosophy for understanding the contemporary world.
Why is your research important?
Global cities, exemplified by London and New York, are the world’s wealthiest and most important cities for international business. My research concerns solutions to the challenges, problems, and pathologies that Global Cities face as the nexuses of globalization. I focus on the networks that global cities make and participate in; linkages that bind global cities together on a worldwide basis and often overcome the limitations of the nation-state system – e.g. it is city, rather than national, leaders who have pushed forward the 2016 Paris Agreement though their collaborative membership of sub-national inter-city international networks like the C40 cities group. This focus on global city networks of all kinds drives my teaching of this subject in our MSc in Society, Environment and Global Change postgraduate degree, and intersects with my supervision of PhD students working on healthy, smart and sustainable city projects: on cities like NEOM and Medina in Saudi Arabia, and Bristol and Swansea in the UK.
What SDG is your research most closely aligned with?
Sustainable Development Goal 11 – Sustainable cities and communities
What do you hope to accomplish with your research?
In 2016 I attended the UN-Habitat Conference on Housing and Sustainable Urban Development in Quito, Ecuador (17 - 20 October) which launched a ‘New Urban Agenda’ to drive UN Sustainable Development Goal 11 – Sustainable cities and communities. In Quito it was clear that the goal of making cities sustainable for a carbon-neutral world was especially important in the world’s leading global cities of the most advanced economies. This is why one focus of my research in recent years has been on two of the stand-out features of the built environment that define the functional success of the world’s leading global cities and financial centers: luxury real estate and specifically the residential and office skyscrapers in global cities. Understanding what is happening regarding these two aspects of global cities is an important, yet not so obvious, component in helping achieve the UN’s ambitious goal because they are both so costly in terms of embodied and operational carbon emissions.
Is there a cross-disciplinary element to your research? If so, who else at the University is involved?
None to date.
Are there any external collaborators involved?
None, but as Director of the University’s Centre for Urban Theory (CUT) I welcome all expressions of interest from anyone researching cities and urban life, be they based at Swansea or elsewhere.
What is next for your research?
I am interested in the future of skyscrapers after the Covid-19 pandemic. Previously published research is the basis for theoretical and empirical studies on the changing demand and usage of skyscrapers in the CBDs and financial districts of global cities. To know and forecast skyscraper demand and usage across the networks of the world’s global firms will enable insights into how global cities work, and will work in the future, through skyscrapers. This is important for reasons ranging from the planning of CBDs and financial districts to the managing of, and finding solutions to, the embodied and operational carbon emissions that skyscrapers demand.