Professor Andy Jonas

Qualifications

• BA (Durham University)
• MA
• PhD / DPhil

Summary

Andy Jonas is an urban political geographer whose research examines the politics, strategies and governance of urban and regional development in the USA, Europe and China. Andy has a First Class BA Hons. degree in Geography from Durham University in the UK and MA and PhD in Geography from The Ohio State University in the USA. He was recently ranked among the world's top 25 most productive and cited scholars in the field of Geography and Urban Studies and in the top 2% of global scientists. Andy is regarded to be one of the world's leading proponents of the idea that city-regions have become key spatial instruments of state internationalisation and geopolitical strategy in what some suggest is a 'post-national' era of economic globalisation.

Andy has published well over 150 peer reviewed journal articles and book chapters in leading peer-reviewed outlets. Some of his better-known work has explored the geopolitics of city-regionalism, how cities around the world have engaged in the search for an urban 'sustainability fix' , and the emergence of new spaces of labour control and 'circuits of value' in capitalism. His books include: The Urban Growth Machine: Critical Perspectives Two Decades Later (SUNY Press, 1999); Interrogating Alterity (Ashgate, 2010); Territory, the State and Urban Politics (Ashgate, 2012); Urban Geography: A Critical Introduction (Wiley Blackwell, 2015); Handbook on Spaces of Urban Politics (Routledge, 2018); and Handbook on Changing Geographies of the State: New Spaces of Geopolitics (Edward Elgar, 2020).

Andy's current research examines the geopolitics and imaginaries of city-regionalism, urban sustainability and climate governance, and the local development of a more socially inclusive and redistributive urban circular economy.

He has been a visiting scholar at universities in the USA, Canada, Finland, Australia and China.

Andy is actively involved as researcher, adviser and consultant for a range of urban regeneration and community-based economic development projects and activities in Hull as well as in cities in the UK, Europe and the USA. His research on habitat conservation and suburban development in Southern California in the 1990s and early 2000s informed regional planning processes that have led to the set aside of thousands of acres of otherwise potentially developable public and private land for nature conservation purposes. He has also conducted evaluations of the new generation of public-private partnerships set up to finance mass transit infrastructure projects across US cities and regions. Working with urban service designers and public, private and third sector partners in the UK, he is currently involved in co-designing place-based approaches to the circular economy and sustainable urban living, and is a Co-Investigator on the Yorkshire Policy Innovation Partnership, which aspires to co-create an innovative place-based approach to policy and decision-making on climate change, income and health inequalities, and data gaps.