“Unfolding Our Shared Future: Challenge, Possibility and Potential in the 21st Century”
Wednesday 8th May 2024 at 4pm BST
Live streaming from Keele Hall, Keele University, UK
Detailed Description
This free event, co-hosted by the American Politics Group, with the support of a special award from the US Embassy/BAAS grants programme, and Keele’s David Bruce Centre for the Study of the Americas, is part of a travelling festival addressing issues facing the US and UK in domestic, trans-Atlantic and global contexts. Keele is delighted to welcome two renowned scholars – Professor Loretta Lees (Boston) and Professor Ray Bromley (Emeritus, Albany) – to talk and answer questions on the theme of 'urban regeneration'. The in-person invited audience will include representatives from the APG and the US Embassy Cultural Office, people from the local area with an interest in urban regeneration and connections to Keele University, and Keele academics.
The live stream event is open to anyone with an interest in the topic by ordering a free ticket to register. Registration will close at 1pm on 8th May. Joining instructions with further information will be sent by email ahead of the event.
Our Speakers
Loretta Lees Loretta Lees is Director of the Initiative on Cities at Boston University in the US (https://www.bu.edu/ioc/profile/loretta-lees/), she previously worked at and held professorships at Leicester University (2013-2022) and King’s College London (1997-2013) in the UK. She is an urban geographer and urbanist who is internationally known for her research on gentrification, urban regeneration, global urbanism, urban policy, urban public space, architecture, and urban social theory. In 2023 she was ranked in the top 2% of most highly cited scholars internationally (Scopus, Elsevier, 2023). She is co-organiser since 2024 of the Boston Urban Salon (https://www.bostonurbansalon.com/) and since 2009 of The Urban Salon: A London forum for architecture, cities and international urbanism (http://www.theurbansalon.org/). She was Chair of the London Housing Panel 2020-22 working with the Mayor of London, Sadiq Kahn (https://www.trustforlondon.org.uk/issues/housing/london-housing-panel/).
Loretta was born in Manchester, England. She did her BA Geography at Queen’s University Belfast and went on to do a PhD in Human Geography at Edinburgh University. She subsequently worked as a visiting lecturer at Waikato University in New Zealand and a Leverhulme funded post-doc at UBC in Vancouver, Canada, before returning to the UK. At KCL she was Chair of the Cities Research Group and at Leicester University Director of Research.
Loretta has published 17 books and 77 journal articles, her Planetary Gentrification (co-authored with Hyun Bang Shin and Ernesto Lopez-Morales, Polity Press, 2016) has been republished in Chinese and Korean. She has authored and edited a number of books on urban regeneration, urban sustainability, and urban policy, and has significant interest in urban policy mobilities between countries as seen in her 2022 Defensible Space: mobilisation in English Housing Policy and Practice (co-authored with Elanor Warwick) published in the prestigious RGS-IBG Book Series, Wiley. Above all Loretta is a committed scholar-activist; she was awarded the 2022 Marilyn J. Gittell Activist Scholar Award by the Urban Affairs Association for her work with low-income, marginalized communities fighting gentrification and displacement.
Ray Bromley is Professor Emeritus at the State University of New York at Albany. From 1971 till 1981 he was based at what is now Swansea University, teaching and researching on international development planning, and consulting on United Nations and World Bank funded projects. From 1981 till 1985 he served as Advisor on Regional Planning to the Peruvian Prime Minister’s Office, sponsored by USAID, and in 1985 he accepted a Professorship in Albany, which has been his base ever since. In 1994 he was granted US citizenship. At SUNY-Albany Ray served for five years as Chair of Geography and Planning, and for almost a decade as Vice Provost for International Education. He played a leading role in the accreditation of the Masters Program in Planning, in the growth of the Urban Studies and Globalization Studies undergraduate majors, and in recruiting and supporting international students. He has held Visiting Fulbright Professorships in Peru (1997) and India (2016).
Ray’s research has focused on national, regional and urban planning, on informality, casual work and self-help housing, and on the 20th century history of ideas in urban studies and planning. He is a fluent Spanish speaker with nine years of field experience in Latin America, and he has travelled widely in other world areas. In January 2020 he retired, hoping to concentrate on international comparative research. Within weeks the Covid pandemic forced him to re-focus on the New York Metro Region, where he is working on Beyond Moses, a book re-thinking the history of public works and the role of Robert Moses. His books include: Envisioning Sociology (Scott & Bromley, 2013), Planning for Small Enterprises in Third World Cities (Bromley ed. 1985), Casual Work and Poverty in Third World Cities (Bromley & Gerry eds. 1979) and The Urban Informal Sector (Bromley ed. 1978).
