Members

Jean-Paul is an Assistant Professor at the Urban Studies Institute at Georgia State University. He is a critical urban geographer working on urban and regional governance, urban political economy, and socio-spatial theory, with a specific focus on the politics of infrastructure. Jean-Paul’s theoretical approach to infrastructural regionalism is shaped by Lefebvrian urban theory and debates surrounding city-regional urbanization. His has published qualitative and comparative research on suburban infrastructure, aero-regionalism, in-between cities, university regionalism, and ‘real existing’ regionalism in journals including Transactions IBG, IJURR, Urban Geography, City, Environment and Planning A, and Geoforum.

 

Jean-Paul’s NOIR-focused research centers on: 1) rethinking universities as the knowledge infrastructure of global city-regions; 2) exploring (sub)urban governance and the political construction of regions through airport space; and 3) unpacking the multi-faceted temporality of urban and regional infrastructure.

Michael is an urbanist working at the intersection of geography and planning. His primary research interests are in metropolitan planning and governance, and in the role of stakeholder visions in shaping city identities, growth and development. He conducts research into practices of bordering: whether through the erection and performance of political boundaries, the development of social spaces such as neighborhood, or the geographical imaginaries created by the consulting firms, urban elites, and other stakeholders. He is also interested in housing and infrastructure, both as material outcomes of urban processes and as a means to understand the dynamism of city-regions. He is currently a Senior Lecturer and Director of Undergraduate Studies at the University of Pittsburgh’s Urban Studies Program, and a Faculty Fellow with the University of Pittsburgh Honors College. His books include Performativity, Politics, and the Production of Social Space (Routledge, 2012), and Priced Out: Stuyvesant Town and the Loss of Middle-Class Neighborhoods (NYU Press, 2014).

 

Michael’s NOIR-focused research is particularly interested in the consequences of infrastructure investment and disinvestment for regional planning and equity. By examining the capacity and constraints of inter-jurisdictional planning and administration, Michael assesses how a practical politics of city-regionalism can lead to more equitable and resilient regional futures. By conducting this work in and through multiple sites, Michael’s goal is a comparative framework for understanding the lived experience of infrastructural regionalism.

Jen is a researcher, professor, and consultant specializing in the areas of metropolitan governance and regional economic development. Her Ph.D. is in political science from the University of Toronto. She is currently a Fellow at the CUNY Institute for Sustainable Cities, the CUNY Institute for Urban Systems, and a Visiting Researcher at the Centre for Regional Economic and Enterprise Development (CREED) at Sheffield University Management School. Her books include Comparative Metropolitan Policy: Governing Beyond Local Boundaries in the Imagined Metropolis (Routledge, 2012), A Quiet Evolution: The Emergence of Indigenous-Local Intergovernmental Partnerships in Canada (University of Toronto Press, 2016), and Discovering American Regionalism: An Introduction to Regional Intergovernmental Organizations (Routledge, 2018). Her current research focuses on regional governance, infrastructure, and systems theory. 

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Her NOIR-focused research focuses on how governments and organizations come together to develop, build, manage, and evaluate infrastructure projects in the context of fragmented and multilevel authority (governance); the ways that different communities experience the same piece of infrastructure differently (equity); and the link between infrastructure and spatial patterns of economic activity (systems). She is currently writing a book with Philip Plotch on the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey.