Matt is a critical urban geographer based in London. He joined WISERD in April 2022 from UCL, where he was Research Fellow in Rethinking Public Value at the Institute for Innovation and Public Purpose and is now a Visiting Fellow at the Bartlett School of Planning. In 2018, he was awarded a three-year Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship to research the transatlantic urban movements dubbed new municipalism and community wealth building. From 2016 to 2021, Matt worked at the Heseltine Institute for Public Policy, Practice and Place at the University of Liverpool, initially in a policy advisory secondment to the Liverpool City Region Local Enterprise Partnership. Prior to that he was engaged in doctoral research at the University of Manchester on Liverpool’s urban politics and housing history, focusing on the city’s cooperative housing movement and community land trusts. He is the author of Reconstructing Public Housing: Liverpool’s hidden history of collective alternatives, published open access by Liverpool University Press.
Current WISERD Projects: Civil society, and place-based strategies for sustainable development
Matt’s research interests span urban political economy, social innovation, state transformation, municipalism, local economic development, collaborative housing, and the politics of urban regeneration. He is interested in collective alternatives to public and private ownership and to state and market-led forms of urban governance as ways to rethink and transform social relations in and beyond capitalism.
With WISERD Matt is undertaking comparative research on social innovations in the foundational economy in various cities across the UK and Europe. The aim is to assess their impacts on urban governance and political-economic development in the current conjuncture and to explore how the foundational economy intersects with related place-based sustainable development discourses such as community wealth building, degrowth and the social and solidarity economy.
