Erik Swyngedouw


Erik Achille Marie Swyngedouw is professor of geography at the University of Manchester in the School of Environment, Education and Development and a member of the Manchester Urban Institute.

Background

Born in Dutch-speaking Belgium and fluent in Dutch, English, French, and Spanish, he graduated from Sint-Jozefscollege, Hasselt in 1974. He graduated with an MSc in Agricultural Engineering from the Catholic University of Leuven in 1979, with a thesis focussed on agrarian change in the community of Heers. His 1985 Master in Urban and Regional Planning was also from Leuven. He earned his PhD with a thesis entitled "The production of new spaces of production" under the supervision of the renowned Marxist geographer David Harvey at Johns Hopkins University in 1991. From 1988 until 2006 Swyngedouw taught at the University of Oxford, latterly as professor of geography and was a fellow of St. Peter's College. He is currently Professor of Human Geography at the University of Manchester, England. He is also visiting professor at the University of Ghent, Belgium. He has worked and taught in the US, France, Belgium, Spain, Germany, Ecuador, and Greece

Scholarship

Swyngedouw has committed his studies to political economic analysis of contemporary capitalism, producing several major works on economic globalisation, regional development, finance, and urbanisation. His interests have also included political-ecological themes, and the transformation of nature, urban governance, politics of scale, notably water issues, in Ecuador, Spain, the UK, and elsewhere in Europe. His recent work focuses on the democratic politics and the strategies and tactics of new political movements, and the political ecology of desalination. He has published over 100 academic papers in leading academic journals in geography and cognate disciplines and in scholarly books.

Selected publications