Dr. Matt Thompson

Biography

I'm a critical urban geographer working at the intersection of theory, policy, and politics. Before joining the Bartlett School of Planning as a Lecturer in Urban Studies in January 2024, I was a Research Associate at the Wales Institute of Social and Economic Research and Data (WISERD) at Cardiff University and a Research Fellow at the UCL Institute for Innovation and Public Purpose. My work has included several postdoctoral fellowships, notably the visiting Mercator Fellowship at the Structural Change Property Research Centre at Friedrich Schiller University in Jena, Germany in 2023, and a three-year Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship at the University of Liverpool starting in 2018, where I traced the historical genealogies of policy mobilities and transatlantic movements related to new municipalism and community wealth building. My research, which culminated in my PhD at the University of Manchester from 2011 to 2015, compared Liverpool’s housing cooperative movement in the 1970s and 1980s against anti-demolition activism and community land trusts in the 2010s. In 2020, Liverpool University Press published my research as an open-access book titled 'Reconstructing Public Housing: Liverpool’s Hidden History of Collective Alternatives'. I am currently working on a monograph provisionally entitled 'Urban Statecraft: Mobilising Strategies in the Post-Growth Conjecture.'

Research Interests

Experience