Gordon  Douglas

[thinking and writing about urban culture, space, identity, and design]

 

 

Contact:

gordon.douglas [at] sjsu [dot] edu

 

 

 

 

I am a writer, researcher, teacher, and photographer of urban places and cultures. My work centers on issues of cultural identity and social inequality in urban planning and development and people's interactions with their changing physical surroundings in cities around the world. After completing my PhD at the University of Chicago and a postdoctoral position at NYU's Institute for Public Knowledge, I joined the Department of Urban and Regional Planning at San José State University, where I am now an Associate Professor of Urban Planning and the Director of the Institute for Metropolitan Studies. My writing and photography have appeared in Urban Studies, City & Community, The Journal of Urban Design, Architect Magazine, Public Books, Streetsblog and other publications - academic and otherwise.  

My book, The Help Yourself City, was published by Oxford University Press in 2018. It concerns the creation of unauthorized "DIY urban design" contributions and what these informal improvement efforts tell us about the political-economy of placemaking and citizenship in the contemporary city. You can hear me talking about it with Roman Mars on a recent episode of 99% Invisible. More of my photos of DIY placemaking are here at #helpyourselfcity.

My current research is primarily focused on the architectures and geographies of extreme inequality in California's Bay Area, especially place and community in the informal settlements of unhoused people (link). Additional studies of mine have focused on how the ideologies of contemporary first-wave gentrifiers influence the geography of neighborhood change at the 'urban frontier' (link), the impact of local cultural expectations on the urban development process (link), the role mass transit design can play in promoting community identity (link), and the local impacts of "open streets" events like VivaCalleSJ (link) and pandemic-inspired signage, streetscape, and placemaking interventions.   I also served as a project research director and curatorial advisor for "Spontaneous Interventions," the U.S. Pavilion at the 13th Venice Architecture Biennale, for which I co-edited the exhibition catalogue. I seek through all of my research and teaching to inform how (and for whom) our cities are organized, designed and understood, as well as contribute to the discourse on urban political economy and critical social theory. You can see some of my landscape and architectural photography on instagram, and I occasionally post about my work and other thoughts concerning urban space and culture on twitter.

I hold additional graduate degrees in sociology from the University of Chicago, and in media and communication from the London School of Economics and USC's Annenberg School. I also did my undergrad, in international relations and journalism, at USC. I'm an avid cyclist, gardener, and neighborhood enthusiast. I was born in London, England and raised in Davis, California. I live in Oakland.