Andrea Gibbons

Andrea Gibbons is an urban geographer in the Sustainable Housing and Urban Studies Unit with a focus on homelessness, housing and sustainability. She is particularly interested in the co-constitutive relationships between people and the cities in which they live. With a background in community organising around health and housing, she brings together political economy and cultural theory to look at race, gender, culture and social movement with cities through archival research, literature, mapping and ethnography. Her book Segregated City: 100 Years of Struggle for Just Housing in Los Angeles is just out from Verso.

Dr Gibbons is interested in the relationship between people and cities, and where power and capacity to build the city of our heart’s desire (in the words of David Harvey) really lies. This implies the inverse, an interest in capital and the larger forces that limit and constrain possibilities. Intertwined with this are sustainability and environmental justice, housing and homelessness and the meaning of home, health, and the relationship between the city and its surroundings. With a background in popular education, she is also interested in participatory and action research, and the use of literature, photography, walking and oral histories