Alan Wiig

Alan is an Assistant Professor of Urban Planning and Community Development who studies urban infrastructure—investment, design, construction, and use—to understand the form, function, and politics of cities across the Global North. He joined the University of Massachusetts, Boston in September 2015 after completing his doctorate in Geography-Urban Studies at Temple University in Philadelphia, and attaining degrees from University of California, Santa Cruz (BA), and San Francisco State University (MA).

His scholarship has critiqued the techno-utopian underpinnings of the smart city movement, the public costs of tax incentives for urban-economic development, and the role of digitized surveillance and policing tactics in facilitating large-scale urban redevelopment in the United States. Alan’s current research agenda considers the geography of global infrastructure within and between cities of the North Atlantic as a means of theorizing the urban futures of older, industrial-era regions.