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
Swyngedouw, E. with L. Albrechts and D. Van Der Wee., Een Regionale Atlas van Vlaanderen . Leuven University Press.
Swyngedouw, E. with L. Albrechts, F. Moulaert, P. Roberts. , Regional Policy at the Crossroads - European Perspectives. Jessica Kingsley, London.
Swyngedouw, E. with P. Cooke, F. Moulaert, O. Weinstein, P. Wells., Towards Global Localization: The Computing and Communications Industries in Britain and France, University College London Press, 227pp.
Swyngedouw, E., La Crisis del Abastecimiento de Agua en Guayaquil, Ed. ILDIS, QUITO.
Swyngedouw, E., "Modernity and Hybridity: Nature, Regeneracionismo, and the Production of the Spanish Waterscape, 1890-1930", Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 89, pp. 443–465.
Swyngedouw, E. with Getimis P., Heinelt H., Kafkalas G., Smith R. , Participatory Governance in Multi-Level Context: Concepts and Experience. Leske & Budrich, Opladen.
Swyngedouw, E. with F. Moulaert and A. Rodriguez. , The Globalized City - Economic Restructuring and Social Polarization in European Cities. Oxford University Press.
Swyngedouw, E., Social Power and the Urbanization of Water - Flows of Power. Oxford University Press.
Heynen, N., Kaika, M. and Swyngedouw, E. , In the Nature of Cities: Urban Political Ecology and the Politics of Urban Metabolism. Routledge, London and New York.
Moulaert, F., E. Swyngedouw, S. Gonzalez, F. Martinelli . Can Neighbourhoods Save the City? Routledge, London and New York.
Swyngedouw, E.. Political Geography, 30, pp. 370–380
Swyngedouw, E. Designing the Post-Political city and the Insurgent Polis. Civic City Cahier 5. Bedford Press, London.
Swyngedouw, E. & J. Wilson The Post-Political and its Discontents: Spaces of De-politicization, Specters of Re-Politicization. Edinburgh University Press.
Swyngedouw, E., Liquid Power: Contested Hydro-Modernities in Twentieth-Century Spain. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA.
Swyngedouw E. Promises of the Political. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA.
Recognition
Anniversary Award from Environment and Planning A for best paper of the year "Power, Nature and the City. The Conquest of Water and The Political Ecology of Urbanization in Guayaquil, Ecuador: 1880-1980", Environment and Planning A, 29, pp. 311–332.
