Maria Kaika
Professor of Urban, Regional and Environmental Planning, Coordinator of Political Ecology
Environment
My research on urban political ecology focuses on the relation between economic and environmental crisis and marginalization, the false dichotomy between labour and environmental politics, and the embodied politics of land, housing, water and energy infrastructure provision.
RESEARCH FOCUS
Political ecology
Table Of Content
Positions & roles
Director, Centre for Urban Studies, University of Amsterdam
Chair in Urban Regional and Environmental Planning, University of Amsterdam
Founding editor of the Journal of Urban Political Ecology
Co-editor in chief of the International Journal of Urban and Regional Research
Editorial Board member of European Urban and Regional Studies and Human Geography
Awards & achievements
I hold a PhD from the University of Oxford in Urban Geography and an MSc in Architecture and Planning from the National Technical University of Athens. I have held tenured posts at the universities of Oxford and Manchester and honorary professorships at many European universities including Paris LATTS, TU Vienna and KU Leuven. In 2017, I was awarded the Jim Lewis Prize for the most innovate academic publication (with L Ruggiero).
Awarded the European Award for Excellence for Teaching in Social Sciences in 2021.
My work has received funding from national and international research councils and organisations including the British Academy, EU Framework and Marie Curie programmes.
Selected publications
Class Meets Land: the Embodied History of Land Financialization, Kaika M and L Ruggiero, University of California Press, 2024
Turning Up the Heat: Urban Political Ecology for a Climate Emergency, Kaika, M, Keil R, Mandler T, Tzaninis Y, Manchester University Press, 2023
The Political Ecology of Austerity, Routledge, New York; with R Calvario and G Velegrakis, 2021
Urbanizing degrowth: Five steps towards a Radical Spatial Degrowth Agenda for planning in the face of climate emergency, Urban Studies Special Issue with Varvarousis, A, Demaria, F and March, H, 2023
In the Nature of Cities: urban political ecology and the metabolism of urban environments, with N Heynen and E Swyngedouw, Routledge, London, 2006
City of Flows: Modernity, Nature and the City, Routledge, New York, 2005
Teaching
My teaching philosophy follows bell hooks’s call for ‘teaching to transgress’. I practice teaching as a means of prompting critical thought and desire for rigorous research and fact checking; I see the development of these skills by students as crucial for enabling the development of new planning imaginaries and prefigurative politics that can lead to more egalitarian use and management of environmental resources and human settlements.
Courses
Planning: a Theory of Praxis (Masters)
Contesting the City: Reading the Classics and Telling our Stories (BA)
Cities Facing Climate Change: Urban Political Ecology for a Climate Emergency (BA)
