Skip to main content

Staff Profile

Professor Stephen Graham

Professor of Cities and Society

Background

Introduction

Stephen Graham FBA is an academic and author who researches cities and urban life. He is Professor of Cities and Society at the Global Urban Research Unit and is based in Newcastle University's School of Architecture, Planning and Landscape. He is a Fellow of the British Academy.

Professor Graham has a background in Geography, Urbanism and the Sociology of Technology. His research centres, in particular, on:

 * Vertical aspects of cities and urban life

 * Connections between cities, technology and infrastructure

 * The mediation of urban life by digital technologies; and 

 * Links between security, militarisation and urban life.

 * Urban aspects of surveillance

Writing, publishing and lecturing across many countries and a variety of disciplines, Professor Graham has been Visiting Professor at MIT and NYU, amongst other institutions. The author, editor or co-author of nine major books, his work has been translated into thirteen languages.

 Qualifications

Ph.D. (Science and Technology Policy), Programme for Policy Research in Engineering, Science and Technology (PREST), University of Manchester.

Title: Networking Cities: A Comparison of Urban Telecommunications Initiatives in France and Britain (completed part-time 1992-1996)

1989 M.Phil. (Town and Country Planning), University of Newcastle upon Tyne
(Royal Town Planning Institute Prize)

1986 B.Sc.(Hons.) (Geography), University of Southampton (First Class).

Previous Positions

2005-2010, Professor of Human Geography, Department of Geography, University of Durham

1992-2005 Lecturer, then Reader, then Professor, School of Architecture, Planning and Landscape, Newcastle University

1999-2000 Full-Time Visiting Professor, Department of Urban Studies and Planning (DUSP), Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)

1989-1992 Urban Planner, then Economic Development Officer, Sheffield City Council

Honours and Awards

2022: Taiwanese edition of Graham, S. (2016), Vertical: The City From Satellites to Bunkers, national translated book of the year, Taipei.

2021: Visiting scholar, Havens Wright Center for Social Justice, University of Madison Wisconsin.

2019: Honorary Doctorate, Aalborg University, Denmark.

2019: Elected as Fellow of the British Academy

2016: Graham, S. (2016), Vertical: The City From Satellites to Bunkers, Guardian book of the week and Financial Times and Observer book of the year.

2011: Graham, S. (2010), Cities Under Siege: The New Military Urbanism, nominated for the Orwell prize for political writing and Guardian book of the week .

2004: Graham, S. and Marvin, S, (2001), Splintering Urbanism, nominated by the Urban Geography Speciality Group for the Royal Geographical Society/Institute of British Geographers annual book prize.

1st Prize for best paper published in European Planning Studies during 1999: Graham, S. and Healey, P. (1999), “Relational concepts of space and place: Issues for Planning Theory and Practice”. European Planning Studies, 7(5), 623-646.


Research

Research Interests

Prof. Graham's research draws on critical social and urban theory to address some of the key challenges facing our rapidly urbanizing world. His focus, specifically, is on five related areas:

      * The vertical aspects of cities, geography and urban life;

      * The politics of urban infrastructure, materiality and mobility;

      * The urban aspects of social and digital surveillance;

      * The links between cities and digital media; and

      * The politics of urban security and the 'new military urbanism'

A wide selection of Professor Graham's publications can be downloaded from Newcastle University's e-prints service or from his Research Gate site. More information on his publications can also be found on his Google Scholar page.

A wide range of Professor Graham's Powerpoint presentations is available at slideshare. 

Influence and Impacts

In developing these themes, Prof. Graham's work has had a major influence on a wide variety of recent  debates in the social sciences and beyond. This influence has straddled three areas.

First, Prof. Graham's work, culminating in the Verso book Vertical: The City From Satellites to Bunkers (October, 2016), is contributing much to  fully three-dimensional re-theorisation of the politics of cities and geography. A full PDF of the book is available here. Book of the week in the Guardian, Vertical was also amongst the books of the year for both the Observer and the  Financial Times (the latter is only accessible to subscribers). Korean, Turkish and Taiwanese editions of the book have been published; the latter received a "Translated book of the year" award for 2021.

Second, Prof. Graham's research is infuential debates about security, war and political violence now permeate deeply into the everyday spaces of urban life. Most important here is the book Cities Under Siege: The New Military Urbanism (Verso, March, 2010) -- a major international and interdisciplinary exposé of the tightening connections across the world between urban life, militarism and security politics. The book was entered for the 2010 Orwell Prize for Political Writing. The book was book of the week in the Guardian. Since publication, Cities Under Siege has been translated into French, Swedish, Turkish,Polish, Arabic and Brazilian editions.

Finally, Prof. Graham's individual and collaborative work has been important catalyst yo the so-called 'infrastructural turn' in the social sciences and humanities. The ways in which framented styles of providing infrastructure have contrbuted to  'splintered' styles of urban development  has been a main focus here. The widely used concept of 'splintering urbanism' was developed in Prof. Graham's highly influential 2001 book of the same name with Simon Marvin. More recent  books have explored infrastructural failures and collapses  (Disrupted Cities: When Infrastructures Fail) and the ways in which everday urban life is mediated through a variety of infrastructures (Infrastructural Lives (with Colin McFarlane). Stephen Graham's work in this area was the basis for his honorary Ph.D. at the University of Aalborg in 2019.

Postgraduate Supervision

Stephen Graham has been involved in the supervision of nineteen  successful PhDs. He is currently co-supervisor on three PhD projects:


* Jennie Day, Experiments in Autonomous Vehicles (2017-2022)

*Farhan Anshary, City Visions in Jakarta (2021-)

* Lingfei Kong, Military Architecture in China (2021-)

Visiting Positions (Selected)

Visiting Scholar, Havens Wright Center for Social Justice, University of Madison Wisconsin, 2021.

November, 2013, International Visitor, Peter Wall Institute for Advanced Studies, University of British Columbia, Vancouver.

November 2008, Distinguished International Visitor, Department of Sociology, New York University.

1999-2000 Full-Time Visiting Professor, Department of Urban Studies and Planning (DUSP), Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)

Research Funding (Selected)

ESRC, Staging and Performing ‘Emergency Situations’ in UK ‘All Hazards’ Preparedness Planning, (Co-Investigator with Ben Anderson of Durham University and Pete Adey of Royal Holloway.

ESRC, Everyday Infrastructures: A Comparative Study of Sanitation in Mumbai’s Informal Settlements, (Co-Investigator with Colin Mcfarlane and Renu Desai.

ESRC, Non-Government Public Action Programme, Contested Borders  (with Louise Amoore and Alex Hall)

British Academy Research Readership, The Software-Sorted Society: Rethinking the Digital Divide.

ESRC E-Society Programme, Multispeed Cities and the Logistics of Living in the Information Age (with Mike Crang and and  Tracey Crosbie)

Keywords

cities; infrastructure; technology; mobility; surveillance; security; splintering urbanism; new military urbanism; disrupted cities; vertical cities; gravity

Teaching

TCP 8025, Linked Research Project (Module Leader), Planning Diploma 2.

Postgraduate Planning Dissertation, supervisor. 

 TCP3099 Undergraduate Planning Dissertation, supervisor. 

Publications