I am an urban geographer whose work examines how cities govern collective futures through finance, development, and public power. My research focuses on the fiscal and institutional capacities of urban governments: how cities budget, borrow, invest, manage crisis, and make decisions that shape democratic life.

Across my writing, I study municipal finance, urban development, state capacity, austerity, and the politics of local governance. I am especially interested in how seemingly technical fiscal arrangements - budgets, debt, revenue systems, liabilities, and intergovernmental finance - become political instruments through which cities organize priorities, distribute risk, and imagine the future.

My work combines urban political economy with a broader concern for explanation in urban research. I am interested in how scholars can build theories that remain attentive to historical and geographical specificity while also generating clearer expectations, comparisons, and public consequences. This concern informs both my empirical research on urban fiscal governance and my editorial work.

My current book project (with Kevin Ward), Red Ink Urbanism, examines how American cities govern under fiscal constraint. The book shows how budgets, debt, revenue systems, and long-term liabilities shape urban policy, development, and democratic possibility. Rather than treating municipal finance as a technical backdrop, it argues that fiscal governance is one of the central ways cities organize collective futures.

I am Professor of Geography at Clark University and editor of Dialogues in Urban Research and Geography Compass. This site brings together my research, books, essays, editorial work, and public writing on cities, finance, democracy, and urban futures.