Summer is a good time for academics to catch up on reading, and I’ve finally found time to go through this v interesting post on Crypto Cities by Vitalik Bukterin, who is always worth your time. (It’s also helpful for the Smart Cities course I teach at UCL). My fast…

As researchers and policymakers, we all say we want evidence-based policy; so why is there little good evaluation evidence about, and why do many decision-makers seem reluctant to use it? I’m back from a trip to Paris, where I gave a keynote at an OECD-European Commission workshop on Place-Based Policies…

GEOINNO has become an essential conference for the large community of researchers working at the intersections of urban economics, networks / complexity analysis, economic geography and the economics of innovation. I’m very happy to see Manchester hosting this coming January, and very happy to be involved in the conference too. …

New/old paper news: I’m very happy to have the lead article in this Urban Studies special issue on COVID-19 and cities. It’s open access! Many thanks to Scott Orford, Yingling Fan and Phil Hubbard for having me. This article is a time capsule. I first drafted these ideas, fast, as…

I have a new City Talks podcast with Eliza Easton (Deputy Director of the Creative PEC) and Centre for Cities CEO Andrew Carter. We talk about creative clusters, whether creative industries drive city growth, and what policymakers can do to help. The podcast is about an hour long. Happy listening! If you want more detail, you have two options: the full-fat academic paper behind the conversation is here, but I also wrote a skinny summary here.

Job alert! I am recruiting an economist and a data scientist to join my new UKRI-funded project. We’re looking at the effects of diversities on productivity, innovation and entrepreneurship in UK firms and cities. The project is based at UCL, and is joint with Jon Reades, Anna Valero (LSE/CEP), Ceren Ozgen (Birmingham), Tom Kemeny (Toronto) and Anna Rosso (Insubria). These are both full-time post-doc positions, funded til July 2025 in the first instance.

Creative and cultural industries are very urbanised. What are the impacts of these creative clusters on their surrounding cities? In a new open access paper with Diana, Tasos and Massi, we test the causal effects of creative clusters on urban economies in the UK over 20 years. Overall, we have…

Heads up — I have a new clusters paper out, open access, written with Emmanouil Tranos and Christoph Stich. It’s largely technical — we develop a new set of tools for tracking cluster evolution using geolocated business website text and metadata, then test it out by tracking the growth of…

Some self-promotion — a team I’m leading has won one of seven new big ESRC grants for productivity research. Our new project will explore the economic effects of diverse teams and workplaces — and the wider role of urban diversity — on entrepreneurship, innovation and productivity in the UK. I’ll…