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Victoria Jessie
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Andrew Young School of Policy Studies
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ATLANTA – Jean-Paul Addie has co-founded the Research Network on Infrastructural Regionalisms (NOIR) along with co-directors Michael Glass of the University of Pittsburgh and Jen Nelles of City University of New York.
When it launches, NOIR will provide a platform that allows urban studies experts to focus on the role infrastructure plays in determining how regions are constructed, governed and experienced.
Addie and his co-directors proposed NOIR as a research network to the Regional Studies Association (RSA), which then funded it through their Research Network grant – a $13,500 award that supports networking and knowledge exchange around regional infrastructure issues.
“We’re interested in how existing and planned infrastructure shapes our perceptions of regions and impacts the behavior and opportunities of the communities that rely upon it,” said Addie, an assistant professor in the Urban Studies Institute, the newest academic unit in the Andrew Young School of Policy Studies.
“Infrastructures draw in multiple overlapping jurisdictions, scales of governance and lived experiences. Interdisciplinary dialogues are therefore essential, in conceptual and methodological terms, to how we study and produce knowledge of urban infrastructure – and how they can support sustainable and inclusive development at the regional scale.”
With the goal of engaging various community stakeholders, NOIR will offer multiple forums including collaboration in research, publications and networking to facilitate meaningful dialogue between urban practitioners and academics.
The forums will focus on infrastructure as the central component of what makes urban life possible.
The team has been busy promoting NOIR across the country. In April, NOIR held its first panel event in Washington, D.C., “Pushing the Boundaries of Regional Infrastructure: The DC Region in Focus,” during the Annual Meeting of the American Association of Geographers.
NOIR will officially launch on September 20-22 during a special session at the RSA North American Conference in Montreal, Canada, where attendees will have the opportunity to learn about NOIR’s research agenda and robust schedule of events in a special virtual issue of Regional Studies.
Featured Researcher
Jean-Paul Addie
Assistant Professor
Urban Studies Institute
Jean-Paul Addie is a critical urban geographer principally concerned with understanding the production, governance, and experience of regional urbanization. Drawing on a dialectical approach to the urban process under capitalism, his research focuses on the politics of urban infrastructure – the material elements and social relations that facilitate urbanization and foster distinct modes of urbanism – to address questions of access, mobility, and social justice. Jean-Paul has conducted qualitative comparative analysis on a range of interdisciplinary topics including university urbanism, transportation governance, suburbanization, city-regionalism, neoliberal urban policy, local democracy, and socio-spatial theory. His research has received funding from the European Commission, the British Council, and the Ontario Ministry of Training, College, and Universities and has been published in international journals including IJURR, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, Environment and Planning A, Regional Studies, and CITY.