Loretta Lees

About

Loretta Lees is an urban geographer and urbanist who is internationally recognized for her research on gentrification, urban regeneration, global urbanism, urban policy, urban public space, architecture, and urban social theory. She has held academic positions at Leicester University and King’s College London in the UK before moving to Boston University, where she serves as Professor and Faculty Director of the Initiative on Cities. Loretta has been elected as a fellow of several prestigious organizations, including Academia Europaea, the UK Higher Education Academy, the Academy of Social Science, and the Royal Society for the Arts. She has published 14 books, with additional works in press, and her recent publications include 'Defensible Space: mobilisation in English Housing Policy and Practice' (2022), which critically examines the concept of defensible space in housing design and policy, and 'Planetary Gentrification' (2016), which develops a planetary view of gentrification building on postcolonial critiques of urban studies. Loretta is credited with coining the term 'super-gentrification' in an ethnographic study of Brooklyn Heights, New York City, where she identified the process of re-gentrification driven by 'financifiers.' Beyond academia, she has been actively involved in policy and community work, serving as Chair of the London Housing Panel and collaborating with residents, officials, and activists to promote just housing and urban regeneration policies. She was…

Research topics

• Political Science
• Sociology
• Humanities
• Art
• Social Science
• Economic growth
• Law
• Economics
• Archaeology
• Law and economics

Selected publications

• From heat racism and heat gentrification to urban heat justice in the USA and Europe

  Nature Cities · 2024-12-05 · 27 citations

  article
  PublisherDOI

• The Planetary Gentrification Reader

  2022-11-23 · 23 citations

  book1st authorCorresponding

  Gentrification is a global process that the United Nations now sees as a Human Rights issue. This new Planetary Gentrification Reader follows on from the editors' 2010 volume, The Gentrification Reader, and provides a more longitudinal (backwards and forwards in time) and broader (turning away from Anglo/Euro-American hegemony) sense of developments in gentrification studies over time and space, drawing on key readings that reflect the development of cutting edge debates. Revisiting new debates…

  PublisherDOI

• What Constitutes Engaged Dialogue in Urban Research? Thoughts From a Long Time “Outside-Insider”

  Dialogues in Urban Research · 2023-11-05 · 11 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  In this plenary for the new journal Dialogues in Urban Research, I discuss what constitutes (and should constitute going forward) engaged dialogue in urban research. Engaged dialogue is the process of working collaboratively with groups of people, whoever they are, in relation to particular issues that affect them, to understand those issues better. So what does engaged dialogue in urban research look like? Who is engaging with who, where, why, and how? Has it changed over time? Most, if not all…

  PublisherDOI

• A ‘gentrification regime’ change: The fiscal roots of buy-to-let gentrification in Dudelange, Luxembourg

  Urban Studies · 2025-01-09 · 7 citations

  articleSenior author

  This article introduces the notion of the ‘gentrification regime’, which we believe is better able to capture the diversity of gentrification trajectories than the more macro-level notions of gentrification ‘waves’ or ‘stages’. We define a ‘gentrification regime’ as a specific set of relations between producers and consumers of housing made possible by a particular policy and financial context. Empirically, this article tracks the shift from a gentrification regime in which social upscaling is l…

  PublisherDOI

• PLANETARY GENTRIFICATION AND URBAN AUTHORITARIANISM

  International Journal of Urban and Regional Research · 2024-06-04 · 5 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract In gentrification studies to date, authoritarianism has mainly served as a contextual backdrop to discussions of state‐led gentrification. In this concluding essay I reflect on the explorations of ‘ordinary’ geographical cases of ‘everyday authoritarianism’ presented in this intervention on planetary gentrification and urban authoritarianism. The cases of Istanbul, Casablanca and Lijiang show how the complex merging of authoritarian and neoliberal is now one of the cruxes of gentrificat…

  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Elvin Wyly

  University of British Columbia

  16 shared

• Rob Imrie

  Goldsmiths University of London

  13 shared

• Gary Bridge

  Cardiff University

  13 shared

• Tom Slater

  Queensland Children’s Hospital

  12 shared

• Hyun Bang Shin

  London School of Economics and Political Science

  11 shared

• Keith Hoggart

  King's College London

  10 shared

• Ernesto López‐Morales

  San Sebastián University

  10 shared

• Phil Hubbard

  King's College London

  9 shared

Education

• Ph.D.

  King’s College London

• M.A.

  Leicester University

Awards & honors

• Fellow of Academia Europaea (2022)
• FHEA - Higher Education Academy (2018)
• Fellow of the Academy of Social Science (2013)
• Fellow of the Royal Society for the Arts (2012)
• Marilyn J. Gittell Activist Scholar Award by the Urban Affai…

Similar researchers at Boston University

• Deborah Carrh-53
• Patrick Sheehanh-24
• Nazli Kibriah-23