Event Recording:

Mass migration to cities perpetuates urban-rural economic inequality, and can pose a heavy burden for material and social infrastructure. Professor Michael Keith, Co-Director of the Future of Cities programme, considers the practical demands of shaping the cities of the future, how cities can drive behavioural change, and how we could sequence the moral DNA of the new city to minimise future inequality.

About the speaker

Michael Keith is Director of COMPAS, Co-ordinator of Urban Transformations (The ESRC portfolio of investments and research on cities), and Co-Director of the University of Oxford Future of Cities programme.

His research focuses on migration related processes of urban change. His most recent work is the monograph China Constructing Capitalism: Economic Life and Urban Change (2014). His next will be a book for Cambridge University Press, entitled: Power, Identity and Representation: Race, Governance and Mobilisation in British Society.

He has experience outside the academy as a politician for twenty years in the east end of London, serving in the 1990s and early 2000s for five years as leader of a London local authority, Chair of the Thames Gateway London Partnership and a commissioner on the Blair government’s response to the 2005 London bombings, the Commission on Integration and Cohesion.