Tom Goodfellow - Our staff - Town and Regional Planning

Dr Tom Goodfellow

Lecturer

Room number: F16

Telephone (internal): 26913

Telephone (UK): 0114 222 6913

Telephone (international) +44 114 222 6913

Academic Profile

My undergraduate degree is in Social and Political Sciences from the University of Cambridge, where I graduated in 2000. The following year I undertook an MSc in International Relations at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE), graduating in 2002. It was only some years later that I became particularly interested in social and political processes at the local – and more specifically, urban – scale, while also focusing my attention on low-income countries and questions of international development. From 2007-2012, alongside working on my PhD in LSE’s Department of International Development, I was a Research Associate both for Oxfam GB and the Crisis States Research Centre (a UK government-funded centre focused on the challenges of violent conflict and state fragility). I was also a Teaching Fellow in International Development at the LSE From 2010, until joining TRP as a lecturer in 2013.

Research interests

My research interests centre on questions of urban development and politics in the global South, especially sub-Saharan Africa. I am particularly interested in how people pursuing livelihoods in the urban informal economy interact with state authorities, and how these interactions affect broader processes of socioeconomic development and political change. Related interests include the politics of urban planning in low-income countries experiencing rapid urban growth; the relationships between urbanisation, conflict and state-building; urban violence and riots; and the politics of property taxation

Teaching

Coming from a highly interdisciplinary background, I am committed to interdisciplinary approaches to teaching and learning and believe that most problems require a range of disciplinary perspectives to be tackled adequately. I think it is critically important to encourage students from different backgrounds to share their knowledge and perspectives, engaging head-on with the contradictions and conflicts generated by different views of what constitutes valid evidence about the world. I enjoy finding innovative ways to stimulate active learning and to apply academic debates to concrete development and urban policy problems.

Modules I will teach on in 2013-14 include the following:

TRP131 - The Making of Urban Places
TRP6404 – Research Methods

Key publications

Goodfellow, T. (in press) Planning and development regulation amid rapid urban growth: explaining divergent trajectories in Africa. Geoforum
Goodfellow, T. (in press). The institutionalisation of ‘noise’ and ‘silence’ in urban politics: case studies from East Africa. Oxford Development Studies
Goodfellow, T. and Smith, A. (forthcoming 2013) ‘From urban catastrophe to ‘model’ city? Politics, security and development in post-conflict Kigali. Urban Studies, Vol 50(15)
Goodfellow, T. and Lindemann, S. (2013) The clash of institutions: traditional authority, conflict and the failure of ‘hybridity’ in Buganda’. Commonwealth and Comparative Politics, Vol 51(1), pp. 3-26
Goodfellow, T and Titeca, K. (2012) Presidential intervention and the changing 'politics of survival' in Kampala's informal economy. Cities, Vol 29(4), pp. 264-270