Eric Clark

Eric Clark is Professor of Human Geography at Lund University and elected member of the Royal Society of Letters at Lund. He studied urban and regional planning at Stockholm University before pursuing PhD studies in human geography at Lund University. His PhD thesis (1987) and related research have been formative in gentrification theory and land rent theory. Clark became ‘docent’ in 1992. He has held positions as associate professor of human geography at the University of Oslo and Copenhagen University, and as full professor at Uppsala University and, since 1998, at Lund University. Clark has been guest professor at National Taiwan University (2010), research fellow at the Hanse Institute for Advanced Studies (2002), and research fellow in Urban Studies at Glasgow University (1994). His research interests include political economy of space, land rent theory, gentrification, financialisation, sustainability, island studies and historical political ecology. His research on rent gaps and gentrification has been especially influential in the field of urban studies. Clark is currently managing editor of the Journal of Urban Affairs (Taylor & Francis), and edited Geografiska Annaler Series B: Human Geography (Blackwell) 1999-2008. He is chair of the International Geographical Union Commission on Islands, and currently engaged in research on small-scale agroecological farming in Sweden and transitioning to sustainable agriculture (funded by Formas). In recent years he led Swedish research teams involved in the EU FP7 research program Financialisation, Economy, Society and Sustainable Development (FESSUD, 2011-2016) and the Urban Europe JPI research program Towards new forms of urban governance and city development: learning from URBan Experiments with Living Labs & City Labs (URB@Exp, 2014-2017), and participated in the European Network of Political Ecology (EU FP7, 2012-2016), and the Lund University Centre of Excellence for Integration of Social and Natural Dimensions of Sustainability (LUCID, Linnaeus Grant, 2009-2018). He also collaborates with Taiwanese researchers studying the historical political ecology of Taiwan’s small islands. His recent publications appear in Urban Studies; Annals of the Association of American Geographers; Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers; Sustainability Science; Cultural Geographies; Oxford Bibliographies in Geography; Journal of Marine and Island Cultures; and Geografiska Annaler Series B: Human Geography. Recent book chapters include contributions to The Routledge International Handbook of Island Studies; Gentrification as a Global Strategy: Neil Smith and Beyond; Sustainability and the Political Economy of Welfare; Global Gentrifications: Uneven Development and Displacement; Urban Sustainability: A Global Perspective; Ecology & Power: Struggles Over Land and Material Resources in the Past, Present and Future; The Gentrification Reader; and Where the Other Half Lives: Lower Income Housing in a Neoliberal World.