Core Faculty

Joan Walker

Professor, Civil and Environmental Engineering

Walker was hired through the Global Metropolitan Studies initiative to enhance the university’s strength in urban infrastructure systems. Her research focuses on transportation systems, with a particular focus on behavioral modeling. She works to improve the models that are used for transportation planning, policy, and operations.  Walker currently serves as a Co-Director of GMS, and she is one of the primary instructors for the core courses for the Designated Emphasis in Global Metropolitan Studies (GMS 200 and GMS201).  

Alison Post

Associate Professor, Political Science

Post was hired through the Global Metropolitan Studies initiative to enhance the university’s strength in comparative urban studies. Her research lies at the intersection of comparative urban politics and comparative political economy, focusing on Latin America and the developing world more broadly.   It examines the political and institutional factors affecting vital urban services such as water and sanitation, mass transit, and electricity.  She has received U.C. Berkeley’s campus-wide Carol D. Soc award for mentoring graduate students.  She is one of the primary instructors for the core courses for the Designated Emphasis in Global Metropolitan Studies (GMS 200 and GMS201).  

Desiree Fields

Associate Professor, Geography

I am an economic geographer and critical urban scholar, and I study how financial processes and digital technologies are shifting the terrain of the housing question in the 21st century. In addition to teaching in Global Metropolitan Studies and my home department of Geography, I am also a trustee of the Urban Studies Foundation and an editor at the journal Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space. 

Graduate courses: GMS200: Histories, Theories, and Methods of Global Metropolitan Studies; GEOG247: Digital Transformations in Land, Housing, and Property

Personal website: https://www.desireefields.org/

Sai Balakrishnan

City and Regional Planning

Sai Balakrishnan is an Associate Professor of City and Regional Planning, in a joint appointment with DCRP and GMS (Global Metropolitan Studies). Her research and teaching broadly pivot around global urban inequalities, with a particular focus on urbanization and planning institutions in the global south, and on the spatial politics of land-use and property. She has worked as an urban planner in the United States, India, and the United Arab Emirates, and as a consultant to the UN-HABITAT, Nairobi. Her book, Shareholder Cities: Land Transformations along Urban Corridors in India (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019) explores new forms of urbanization along infrastructural / economic corridors in liberalizing India. Balakrishnan is currently working on two books: i) global-comparative research on the transfer of development rights (TDRs), a new land (and air) commodification instrument, in Mumbai, New York and São Paulo, and ii) in collaboration with historian Arindam Dutta (MIT), a spatial mapping of infrastructural inequalities and the new geographies of uneven development in post-liberalization India.