The Centre would like to extend a warm welcome to Professor Jane M Jacobs, who will be spending a sabbatical year with LKYCIC. During this time, she will work closely with Dr Belinda Yuen on “A history of building technology innovation in Singapore public housing” under the Chen Tianqiao Research Programme on Urban Innovation.
Professor Jane M Jacobs is a Professor and Director of the Division of Social Sciences at Yale-NUS College. Prof Jane M Jacobs’ undergraduate and Masters’ training in Human Geography was at the University of Adelaide, Australia. She completed her PhD at University College London. Prior to joining Yale-NUS College, Prof Jane M Jacobs taught at University College London from 1989 to 1991, The University of Melbourne from 1992 to 2002, The University of Edinburgh from 2002 to 2010, and the National University Singapore in 2011. She was a founding member of Melbourne’s Institute of Postcolonial Studies, and served a term as its Director. Prof Jane M Jacobs has supervised more than 15 PhD students, and has been on the editorial team of various journals, including the Geographical Research, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, Scottish Geographical Journal, Cultural Studies Review, Social and Cultural Geographies, Transactions IBG (NS), Gender, Place and Culture, Annals of the Association of American Geographers and Antipode.
Prof Jane M Jacobs researches, publishes and teaches in the fields of urban studies, postcolonial studies, and qualitative urban methods. Her early research was on indigenous rights and cultural property, and she played a key role in the first national survey of tourist impact on Australia Aboriginal rock art sites, which was published by the Australian Heritage Commission as Tourists and the National Estate in 1987 and in revised form in 1994 as Tourism and the Protection of Aboriginal Cultural Sites.
The main focus of Prof Jane M Jacobs’ current research is urban studies. She has published on the postcolonial politics of cities, including her monograph Edge of Empire: Postcolonialism and the City (1996) and her co-edited book Cities of Difference (1998). Recent work has focused on high-rise housing knowledge and infrastructures (http://www.ace.ed.ac.uk/highrise/), comparative urbanism, and the relationship between architecture and society. As part of her research, Prof Jane M Jacobs co-created a “memory box” of Red Road high-rise for the Glasgow Museum. She has published in a range of peer review journals including Urban Studies, Environment and Planning D and the International Journal of Urban and Regional Research. She is the co-author of the book Buildings Must Die: A Perverse View of Architecture, published by MIT Press in 2014, and the co-editor of Architecture and Geography (Routledge, 2015). Her current research is in property and security in Asian cities and she co-curates a blog on architecture in Singapore (http://architecturesingapore.wordpress.com).