Prof. Sara González

Profile

Relevant academic employments

Relevant academic qualifications

Responsibilities

• Associate Director, Global Food and Environment Institute

Research interests

I am a critical urban geographer interested in the political and economic transformation of cities, neoliberal urban policies, gentrification and contestation. I am researching the transformation of traditional retail markets and their social value, as well as starting to research urban food systems from a food justice angle. I also conduct comparative research in European and Latin American cities. I espouse participatory action research methodologies.

Current project

2020-2025 Contested Territories. A Marie Skłodowska-Curie Research and Innovation Staff Exchange (RISE) project. International and intersectoral organisations from across Europe and Latin America will join forces to develop a grassroots model of territorial development. Inicio — Contested TERRITORIES (contested-territories.net)

Past projects

2019-2021 University of Leeds ‘Pump Priming for Interdisciplinary Research Initiatives’. Mapping the Production-Consumption Gap, Health Outcomes and Potential Circular Economy of the Leeds Food System.

2018-2020 Economic and Social Research Council. Principal Investigator. Understanding and Enhancing the Community Value of Traditional Retail Markets in UK cities. For more information, see our website https://trmcommunityvalue.leeds.ac.uk/ and follow any updates through our Twitter account @markets4people

2012-2016. Contested Cities was a staff and postgraduate mobility network between Europe and Latin America funded under the IRSES scheme of the EU FP7. Michael Janosckha at the Autonomous University of Madrid was the lead partner, and I was a co-investigator and the lead partner at the University of Leeds. The network extended to colleagues in Chile, Argentina, Brazil and Mexico. The project theme is Contested Spatialities of Urban Neoliberalism: Dialogues between Emerging Spaces of Citizenship in Europe and Latin America. For more information, check out the website, which details the activities and outputs of the network: http://contested-cities.net/. A major output of this project was an edited book titled Contested Markets Contested Cities. Gentrification and urban justice in retail spaces.

2014-2015. Principal investigator. Scaling up urban resistance to the new gentrification frontier: Creating a national campaign network to defend traditional retail markets.This was a project to map. document and bring together campaigns across the UK working to save, improve or rescue markets from neglect, decline and gentrification. The Trade Market Research website documents our work, including our final report.

2010-2015 Uneven local responses to the global recession. Leverhulme International Network. An international network funded by the Leverhulme Trust to analyse the impacts of the global financial crisis in European Cities. I was the Principal Investigator with colleagues from University of Antwerp (Stijn Oosterlynck), Universitat Oberta de Catalunya (Ramon Ribera Fumaz), University of Turin (Ugo Rossi) and Prof Martin Jones. There were several academic outputs from this research, culminating in a collaborative publication.

Older projects

• 2001-2004 SINGOCOM (Social Innovation, Governance and Community Building) EU Framework 5. With Frank Moulart as Principal Investigator
• 2004-2005 Shaping and contesting narratives of globalisation in European cities. EU Research and Training Network, Postdoctoral Fellowship. EU Framework 5.
• 2005-2006 The Northern Way: filling in an imaginary geography or a collective voice for the North? ESRC Postdoctoral Fellowship.
• 2006 Representations of the “regional problem”. A comparison of Northern England and the Mezzogiorno. British Academy. Principal Investigator.
• 2004-2007 DEMOLOGOS: Development Models and Logic of Socio-Economic Organization in Space. EU Framework 6. With Frank Moulaert as Principal Investigator
• 2008 British Academy “Urban policy tourism in Bilbao and Barcelona: the construction, delivery and diffusion of urban regeneration success stories”. British Academy. Principal Investigator
• 2009 Urban mobilities: The Anglo-Catalan production of the Barcelona Model. Catalan Government (Spain). Co-applicant.

Research impact

• Managing a Market as a Front-line Service and Community Asset
• Taking back the food system through the Social and Solidarity Economy in Barcelona
• Webinar: Traditional markets in the UK
• Food hubs support communities against food poverty
• GFEI welcomes Effie Papargyropoulou and Sara González as joint Associate Directors for Urban Food Systems
• World Food Day 2023: Building resilient, secure and sustainable food systems
• How to Fix podcast: How do we cut the cost of healthy food?
• Traditional markets key to COVID-19 recovery plan
• Coronavirus recovery: why local markets are key to reviving our locked-down town centres
• High-street regeneration has to start with community trust and care.

• Communities in crisis (Connected Communities Scoping Studies and Reviews)
• Contested Cities: Contested spatialities of urban neoliberalism - Dialogues between emerging spaces of citizenship in Europe and Latin America
• CONTESTED_TERRITORY From Contested Territories to alternatives of development: Learning from Latin America
• Mapping the Production-Consumption Gap, Health Outcomes and Potential Circular Economy of the Leeds Food System
• Professor John Holloway Visiting Professorship
• Trade market research
• Understanding and Enhancing the Community Value of Traditional Retail Markets in UK Cities

Qualifications

• PhD, Urban sociology, University of the Basque Country
• BA (Hons), Sociology and Political Science, Deusto University

Student education

Undergraduate teaching

I teach on several undergraduate modules within the BA Geography programme, specialising in urban and economic geography: modern cities, planning in the 19th-2th century, urban social movements, gentrification, and urban neoliberalisation.

PhD Supervision

I welcome PhD applications in the following areas:

• Neoliberal urban policies in cities around the world
• Policy mobilities
• Urban resistance and social movements
• Retail gentrification and traditional retail markets (indoor or street markets)
• Goumetisation; foodification in cities
• Urban Justice and Urban Food Systems.

Research groups and institutes

• Social Justice, Cities, Citizenship

Current postgraduate researchers

• Jianlin Xu
• Claire Gribben