Faculty Fellow, Faculty of Environmental and Urban Change
Faculty Fellow

Roger Keil is a professor at the Faculty of Environmental and Urban Change, York University, in Toronto, Canada. He is the author of Suburban Planet (Polity 2018) and co-editor with Judy Branfman of Public Los Angeles: A Private City's Activist Futures (UGAPress 2020), with Xuefei Ren of The Globalizing Cities Reader (Routledge 2017) and with K. Murat Güney and Murat Üçoğlu of Massive Suburbanization (UTP 2019). Keil’s research areas are global suburbanization, cities and infectious disease, regional governance and urban political ecology. He is a co-investigator in a partnership grant on regional student mobility and currently works at the intersection of global urbanization and (emerging) infectious disease, including research under the leadership of S.Harris Ali on community responses to Ebola Virus Disease in urban West Africa and the DRC. Past work with Ali resulted in the book Networked Disease (Wiley 2008), which the Globe & Mail listed as one of “ten books that offer lessons from past pandemics” at the outset of the COVID-19 lockdown. Keil is also conducting ongoing comparative research with colleagues in Berlin, Chicago, Johannesburg, Milan and Toronto on the relationship of the COVID-19 pandemic and cities and healthy cities.
Research keywords:
Sub/urbanization; infectious disease; urban political ecology
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