Sustainable Consumption Institute

Melissa has worked, researched and taught in issues related to organisational sustainability, urban politics and development and urban transformation for over a decade in Canada and internationally. She has a BA in Geography and Economics from McGill University (2001) and a Graduate Diploma in Community Economic Development from Concordia University (2003), in Montreal, Canada. She completed an MSc in Building and Urban Design in Development from University College London in 2009, where she was a Commonwealth Scholar. She is currently a doctoral student in Human Geography at the University of Manchester’s School of Environment and Development, studying with Erik Swyngedouw and Maria Kaika. She is a regular contributor to Polis, a collaborative blog on cities, with a team of over a dozen people around the world.

Melissa’s research is based on a deep interest in the interplay between bottom up social change and the transformation of urban space, the latter referring to both physical spaces and the institutional systems involved in such transformations. She is exploring such notions conceptually and will investigate a place based practice in a city in Spain or Latin America.