Byron Miller

Associate Professor
Director, Urban Studies Program
BA, Pennsylvania State
MA, Arizona State
PhD, Minnesota
Department of Geography
University of Calgary
Calgary, AB T2N 1N4
(403) 220-7321
byron.miller@ucalgary.ca

Bio Summary

Byron Miller is an urban political geographer whose work draws heavily from contemporary political economy and social theory. His recent work focuses on the geographic structuring of social movements, both domestically and globally, the geographic re-scaling of state functions, urban governance, and the political economy of urban sustainability. In the summer of 1998 Miller completed fieldwork in Chiang Mai, Thailand, examining the geographic restructuring of the Thai state and its implications for political participation and development. A project in the summer of 1999 examined state restructuring and the politics of sustainable urban development on Crete. In the summer of 2000 his book, Geography and Social Movements: Comparing Antinuclear Activism in the Boston Area, was published by the University of Minnesota Press. He has published articles in Political Geography, Economic Geography, Mobilization, and The International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, as well as chapters in a variety of books.

Miller holds a bachelor's degree (honours) in geography from the Pennsylvania State University (1978), a master's degree in geography from Arizona State University (1984), and a Ph.D. in geography from the University of Minnesota (1995). He worked as an urban planner for the City of Scottsdale, Arizona (1981-1984), and began study of urban and political geography in an international context while living in Germany (1984-1987) and studying at the Universität Freiburg (1985-1987). In 2000 Miller was selected as a summer fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University. In 2004 he was selected as a fellow of the Institute for Advanced Policy Research at the University of Calgary. He currently serves as Director of the University of Calgary’s Urban Studies Program.

Current Research

Byron Miller's current research focuses on the fiscalization of urban governance (a collaborative project with Alan Smart, Department of Anthropology), forms of resistance to neoliberal urban policy, multi-level governance (as co-investigator, with Alan Smart, for the Calgary portion of a national SSHRC funded MCRI project), and urban sustainability policy (a collaborative project with members of the Calgary Citizens' Forum).

Active Research Programs

Cities as complex adaptive systems
Using Calgary as our test city we are attempting to blend ‘old’ and ‘new’ systems theory, in order to understand the role played by cities and city dwellers, as entities in ecological world system.

Current Graduate Students

Scott Bennet
Geoff Ghitter
Kyle Peterson

Courses Taught

Geog 253: Introduction to Cities
A broad introductory survey, from diverse perspectives, of the processes that shape cities and urban life.

Geog 351: Urban Social Geography
Concepts of urban geography with particular reference to intra-urban social issues.

Geog 553: Globalization and the City
Introduction to the economic, political and cultural forces operating on a global scale that increasingly shape the growth and development of cities. Emphasis is placed on the dynamics of growth, competition, and polarization that structure urban hierarchies as well as cities' internal social and economic geographies.

Geog 565: Urban Political Geography
An examination of how urban spatial relations shape, and are shaped by, political institutions, organizations, and social movements.

Geog 697: Seminar in the Philosophy and Nature of Human Geography
This graduate course is designed to provide a critical survey of the key issues and problems in the ‘construction’ of the field of Geography throughout history and its relationships with other fields of enquiry. This will provide an essential background to a survey of the contemporary methodological and philosophical debates about its nature, from such issues as the scientific approaches of the 1960s and their utility, the humanistic reactions, through structuralism and post structuralism, radicalism, the new ecological and technical approaches, gender geography, post-modernism, and hermeneutic perspectives, especially the critical practice approach and the new cultural geography. In addition, questions such as the decline and relevance of traditional fields such as regional geography, and new trends such as globalization will be addressed.