Warren Smit

Warren Smit has been a researcher on urban issues since 1993. Since January 2016 he has been the Research Manager for ACC, responsible for overseeing ACC’s research activities. He also co-ordinates the Healthy Cities CityLab and has been involved in the Mistra Urban Futures network since its inception in February 2010.

His research interests include: urban governance, urban planning, housing and urban health. His work revolves around some common themes:

• Urban planning and urban management in cities of the global South.
• Urban policy discourses: how ideas emerge, compete, and are adopted and adapted, and used to construct problems and solutions, and then turned into policies and practices. An important strand of this work is how to create new policy-relevant knowledge around understanding and achieving more equitable and sustainable cities.
• Urban governance: how decisions are made and who makes them, and the relation of this to institutional structures and policies.