Jamie Peck

Born in England in 1962 and trained in Manchester, Peck is professor of geography at the University of British Columbia, in Vancouver, after teaching in Manchester and Wisconsin. His first field was labour: Work-Place (1996) and Workfare States (2001) studied how labour markets are regulated locally and how activation policies travelled from the United States to the United Kingdom.

With Neil Brenner and Nik Theodore he formulated in 2002 the idea of actually existing neoliberalism, a process of destruction and creation different in each city, and Constructions of Neoliberal Reason (2010) reconstructed the intellectual history of that doctrine from Hayek and Chicago to New Orleans after Katrina. His 2005 article on Richard Florida's creative class is the most cited critique of that recipe, which he called fast policy: a cheap package cities buy without touching inequality.

Fast Policy (2015), with Nik Theodore, followed how policies travel between cities today, from Porto Alegre's participatory budget to Mexico's conditional cash transfers, and how they are hollowed out along the way. He was for years an editor of Environment and Planning A and is one of the references of critical economic geography; he is reproached, like Brenner, for a theory that sometimes forgets concrete places.