Nik Theodore

Professor of urban planning at the University of Illinois at Chicago, where he directs the Center for Urban Economic Development, Theodore has joined for three decades research on precarious work with the theory of urban neoliberalism. With Neil Brenner and Jamie Peck he formulated in 2002 the idea of actually existing neoliberalism, a process of destruction and creation different in each city, and Spaces of Neoliberalism, the volume they edited, is one of the field's references.

His empirical work follows the day labourers on the corners of Chicago and Los Angeles, domestic workers and temp agency employees: national surveys on wage theft, studies of the worker centres that rebuild regulation from below and analyses of how immigration policy disciplines the labour force. The informal economy, he shows, is not a feature of the South but a growing part of Northern cities.

Fast Policy (2015), with Peck, followed how models such as the participatory budget and conditional cash transfers travel from city to city and are hollowed out along the way. Theodore combines theoretical critique with advice to unions and worker organisations, and his contribution is to have put labour, and not only land and capital, at the centre of urban political economy.

His study Insecure Communities (2013), based on a survey of Latino residents in several large American cities, showed that local police cooperation with immigration authorities leads many residents, including those with papers, to stop reporting crimes for fear of exposing their relatives. The result is less safety for the whole neighbourhood, and the study was used in the debate on sanctuary cities that limit that cooperation.