Roger Lee

Lee's argument is that calling a city's economy a market hides what matters: who depends on whom, who trusts whom, and who can impose terms. Prices do not appear by themselves, they are set by people with unequal power, which is why a crisis, a regeneration scheme or a factory closure cannot be explained by supply and demand alone.

Hence his second idea, that of ordinary and alternative economies. In any city, alongside the visible capitalist circuit, many others coexist: unpaid domestic work, barter, cooperatives, local currencies, help between relatives, the care economy. They are not leftovers from the past or marginal experiments; they are the part of the economy that sustains people when the other one fails, and Lee argued that ignoring them gives a false picture of how a city lives.

A British geographer, Lee was a professor at Queen Mary University of London throughout his career and a central figure in British critical economic geography. With Jane Wills he co-edited Geographies of Economies (1997), the volume that marked the discipline's cultural and institutional turn.

Alternative Economic Spaces (2003), with Andrew Leyshon and Colin Williams, gathered the research on those other circuits, and The SAGE Handbook of Economic Geography (2011) set out the state of the field. His work is the theoretical background to much of what is now discussed about the social economy, local currencies and the care economy in cities.