# Matthew Gandy

Matthew Gandy, FBA (born 1965 in London) is a geographer and urbanist. He is Professor of Cultural and Historical Geography and Fellow of King's College at the University of Cambridge, moving from University College London (UCL) in 2015, where he was also the founder and first Director of the UCL Urban Laboratory from 2005 to 2011.

## Education

Matthew Gandy grew up in Islington, London.
* University of Cambridge, BA Geography, 1988
* London School of Economics, PhD Geography, 1992

## Career

His research on environmental history, urban infrastructure and visual culture has involved work in a variety of countries including France, Germany, Nigeria, India, the UK and the USA. In 2003 he was winner of the Spiro Kostof Prize of the Society of Architectural Historians for Concrete and clay: reworking nature in New York City as the book “within the last two years that has made the greatest contribution to our understanding of urbanism and its relationship with architecture”. In 2005 he set up the UCL Urban Laboratory as an international and interdisciplinary centre for urban research and teaching and in 2006 he was a founder of the London-wide Urban Salon. In 2007 he produced and directed a documentary film, Liquid City (2007), which explores the complexity of water politics in Bombay/Mumbai. In 2015 his book "The fabric of space: water, modernity, and the urban imagination" won the Meridian Book Award for Outstanding Scholarly Work in Geography and in 2016 it was awarded the International Planning History Society's prize for the "most innovative book in planning history". In 2016 he was elected as a Fellow of the British Academy. In 2017 he produced, wrote, and directed the prize-winning documentary film, Natura Urbana: the Brachen of Berlin, which charts the dual histories of urban botany and geo-politics in post-war Berlin. In 2023 his book Natura Urbana: ecological constellations in urban space won a John Brinckerhoff Jackson Prize awarded by the Foundation for Landscape Studies and UVA School of Architecture and he was also elected a fellow of the Academic Europaea.
His current work explores five main themes: landscape (including depictions of nature in the visual arts), infrastructure and urban metabolism (including atmospheres and corporeal geographies), urban bio-diversity, urban epidemiology, and visual methodologies.
He is also actively involved in local issues in Hackney, east London, writes regular reviews and commentaries for his personal website at http://www.matthewgandy.org, and is an urban field ecologist, specialising in entomology and has written a book on moths.

## Publications

He has over a hundred and fifty publications in many international journals including Architectural Design, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, New Left Review and Society and Space. He is also author or editor of eleven books.
Selected publications include:

### Books

* Gandy, M. 1994. Recycling and the politics of urban waste. London: Earthscan.
* Gandy, Matthew (2002). Concrete and Clay: Reworking Nature in New York City. The Urban & Industrial Environment Series. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press.
* Gandy, Matthew; Zumla, Alimuddin, eds. (2003). The return of the white plague: global poverty and the 'new' tuberculosis. Verso. ISBN 9781859846698.
* Frank, Susanne; Gandy, Matthew, eds. (2006). Hydropolis: Wasser und die Stadt der Moderne. Campus. ISBN 9783593380032.
* Gandy, Matthew, ed. (2011). Urban constellations. jovis Verlag. ISBN 9783868591187.
* Gandy, Matthew; Nilsen, B.J., eds. (2014). The acoustic city. jovis Verlag. ISBN 9783868592719.
* Gandy, Matthew (2014). The Fabric of Space: water, modernity, and the urban imagination. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press. ISBN 9780262028257.
* Gandy, M, 2015. Ecologie queer: Nature, sexualité, et hétéropie. Paris: Eterotopia.
* Gandy, M. 2016. Moth. London: Reaktion Books.
* Gandy, Matthew; Jasper, Sandra, eds. (2020). The botanical city. jovis Verlag. ISBN 9783868595192.
* Gandy, Matthew (2022). Natura Urbana: Ecological Constellations in Urban Space. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press. ISBN 9780262046282.

### Book chapters

* Gandy, Matthew (2003), "Life without germs: contested episodes in the history of tuberculosis", in Gandy, Matthew (ed.), The return of the White Plague: global poverty and the 'new' tuberculosis, London: Verso, pp. 15–38, ISBN 9781859846698.
* Gandy, Matthew, "Urban nature and the ecological imaginary", in Heynen, Nik (ed.), In the nature of cities: urban political ecology and the politics of urban metabolism, London: Routledge, pp. 62–73, ISBN 978-0415368278.
* Gandy, Matthew (2006), "The cinematic void: the representation of desert space in Michelangelo Antonioni's Zabriskie Point", in Lefebvre, Martin (ed.), Landscape and film, AFI Film Readers Series, London: Routledge, pp. 315–332, ISBN 9780415975551.
* Gandy, Matthew (19 August 2013), "Landscape and infrastructure in the late-modern metropolis", in Bridge, Gary; Watson, Sophie (eds.), The new Blackwell companion to the city, Wiley Blackwell Companions to Geography Series, Malden, Massachusetts Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, pp. 57–65, ISBN 9781118655306.
* Gandy, Matthew (2011), "The texture of space: desire and displacement in Hiroshi Teshigahara's Woman of the Dunes", in Richardson, Douglas; Daniels, Stephen (eds.), Geography and the humanities, London: Routledge, pp. 198–208, ISBN 978-0415589772.
* Gandy, Matthew (2011), "Interstitial landscapes: reflections on a Berlin corner", in BeGandy, Matthew (ed.), Urban constellations, Berlin: jovis, pp. 149–152, ISBN 9783868591187.
* Gandy, Matthew (21 May 2012), "The melancholy observer: landscape, neo-romanticism and the politics of documentary film making", in Praeger, Brad (ed.), Companion to Werner Herzog, Wiley Blackwell Companions to Film Directors Series, Malden, Massachusetts Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, pp. 528–546, ISBN 9781405194402.
* Gandy, Matthew (2014), "Acoustic terrains", in Gandy, Matthew (ed.), The acoustic city, Berlin: jovis, pp. 7–13, ISBN 9783868592719.
* Gandy, Matthew (2016), "Mapping urban nature", in Beebeejaun, Yasminah (ed.), The participatory city, Berlin: jovis, pp. 162–168, ISBN 9783868593754.

### Journal articles

* Gandy, Matthew (June 2003). "Landscapes of deliquescence in Michelangelo Antonioni's Red Desert". Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers. 19 (2): 218–237. doi:10.1111/1475-5661.00088.
* Gandy, Matthew (December 2004). "Rethinking urban metabolism: water, space and the modern city". City. 8 (3): 363–379. doi:10.1080/1360481042000313509. S2CID 55064669.
* Gandy, Matthew (May–June 2005). "Learning from Lagos". New Left Review. II (33).
* Gandy, Matthew (March 2005). "Cyborg urbanization: complexity and monstrosity in the contemporary city". International Journal of Urban and Regional Research. 29 (1): 26–49. doi:10.1111/j.1468-2427.2005.00568.x.
* Gandy, Matthew (2006). "Planning, antiplanning, and the infrastructure crisis facing metropolitan Lagos". Urban Studies. 43 (2): 71–96. doi:10.1080/00420980500406751. S2CID 59133604.
* Gandy, Matthew (October 2006). "Zones of indistinction: bio-political contestations in the urban arena". Cultural Geographies. 13 (4): 497–516. doi:10.1191/1474474006cgj372oa. S2CID 146243545.
* Gandy, Matthew (January 2008). "Landscapes of disaster: water, poverty and urban fragmentation in Mumbai". Environment and Planning A. 40 (1): 108–130. doi:10.1068/a3994. S2CID 14848227.
* Gandy, Matthew (August 2012). "Queer ecology: nature, sexuality and heterotopic alliances". Environment and Planning D: Society and Space. 30 (4): 727–747. doi:10.1068/d10511.
* Gandy, Matthew (January 2013). "Entropy by design: Gilles Clément, Parc Henri Matisse and the Limits to Avant-garde Urbanism". International Journal of Urban and Regional Research. 37 (1): 259–278. doi:10.1111/j.1468-2427.2012.01164.x.
* Gandy, Matthew (November 2013). "Marginalia: aesthetics, ecology, and urban wastelands". Annals of the Association of American Geographers. 103 (6): 1301–1316. doi:10.1080/00045608.2013.832105.
* Gandy, Matthew (February 2015). "From urban ecology to ecological urbanism: an ambiguous trajectory". Area. 47 (2): 50–54. doi:10.1111/area.12162.
* Gandy, Matthew (April 2016). "Unintentional landscapes". Journal of Landscape Research. 41 (4): 433–440. doi:10.1080/01426397.2016.1156069.
* Gandy, Matthew (May 2017). "Negative luminescence". Annals of the American Association of Geographers. 107 (5): 1090–1107. doi:10.1080/24694452.2017.1308767.
* Gandy, Matthew (July 2017). "Urban atmospheres". Cultural Geographies. 24 (3): 353–374. doi:10.1177/1474474017712995. PMC 5732615. PMID 29278257.
* Gandy, Matthew (March 2018). "Cities in deep time: bio-diversity, metabolic rift, and the urban question". City. 22 (1): 96–105. doi:10.1080/13604813.2018.1434289.
* Gandy, Matthew (January 2019). "The fly that tried to save the world: saproxylic geographies and other-than-human ecologies". Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers. 44 (2): 392–406. doi:10.1111/tran.12281. PMC 6582619. PMID 31244491.
* Gandy, Matthew (2021). "Film as method in the geohumanities". GeoHumanities. 7 (2): 605–624. doi:10.1080/2373566X.2021.1898287. S2CID 236546407.
* Gandy, Matthew (2021). "An Arkansas parable for the Anthropocene". Annals of the American Association of Geographers . 112 (2): 368–386. doi:10.1080/24694452.2021.1935692. S2CID 244632570.
* Gandy, Matthew (2021). "Urban political ecology: a critical reconfiguration". Progress in Human Geography. 46: 21–43. doi:10.1177/03091325211040553. S2CID 243899818.
* Gandy, Matthew (2021). "The zoonotic city: urban political ecology and the pandemic imaginary". International Journal of Urban and Regional Research. 46 (2): 202–219. doi:10.1111/1468-2427.13080. PMC 9299822. PMID 35874453.
* Gandy, Matthew (2022). "Ghosts and monsters: reconstructing nature on the site of the Berlin Wall". Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers. 47 (4): 1120–1136. doi:10.1111/tran.12562. PMC 9804919.
* Gandy, Matthew (2022). "Chennai flyways: birds, biodiversity, and ecological decay". Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space. doi:10.1177/25148486221142491.
* Gandy, Matthew (2023). "Zoonotic urbanisation: multispecies urbanism and the rescaling of urban epidemiology". Urban Studies. doi:10.1177/00420980231154802.