He teaches in urban anthropology, cultural anthropology and environmental anthropology, and directs the Center for Place Culture and Politics . His environmental work is largely theoretical, focusing on questions of the production of nature. His urban interests include long term research on gentrification, including empirical work in North America and Europe and a series of theoretical papers emphasizing the importance of patterns of investment and disinvestment in the the real estate market. His interests in social theory include political economy and marxism and lie behind his theoretical work on uneven development. From the global to the local scales, he argues, our spatial worlds are constructed and reconstructed as expressions of social relations and especially as expressions of capitalist social relations.
Uneven development is in many way the hallmark of capitalism.
This has also led to considerable research on the construction of geographical scale. He co-edits Society and Space and sits on numerous editorial boards including Social Text and Capitalism, Nature, Socialism .