Samuel Tabory

Sam Tabory is a second-year PhD student. He studies the governance and negotiation of urban infrastructure transitions, paying attention to questions of system scale and boundary. He is interested in how transitions and alternative urban-regional governance logics interact with evolving spatial and temporal understandings of urban crisis under conditions of global environmental change and rising resource scarcity. Comparative and global perspectives inform his work. Rapid urbanization and the growth of secondary/tertiary cities are of particular interest to him, including the diverse ways in which they are accounted for and activated in national urbanization strategies. In addition to place-based transitions, Sam studies science-policy dialogues on the topic of urban transitions, focusing on how ‘city types’ mediate socio-technical understandings of urban systems change.

Prior to doctoral studies, Sam worked in urban science-policy engagement for a Sustainability Research Network supported by the US National Science Foundation and as a research associate with the global cities research team at the Chicago Council on Global Affairs. He has also held project management positions with international NGOs in Latin America. Professionally, he has contributed to reports commissioned by UN Environment, the World Bank, and NATO. His scholarly work has been published in Global Environmental Change.

Sam holds master’s degrees in urban planning and Latin American studies from the University of Texas at Austin, where his thesis and fieldwork focused on coproduced service provisioning in informal settlements. He holds a bachelor’s degree in Latin American Studies from Tulane University.