Dr Mike Hodson

Senior Research Fellow and Associate Director of SURF

• Joule House Room 2.01
• T: +44 (0)161 295 4018
• M: +44 (0)7970 242219
• E: m.hodson@salford.ac.uk
• SEEK: Research profile

Varies daily depending on meetings with external clients and project collaborators and the need to undertake fieldwork for externally funded projects.

I am an Associate Director of SURF and Senior Research Fellow, having joined SURF in 2003 as a Research Fellow.

Prior to joining SURF I completed degrees in social and political studies at Sheffield (1996), communications policy at City University, London (1997) and my doctorate at Salford (2004). My research interests focus on urban, regional and community transitions to low-carbon economies, the ways in which this may or may not happen and understandings of the lessons to be learned from such processes. I have developed projects funded by the European Commission, UK research councils, sub-national government and through private consultancy. These have principally addressed relationships between sub-national territories and the reconfiguration of their key socio-technical infrastructures in a period of globalisation, neoliberalisation and in a context of the challenges posed by climate change and resource constraint.

I have published and presented widely on this agenda. I have done so for academic, practitioner and policy audiences, in the UK and internationally. Most recently Mike has written World Cities and Climate Change (2010, Open University Press, Maidenhead) with Simon Marvin and has edited an international collection on Cities and Low Carbon Transitions (2011, London, Routledge) with Harriet Bulkeley, Vanesa Castan Broto and Simon Marvin. I also review journal articles in urban studies, science and technology studies and innovation studies.

I am currently leading on SURF’s involvement in the EPSRC Urban Retrofit project and I am providing senior research support to the Greater Manchester Local Interaction Platform for Mistra – Urban Futures.

1. Socio-technologies and organising the re-scaling of territoriality

This aspect of my research interests is concerned with macro level debates around the role of the national state, in a context of globalisation and neo-liberalisation, and its reconfiguring of Relationships, political economy and the regulatory fixes which create the conditions within which technology, innovation and constant re-invention of territories becomes seen as increasingly desirable or even 'naturalised'. It sits above the two themes below.

2. Governance, socio-technical transitions to sustainability and territoriality

This theme addresses the governance of socio-technical transitions to sustainability in relation to different scales of territory. In the context of the issues raised above, my interests are related to how we understand the ways in which historically different spatial contexts are re-shaped, in what ways they offer different examples of transitions to sustainability, and what comparative lessons we can draw from this. It explores, analyses and assesses the extent to which place-based transitions are purposively shaped or constrained and the reasons for this.

3. Socio-technical transitions: politics and processes of participation

This third theme seeks to move the debate on by developing ways in which the governance of socio-technical transitions may be formulated differently through an active political engagement which shapes processes of participation in socio-technical transitions.

2004 - PhD Institute for Social Research/Gemisis, University of Salford.

Integrated Futures? Understanding Relationships between SMEs and the Internet. (Pass

1997 - MA Communications Policy Studies, City University, London.

1996 - BA (Hons) Social and Political Studies, University of Sheffield.

For a full list of publications, including books, book chapters, peer reviewed journal articles, research reports and articles for the practitioner press see here.