Biography

Andrew Harris grew up in Hanwell in West London. He graduated in geography from the University of Cambridge in 1999. After a year working in various places including Channel East Television and HMP Wormwood Scrubs, he completed a MSc in Modernity Space and Place at UCL in 2001 with a dissertation on ‘The artistic installation of Hoxton’.

Andrew undertook a ESRC-funded PhD at UCL Geography between 2001 and 2005. Entitled ‘Branding urban space: the creation of art districts in contemporary London and Mumbai’, this thesis critically examined the role of art and artists in recent processes of urban transformation. It detailed how attempts have been made since the early 1990s to brand four localities as art districts: Hoxton and Bankside in London and Lower Parel and Kala Ghoda in Mumbai.

After a year working away from academia, Andrew was as a part-time research fellow at UCL on an AHRC-funded project entitled ‘Liquid City: water, landscape and social formation in twenty-first century Mumbai’. This project explored the material and metaphorical dimensions to water and landscape in Mumbai, and included the making of a short documentary film. Between July 2007 and June 2008, Andrew was an ESRC Postdoctoral Fellow working on a project entitled ‘Rethinking the creative city: twenty-first century urbanism in London and Mumbai’. This further considered how culture is increasingly entangled with the economic restructuring of cities, the creation of new social identities, and shifts in the scale and scope of urban governance.

In September 2008, Andrew was appointed as a Lecturer in Urban Studies and Geography at UCL to support an innovative new MSc programme in Urban Studies, part of an interdisciplinary initiative at UCL called the Urban Laboratory. He was the primary investigator on an ESRC funded research project between 2009-2010 entitled 'Vertical urbanism: geographies of the Mumbai flyover' and is currently running an AHRC funded international research network on 'Creative city limits: urban cultural economy in a new era of austerity'. He is a member of the ESRC Peer Review College and Events Coordinator for the Royal Geographical Society-Institute of British Geographers Urban Geography Research Group.