Sheila R. Foster is the Scott K. Ginsburg Professor of Urban Law and Policy at Georgetown University. She holds a joint appointment with the Georgetown Law School and the McCourt School of Public Policy.  

 

Foster is a recognized authority on the role of cities and city leadership in promoting social and economic welfare, achieving environmental and climate justice, improving global governance, and addressing racial inequality. From 2017-2020, she served as the chair of the advisory committee for the Global Parliament of Mayors, is currently a member of the New York City Mayor's Panel on Climate Change, and is a former member of the Aspen Institute's Urban Innovation Group.


Foster also co-directs LabGov, an international applied research project that has pioneered an award-winning approach to economic development that enables local communities to become co-creators and stewards of urban revitalization in their neighborhoods. 


Her influential scholarship is published in top law journals like Yale, Berkeley, Harvard, Notre Dame and in books by NYU Press, MIT press, Cambridge University Press, and Oxford University Press. 


In addition to Georgetown, Foster has taught at a number of major U.S. and international universities including University of California at Berkeley, Rutgers University, Fordham University, Imperial College London, Karl-Franzens University School of Law (Graz), University of Paris X (Nanterre), Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna (Pisa), Luiss Guido Carli University (Rome), GIMPA University (Accra), and the Swiss Institute of Comparative Law (Lausanne).


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PUBLICATIONS

Professor Foster’s work focuses on the intersection of law, policy and governance with a specific focus on urban communities and cities. She is one of the leading scholars on environmental and climate justice, most recently recognized by the IUCN Academy of Environmental Law’s 2018 Senior Scholarship Award. Her work analyzes urban governance and the right to the city through the lens of the “commons” as most comprehensively examined in her forthcoming MIT Press Book, Co-Cities ( with Christian Iaione). Her work also focuses on the role of cities in international law and global governance and is exemplified by her forthcoming work City Networks and the Glocalization of Urban Governance in The Elgar Research Handbook of International Law and Cities (Janne Nijman and Helmut Aust, eds.) (with Chrystie Swiney)

ENVIRONMENTAL JUSTICE AND CLIMATE CHANGE

CO-CITIES AND URBAN COMMONS

LAND USE, PROPERTY AND URBAN DEVELOPMENT

CITIES AND GLOBAL GOVERNANCE

 

LABGOV

LabGov is an international network of theoretical, empirical, and applied research teams engaged in exploring and developing methods, policies, and projects that enable city residents to co-create and steward land, digital, and other resources in their communities.

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LabGov conceptualizes the city as a “commons,” or a shared resource, in order to help reclaim for city inhabitants more power in shaping urban space, in deciding how cities should grow and develop, and as a means of promoting greater access to urban resources and goods by a broader class of city inhabitants. 

 

NEWS AND STORIES

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SHEILA FOSTER GIVES SYLVESTER BAXTER LECTURE AT HARVARD GRADUATE SCHOOL OF DESIGN

November 19, 2020

“Co-Cities: Reimagining the City as a Commons”: In the U.S., and around the world, vacant and abandoned urban land and structures are more ubiquitous than most people realize. In this lecture, Professor Foster will argue why we should think about this urban infrastructure as a “commons” capable of meeting the social and economic needs of the most vulnerable urban populations.  Thinking of the city as a commons recognizes as legitimate, even innovative, the collective action of urban actors who utilize land and other infrastructure to construct informal settlements, community gardens and urban farms, mesh wireless networks,  and new limited equity housing and commercial spaces that are then collaboratively stewarded by an identified community or group of people.  Thinking of the city as a commons requires us to move beyond the public/private and market/state binaries when thinking about urban development and revitalization. It is in the space between public and private, market and state, where we can find a set of rich conceptual and practical solutions to enduring racial and economic inequities that continue to plague many communities around the world, particularly those on the margins—social, economic, and geographic—of so many cities.

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