GaWC Research Network: Kathy Pain

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Kathy Pain

GaWC Associate Director (Global City Planning)

Kathy Pain has been a contributor to GaWC research since 2000. At Loughborough, she was senior researcher for the GaWC 2000 Comparing London and Frankfurt as World Cities and the 2001 Financial Services Clustering and its Significance for London studies. She was principle investigator for the 2008 Project to Map and Measure the Absorptive Capacity of UK Cities and Regions and co-researcher for the 2009-10 study Benchmarking the World City Network: City Connectivities on the Eve of the Financial Crisis. As a GaWC associate director in the network, Kathy has participated in major European Union studies. At The Young Foundation London, she co-directed the INTERREG IIIB 2003-06 North West Europe POLYNET: Sustainable Management of European Mega-City Regions study with Sir Peter Hall and was co-author/editor of The Polycentric Metropolis: Learning from Mega-City Regions in Europe published by Earthscan. At Reading, she has been the UK principal investigator for the 2010-12, European Spatial Observation Network research project led by the Université Libre de Bruxelles, TIGER – Territorial Impact of Globalization for Europe and its Regions.

Kathy's research specializes in the role of advanced international financial and business services in global city/mega-city region formation and development. She specifically focuses on investigating the contribution of business practices and flows in knowledge-intensive cross-border service networks and clusters to city region economic growth and the implications for state policy, planning and professional practice on sustainable development. She is an expert member of the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors ‘Vision for Cities' Task Group focusing on global sustainability and an external expert to the 2006-13 German Research Foundation international research project Megacities-Megachallenge: Informal Dynamics of Urban Change. Her research has informed academic and policy thinking in the UK, Europe, North America and Pacific Asia. She has contributed to numerous state policy development initiatives and to cross-border policy cooperation projects in the European Union and in the East Asian Pan-Yellow Sea Region (PYSR).

Kathy Pain is Professor of Real Estate Development in the Henley Business School at the University of Reading, UK. She holds a PhD in geography and is a Corporate Member of the Royal Town Planning Institute and a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society. She has published extensively on global city-region development, policy and planning.