Academic Career
- 2025-onwards: Professor of Urban and Regional Studies
- 2024-present: Associate Dean (Research & Innovation), School of Social Sciences and Humanities
- 2016-onwards: Reader in Human Geography, Loughborough University.
- 2012-2016: Senior Lecturer in Human Geography, Loughborough University.
- 2006-2011: Lecturer in Human Geography, Loughborough University.
Professional Responsibilities
- 2023- : Deputy Editor-in-Chief, Regional Studies
- 2020- : Board Member and Trustee, Regional Studies Association
- 2019- : Adjunct Professor, Hunan University, China
- 2013- : Editor, Urban and Regional Horizons, Regional Studies
- 2013- : Associate Director, GaWC
Prizes and Awards
- 2015: Vice Chancellor's Loughborough Academic Award of Excellence
2015: Jim Lewis Prize
2011: Routledge Regional Studies Association Award for Early Career Excellence
John’s research interests lie within the broad scope of political-economic geography, with a specific focus on the planning and governance of cities and regions. This work centres around three main themes.
Regions and Regional Theory
- The political construction of regions and regional spaces
- The relationship between regions, territoriality and relationality
- Theorising processes of regionalism and regionalisation
Urban and Regional Governance
- The uneven geographies of devolution and decentralisation
- City-regions and metropolitan regions
- Planning and governing cities and regions
Global Urban Studies
- Global city-region governance
- Researching globalization’s new urban form
- The practice of doing global urban research
John's teaching examines political and economic globalization with a focus on cities and regions.
Current Postgraduate Research Students
- Lingjia Zhao: Rural planning in China: planning the new countryside
- Carla Cannone: Climate compatible growth
- Jiaying Xue: Polycentricity in China’s ‘Greater Bay’ area
- Naomi Tan: From energy modelling to funding applications: what dataset must we need to financially realize climate-compatible growth?
Recent Postgraduate Research Students
- Swayam Das (2020) Placing Indian cities in the world city network: a firm-level spatial and temporal study
- Richard Sieff (2020) Decentralised energy governance in the global south: political decentralisation and energy access in Kenya
- Ozgur Sayin (2018) Istanbul - the making of a ‘global city' between East and West
- Chao Luo (2016) Integrative development and governance of ‘megaregion’: the case of Wuhan ‘1+8’ city circle
- Yifei Chen (2016) Understanding city expansion into larger city-regions: the case of the Yangtze River Delta
- David Rigby (2016) Nascent geographies of austerity – understanding the implications of a (re)new(ed) welfare-to-work discourse
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Harrison J and Gu H (2023) Arguing with megaregions: learning from China’s chéngshì qún Transactions in Planning and Urban Research 2(1) 53-70
- Harrison J (2022) Geography and public policy: taking responsibility in research and teaching Space & Polity 26(2) 88-93.
- Harrison J, Hoyler M, Derudder B, Liu X and Meijers E (2022) Governing polycentric urban regions Territory, Politics, Governance 1-9
- Harrison J, Galland D and Tewdwr-Jones M (2022) Planning Regional Futures. Routledge: London
- Harrison J and Gu H (2021) Planning megaregional futures: spatial imaginaries and megaregion formation in China Regional Studies 55(1) 77-89.
- Harrison J, Galland D and Tewdwr-Jones M (2021) Regional planning is dead, long live planning regional futures Regional Studies 55(1) 6-18.
- Sayin O, Hoyler M and Harrison J (2020) Doing comparative urbanism differently: conjunctural cities and the stress-testing of urban theory Urban Studies
- Harrison J (2020) Seeing like a business: rethinking the role of business in regional development, planning and governance Territory, Politics, Governance
- Zimmermann K, Galland D and Harrison J (eds.) (2020) Metropolitan Regions, Planning and Governance. Springer.
- Paasi A, Harrison J and Jones M (2018) New consolidated regional geographies in Paasi A, Harrison J and Jones M (eds.) Handbook on the Geographies of Regions and Territories. Edward Elgar: Cheltenham.
- Harrison J and Hoyler M (eds.) (2018) Doing Global Urban Research. Sage: London.