Biography
Michael Keith is the Director of the Centre on Migration, Policy and Society (COMPAS) at the University of Oxford (previously held from 2014-2019). He is the Director of the PEAK Urban Research programme. He was, until 2021, co-ordinator of Urban Transformations (The Economic and Social Research Council portfolio of investments and research on cities) and is the Co-Director of the Oxford Programme for the Future of Cities. He is also a Co-Investigator of the Open City research project.
His research focuses on migration-related processes of urban change. His most recent works include ‘Urban Transformations and Public Health in the Emergent City’, and African Cities and Collaborative Futures, both published by Manchester University Press and The Unfinished Politics of Race, published by Cambridge University Press in 2022.
He has experience outside the academy working in the community and voluntary sector and as a politician for twenty years in the East End of London, leader of a London local authority and founder, chair and board member of a wide range of urban regeneration companies and public/private partnerships. He also has several decades of experience in the voluntary sector, initially in organisations focusing on racism and the criminal justice system and more recently as the co-founder and chair of the Rich Mix Cultural Foundation, the largest multicultural arts centre in the UK.
Podcast
Mobility & Future Cities: The Direction Ahead
Podcast | Jacobs: If/When | 05/05/2020
Videos
Select Publications
Books
2025 Cities Rethought: A New Urban Disposition London: Polity (with Gautam Bhan, Sue Parnell, Edgar Pieterse)
2022 The Unfinished Politics of Race : Race, Governance and Mobilisation in British Society Cambridge: Cambridge University Press (with Les Back, Kalbir Shukra and John Solomos)
2021 African cities and collaborative futures: urban platforms and metropolitan logistics (co-edited with Andreza Aruska de Santos); Manchester: MUP
2020 Urban Transformations and public health in the emergent city (co-edited with Andreza Aruska de Santos) Manchester: MUP
Articles
2025 ‘Entanglements of Race and Migration in the (Open) City: Analytical and Normative Tensions of the Sociological Imagination’ (Michael Keith, Susannah Cramer-Greenbaum, Karim Murji, Steve Pile, John Solomos, Edanur Yazici, Ying Wang) Sociological Review 71, 1: 3-23
2025 ‘Uncovering the Colonial Histories of Three North London Housing Estates’ (Edanur Yazici, Steve Pile, Michael Keith, Karim Murji, John Solomos, and Susannah Cramer-Greenbaum) The London Journal.
2024 Keith, M. ‘Whose values? From the discrete to the continuous in how place and space matter in valuation studies’. Environment and Planning F, 3(4), 356-363.
2024 Espey, J; Keith, M.; Parnell, S.; Schwanen,T; and Seto, K.. "Designing policy for Earth’s urban future." Science 383, no. 6681 (2024): 364-367.
2024‘Representing London: Making and Claiming the City’ (Karim Murji, Michael Keith, Steve Pile, John Solomos, Edanur Yazici and Susannah Cramer-Greenbaum) City: Analysis of Urban Change, Theory, Action 28, 5-6: 793-811
2023 Planning Logics in east London In Susan S. Fainstein and John Forester (Eds) (2023): Resistance and Response in Planning, Planning Theory & Practice, DOI:10.1080/14649357.2023.2190681
2023‘Politicization, Postpolitics and the Politics of the Open City: Openness, Closedness and the Spatialisation of the Political’ (Steve Pile, Michael Keith, Edanur Yazici, Karim Murji, John Solomos, Eda Yazici, Susannah Cramer-Greenbaum) Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 41, 6: 1075–1093
2023 ‘A Progressive Sense of Place and the Open City: Micro-Spatialities and Micro-Conflicts on a London Council Estate’ (Steve Pile, Michael Keith, Karim Murji, Edanur Yazici and Susannah Cramer-Greenbaum, John Solomos) Geoforum 144, 1-11
2023 ‘ “London is Avocado on Toast”: The Urban Imaginaries of the #LondonIsOpen Campaign’ (Edanur Yazici, Karim Murji, Michael Keith, Steve Pile, John Solomos, Ying Wang) Urban Studies 60, 12: 2418-2435
2023 Keith, M., Birch, E., Buchoud, N.J., Cardama, M., Cobbett, W., Cohen, M., Elmqvist, T., Espey, J., Hajer, M., Hartmann, G. and Matsumoto, T., 2023. A new urban narrative for sustainable development. Nature Sustainability, 6(2), pp.115-117.
2023 Liu, Huazhen, Miao Yang, ChengHe Guan, Yi Samuel Chen, Michael Keith, Meizi You, and Monica Menendez. "Urban infrastructure design principles for connected and autonomous vehicles: a case study of Oxford, UK." Computational Urban Science 3, no. 1 (2023): 34
2023 Guan, ChengHe, Jairo A. Gómez, Pratyush Tripathy, Juan C. Duque, Santiago Passos, Tong Cheng, Ying Li, and Michael Keith. "Evaluating the impact of water protection policy on urban growth: A case study of Jiaxing." Environment and Planning B: Urban Analytics and City Science 50, no. 4 (2023): 1000-1019
2023 Guan, C., Tan, J., Li, Y., Cheng, T., Yang, J., Liu, C., & Keith, M. (2023). How do density, employment and transit affect the prevalence of COVID-19 pandemic? A study of 3,141 counties across the United States. Health & Place, 84, 103117
2022 Climate mobilities into cities: A systematic review of literature from 2011 to 2020 with Jin-ho Chung, Bhawani Buswala, and Tim Schwanen Urban Climate 45 (2022) 101252
2021 ‘Seasonal Greening approach combining big data and field observations. Urban Forestry and Urban Variations of park visitor volume and park service area in Tokyo: A mixed-method approach. (2021) with Guan, C., Song, J., KeiZhang, B., Akiyama, Y., Da, L., et a
2021 Gómez, Jairo Alejandro, ChengHe Guan, Pratyush Tripathy, Juan Carlos Duque, Santiago Passos, Michael Keith, and Jialin Liu. "Analyzing the spatiotemporal uncertainty in urbanization predictions." Remote Sensing 13, no. 3 (2021): 512.
2020 ‘The future of the future city? An interdisciplinary framing of the PEAK Urban globe, with Neave O’Clery, Susan Parnell and Aromar Revi, Cities, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cities.2020.102820
2020 ‘Delineating urban park catchment areas using mobile phone data: A case study of Tokyo’ with Guan, C., Song, J., Akiyama, Y., Shibasaki, R., & Sato, T. (2020).. Computers, Environment and Urban Systems, 81.
2020 ‘The influence of neighborhood types on active transport in China’s growing cities’. With Guan, C., Srinivasan, S., Zhang, B., Da, L., Liu, J., & Nielsen, C. (2020). Transportation Research Part D: Transport and Environment, 80.
