Dr Francesca Froy

Profile details

Biography

Francesca Froy is a Lecturer for the Master’s in Sustainable Urban Development at the University of Oxford and a Fellow of Kellogg College. She is an Honorary Lecturer at the Bartlett School of Planning and also a Senior Research Fellow at the Bartlett School of Architecture. Francesca sits on the Editorial Board for the Local Economy Journal. Prior to her academic roles she worked for over twenty years in policy analysis and delivery, and until 2015 was a senior policy analyst at the OECD, where she led international reviews on local policy implementation, employment and skills strategies and local governance for the Centre for Entrepreneurship, SMEs, Regions and Cities. She is an Associate at the planning and architecture consultancy, Space Syntax.

Francesca holds a PhD in Architecture from the Bartlett, UCL (2021), an MSC in Advanced Architectural Studies from UCL (2014), an MA in The Body and its Representation from the University of Reading (1996) and a BSc in Anthropology from UCL (1994). 

Research and teaching

Francesca’s research and teaching has three main strands. Firstly, she focuses on urban morphology and the spatial organisation of cities. Secondly, she explores evolutionary economic geography and the factors influencing economic diversification and economic complexity in cities. Within this field she has become increasingly focused on sustainable or regenerative economies and the green transition. Thirdly she analyses local governance and the ways in which local policy makers work together to govern economic and spatial complexity in cities. She has been involved in many international research projects while working for the OECD and on behalf of the European Commission (at the Brussels office of the consultancy ECORYS).

Keywords

Urban morphology, evolutionary economic geography, governance, skills, network analysis.

Journal articles, books and book chapters

Reports, policy and policy analysis