I am a professor of individualized studies and sociology at NYU, where I am the founding director of the Urban Democracy Lab, a center that currently works with more than a dozen housing rights organizations in the US and abroad on visioning plausible alternatives to market-based housing. I am also a senior fellow for housing at The Action Lab. I am a Brazilian-born and New York City-based activist scholar, and I have always worked at the intersection of utopian imaginings and plausible policies. My first set of projects grew out of my dissertation on Porto Alegre’s system of participatory democracy, followed by some years of work on actually existing civic life and its limits both in Brazil and the US, before turning to decommodifying housing.
I earned my PhD in sociology in 2001 from the University of Wisconsin Madison, specializing in critical theory, urban sociology, political sociology, and cultural sociology. While I am, in principle, method-agnostic, I prefer to, when I can, research things ethnographically, and believe there is such a thing as an ethnographic sensibility. I am the author or co-author of seven books, and two edited volumes, and more than fifty academic articles and book chapters. I collaborate whenever I can and I endeavor to research non-extractively. I regularly write in public-facing outlets, and have published in the likes of The New York Times, Dissent, NACLA Report on the Americas, and, most often, at the Boston Review.
My latest book, Housing is a Social Good (University of Chicago Press), with H. Jacob Carlson, explores how market-based thinking came to dominate housing debates in the US and how to reverse that trend. I am incidentally, one of the founders of the Participatory Budgeting Project, and continue to be consulted on implementations of participatory democracy and co-governance.
Thank you for visiting my page. After a long time, I’ve decided to have a web presence again. You’ll find here essays, syllabi, and interesting things related to sociology, broadly conceived.
This website is also not paid for by any university resources.
gianpaolo baiocchi 