Michael Hooper is an Associate Professor of Urban Planning at Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design. He previously worked for several years with the United Nations Development Programme, including a year posted to the Kenya Ministry of Planning in Nairobi. Hooper’s research focuses on the politics of land use, housing and urbanization, with particular interest in issues of displacement, disasters and participatory governance. He currently works on projects related to forced evictions and involuntary resettlement in East Africa, the politics of post-disaster reconstruction in Haiti, the dynamics of rapid urbanization in Mongolia, and aboriginal housing policy in Canada. At the GSD, Hooper leads the Urban Planning and Design thesis program and serves as Director of the Social Agency Lab, an interdisciplinary research group that studies the ways in which individuals, institutions and organizations shape social outcomes in cities.
Professor Hooper began university at National Taiwan Normal University in Taipei and received undergraduate and master’s degrees from McGill University and MIT. He completed his PhD at Stanford University, where he conducted research on forced evictions and resettlement in Tanzania. He has been a visiting research fellow at the University of Oxford and the Nordic Africa Institute in Uppsala, Sweden. Professionally, he is a chartered town planner in the United Kingdom and a certified planner in the United States and Canada. He has received a number of awards and fellowships, including a doctoral fellowship from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada and the Graham Family, Robert Kirby and Richard Goldsmith Fellowships from Stanford University. He received the Urban Planning and Design teaching award from GSD students in 2011, 2013 and 2014. Hooper remains affiliated with the United Nations as a member of the Technical Advisory Committee for the UN Equator Prize.