Michael Storper

Distinguished Professor
Department: Urban Planning
storper@ucla.edu
Website
Keywords: Economics, Development, Brazil

Michael Storper is an economic geographer whose research is about the geography of economic development. In one major recent project, he examined why cities and metropolitan regions grow and decline. His latest big project on this subject was published in 2015 in a book entitled The Rise and Fall of Urban Economies: Lessons from San Francisco and Los Angeles (Stanford University Press). Professor Storper also published a closely-related theory book on how to understand divergent regional and urban development: Keys to the City (Princeton University Press, 2013).

Beyond his core disciplinary skills in economic geography, his work on occasion draws on, and has links to, economics, sociology. and urban studies. Storper holds concurrent appointments in Europe, where he is Professor of Economic Sociology at the Institute of Political Studies (“Sciences Po”) in Paris, and a member of its research Center for the Sociology of Organizations (CS0), and at the London School of Economics, where he is Professor of Economic Geography.

Storper is currently completing a five-year research project on the divergent economic development of the Los Angeles and San Francisco Bay Area economies since 1970, which is the subject of his next book, The Rise and Fall of Urban Economies: Lessons from San Francisco and Los Angeles. SFGate calls it “a must-read for anyone who cares about the future of California and cities more broadly.”