Kathy Pain

Kathy Pain is a Professor in the Henley Business School, Department of Real Estate & Planning, at the University of Reading. She is a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society / Institute of British Geographers, a Corporate Member of the Royal Town Planning Institute and a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences. She joined the GaWC team of researchers at Loughborough University in 1999 and has since led GaWC’s Global City Planning research engaging with organisations in the UK, Europe, North America, the Middle East and the Pacific Asia region.

Her focus is the changing business, economic and spatial relations of cities and regions under conditions of contemporary globalisation and the challenges for sustainable development and policy. Her European Regional Development Fund INTERREG IIIB research on the sustainable management of polycentric mega-city regions with Sir Peter Hall, published in The Polycentric Metropolis: Learning from Mega-City Regions in Europe (2006, Earthscan), has informed policy thinking worldwide. She led the cities research in the European Spatial Observation Network ‘TIGER’ study published in Changing Urban and Regional Relations in a Globalizing World: Europe as a Global Macro-Region (2014, with Gilles Van Hamme, Edward Elgar). Her recent research for the Urban Land Institute and New Climate Economy into the association between sustainable city density and risk-adjusted real estate investment is being drawn on in a current 6-years UK Prevent Partnership consortium project. Kathy’s focus is how human health evidence can inform city brownfield redevelopment social impact performance and counter spatial health inequalities.