Joseph Heathcott is the Director of the Laboratory for Urban Spatial and Landscape Research, and Professor of Urban and Environmental Studies at The New School.  His work examines the metropolis and its diverse cultures, institutions, and environments within a comparative and global perspective. His research and teaching interests include: cities real and imagined; social and spatial inequality; history and theory of the built environment; race, class, and urban planning; urban redevelopment; cities as living archives of creativity, urbanity, and design.

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Prof. Heathcott has taught and widely, including as a Distinguished Fellow at the CUNY Graduate Center, Visting Scholar at Sciences Po in Paris, Mellon Distinguished Fellow at the Princeton University School of Architecture, U.S. Fulbright Distinguished Chair to the United Kingdom, and Senior Visiting Scholar at the London School of Economics. He has also given workshops and master classes at the University of Maastricht, the Catholic University of Lisbon, the University of Vienna, the Royal College of Art in London, Harvard GSD, the Netherlands Institute for Cultural Analysis.   Currently (2024) he is a Visiting Fellow at the Russell Sage Foundation.

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Heathcott's work has appeared in a range of venues, from books and magazines, to exhibits, blogs, 'zines, and journals of opinion.  He has been awarded fellowships and grants from the Russell Sage Foundation, the Gerda Henkel Foundation, U.S. Fulbright, the American Council of Learned Societies, the Erasmus Institute, the Mellon Foundation, The Global Architectural History Teaching Collaborative/MIT, the Brown Center for the Humanities, and the Zolberg Institute for Migration Studies. He frequently volunteers his time with neighborhood groups and community organizations around issues of planning, preservation, and urban design.

 

Currently, Heathcott serves as Associate Editor of the Journal of the American Planning Association, and on the editorial boards of the Journal of the Society for Architectural Historians, Planning Perspectives, the International Journal of Architectural Education, and on the advisory board for the Global Urban History Project.  He also served on the Boards of Directors of the Center for Urban Pedagogy and the Urban History Association, and as President of the Society for American City and Regional Planning History. 

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