Dr Asa Roast

Profile

Asa Roast is an urban geographer with expertise in urbanisation, urban planning, alternative economics, peri-urban spaces, and contemporary China. His research asks what formal and informal systems emerge when people live together in shared space. Across the various research projects he has worked on—from fieldwork in Chinese cities to speculative game spaces—his work investigates the boundaries and breakdowns of formal systems: how infrastructures, imaginaries, and institutions produce spaces of creativity, improvisation, and possibility. His research has contributed insights to public and policy discussions on urban governance, housing, and the social impacts of planning.

PhD Supervision

Dr Roast welcomes proposals from potential PhD students interested in critical approaches to urbanisation, urban systems, and everyday life. He is particularly keen to supervise projects that combine detailed empirical research—especially ethnographic or other qualitative methods—with a strong theoretical ambition. He is supportive of work that takes marginal, informal, or experimental spaces seriously as sites of both social practice and conceptual insight, whether in relation to infrastructure, housing, alternative political economies, or urban governance.

About me

I became an urban geographer by way of training in history, anthropology, Chinese language, and a lot of self-organised reading groups. Eclecticism and intellectual curiosity is important to me. I have written and researched on digital spectacle, Dungeons and Dragons, verticality, clean air zones, financialisation, Japanese pop music, ethnographic map-making. I released an album of field recordings from my doctoral fieldwork. I’m interested in contemporary critical theory, experimental music, art, and games.

Responsibilities

• Study Abroad Coordinator

Research interests

I'm interested in rural-urban transitions, urban peripheries, commons, infrastructure, urban planning, informality, and socio-technical imaginaries. My approach is informed by critical political economy perspectives in the tradition of Lefebvrian critical urban geography, and I'm interested in understanding what opportunities urban spaces provide for emancipatory politics. While my early research was grounded in 20 months of ethnography in urban China, I’m increasingly interested in China as one of several terrains through which to explore wider questions of urban governance and experimentation. My research uses qualitative methods including ethnography. and I am interested in a range of contemporary social theory including decolonial urban studies and planning theory, STS, and critical political economy.

My doctoral research involved long-term fieldwork in Chongqing, southwest China which led to me publishing on informal urban commons emerging in wastelands, the politics of 'weird' architecture, and public housing. More recent projects have explored the politics of displacement, the research potential of tabletop roleplaying games, and discourse of wanghong urbanism. I lead the WUN-funded project 'Zoning Urbanisation' which compares how new policy zones in China, the UK and Latin America seek to manage urbanisation and the implications for residents living in and around these spaces.

Generally, what I find interesting in geography is the boundaries and edges of social and technical systems. The enclaves, peripheries, and alternative spaces inside and outside of capitalism and urban life where existing systems are breaking down, producing unforeseen outcomes, or evolving into something new. That informs my interest in the commons, alternative economics, extended urbanisation, and informality. It also underpins an epistemological focus on everyday life and different experimental ways of producing and sharing social and technical knowledge.

Qualifications

• PhD Social Geography (UoL)
• MA Social and Cultural Geography (UoL)
• MA Chinese Studies (SOAS)
• BA History (UoL)

Professional memberships

• Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society
• Fellow of Higher Education Academy

Student education

I teach on a range of undegraduate modules related to urban and economic geography on the BA Human Geography programme, and occasionally contribute to postgraduate teaching.

Research groups and institutes

• Social Justice, Cities, Citizenship