About
Miriam Greenberg is a Professor of Sociology at the University of California Santa Cruz and co-director of the Center for Critical Urban and Environmental Studies. She earned her PhD in Sociology from the City University of New York Graduate Center. Her scholarly work includes authorship of several books such as Branding New York: How a City in Crisis was Sold to the World (Routledge, 2008), Crisis Cities: Disaster and Redevelopment in New York and New Orleans (Oxford, 2014) co-authored with Kevin Fox Gotham, and The City is the Factory: New Solidarities and Spatial Tactics in an Urban Age, co-edited with Penny Lewis (Cornell, 2017). Greenberg's research engages with urban and environmental justice issues, particularly in California, through public-facing projects like the Critical Sustainabilities project and No Place Like Home, which addresses the affordable housing crisis in Santa Cruz County. She is currently the principal investigator on the WUI Research for Resilience project, which addresses California's climate, conservation, and housing crises as part of the UCOP Climate Action Research Initiative. Her recent publication in PNAS outlines the conceptual framework for this project, focusing on the relational geographies of urban unsustainability and the entanglement of California's housing crisis with wildland-urban interface growth and climate change. Additionally, she serves on the editorial board of the IJURR Studies in Urban and Social Change book series at University of California Press. Her research interests encompass social theory, urban studies, geography, political ecology, disaster and crisis, sustainability studies, media and cultural studies, social movements, and housing, with a focus on cities such as New York City, New Orleans, Buenos Aires, and California.
Research topics
- Sociology
- Political Science
- Geography
- Political economy
- Public administration
- Law
- Economic geography
- Environmental planning
- Economic growth
- Economics
Selected publications
The relationship between social vulnerability and wildfire structure loss across California
International Journal of Disaster Risk Reduction · 2026-02-21
articleSenior authorThe relationship between social vulnerability and wildfire structure loss across California
SSRN Electronic Journal · 2025-01-01
preprintOpen accessSenior authorProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences · 2024-07-29 · 19 citations
articleOpen access1st authorCorrespondingOne of California's most pressing social and environmental challenges is the rapid expansion of the wildlands-urban interface (WUI). Multiple issues associated with WUI growth compared to more dense and compact urban form are of concern-including greatly increased fire risk, greenhouse gas emissions, and fragmentation of habitat. However, little is understood about the factors driving this growth in the first place and, specifically, its relationship to urban-regional housing dynamics. This paper connects work in urban social science, urban and regional planning, and natural sciences to highlight the potential role of housing crises in driving displacement from the urban core to relatively more affordable exurbs, and with this, WUI growth. We analyze this relationship in California, which leads the nation in lack of affordable housing, scale of WUI growth, and many associated WUI hazards, including wildfire. We offer three related arguments: first, that California's affordable housing crisis, with its effect of driving migration to exurban areas, should be recognized as a significant urban form-related sustainability challenge; second, that to understand this challenge scholars must expand the spatial scale and analytic toolkit of both urban and WUI analysis through relational, mixed methods research; and third, that political and programmatic efforts to address California's housing crisis should undergird efforts to address WUI growth and climate change. Ultimately, we argue that expanding access to affordable urban housing can produce a more sustainable and just urban form that mitigates WUI-related climate and environmental impacts and reduces the vulnerability of growing numbers of WUI residents living in harm's way.
Environmentalizing Urban Sociology
City and Community · 2023-10-31 · 11 citations
articleOpen accessSenior authorCorrigendum: Seeking Shelter: How Housing and Urban Exclusion Shape Exurban Disaster
DOAJ (DOAJ: Directory of Open Access Journals) · 2021-09-29
erratumOpen access1st authorCorresponding‘First publics’ as knowledge producers
2021-06-07 · 1 citations
book-chapter1st authorCorrespondingWhile public sociology has enjoyed a resurgence and rigorous debate since Michael Burawoy’s celebrated 2004 American Sociological Association presidential address, one area that has curiously lacked attention has been what most agree is academic sociology’s ‘first public’ – undergraduate students. Recent writings on public sociology recognize students as one of multiple publics; however, it is a public often defined as distinct and separate, acknowledging students as potential knowledge producers, but only in the context of their courses and in relation to their faculty. So compartmentalized, students often are not included in the central debates animating discussions about the future of public sociology. This chapter demonstrates how we might organically integrate undergraduates into public sociology as knowledge producers and how this approach can help address gaps and debates in the current conceptualization of public sociology more broadly. We draw on a multi-year local research project on the affordable housing crisis in Santa Cruz County, California, and outline an extended model of organic public sociology we call Community Initiated Student Engaged Research or CISER. The CISER model brings together three key groups of actors – undergraduate students, university researchers and community organizations/members – drawing on and extending the powers of previous cooperative ‘dyads’ between them.
The Right to the City and to the University: Forging Solidarity Beyond the Town/Gown Divide
2021 · 11 citations
- Sociology
- Political Science
- Sociology
Over the last fifty years, institutions of higher education have served as anchor institutions in cities’ broader neoliberal efforts to generate new economic sectors, attract the creative class, and build amenities that stimulate market-oriented redevelopment. These activities, combined with universities’ own neoliberal restructuring, including diminishing housing support for students and staff, have contributed to gentrification and displacement in neighborhoods surrounding universities, creating the context for interrelated struggles for the right to the city and the right to the university. Using Temple University in Philadelphia, and University of California Santa Cruz as case studies we examine how students, faculty, and other university actors are joining with organizations and movements in surrounding communities to resist restructuring and displacement. In doing so, these emerging coalitions are transcending the more divisive town/gown narrative, forging new solidarities that are reimagining more just and equitable futures for both the city and the university.
The Progressive Disjuncture on Land Use and Housing: Learning from the Leftmost City
New Labor Forum · 2021-08-14 · 1 citations
article1st authorCorrespondingSeeking Shelter: How Housing and Urban Exclusion Shape Exurban Disaster
DOAJ (DOAJ: Directory of Open Access Journals) · 2020 · 24 citations
1st authorCorresponding- Sociology
- Geography
- Economic geography
From extreme weather to infectious disease, disasters now arrive in ever more rapid succession, combining with and compounding one another with increasing complexity and potential for crisis. In this context I suggest a particularly important site for analysis and intervention: the chronic lack of affordable housing and broader processes of exclusion now prevalent in cities around the world. These dynamics, I argue, help drive increasing movement to and development in interface zones between urban, rural, and undeveloped areas. In so doing, they also are implicated in a range of “exurban disasters”, including wildfires and infectious disease, and in the broader crises these disasters generate for vulnerable populations. The article develops this relational argument across three moments. First, I posit contemporary dynamics of housing crisis and urban exclusion, which prevent people from finding adequate shelter in cities, as key drivers of displacement and settlement across various framings of urban interface zones — from the Wildlands Urban Interface [WUI] to the peri-urban fringe. I then explore how the increasingly forced settlement in these zones — themselves destabilized by prior processes of settler colonialism, neoliberal land-use planning, and climate change — contribute to both environmental and health related disasters. Here I focus on two contemporary cases: catastrophic wildfire in the WUI of California, and the emergence of zoonotic diseases in peri-urban regions around the world. Finally, with a focus on California, I explore how, once health and environmental disasters land and combine within a single location, inadequate housing increases the likelihood of multiple forms of exposure and susceptibility — e.g. to toxic smoke, respiratory ailments, and COVID. In conclusion, I argue for increased scholarly and political focus on the role of housing crises and urban exclusion in both the origins and outcomes of disaster. More scholarly and political work is needed that bridges city and hinterland, linking disaster research to critical approaches in housing studies and urban political ecology, together with wildfire ecology, epidemiology, and environmental stewardship.
International Journal of Urban and Regional Research · 2019-01-01
paratextOpen accessIJURR is the leading social science journal for urban studies. It publishes articles from a variety of disciplines and from many countries, including many articles on comparative topics. It is not restricted to any theoretical perspective but has consis tently published articles which take a critical stance towards existing theories and policies, and which apply theories and analyse empirical data in a rigorous way. IJURR's Interventions section presents shorter, sometimes contentious papers on recent developments in the fieldpolicy, practice and theoryand occasional coverage of truly groundbreaking convocations, mobilizations and reports. This section aims to create a space for provocation, critical reflection, heuristic propositions and initial reports on the use of new methodologies. It also features debates centered on articles published in this journal that have prompted controversy, conceptual breakthroughs and strong opinion among IJURR's readership. The Book Reviews section is a valuable resource for researchers, providing an informed, critical overview of important new publications. With a commitment to global and local issues, a cutting edge approach to linking theoretical development and empirical research, and a consistent demand for quality, IJURR is a groundbreaking force for intellectual debate.
Frequent coauthors
- 11 shared
Steven C. McKay
University of California, Santa Cruz
- 9 shared
Barbara Ferman
Temple College
- 9 shared
Thao Lee
University of California, Santa Cruz
- 7 shared
Eduardo Blumwald
Plant (United States)
- 7 shared
Teresa Dunn
University of Health Sciences
- 7 shared
David Daleke
Milbank Memorial Fund
- 7 shared
Bruce Demple
Stony Brook School
- 7 shared
Vera Bianchi
University of Padua
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