Phil Ashton Ph.D.,
Assistant Professor
Phil Ashton joined the Urban Planning and Policy Program at UIC as an Assistant Professor in August 2005. After an initial training as a political scientist and an urban planner, he worked as a technical assistance provider for existing and startup consumer cooperatives in the United States and Canada. For six years, he was a research associate at the Center for Urban Policy Research at Rutgers University, investigating neighborhood change in Newark, NJ and large scale urban redevelopment in Camden, NJ. He has also been a research consultant for the Fannie Mae Foundation.
Currently, Phil's research focuses on three inter-related areas. His primary interest lies in analyzing the industrial organization of US mortgage markets, with particular attention to the effects of financial restructuring on inner city neighborhoods. He is currently engaged in writing a series of analyses of the subprime mortgage market and the sources and dimensions of the mortgage crisis. His dissertation, which focused on subprime lenders and large financial conglomerates in inner city Chicago, was honored as the 2006 Best Dissertation in Planning in by the Association for Collegiate Schools in Planning.
A second line of research examines the neighborhood effects of broad changes in financial markets and urban policy, attempting to distinguish the different paths to neighborhood change that have accompanied the marketization of urban redevelopment. With his colleague Kathe Newman at Rutgers, he conducted a detailed study of real estate development in the West Side Park neighborhood in Newark, NJ. More recently, he was part of a team conducting a study of neighborhood changes produced by concentrated subprime lending in Chicago, carried out through the UIC City Design Center and funded by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation.
Third, Phil is interested in the regulatory regime governing the US financial system, and in the modes of credit market regulation capable of shaping a progressive path within financial sector reform. He has been particularly focused on the tensions and conflicts in various civil rights frameworks as they have been applied to questions of credit access. In 2008-2009, Phil was a Faculty Scholar at the Great Cities Institute at UIC, beginning a research project on the reshaping of rights and the transformation of citizenship through the management of financial crises. An interactive presentation of this work can be found here.
Phil has a Bachelor of Arts (Honours) from the University of Winnipeg, a Masters in Urban Planning from McGill University, and a Ph.D. from Rutgers University.
Courses
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UPP 501 Urban Space, Place and Institutions
UPP 530 Economic Development I: Analysis
UPP 533 Development Finance Analysis
UPP 545 Community Development PhD Seminar
UPP 542 Community Development II: Practice
UPP594 Community Reinvestment: Building Access to Capital
Research
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Housing finance; community economic development; inner city markets; financial geography; comparative urban policy; normative ethical theory in planning.
Publications
Ashton, Philip. 2009. An appetite for yield: The anatomy of the subprime mortgage crisis. Environment & Planning A 41 (6): . (PDF available here.)
Crump, Jeff, Newman, Kathe, Belsky, Eric, Ashton, Philip, Kaplan, David H., Hammel, Daniel J., and Wyly, Elvin. Cities destroyed (again) for cash: Forum on the US foreclosure crisis. Urban Geography 29 (8): 745-784. (PDF available here.)
Ashton, Philip. 2008. Advantage or disadvantage? The changing institutional landscape of underserved mortgage markets. Urban Affairs Review 43 (3): 352-402. (PDF available here.)
Pendras, Mark, Lake, Robert, and Philip Ashton. 2005. Review of Neil Brenner, Bob Jessop, Martin Jones, and Gordon Macleod, eds., State/Space. Environment & Planning D: Society and Space 23(4): 313-314. (PDF available here.)
Newman, Kathe, and Philip Ashton. 2004. Neoliberal Urban Policy and New Paths of Neighborhood Change in the American Inner City. Environment and Planning A 36 (7): 1151-1172. (PDF available here.)
Ashton, Philip, Lake, Robert, and Mark Pendras. 2004. Review of Nicholas Blomley, David Delaney, and Richard T. Ford, eds., The Legal Geographies Reader. Political Geography 23 (2): 229-231. (PDF available here.)
Contact
pashton@uic.edu
Room 231 (MC 348)
312-413-7599