John Garrard Stehlin

I grew up in central Virginia and first came to Vassar as an undergraduate majoring in Political Science with a correlate in Hispanic Studies. Following graduation, I worked as a bicycle mechanic for several years in Philadelphia, before moving to Oakland, California to work on a PhD in Geography at UC Berkeley, where I also continued working at a bike shop in San Francisco on weekends. After completing my PhD, I taught at Berkeley and the University of San Francisco before moving to the University of Manchester as a research associate at the Sustainable Consumption Institute. I then spent several years as an Assistant Professor at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, before jumping at the chance to return to my roots at Vassar.

I am an urban economic geographer focused on the political economy and ecology of urban mobility and built environment transformations in the context of climate crisis. I have followed these issues through two main threads of scholarship. The first concerns the political-economic and sociospatial inequalities in the planning and distribution of low-carbon mobility in the United States, focusing on bicycle and pedestrian infrastructure, bicycle sharing systems, and shared mobility platforms. This thread culminated in my first book, Cyclescapes of the Unequal City: Bicycle Infrastructure and Uneven Development (University of Minnesota Press, 2019) as well as Urban Platforms and the Future City: Transformation in Infrastructure, Governance, Knowledge, and Everyday Life with coeditors Mike Hodson, Julia Kasmire, Andrew McMeekin, and Kevin Ward (Routledge, 2021). The second examines the political economy and ecology of urban highway removal, retrofitting, and reconfiguration in the US and Spain, focusing on questions of urban climate change mitigation, redevelopment politics, and (stalled) mobility transitions in Dallas, Rochester, Bilbao, and Madrid. My second monograph, tentatively titled Afterlives of Automobility, is under contract with the University of Minnesota Press. I have also begun exploring a third thread on novel combinations of sprawl and density in contemporary patterns of American urbanization, and I am particularly interested in comparing these patterns between urban regions.

At Vassar, I teach courses in urban geography (GEOG/URBS 250) and urban political ecology (GEOG/URBS 322), and in the future I plan to offer courses on transportation and mobility, American cultural landscapes, and qualitative research methods, as well as teaching Global Geography (GEOG 102). I am keen to mentor students interested in issues like urban development and gentrification, transportation (especially alternative mobility), climate change mitigation, and infrastructure.

In my spare time, I enjoy cycling (on and off pavement), running, hiking, whitewater kayaking, and fixing things.