Leah Lazer is a PhD candidate in Urban Studies at the University of Basel, supervised by Prof. Dr. Nancy Odendaal. Her research examines how financialization and geopolitics shape the development of urban transport systems in the Global South.

Leah’s doctoral project, Geopolitics and Gridlock: Urban Mobility in the Age of Financialized Infrastructure, uses a nested mixed-methods design combining large-N quantitative analysis with comparative case studies. The first phase constructed a new dataset of 4,800 urban transport infrastructure projects across 1,200 cities, with quantitative analysis to document how private investment privileges capital-intensive, revenue-generating transport projects, and to identify polyaligned cities that receive transport infrastructure investment from competing geopolitical blocs. The second phase develops a causal mechanism framework for how financialization and geopolitics influence transport project selection and design, and tests it through case studies of public transport PPPs in Global South cities.

Leah holds an MSc in Regional and Urban Planning Studies from the London School of Economics and a BA in Food System Studies from Tufts University. Previously, over seven years at the World Resources Institute in Washington DC and London, she authored over a dozen peer-reviewed publications on urban planning, mobility, climate action, just transitions, and circular economy. Leah also worked as an Expert for ICLEI Europe, supporting local governments in implementing circular economy projects. Her work has been formally presented at the UN Climate Action Summit and COP26, featured as a chapter in The Climate City, and cited in the Wall Street Journal, The Guardian, and Time Magazine. She is an Area Editor for the journal Data & Policy (Cambridge University Press) and advises climate tech start-ups as a Domain Expert for Built Environment for Carbon13.

On a personal note, Leah used to run a mostly-vegan micro-bakery, founded a volunteer group that resettled a family of Afghan refugees in Washington DC, and participated in a month-long artist residency in rural Colombia. She lives in Freiburg im Breisgau, Germany.

• urban planning
• mobility
• infrastructure finance
• climate action
• just transitions