Gandy, Matthew 1965-

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GANDY, Matthew 1965-

PERSONAL: Born May 4, 1965 in London, England. Education: University of Cambridge, B.A., 1988; London School of Economics, Ph.D., 1992.

ADDRESSES: Offıce—Department of Geography, 26 Bedford Way, London WC1H 0AP, England. E-mail— [email protected].

CAREER: College professor, lecturer, and author. University of Sussex, School of European Studies, lecturer in geography, 1992-97; University College London, lecturer in geography, 1997-2002, reader in geography, 2002.

MEMBER: Institute of British Geographers, Association of American Geographers, International Water History Association, British Film Institute.

AWARDS, HONORS: Society of Architectural Historians Spiro Kostof award, 2003, for Concrete and Clay.

WRITINGS:

Recycling and the Politics of Urban Waste, St. Martin's Press (New York, NY), 1994.

Concrete and Clay: Reworking Nature in New YorkCity, MIT Press (Cambridge, MA), 2002.

(Editor with Alimuddin Zumla) The Return of theWhite Plague: Global Poverty and the New Tuberculosis, Verso Press (New York, NY), 2003.

SIDELIGHTS: Matthew Gandy is a geography professor who has special interests in urban environmental problems, philosophies, and politics. In his first book, Recycling and the Politics of Urban Waste, he asks the question of what to do with the enormous amount of waste that confronts urban dwellers. He examines this question by researching the historical recycling attempts in three major cities: London, New York, and Hamburg. Gandy maintains that recycling and waste management must be looked at in a political context and the state plays a crucial role in helping to shift citizens' behavior and practice. Scott Freeman, reviewing for Environment, called this book "a well-documented attempt to describe . . . the issues faced by waste management policymakers."

Gandy's second book also has a major environmental theme coupled with his knowledge of urban issues. Concrete and Clay: Reworking Nature in New York City is an environmental history of this major American city, focusing on how nature has been revised to create a modern "metropolitan nature." The book is divided into five specific sections: creating an effective water supply system, redefining the issue of public space, the development of landscaped highways, the transformation that environmental politics had on the Latino sections of the city in the 1960s and 1970s, and the present-day environmental movement. A Publishers Weekly reviewer commented that Gandy "deftly and provocatively connects issues of health, politics, economics, and urbanology in a compulsively readable and illuminating cultural analysis." Yvonne Rydin, in her review for Local Environment, wrote, "his argument is worked through a series of detailed and beautifully illustrated case studies, grounded on extensive historical research."