During 2011-2012, the Department of Urban Studies & Planning will host a series of high-profile speakers and panels on a wide-range of topics related to the future of cities, planning, participation, economies, technology, design, and development. This series is part of a multi-year initiative in the department to raise cutting-edge questions about the field in an era of rapid change.

Luc Anselin is the Director and Walter Isard Chair at the School of Geographical Sciences and Urban Planning at Arizona State University. He is also the Director of the GeoDa Center for Geospatial Analysis and Computation. He has previously held appointments at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, where he directed the Spatial Analysis Laboratory in the Department of Geography and was a Senior Research Scientist at the National Center of Supercomputing Applications (NCSA), the University of Texas at Dallas, West Virginia University, the University of California, Santa Barbara, and the Ohio State University. He has held (joint) appointments in a range of disciplines, including Geography, Urban and Regional Planning, Economics, Agricultural and Consumer Economics, Political Economy, and Political Science.