Stephen Collier

Climate change and urban planning, insurance, American emergency government, neoliberalism, Soviet and post-Soviet urban planning, social welfare, infrastructure, expertise and expert systems.

Stephen Collier studies city planning and urban governance from the broad perspective of the critical social science of expertise and expert systems. His work addresses a range of topics, including climate resilience and adaptation, emergency preparedness and emergency management, neoliberal reform, infrastructure, and urban social welfare. Collier examines both contemporary and historical topics, and is engaged with a number of disciplinary fields, including science and technology studies, governmentality studies, and cultural geography. A full description of projects and publications can be found here.

Climate Change, Urban Resilience, and Emergency Government

Collier’s current research examines urban resilience as a significant new paradigm and practice in city and regional planning. In a field originally oriented to a future vision of improvement and development, what does it mean—both theoretically and practically—that city planners must increasingly anticipate a future marked by ever more frequent and intense disasters? And how must urban governance and planning practice change to take up the challenge of climate adaptation? He is currently working on a range of research and editorial projects that examine issues such as fire risk and adaptive change in California, conceptual debates about resilience in the interpretive human sciences, the government of climate emergencies, and the relationship between finance and urban adaptation to climate change.

Past publications in this topic area address questions such as: the relationship between city planning and catastrophe insurance for hazards such as floods and fires; insurance and climate change; insurance and urban resilience; the historical development and current uses of catastrophe modeling in urban planning; infrastructure as a focal point for public participation in climate adaptation; and new intersections between design and resilience planning. 

Collier’s ongoing work on resilience and urban adaptation builds on longer-term research on the genealogy of emergency government in the United States, which resulted in a co-authored book, The Government of Emergency: System Vulnerability, Expertise, and the Politics of Security (Princeton University Press, 2021). The Government of Emergency examines the emergence of now taken-for-granted problems of emergency management—such as system vulnerability and preparedness—through the interlinked histories of air war and mobilization planning in the mid-20th century, and through preparedness planning in the early Cold War. This study connects emergency management to basic problems of modern government, such as the relationship between constitutional liberalism and crisis situations, and the role of technical expertise in democracy. Other publications connected to Collier’s work on emergency government address biosecurity, critical infrastructure protection, the distributed model of American emergency preparedness, and “vital systems security” as an important form of political rationality in modern societies.  

Socialist Planning and Neoliberal Reform

Prior to these projects on emergency government, disasters, and resilience, Collier studied Soviet city planning and post-socialist urban transformations in Russia in the context of “neoliberal” reform. His book Post-Soviet Social: Neoliberalism, Social Modernity, Biopolitics (Princeton University Press, 2011) examined the planning and construction of small industrial cities, which Soviet urban planners believed could overcome the pathologies of capitalist urbanization. This research also investigated post-Soviet reforms of these cities that targeted the mundane infrastructural and budgetary systems that underpinned the Soviet project of social welfare. Collier’s work in Russia showed that these reforms—often analyzed as “neoliberal”—sought to preserve key norms and systems that comprised the substantive economy of Soviet cities. Thus: post-Soviet social.

Collier extended this work on neoliberal reform in the post-Soviet context through a series of specific inquiries that reconceptualize neoliberalism by examining how new liberal thinkers have taken up concrete governmental problems. Among these are: the management of disaster risk and the status of technical expertise in democratic government. Collier has also written on methodological approaches to neoliberalism, in particular on Foucaultian alternatives to the critical conventional wisdom about neoliberalism.

Theory and Method

A final area of Collier’s scholarship is theory and methods in the interpretive social sciences. Beginning with Global Assemblages (co-edited with Aihwa Ong) he has explored an emerging body of work on modern science, technology, and expertise at the intersection of geography, sociology, anthropology, and science and technology studies. He has also written on new approaches to governmental rationality suggested by the late work of Michel Foucault and on methods in anthropology and related fields.

ENVDES 102 – City Planning and Climate Change: Adaptation and Resilience

CYPLAN 214 – Infrastructure Planning and Policy: Climate Planning and Urban Systems

CYPLAN 280C – Doctoral Seminars: Doctoral Colloquium

CYPLAN 281 – Planning Theory

Books

2021   The Government of Emergency: System Vulnerability, Expertise, and the Politics of Security (with Andrew Lakoff). Princeton University Press. 

2011   Post-Soviet Social: Neoliberalism, Social Modernity, Biopolitics. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Edited Books

2008   Biosecurity Interventions: Global Health and Security in Question (edited with Andrew Lakoff). New York: Columbia University Press.

2005    Global Assemblages: Technology, Politics, and Ethics as Anthropological Problems (edited with Aihwa Ong). Malden, Mass: Blackwell.

Journal Articles 

2025 “The Disaster Contradiction of Contemporary Capitalism: Resilience, Vital Systems Security, and ‘Post-Neoliberalism’” Geoforum 159. 

2021 “Design in Government: City Planning, Space-Making, and Urban Politics.” (with Anke Gruendel). Political Geography 97, 1-13.

A full description of projects and publications can be found here.