Ken Salo

Law; justice; and transnational social movements.

I believe students best learn the knowledge, skills, and values necessary to question, imagine and create more just alternate futures when engaged in collaborative dialog circles with their local and trans-local cultural others. I teach a narrative centered pedagogy so students can uncover the concealed counter narratives from which to curate persuasive arguments for alternate futures. Students then evaluate how counter narratives challenge dominant social and spatial hierarchies and legalities of institutionalized power. I seek to create a learning space for critical dialogs with different peers to imagine and map existing and emergent modes of more just urban governance. My teaching praxis is to develop critical thinkers as creative collaborators engaged dialogs on struggles for social justice in and beyond conventional classrooms and multiple scales of practice.

Ken Salo is the 2026 Theodore B. and Doris Shoong Lee Chair in Real Estate Law and Urban Planning at the College of Environmental Design. Salo retired from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in August 2026 as a clinical associate professor in the Department of Urban & Regional Planning, where he taught international institutions, law and urban conflicts, social Inequalities and planning practices, and race, social justice and cities. His peer-reviewed publications include “Constructing Solidarities for Humane Urbanisms” (2019), “Cities and Inequalities in a Global and Neoliberal World” (2015), and “Contested Legalities in the Production of Post-apartheid South Africa’s Privatizing Seafood Fishery” (2007). He continues to collaborate with racialized subaltern urban collectives in South Africa, Northeast Brazil, and the Midwest USA to redress persistent inequalities and forge trans-local solidarities through a praxis of Building Race and Immigration Dialogs on Global Exclusions (BRIDGE) and Writing Manifestos for Human Urbanisms.

CYPLAN 290: SEM 00B

University of Illinois YMCA Faculty Award for Distinguished Volunteer Service, 2021

Salo, Ken (Principal Investigator), and Faranak Miraftab (Co-Principal Investigator). Building a Race and Immigration Dialog on Global Exclusions (BRIDGE).

Miraftab, Faranak, Ken Salo, Efad Huq, A. Aristizabal, and A. Ashtari, eds. Constructing Solidarities for Humane Urbanism. Champaign, IL: Publishing Without Walls, 2019.

Miraftab, Faranak, David Wilson, and Ken Salo, eds. Cities and Inequalities in a Global and Neoliberal World. New York: Routledge, 2015.

Salo, Ken. “Local Practices and Trans-local Solidarities.” In Cities and Inequalities in a Global and Neoliberal World, edited by Faranak Miraftab, David Wilson, and Ken Salo, 217–226. New York: Routledge, 2015.

Salo, Ken. “Contesting Liberal Legality: Informal Legal Cultures in Post-Apartheid South Africa's Privatizing Seafood Fishery.” African Studies Quarterly 9, no. 4 (Fall 2007).