Described by the New York Times as “America’s uber-geographer,” Joel Kotkin is an internationally-recognized authority on global, economic, political and social trends. His work over the past decade has focused on inequality and class mobility as well as how regions can address these pressing issues.

Mr. Kotkin is the Presidential Fellow in Urban Futures at Chapman University in Orange, California and Executive Director of the Houston-based Urban Reform Institute. He is Senior Fellow for Heartland Forward and Executive Editor of the widely read website NewGeography.com. He is a regular contributor to the City Journal, Daily Beast, Quillette and Real Clear Politics.

Kotkin recently completed several studies including on Texas urbanism, the future of localism, the changing role of transit in America, and, most recently, California’s lurch towards feudalism.

His next book, The Coming of Neo Feudalism: A Warning to the Global Middle Class, deals with the issue of declining upward mobility and growing inequality in almost all middle and high-income countries. Kotkin is also the author of eight previous books, including The Human City: Urbanism for the Rest of Us and the widely praised The New Class Conflict, which describes the changing dynamics of class in America. He is co-editor of the 2018 collection Infinite Suburbia.

Over the past decade, Mr. Kotkin has completed studies focusing on several major cities, including a worldwide study for the UK-based Legatum Institute on the future of London, Mumbai and Mexico City, and in 2010 completed an international study on “the new world order,” also for Legatum, that traced trans-national ethnic networks, particularly in East Asia. He has also done studies of New York, Los Angeles, New Orleans, Houston, San Bernardino, and St. Louis, among others.