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Sheila R. Foster is the Scott K. Ginsburg Professor of Urban Law and Policy at Georgetown University. She holds a joint appointment with the Law Center and the McCourt School of Public Policy.
For the upcoming academic year ’23-’24, Foster will be a Visiting Professor at Columbia University’s Climate School.
Foster is a recognized authority on the role of cities and city leadership in promoting social and economic welfare, achieving environmental and climate justice, improving global governance, and addressing racial inequality.
From 2017-2020, she served as the chair of the advisory board for the Global Parliament of Mayors and is currently a member of the New York City Mayor's Panel on Climate Change (serving as co-chair of the Equity Workgroup). Foster is co-editor and a founding Advisory Board member of the Journal of Climate Resilience & Climate Justice.
Foster also co-directs LabGov, a ground-breaking platform that pioneered the award-winning Co-City approach applied in various cities around the world, helping to reorient cities toward more collaborative and place-based solutions to urban challenges. This approach is detailed in her award-winning MIT Press book, Co-Cities: Innovative Transitions Toward Just and Self-Sustaining Communities (with Christian Iaione).
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Professor Foster’s influential scholarship focuses on the intersection of law, policy, and governance with a specific focus on urban communities and cities. She is one of the leading scholars of environmental and climate justice, recognized by the IUCN Academy of Environmental Law with its 2018 Senior Scholarship Award. Her most recent work analyzes city governance through the lens of the “urban commons” and the idea of the city as a commons as most comprehensively examined in her recently published MIT Press Book, Co-Cities (with Christian Iaione).
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