James Biles is a newly affiliated faculty member in the MS Program in Urban Sustainability. An Associate Professor in the Colin Powell School for Civic and Global Leadership since 2009, Jim is also affiliated with CCNY’s International Studies Program and the PhD Program in Earth and Environmental Sciences at the CUNY Graduate Center.
As an economic geographer, Jim’s research and praxis are situated at the confluence of social and economic processes, development policy, and local livelihoods, primarily in Mexico and Latin America. In light of the deep-seated changes in the role of government and the prevailing ideology of development, his work relies heavily on fieldwork, including large-scale household surveys, and attempts to incorporate the knowledge and experiences of those excluded from prevailing models of development while highlighting agency – the place-specific practices and strategies that people employ for the purposes of improving livelihoods. Jim’s current projects focus on the contradictions of decent housing policy in Mexico, identifying housing vulnerability and possible interventions to promote resilience in coastal areas of the Yucatán Peninsula, and the social, economic and environmental factors contributing to the proliferation of bottled water in southeastern Mexico. His most recent paper, A Multi-scale Analysis of Urban Warming in Residential Areas of a Latin American City, recently appeared in the Journal of Planning Education and Research (https://doi.org/10.1177/0739456X20923002). These scholarly activities have been funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF) and its Mexican equivalent (CONACYT).
During the past decade, Jim has taught classes on Social Change in Developing Countries, Globalization, Development Theory, Geography and the Global Economy, Research Methods, and the Nature of Scientific Research. During Spring 2020, he introduced a new class, Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Water: Theory, Policy and Governance, for students in the Sustainability Program. He is also planning a capstone project for Sustainability students investigating the social and environmental implications of Newark’s ongoing municipal water crisis.
Jim earned his undergraduate degree in Urban and Environmental Studies at Ohio University and his Ph.D. in Economic Geography at Michigan State University (2001). He has been a member of the American Institute of Certified Planners (AICP) and served as a consultant for the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) and the State of Yucatán (Mexico) Beyond CUNY, Jim also serves as Director of In Situ, a New York-based policy research center that collaborates with local community organizations and other stakeholders to develop and evaluate place-based solutions to social and economic problems in the US and Mexico. He lives with his wife and the youngest of their three children in Dutchess County; although the current COVID-19 pandemic has intervened, they try to spend a couple months each year in Mexico’s Yucatán Peninsula, Jim’s research base and segunda patria.
