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Dr Francesca Froy

Fellow, Ordinary Fellow

Departmental Lecturer in Sustainable Urban Development

Oxford Lifelong Learning

PhD, MSc, BSc (UCL), MA (Reading)

Francesca Froy is a Departmental Lecturer for the Sustainable Urban Development Programme at the University of Oxford and an Honorary Lecturer at the Bartlett School of Planning, University College London. She is also an Honorary Senior Research Associate with the Bartlett School of Architecture.

Prior to her academic roles she worked for over twenty years in policy analysis and delivery, and until 2015 was a senior policy analyst at the OECD, where she led international reviews on local policy implementation, employment and skills strategies and local governance for the Centre for Entrepreneurship, SMEs, Regions and Cities. She has also researched and evaluated European policies, based at the Brussels office of the consultancy ECORYS. Francesca holds a PhD in Architecture from the Bartlett, UCL (2021), an MSc in Advanced Architectural Studies from UCL (2014), an MA in The Body and its Representation from the University of Reading (1996) and a BSc in Anthropology from UCL (1994).

Francesca’s research and teaching focuses on the systemic and network properties of cities. She recently published a book on this topic with Routledge called Rebuilding Urban Complexity: A Configurational Approach to Postindustrial cities. She is very interested in urban morphology, and the spatial configuration of urban street networks, and how this shapes movement, interaction and urban sustainability. She is currently putting these theories into practice as an Associate at the planning and architecture consultancy, Space Syntax. She also researches and writes in the field of evolutionary economic geography, where she explores the factors influencing economic diversification and economic complexity in cities. Her work in this field is published in multiple academic journals including the Cambridge Journal of Regions, Economy and Society, European Planning Studies and the Oxford Review of Economic Policy.