Madeleine Galvin

Madeleine Galvin is a doctoral student in the City and Regional Planning program at the University of Pennsylvania Weitzman School of Design and a Fontaine Fellow. Her research is focused on race, redevelopment, and housing in the U.S. and France. She is interested in the ways redevelopment practices utilize colorblind or race neutral language and logics to naturalize dispossession and displacement and how these practices shift alongside changes in the broader political economy. Her research explores how these practices parallel and intersect with community-led efforts to contest and reshape redevelopment and articulate claims to space, community, and place.

Prior to her doctoral studies, Madeleine completed a Master of City Planning at UC Berkeley, where she wrote a thesis demonstrating how the Atlantic Yards redevelopment project in downtown Brooklyn represents a contemporary form of urban renewal. She studied Italian, urban studies, and creative writing for her undergraduate degree at Cornell University. In between her studies, she worked as a research analyst at the WRI Ross Center for Sustainable Cities, where she collaborated with city stakeholders around the world to study and produce knowledge on urban transformation. Her professional and educational experiences have deeply influenced her interests in humanistic research and blending the study of languages and literature with more traditional historical and social science methods.