Peter Marcuse, a planner and lawyer, is Professor Emeritus of Urban Planning at Columbia University in New York City. He has a J.D. from Yale Law School, and a Ph. D in planning from the University of California at Berkeley, was Professor of Urban Planning at UCLA, and President of the Los Angeles Planning Commission and member of Community Board 9M in New York City. His fields of research include city planning, housing, the use of public space, the right to the city, social justice in the city, globalization, and urban history, with some focus New York City. He has taught in both West and East Germany, Australia, the Union of South Africa, Canada, Austria, Spain, Canada, and Brazil, and written extensively in both professional journalists and the popular press. His most recent books include, co-edited with with Ronald van Kempen, Globalizing Cities: A New Spatial Order?, Blackwell, 1999, and Of States and Cities: The Partitioning of Urban Space, 2002, Oxford University Press, and most recently, a co-edited volume, Searching for the Just City, Routledge, forthcoming. His current projects include a historically-grounded political history of urban planning, the formulation of a theory of critical planning, including the attempt to make urban theory useful to the U.S. Right to the City Alliance, and an analysis of the financial crisis and proposals to deal with the subprime mortgage defaults in the United States.