Rowan Arundel is Assistant Professor in Geographic Information Science (GIS) in the Department of Geography, Planning and International Development at the University of Amsterdam. Within the research institute AISSR, he is a member of the research group Political and Economic Geographies.

He is also the director of the GIS Lab, a state-of-the-art centre for Geographical Information Systems expertise and resources for research and education in the social sciences, embedded within the Faculty of Social and Behavioural Science.

His interests cover many areas of urban geography, planning and housing studies with a focus on dynamics of housing inequalities and interactions between housing, labour and welfare, as well as more broadly spatial analysis and macro and micro quantitative methods.

He is the recipient of an NWO Veni fellowship from 2021-2025 for his project WEALTHSCAPES: the spatial inequality of housing wealth accumulation. Looking at the Netherlands, UK and Spain - varying across salient housing, labour, and policy contexts – the project confronts the crucial role of both housing market spatial polarization and divided housing access in driving growing wealth inequalities. The research will combine detailed spatial and quantitative analyses of cadastral, full-population registers, census and national datasets to map, sequence and explain dynamics of unequal housing wealth accumulation.  

His PhD, entitled “The End of Mass Homeownership? Housing Career Diversification and Inequality in Europe” and completed in 2017, focused on how contemporary housing careers are increasingly structured by growing diversification, complexity and inequality. The work exposes both the role of varied socio-cultural and institutional contexts in shaping housing career realignment as well as common trajectories in the face of global forces of labour, housing and state transformations. The research underscores how realignments in housing careers fundamentally undermine promises of mass homeownership and the democratic nature of housing wealth. 

Following his PhD, he held a postdoctoral position at KU Leuven under a mare-curie fellowship, where he continued research on housing market inequalitlies with a particular attention to the impacts of increasing housing market financialization on diverging housing outcomes.

Education

• 2017 – PhD – University of Amsterdam
• 2011 – M.Sc. in Urban and Regional Planning  - University of Amsterdam
• 2009 – B.A. in Geography - University of British Columbia (Vancouver, Canada)