Dr Philipp Rode is Executive Director of LSE Cities and Associate Professor (Education) at the School of Public Policy. He is Co-Director of the LSE Executive MSc in Cities and Visiting Professor at University of St Gallen’s Institute for Mobility. Dr Rode has been leading interdisciplinary programmes in urban development and transport, sustainable urbanism and climate change, and city policy and governance at the LSE since 2003. Across his work, he is interested in multi-dimensional aspects of global urbanisation, sustainability and urban change.
The focus of Dr Rode’s current research is on government systems, integrated policy making and emergency governance in cities, and on sustainable urban development, transport transitions and new urban mobility. His research has been published in Transport Policy, Journal of Urban Affairs, Transportation Research Part A, Environment and Planning B, Land, Journal of British Academy, Urban Science, and Applied Mobilities. His recent books include ‘Governing Compact Cities: How to connect planning, design and transport’ (Elgar 2018) and co-editing ‘Shaping Cities in an Urban Age’ (Phaidon 2018).
Dr Rode is co-founder of the Urban Age Programme, manages its global engagement efforts and co-chairs the Addis Ababa Urban Age Task Force. He is LSE lead for the Emergency Governance Initiative for Cities and Regions organised in partnership with United Cities and Local Governments (UCLG) and Metropolis. Between 2016 and 2021, he served as Steering Committee Member of the Coalition for Urban Transitions led by the C40 Cities Climate Leadership Group and the World Resources Institute. He co-led the UN Habitat III Policy Unit on Urban Governance which informed the UN’s New Urban Agenda (2016) and co-directed the cities workstream of the Global Commission on the Economy and Climate in the run-up to the 2015 UN Climate Change Conference in Paris.
His current and past work with public, private and third sector organisations further includes OECD, UNDP, UNEP, ICLEI, GIZ, European Environment Agency, National Ministries in the UK, Germany, India, Ethiopia, Colombia, Chile, Peru, France and the Netherlands alongside over 50 city and metropolitan governments from across the world. Rode is a Member of the Board of Directors of the Institute for Transportation and Development Policy (ITDP) and a Member of the Science of Cities Knowledge Council of the World Cities Summit. Dr Rode holds degrees in transport systems (Dipl. Ing., TU Berlin), city design and social science (MSc, LSE) and cities/urban governance (PhD, LSE). He was awarded the Schinkel Urban Design Prize 2000.