••• Ben Walker •••
Now:
I am a research consultant and trained urban planner.
My work engages complex conflicts over land and property ownership, with specialties in housing policy, Ukraine, and climate displacement.
Get in touch:
bwalker16 [at] protonmail.com
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Before:
As Research Coordinator with City Life/Vida Urbana, I authored Housing Justice is the Cure: Evictions in Boston’s Communities of Color During COVID-19.
As a National Geographic Early Career Grantee, I investigated nationalism’s impact on Ukraine’s national parks. My team traveled to each of the Seven Natural Wonders of Ukraine, a group of parks, landscape features, and conservation sites selected to highlight certain “European” qualities of the nation’s past. Picked to embody a unitary, self-contained country, the Natural Wonders also point to a more fragmentary history, and to a present moment besieged by extranational shocks -- namely, war with Russia and climate change. I continue to support research efforts for a book about this project.
In 2016, I recieved a Thomas J. Watson Fellowship. As a Fellow, I spoke with people about climate change-induced displacement in Kiribati, Fiji, South Africa, Lesotho, Vietnam, Cambodia, Bolivia, and Peru. Climate displacement describes what happens when people have to move because of climate change. Yet climate displacement might also refer to an expansive sweep of conflicts agitated by economic precarity, extreme weather, and the continuing extraction of fossil fuels. My goal was to test how far-reaching climate displacement could be -- and if solutions proposed were adequate, effective, and just.
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Education:
• Master in City Planning, MIT
• BA in Law, Jurisprudence, and Social Thought, Amherst College