Dr. Alan Wiig
Associate Professor
Focus Areas
- Focus Area 3: Places, Networks, & Flows
- Focus Area 4: Geopolitics and The Global Economy
- Focus Area 6: Sustainability & Global Environmental Change
Research Statement
Dr. Alan Wiig is an Associate Professor of Geography at the University of Florida. His research sits at the intersection of urban geography, urban planning, and infrastructure studies and examines three areas of scholarly and public concern: the new digital divides emerging alongside smart city projects, the politics of large-scale urban revitalization efforts, and the spatial strategies through which transnational logistics corridors are remaking city regions.
By using in depth fieldwork, semi-structured interviews with politicians and government officials, community leaders, and corporate executives, alongside analysis of policy and planning documents, his work critically assesses city regions’ top-down and bottom-up responses to economic globalization and emerging technologies. There are two key aspects to this scholarly contribution. First, it demonstrates that trade corridors and economic zones operate as testbeds for 21st century, smart city technologies. These are spaces where patterns of digital connectivity and wireless mobility are maintained through new systems of civic management to align established city-regions into a world economy facing significant geopolitical, climactic, and pandemic-driven turbulence. Second, this work draws attention to the ways billions of dollars of international infrastructure investment amplify uneven development by transforming city-regional economies but also reinforcing existing inequalities. This scholarship argues for a grounded understanding of the political logics justifying speculative infrastructure projects by asking how, where, and for whom these networks reinforce or constrain efforts at building just and sustainable cities.
Recent Courses
GEO 2500: Globalization and Regional Economies
GEO 4554: Regional Development
Recent Funded Projects
SPARK Grants Program. (PI) Planning with and for coastal flooding: A comparative analysis of climate adaptation infrastructure in three United States cities. University of Florida College of Liberal Arts and Sciences. 2026. ($9,844)
Recent Publications
Webber, S., Wiig, A., & Saeran, H. (2026). Urban pulse: land reclamation as climate urbanism. Urban Geography, 1-10.
Nikolovski, T., & Wiig, A. (2026). Why Ports Matter to Cities: Understanding the Importance of Logistics‐Led Urbanism. Geography Compass, 20(2), e70065.
Masucci, M., Mahmoudi, D., & Wiig, A. (2026). Bluetech in Baltimore: Co-creating smart city innovations with local youth. Applied Geography, 187, 103887.
Mahmoudi, D., & Wiig, A. (2026). Land for AI: Data Center Real Estate Markets. In The Inner World of Artificial Intelligence (pp. 108-128). CRC Press.
Ward, K., & Wiig, A. (2025). Arriving at Airport City Manchester: “Exporting” and “Importing” the Enterprise Zone, Entrepreneurial Governance, and the Geopolitics of Economic Development. Annals of the American Association of Geographers, 115(8), 1867-1886.
Apostolopoulou, E., Cheng, H., Silver, J., & Wiig, A. (2024). Cities on the new silk road: The global urban geographies of China’s belt and road initiative. Urban Geography, 45(6), 1095-1114.
Marvin, S., McFarlane, C., Guma, P., Hodson, M., Lockhart, A., McGuirk, P., ... & Wiig, A. (2023). Post‐pandemic cities: An urban lexicon of accelerations/decelerations. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 48(3), 452-473.
Wiig, A., et al. eds. (2023). Infrastructuring urban futures: The politics of remaking cities. Policy Press.
Guma, P. K., & Wiig, A. (2022). Smartness beyond the network: Water ATMs and disruptions from below in Mathare Valley, Nairobi. Journal of Urban Technology, 29(4), 41-61.
Wiig, A., Karvonen, A., McFarlane, C., & Rutherford, J. (2022). Splintering urbanism at 20: Mapping trajectories of research on urban infrastructures. Journal of Urban Technology, 29(1), 1-11.
Educational Background
- Ph.D. in Geography-Urban Studies, Temple University, 2014
- M.A. in Geography, San Francisco University, 2009
- B.A. in Literature, University of California, Santa Cruz, 2002
Current Graduate Students
Recent Graduate Students
Yue Jing