Dr Vlad Mykhnenko

I read international relations as an undergraduate and graduate student at the Institute of International Relations, Taras Shevchenko University of Kyiv (Ukraine), before doing another Master’s degree in international relations and European studies at the Central European University, Budapest (Hungary). Afterwards, I moved to Darwin College, Cambridge to work on a doctorate concerned with the political economy of post-communist transformations in eastern Europe’s two largest old industrial regions – Upper Silesia (Poland) and the Donbas (Ukraine). In the meantime, from 2003-2004, I served as an International Policy Fellow at the CEU Centre for Policy Studies in Budapest, working on the restructuring of the Ukrainian iron and steel industry.

After submitting my thesis, I took up the post of Research Fellow at the Centre for Public Policy for Regions, University of Glasgow, where I remained until October 2008, before moving to the School of Geography at the University of Nottingham to complete a major European research project on shrinking cities. In January 2012, I was appointed Lecturer in Human Geography (Urban Adaptation and Resilience) in the School of Geography, Earth, and Environmental Sciences at the University of Birmingham. In 2014, I served as a Visiting Professor, teaching economic geography at Al-Farabi Kazakh National University in Almaty (Kazakhstan).

I joined the University of Oxford in January 2017 to take up a Research Fellowship at St Peter’s and an Associate Professorship in Sustainable Urban Development at the Department for Continuing Education. I am thrilled to be joining such a distinguished college and hope that my interests and expertise in comparative political economy, economic geography, and urban and regional economics will be of great benefit to the students here.

Teaching

I have taught undergraduate and graduate students in England, Kazakhstan, Scotland, and Ukraine, including at the Universities of Kyiv (Taras Shevchenko), Kyiv Mohyla Business School, Cambridge, Glasgow, Nottingham, Birmingham, and Almaty (KazNU).

At St Peter’s, I serve as a college adviser, making myself available as a source of help and guidance to graduate students at the college.

Research

My overall research is dedicated to the advancement of geographical political economy – a study of modern capitalist social formations understood as highly dynamic and innovative, but spatially uneven, variegated, crisis-driven systems. Major research foci include the interrelationship between spatial imbalances in production and consumption, physical and material manifestations of urban growth and decline, state power inequalities, and their impact upon economic development, territorial, social, and political cohesion.

My current research covers the following themes:

• Urban and regional economies: urban shrinkage, structural adjustment, and economic resilience; de-industrialisation, re-industrialisation, and the urban knowledge-based economy.
• Sustainable urban development: the New Urban Agenda (UN Habitat III); global political economy and the re-scaling of housing markets (Brazil);
• public policy and shrinking cities (China, Europe, Japan); urban resilience to sudden shocks (Ukraine).
• Regional growth and territorial cohesion: economic convergence and divergence; the spatial distribution of national income, local government finance, and fiscal federalism; regional governance, state re-scaling, and territorial cohesion.