About

ALEX MARSHALL writes and speaks about the world we live in. His work has been featured in The New York Times Magazine, Metropolis, The Boston Globe, Architectural Record, Slate and other publications. His books include How Cities Work (University of Texas 2001) and Beneath the Metropolis (Carroll and Graf 2006). He is a member of Citistates Associates (citistates.com), a group of speakers about urban planning, design and architecture, and he is a regular columnist on transportation for Governing Magazine. He is a Senior Fellow at Regional Plan Association, the seminal urban planning group in New York City, where he edits a bi-weekly email newsletter, Spotlight on the Region. He teaches classes on infrastructure at the Architecture School of the New Jersey Institute of Technology.

As a journalist, Marshall has shaken holders of conventional wisdom with his critiques of everything from the design philosophy of New Urbanism to airline deregulation. In recent years he has emphasized how transportation shapes our cities. He is currently working on a book about how governments create economies. A former staff writer for The Virginian-Pilot in Norfolk, where he covered regional politics and city hall, Marshall holds a master's degree in Journalism from Columbia University, and a bachelor's in Political Economy and Spanish from Carnegie-Mellon University.

In 1999-2000, Marshall was a Loeb Fellow at Harvard University's Graduate School of Design, where he studied urban design, architectural history, political philosophy, law and economics. In 1994, Marshall was awarded the German-Marshall European Community Journalism Fellowship, which sponsored a 10-week study of the European city and suburb. A native of Norfolk, Va., Marshall now lives in New York City.

[last updated: January 2009]

Categories: About me