Justin Mcguinness

Born in England, Justin McGuinness joined The American University of Paris in 2001. After a first degree in Oriental Studies (Arabic and Islamic studies) at Cambridge, he headed for North Africa where he taught at the University of Tunis and worked free-lance as a conference interpreter and translator. Eventually, on completion of a PhD focusing on representations of power, poverty and the city (University of Newcastle Upon Tyne, Department of Architecture, Landscape and Planning), he turned to travel writing before moving to France to take up his current academic post. By dint of his experience of acquiring languages and moving between cultures, jobs and locales, he is much interested in the mechanics of different discursive worlds.

McGuinness is essentially a cultural geographer with strong interests in architectural history, the construction of place, and policy implementation. In his current work, he considers urban change within the perspectives offered by theories of neoliberal urbanism and globalization. He is concerned with the processes, practices and discourses at work in the city – hence recent work on changes in land and property use in the Maghrebi cities of Fès and Tunis. (He has also worked on urban cultural events and spiritual tourism). Currently, McGuinness is studying the transformation of the river-front district at the heart of historic Fès. In another project for 2017, he is returning to an area he first studied in the early 1990s, namely conservation planning in the médina of Tunis. The context, authoritarian twenty years ago, is now essentially democratic. What does this new political situation mean for planning professionals, urban conservationists and the users of historic neighbourhoods concerned, whether residents, workers or visitors.