Nicola Livingstone

Nicola Livingstone is Professor in Real Estate, based in Urban Studies and Social Policy. Prior to joining the University of Glasgow in 2023, Nicola worked at the Bartlett School of Planning, UCL and Heriot-Watt University, where she completed her PhD in 2011. Her thesis explored the urban form of charity retailing from a Marxist perspective.

Nicola has published widely on real estate and urban studies and has recently been working on projects exploring investment market trends, housing densification, health impacts of housing, the evolution of the office market during the coronavirus pandemic, charity and food insecurity, and the impacts of changes to the planning system on cities. She has completed work for the RICS, BA/Leverhulme and the Investment Property Forum, and worked on an ORA/ESRC project on investment flows and residential development in London, Paris and Amsterdam.

Nicola also works with colleagues the University of Toronto where she is a Visiting Professor, and in 2020 co-edited the collection ‘Critical Dialogues of Urban Governance, Development and Activism: London and Toronto’. Her work is broadly interdisciplinary, blending perspectives drawn from real estate, planning and governance and critical social science, interrogating our lived experiences of the built environment.

Nicola's research interests are varied and multidisciplinary. They include:
Property market dynamics & real estate investment.
Residential markets.
Interpreting the social form of the built environment.
The third sector - particularly charity retail, volunteering and the politics of food aid in the UK.