Robert Chaskin is the McCormick Foundation Professor and Faculty Director of the Kiphart Center for Global Health and Social Development at the University of Chicago Crown Family School of Social Work, Policy, and Practice, where he holds the UNESCO Chair for Inclusive Urbanism. He has written widely on the topics of neighborhood intervention, community capacity building, public housing reform, urban youth, and the dynamics of participatory planning and neighborhood governance.
His study of public housing reform in Chicago, culminated in the book Integrating the Inner City: The Promise and Perils of Mixed-Income Public Housing Transformation (with Mark Joseph, The University of Chicago Press, 2015), received the Honorable Mention for the Best Book in Urban Affairs Award from the Urban Affairs Association. His latest book (edited with Bong Joo Lee and Surinder Jaswal), Social Exclusion in Cross-National Perspective: Actors, Actions, and Impacts from Above and Below was published by Oxford University Press in 2019.
More recent projects include a study on the civic and political engagement of marginalized urban youth in Belfast, Dublin, and London with support from a Marie Sklodowska-Curie Fellowship from the European Commission; research on slum clearance and social housing policy in Mumbai, India, with colleagues from the Tata Institute of Social Sciences (TISS); a study on the challenges and responses of civil society organizations in post-COVID urban India, also with colleagues at TISS; and a project focused on urbanization and migration in China with colleagues at the University of Chicago, Peking University, and Hong Kong Polytechnic University. Professor Chaskin was inducted into the American Academy of Social Work and Social Welfare in 2020. He received his A.M. in Anthropology and Ph.D. in Sociology from the University of Chicago.