Fernando Calderón Figueroa
I am interested in the relationship between socio-spatial inequality, social solidarity, and policy. My research expands over three areas: (1) the impact of urban design and social infrastructure on communities, (2) urban politics and policy, and (3) the evolution of neighbourhoods. I draw on sociology, geography, political science, urban planning, and computational social science. My work uses traditional quantitative and qualitative methods in combination with novel spatial and computational techniques. To date, my contributions have been published in Land, Socius, Cities, Geographical Analysis, and the International Journal of Politics, Culture, and Society. I am committed to ensuring my scholarship has an impact on urban and social policy. Thus, my research is featured in policy-oriented outlets such as Bloomberg’s CityLab.
Before moving to Canada, I worked for the Peruvian Ombudsman’s Office and the Peruvian Ministry of Culture developing policy-oriented data on political engagement, local communities, and indigenous peoples. On my spare time, I enjoy staying home with my family, cycling, and swimming.
Website: fernandocalderonfigueroa.com
X (formerly known as Twitter): @ferderon
Education
Ph.D., University of Toronto – 2024
M.A., University of Toronto – 2016
B.A., Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú – 2010
Teaching Interests
- Local politics and urban policy
- Neighbourhoods
- Urban economics
- Mixed Research Methods
- Geographic Information Systems
Research Interests
- Social infrastructure and social capital
- Urban social policy
- Neighbourhood change
- Mapping technologies for urban policy
- Urban theory
Publications
- Calderón-Figueroa, Fernando. 2024. “Residential Micro-Segregation and Social Capital in Lima, Peru.” Land 13(1):113. doi: 10.3390/land13010113
- Calderón-Figueroa, Fernando, Daniel Silver, and Olimpia Bidian. “The Dilemmas of Spatializing Social Issues.” Socius 8:1-20. doi:10.1177/23780231221103059
- Olson, Alexander W., Fernando Calderón-Figueroa, Olimpia Bidian, Scott Sanner, and Daniel Silver. 2021. “Reading the City through its Neighbourhoods: Deep Text Embeddings of Yelp Reviews as a Basis for Determining Similarity and Change.‘” Cities 110:1-14. doi:10.1016/j.cities.2020.103045
- Olson, Alexander W., Kexin Zhang, Ronen Yakubov, Scott Sanner, Daniel Silver, Daniel Arribas-Bel and Fernando Calderón-Figueroa. 2020. “Classification and Regression via Integer Optimization for Neighbourhood Change.” Geographical Analysis 53(2):192-212. doi:10.1111/gean.12252
- Silver, Daniel, Zack Taylor, and Fernando Calderón-Figueroa. 2020. “Populism in the City: The Case of Ford Nation.” International Journal of Politics, Culture, and Society 33(1):1-21. doi:10.1007/s10767-018-9310-1