70+
Publications
Urban and environmental scholar, and principal of Azurest Associates — bringing peer-reviewed research, federal testimony, and funded studies to the cities, agencies, and communities that need them.
Three decades of inquiry into how cities decide who belongs — and what it takes to build them more justly. Selected works below; the complete catalog lives in the Library.
Short audio and video overviews of each research area, in Fraser's own words. Select a theme, then press play.
The newest of the work — manuscripts in preparation and peer review, and sponsored research in development — extends three decades of asking how cities decide who belongs.
The largest body of current work returns to the core question of urban development: when cities grow and capital arrives, who is it for? New studies test whether tools like Opportunity Zones actually produce housing or simply capitalize land, and build decision-support methods that help agencies steer investment toward more equitable outcomes. Companion manuscripts examine guaranteed income and the reproduction of urban precarity, and the contested politics of property, home, and the right to stay put.
A second strand traces the long struggle over who belongs in the city — more than a century of Black organizing and place-making, reparations and the racial-capitalist politics of repair, the carceral geography of homelessness and the policing of public space, and the collective organizing through which communities produce locality on their own terms.
A smaller, separate line of inquiry asks how emerging AI tools support — or substitute for — critical thinking in the classroom.
A first taste — the full catalog of articles, books, reports, and op-eds lives in the Library.
A municipal, state, and federal consultancy I co-lead. Azurest partners with foundations, governments, and community-based organizations to design, finance, and evaluate the initiatives that improve cities — and the lives of the people who live in them.
Visit Azurest Associates →For research collaborations, consulting through Azurest, speaking, or press.