Matthew Hiett

Colloquium Presentation Dec 2025: https://emails.illinois.edu/newsletter/76/1658385176.html

My dissertation makes neighborhood boundaries the primary object of study, asking when neighborhood change is structured by urban morphology and when it is produced by political-economic processes. Standard neighborhood units stabilize analysis and administration but conflate convenience with the structuring forces of the city. Material urban form — street networks, plot arrangements, enclosure patterns, building configurations — coheres into a durable morphology that sorts accessibility, capital flows, and opportunity. The defining features of that form often align with social, political, and economic divergence, but the correspondence is uneven because state policy and capital concentrate where returns and political feasibility are highest.

I use computational morphometric methods to derive boundary delineations from Chicago's built form and model how those boundaries interact with the instruments of the real estate state to co-produce outcomes at neighborhood edges. The project bridges the historico-geographical tradition of urban morphology (Conzen/Whitehand) with contemporary morphometrics and critical urban political economy. I am especially interested in boundaries as liminal confluence zones where the stability of inherited urban structure confronts the dynamics of policy-driven change, and where one differentiated place becomes another.