Estelle Broyer
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About
Estelle joined LSE Cities in November 2025 to explore the enablers and barriers to innovation in urban governance. Her work will contribute to the development of novel ethnographic and participatory research in partnership with the councils of several European cities.
Broadly speaking, Estelle is interested in local democracy in urban contexts and in the relationships that local state institutions forge with various publics in their attempt to address urgent but complex public problems.
Estelle conducted her PhD in the School of Geography at Queen Mary, University of London. Her research spanned urban geography and political philosophy to explore the politics and publicness of London's Low Traffic Neighbourhoods—a local transport measure deployed in several UK cities as a national response to the COVID-19 pandemic, with long-term goals for climate resilience and active travel. She used a mix of qualitative research methods and a pragmatist, feminist, and intersectional approach to inquiry. Taking seriously both the urgency of reducing car traffic in cities and the democratic need to foreground claims of injustice arising from rapid urban transformation, her thesis offers a critical and relational account of how urban futures are assembled and contested.
Estelle holds an MSc in Electronics Engineering from the Lyon School of Chemistry, Physics and Electronics and an MA in Geography from the University of Washington.
Key Expertise
Urban Political Geography
Expertise Details
Urban political geography, urban governance, local democracy, publicness, emergency politics, philosophical pragmatism, pragmatist inquiry, feminist epistemologies, intersectionality
ECLI CGI Deep Dives
Broyer, E. (2026). The city. In S. Calkin & C. Freeman (Eds.), De Gruyter handbook of feminist political geography. De Gruyter. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783111289274
Broyer, E. (2024). Commuting to the urban tech campus: Tech companies’ and their elite workers’ co-production of South Lake Union, Seattle. Urban Studies, 61(11), 2118-2134. https://doi.org/10.1177/00420980241230883
Broyer, E. (2022). Book review: The green city and social injustice: 21 tales from North America and Europe. Urban Studies, 59(14), 3033-3035. https://doi.org/10.1177/00420980221108845
Estelle taught in Geography and Politics at the University of Washington, Seattle, and at Queen Mary, University of London, from 2018 to 2026 as a Teaching Assistant and Teaching Associate. She earned her Associate Fellow in Higher Education Award (AFHEA) in 2025.