Walter Nicholls
Dr. Walter J. Nicholls is a Professor in the Department of Urban Planning and Public Policy at the University of California, Irvine, and serves as Faculty Director of the UCI Labor Center. His research sits at the intersection of urban studies and planning, immigration, and social movements, drawing on interdisciplinary approaches from planning, sociology, and geography.
Walter’s work examines how cities incubate the activism of marginalized groups, how local government officials develop policies to incorporate, control, or exclude undocumented immigrant populations, and how local struggles scale up into national movements. His research has been comparative and international in scope, with fieldwork in Los Angeles, Paris, Amsterdam, and Orange County, among other sites. Recent projects have addressed municipal bureaucracies as arenas of contentious struggle over urban citizenship, the governance of immigrant communities at the city level, and the politics of housing density and homeowner opposition.
Walter holds a Ph.D. in urban planning from UCLA. He is the author of The Immigrant Rights Movement: The Battle over National Citizenship (Stanford University Press, 2019), Cities and Social Movements: Immigrant Rights Activism in the US, France, and the Netherlands, 1970–2015 (Wiley-Blackwell, 2016), and The DREAMers: How the Undocumented Youth Movement Transformed the Immigrant Rights Debate in the United States (Stanford University Press, 2013), and co-editor of Spaces of Contention: Spatialities and Social Movements.
