Patterson, Matt

Bio Sketch

Matt Patterson is an urban sociologist at the University of Calgary who studies iconic/star architecture, culture-led urban regeneration, and the political economy of the built environment. His work is notable for combining the critical literature on iconic architecture (Sklair, Ponzini) with large-N, quantitative, longitudinal methods — an empirical counterweight to the largely case-study or theoretical icon literature.

Key Works

• Revitalization, Transformation, and the 'Bilbao Effect' (2020, European Planning Studies) — a fixed-effects test of the Bilbao effect across 142 IADs and ~32,000 North American neighbourhoods; evidence for the effect with the population-vs-rent and Manhattan "super-gentrification" nuances.
• "The Role of the Public Institution in Iconic Architectural Development" (2012, Urban Studies).
• "Architecture as Performance Art: Evaluating 'Iconic Power' in the Development of Two Museums" (2020, American Journal of Cultural Sociology).
• With Hyesun Jeong, "Starchitects in Bohemia" (forthcoming, Urban Affairs Review).

Key Concepts

Concepts associated with this author that have pages in this wiki:

• Iconic Architecture
• Star Architecture
• Gentrification

Relevance to Geoffrey's Research

Patterson matters to Geoffrey's spectacle & iconic architecture research because he supplies an empirical, causal dimension that the wiki's otherwise largely theoretical and critical literature on the icon lacks. His large-N finding that the Bilbao effect is real at the neighbourhood scale — but bifurcates into population growth (revitalization) or rent increases / super-gentrification (exclusion) — gives a concrete, testable anchor for the critical claims of Sklair, Kaika and Goudsmit about who wins and loses from iconic development, and for the everyday-vs-iconic and spectacle-vs-function debates.

Source Support

Source notes in this wiki drawn from this author's work:

• Revitalization, Transformation, and the 'Bilbao Effect' (2020)