Biography

Research Interests: housing, municipal law, suburbs, urban governance, legal geography

Dr. Lisa Freeman is a faculty member in the Criminology Department at Kwantlen Polytechnic University. She is an interdisciplinary scholar whose research and teaching intersects in the fields of socio-legal studies, human geography and urban planning. Her research focuses on the questions of law and regulation in the city, the relationship between gentrification and the suburbanization of poverty, and the role of municipal government in regulating low-income housing.

Lisa's research focus is on the changing landscape and regulation of rooming houses and SRO dwellings. She completed her PhD in the Department of Geography and Planning at the University of Toronto where she studied the impact Toronto’s Rooming House Bylaw had on inner suburbs tenants, primarily but not exclusively for low-income, immigrant, and refugee tenants. This research heightened Lisa’s interest in questions of housing, marginality, suburbs and urban governance. In 2013 she started a new research project on public libraries and urban governance in Vancouver and the Lower Mainland as part of her SSHRC post-doctoral fellowship in the Geography Department at Simon Fraser University. This research explores the changing nature of public libraries, and their governance, for newcomers to Canada, marginalized communities, and urban residents amidst escalated housing prices, times of austerity, and the changing role of public libraries in urban and suburban settings.

Community-engaged research is a large part of Dr. Freeman’s work. She continually engages with research participants and publishes in a variety of community and academic publications. She is continuing community-engaged research with Northern Canadian communities and is working towards a new research project that addresses the relationship between the criminal courts, low-income housing, and the escalated housing market in Vancouver and the Lower Mainland. Lisa is currently the co-principal investigator (with Dr. Julia Christensen) on a SSHRC-funded resource and sustainable development Project, researching the connections between resource development and housing in the Northwest Territories.