Dr. Brandon Marc Finn
Research Faculty at the University of Michigan School for Environment and Sustainability and leader of the Informal Sustainability Lab
Dr. Brandon Marc Finn is a faculty member at the School for Environment and Sustainability at the University of Michigan. Brandon received his PhD in Urban Planning from Harvard University in 2022. He leads The Informal Sustainability Lab at the University of Michigan. Brandon conducts mixed-methods research on informality related to urbanization and global decarbonization. Brandon’s work critically assesses notions of justice in relation to global social and environmental change. His work recognizes that unregulated and unregistered labor constitutes the predominant form of economic activity around the world. Similarly, informal housing is a defining feature of global urbanization trends. Despite these realities, sustainability scholarship overlooks these modes of urban and economic life, essentially creating developmental and sustainability models that do not speak to nor account for some of the world’s most vulnerable people, places, and environments. Brandon is committed to addressing these gaps. His current work assesses the role of artisanal and small-scale informal cobalt miners in the Democratic Republic of Congo, and the intersection of electronic waste and urbanization in Accra, Ghana. Brandon is leading efforts to establish a new subfield in Geography and sustainability-related scholarship under the theme 'informal sustainability.' This subfield recognizes the importance of informality as a livelihood and housing strategy to enable survival and upward socio-economic mobility, but also interrogates its tensions with sustainability-related outcomes.