Susan Parnell is Chair in Human Geography in the School of Geographical Sciences, Bristol University, United Kingdom.

She is on the executive of the African Centre for Cities at the University of Cape Town (UCT), an interdisciplinary research and teaching program on the dynamics of unsustainable urbanization processes in Africa.

She has held teaching and research roles in the Department of Environmental & Geographical Sciences at UCT, the University of the Witwatersrand (Wits), Johannesburg, South Africa and the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London, United Kingdom. She has held academic fellowships at the University of Oxford, London School of Economics, Durham University and University College London.

Her publications include A Routledge Handbook of Cities of the South; Africa’s Urban Revolution (Routledge, 2016); “A Global Outlook on Urbanization” in Urbanization, Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services: Challenges and Opportunities – A Global Assessment (Springer, 2013) and Climate Change at the City Scale: Impacts, Mitigation and Adaptation in Cape Town (Routledge, 2013). She co-authored the Urban Transformations key debate on a 2030 Policy Endorsement of a Sustainable Future: Implications for Urban Research.

Susan Parnell was a participant in the 2nd LafargeHolcim Roundtable “Re-materializing Construction” held in Einsiedeln, Switzerland (2015).