Mike Gibson has over 40 years experience of university teaching, management and research, private sector consultancy and local government practice, and is an internationally known specialist in urban regeneration. He graduated in Geography from the University of Birmingham in 1966 and after three years working in Lancashire County Council Planning Department, completed a Masters in Town Planning at the University of Aston in Birmingham.
He was elected as Member of the Royal Town Planning Institute (RTPI) in 1973.
From 1971 to 1986, he was Lecturer, Senior Lecturer and Principal Lecturer in Town Planning at the City of Birmingham Polytechnic (now Birmingham City University).
During the 1970s he was the director of Community Planning Associates, a group of volunteer planners who pioneered the provision of free technical assistance to community groups in Birmingham affected by urban regeneration and edited their bi-monthly magazine West Midlands Grass Roots.
Since the 1980s he has continued to work with neighbourhood and voluntary organisations in a variety of technical advisory roles. In 1983 and 1984 he was Visiting Associate Professor at the Universities of Akron and Cleveland in the USA and Visiting Research Fellow at the University of Nijmegen in the Netherlands.
From 1986 to 1996 he held managerial appointments as Head of the Department of Town Planning and then as Head of the School of Urban Development and Policy at South Bank University (SBU), where he was awarded a professorship in 1989. From 1997 to 2001 he was Director of the University’s Local Economy Policy Unit (LEPU) a research, consultancy and advanced training unit, within the Faculty of the Built Environment, staffed by social scientists and planners, focussing on urban policy, local economic development and urban regeneration.
Since 2001 as Emeritus Professor of Urban Planning, he has worked as an independent researcher and consultant, dividing his time between the UK and Turkey.
Since 2008 he has been Associate Director of JVM, developing their work on low carbon planning, housing and neighbourhood regeneration.