Tim is Professor and Director of the Centre for Sustainable Urban and Regional Futures, University of Salford, Manchester, UK. He holds degrees from the London School of Economics and Political Science (1985) and the Universities of Surrey (1986) and Plymouth (1990). These followed a first career as an agricultural engineer and an evening return-to-study course, during which time he worked as a manager in the retail sector.

Tim’s interests centre upon the relationship between knowledge, strategy, context and practice. He has developed these in a variety of fields and settings including universities; local government; regional and city innovation and knowledge partnerships; international and national research council funded programmes; Whitehall and regional agencies; health, probation, prison and social services and urban and regional policy in general. He has taken this work to examine how it relates to knowledge generation and reception, sustainability, policy formulation and implementation and organizational actions and outcomes at different levels: from the local, to city, regional, national and international scales. The roles of management, culture, communication and coordination and intelligence, as well as developing more holistic views on city-regional development, feature in his work for SURF, along with concerns over the future of the university, active intermediation and urban arenas in knowledge exchange and the production and reception of different forms of knowledge. He is seconded to the Mistra Urban Futures Centre, based in Gothenburg, Sweden and working on an Retrofit programme with partners in Cardiff, Oxford and Cambridge and a project on cultural intermediaries with partners in Birmingham, Liverpool and London (the former funded by the Engineering and Physical Sciences and the latter the Arts and Humanities, Research Councils).

In addition to his managerial, research and policy activities, Tim has given numerous talks nationally and internationally, as well having served on selection committees and commissioning bodies. He has written and edited fourteen books (including new editions) that have been translated into fifteen languages, as well as many articles, book chapters and research reports. Tim was also the series editor of ‘Issues in Society’ – an international book series with Open University Press/McGraw-Hill in which  seventeen books were published between 1998 and 2010.