Together with co-authors, Nick has made a number of important interdisciplinary contributions within economic geography. These include a string of theoreticaly informed empirical articles in Regional Studies (1993, 2003, 2008), Journal of Economic Geography (2006) and Economic Geography (2000, 2004, 2007) which address aspects of the economic geography of multinational enterprises and foreign direct investment and in the journals Environment & Planning A (2001), European Urban and Regional Studies (1998) on the subject of the political economy of foreign direct investment and investment promotion. Research here has been funded by the UK Economic and Social Research Council and the British Academy.

In addition Nick has authored and co edited the following books which cover these subjects.

Phelps, N.A. and Raines, P. (Eds) (2003) The New Competition for Inward Investment: Companies, Institutions and Regional Development. Edward Elgar, Cheltenham. pp.xiii + 231 

Phelps, N.A. and Alden, J. (Eds.) (1999) FDI and the Global Economy: Corporate and Institutional Dynamics of Global-Localisation. The Stationery Office,   Norwich. pp. xvi+314

Phelps, N.A. (1997) Multinationals and European Integration: Trade, Investment and Regional Development. Jessica Kingsley, London. pp. x+181

Nick has also written extensively on the subject of industrial clustering and economic agglomeration as these affect city-region economies. His key publications here are in the journals Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers (1992), Progress in Human Geography (2003) and Urban Studies (2004).

More recently, as a result of research funded by the UK Economic and Social Research Council (2000 and 2008) and the British Academy (2002), Nick has been involved with colleagues in researching into the politics of development processes at the urban edge and their implicatons for undertanding the political and plannning dynamics of ciy-regions. Nick is the European Reserach Cluster leader for a unique international collaborative research network administered from York University in Canada in a project funded from 2010 to 2017. These collaborations have led to a number of important papers in the journals Urban Studies (2003, 2011), Environment & Planning A (2010) and International Journal of Urban and Regional Research (2005).

Key books from this rsearch are the following:

Phelps, N.A. and Wu, F. (Eds.) (2011) International Perspectives on Suburbanization: a Post-suburban World? Palgrave-MacMillan, Basingstoke.

Phelps, N.A., Parsons, N., Ballas, D. and Dowling, A. (2006) Post-suburban Europe: Planning and Politics at the Margins of Europe’s Capital Cities. Palgrave-MacMillan, Basingstoke. pp.xiii +233


Most recently Nick has been involved with research concerned with understanding the planning of urban sprawl in the UK and the planning and political possibilities for re-planning or re-working suburban space in the United States in research projects funded by the British Academy (2007, 2010). The key publications to date from this strand of work are:

Phelps, N.A. (2012) An anatomy of sprawl: Planning and Politics in Britain. Routledge, London.