David Swindell is the Director of the Center for Urban Innovation and an associate professor in the School of Public Affairs at Arizona State University. His work focuses primarily on community and economic development, especially public financing of sports facilities, and the contribution of sports facilities to the economic development of urban space. His most recent work examines collaborative arrangements with public, private, and nonprofit organizations for service delivery, and citizen satisfaction and performance measurement standards for public management and decision making. His forthcoming book, "American Cities and the Politics of Party Conventions" (with co-authors Eric Heberlig and Suzanne Leland), arrives in 2017 from SUNY Press. He has also published in Public Administration Review, Social Science Quarterly, American Review of Public Administration, Public Productivity and Management Review, Public Administration Quarterly, State and Local Government Review, Economic Development Quarterly, Journal of Urban Affairs, Urban Affairs Review, Journal of Sports Management, Johnson’s Minor League Baseball and Local Economic Development, Rosentraub’s Major League Losers, and The Brooking Institution’s Sports, Jobs, and Taxes. He has testified to federal, state, and local legislative bodies on a range of issues related to community and economic development. Dr. Swindell’s other grants and contracts policy reports include alternative financing mechanisms for smart city investments, home rule vs. state preemption, numerous citizen satisfaction survey reports, models for involving nonprofits in urban service delivery, public program evaluations, estimation methodologies for light rail ridership, and business retention strategies for local governments.
Dr. Swindell is an advocate of the metropolitan mission concept through which the intellectual resources of the university are focused on developing new solutions to the challenges confronting citizens in urbanized areas. Before joining ASU, he served seven years as director of the interdisciplinary Ph.D. in Public Policy Degree Program at the University of North Carolina. Prior to that, he was director of the UNC-Charlotte Master of Public Administration program as well as MPA director at Clemson University. Dr. Swindell received his doctorate in Public Policy from Indiana University.