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Robert Pyka is a professor of sociology at the University of Silesia in Katowice. In his research, he focuses on issues related to the city and metropolis, including empowerment, decentralisation and the complexity and diversity of urban processes as source of creativity and innovation. He is interested in multilevel governance and participatory democracy. He perceives cities as a lens focusing major challenges of the contemporary world. He mainly concentrates on problems of sociology and anthropology of politics, especially focusing on issues connected with the future of a state and local structures in globalisation, metropolisation and “governance” perspective.  Between 2019 and 2020, he was a Deputy Dean for Research and Internationalisation at the Faculty of Social Sciences. Before that, he had the position of Scientific Director of the Institute of Sociology. In 2017, he established the Observatory of Urban and Metropolitan Process (OUMP), the consortium of seven research entities from the Silesian Voivodship, focusing on urban and metropolitan research. He has written several scientific articles. He is also an author of books titled “Metropolization and local governance” (Pyka, 2014); Globalization – Social Justice – Economic Effectiveness (Pyka, 2008). Between 2020 and 2021, he conducted a project “Metropolises as laboratories for new models of innovation places” as a fellow in the Institute for Advanced Study at the University of Lyon (France).