Professor Aseem Inam
Aseem is Professor and Chair in Urban Design at Cardiff University. He is also Director of TRULAB: Laboratory for Designing Urban Transformation. He is currently leading multiple projects, including “Co-Designing Publics: [Re]Producing the Public Realm via Informal Urbanisms in Cities of the Global South,” “The Prismatic City: How Las Vegas Reveals the True Nature of the Contemporary Urbanism,” and “Designing an Equitable City: Confronting Gentrification in Studio Pedagogy.” In addition to numerous book chapters, journal articles and professional reports, his books include Planning for the Unplanned: Recovering from Crises in Megacities and Designing Urban Transformation. He has worked as an activist, scholar and practitioner in Canada, France, Greece, Haiti, India, Morocco, Sweden, United Kingdom and the United States. For this “Co-Designing Publics” research network, he has tremendously enjoyed working with his co-investigators and local collaborators, and looks forward to a further exchange of knowledge and ideas and the collaborative generation of new knowledge.
Dr. Charlotte Lemanski
Dr Charlotte Lemanski is Reader in Urban Geography at the University of Cambridge. Her research explores everyday urban inequality in the global south, primarily through the lens of infrastructure (housing and services), urban governance and citizenship. She works in partnership with scholars from a wide range of disciplines, as well as small-scale NGOs, to co-produce knowledge that spans the physical and social sciences, and is grounded in local expertise. She has recently completed a British Academy GCRF ‘Cities and Infrastructure‘ (2018-2019) project exploring domestic energy innovation for low-income households in India and South Africa, involving primary fieldwork with public, private and community-based energy stakeholders in Cape Town and Bangalore. She is currently completing a long-term project connecting infrastructure and citizenship – her edited collection, Citizenship and Infrastructure, was published by Routledge in 2019; and her monograph, Infrastructural Citizenship, will be published by the RGS-IBG book series in 2023.
Dr. Melanie Lombard
Dr Melanie Lombard is a Lecturer in the Department of Urban Studies and Planning at the University of Sheffield. Her research agenda involves connecting the built environment to social processes through exploring the everyday activities that construct cities, often neglected by formal theories and practices of planning and urbanism. Under this broad agenda, two core themes of urban informality, and land and conflict, have emerged. She has explored these themes in cities in Latin America (Mexico and Colombia) and Europe (UK), and more recently has been interested in comparing these issues across diverse contexts, including in African cities. Her current research explores the effects of the Colombian peace process on marginalised urban communities. She has published articles in journals including Urban Studies, Progress in Planning, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, and the International Journal of Urban and Regional Research.
Dr. Neha Sami
Dr. Neha Sami’s research focuses on the governance of infrastructure, especially mega-infrastructure in the context of post-liberalization urban India. She also works on questions of environmental governance particularly at the sub-national scale, focusing on institutional analysis and state capacity. She is currently faculty at the Indian Institute for Human Settlements in Bangalore, India where she teaches on questions of governance and sustainability and anchor the Research Programme. Her research has been published in the Economic and Political Weekly, the International Journal for Urban and Regional Research (IJURR), and Land Use Policy, as well as through contributions to several edited volumes. She is a Corresponding Editor for the International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, and has served on the Editorial Collective of Urbanization. She holds a Ph.D. in Urban Planning from the University of Michigan, a master’s degree in Environmental Management from the Yale School of the Environment and a B.A. in Economics from the University of Mumbai.
Professor AbdouMaliq Simone
AbdouMaliq Simone is Senior Professorial Fellow at the Urban Institute, University of Sheffield and Visiting Professor of Urban Studies at the African Centre for Cities, University of Cape Town. Key publications include, For the City Yet to Come: Urban Change in Four African Cities, Duke University Press, 2004, and City Life from Jakarta to Dakar: Movements at the Crossroads: Routledge, 2009, Jakarta: Drawing the City Near: University of Minnesota Press, 2014, New Urban Worlds: Inhabiting Dissonant Times, Polity (with Edgar Pieterse, Polity 2017), Improvised Lives: Rhythms of Endurance for an Urban South (Polity 2018), and The Surrounds: Urban Life Within and Beyond Capture (forthcoming, Duke University Press).
Simone has worked for a wide range of multilateral institutions and NGOs specializing in urban development, as well as holding academic appointments at Medgar Evers College, the University of Khartoum, Cape Coast University, Witwatersrand University (Johannesburg), the New School, and Goldsmiths College, University of London. For decades he has travelled across the world working with various municipalities, research groups and social movements on issues of urban transformation.
Professor Simon Springer
Simon Springer is Professor of Human Geography, Head of Discipline for Geography and Environmental Studies, and Director of the Centre for Urban and Regional Studies at the University of Newcastle, Australia. His research agenda explores the social and political exclusions that neoliberalism has engendered, particularly in post-transitional Cambodia, where he emphasizes the geographies of violence and power. He cultivates a cutting edge theoretical approach to his scholarship by foregrounding both poststructuralist critique and a radical revival of anarchist philosophy. Simon’s books include Translating Resistance (PM Press), The Anarchist Roots of Geography (University of Minnesota Press), The Discourse of Neoliberalism (Rowman & Littlefield), Violent Neoliberalism (Palgrave Macmillan), and Cambodia’s Neoliberal Order (Routledge). His edited books include The Handbook of Neoliberalism (Routledge), The Handbook of Contemporary Cambodia (Routledge) the Anarchism, Geography and the Spirit of Revolt trilogy (Rowman & Littlefield), and the Anarchist Political Ecology trilogy (Rowman & Littlefield). He serves as an Editor of the Transforming Capitalism book series published by Rowman & Littlefield.
Professor Fernando Luiz Lara
Fernando Luiz Lara works on theorizing spaces of the Americas with emphasis on the dissemination of architecture and planning ideas beyond the traditional disciplinary boundaries. In his several articles Prof. Lara has discussed the modern and the contemporary architecture of our continent, its meaning, context and social-economic insertion. His latest publications include Excepcionalidad del Modernismo Brasileño; Modern Architecture in Latin America (Hamilton Award runner up 2015) and Quid Novi (Anparq best book award 2016). Prof. Lara holds the Potter Rose Professorship in Urban Planning at the University of Texas at Austin where he currently serves as Director of the PhD Program in Architecture.
Juan Usubillaga – Network Administrator
Juan is based at the Welsh School of Architecture at Cardiff University. He is currently investigating political activism as a mode of urban design practice for his ongoing PhD studies under the supervision of Professor Aseem Inam and Dr. Anthony Ince. He graduated with a B.A. Architecture from Universidad de los Andes in Colombia and holds a MSc. Building and Urban Design in Development from UCL. His research interests revolve around urban design practices ignited by bottom-up initiatives, in areas like housing, social integration and humanitarian response.