The Collective
Abdou-Maliq Simone
The Urban Institute, University of Sheffield
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), and Improvised Lives: Rhythms of Endurance for an Urban South (Polity 2018).
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
Morten Nielsen
The National Museum of Denmark
Morten Nielsen is senior researcher at the National Museum of Denmark and head of the interdisciplinary research project ‘Middle Class Urbanism: An interdisciplinary study of the physical reordering of urban sub-Saharan Africa’. Based on his fieldwork in Mozambique, Scotland, and USA, he has published on issues such as urban citizenship, time and temporality, comedy, human creativity, urban aesthetics, materiality, infrastructure, and political cosmologies. Recent publications include articles in the Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, Social Analysis, and Social Anthropology. Together with Mikkel Bunkenborg and Morten Axel Pedersen, Copenhagen University, he recently completed the monograph ‘Collaborative Damage: An Experimental Ethnography of Chinese Globalization’, which will be published with Cornell University Press in early 2021.
Nielsen is coordinating an interdisciplinary urban research collective consisting of researchers, practitioners and artists focusing on ‘social urban modelling’, which will lead to the establishment of The Research Center for Social Urban Modelling (SUMO) at the National Museum of Denmark.
Heidi Svenningsen Kajita
University of Copenhagen
Heidi Svenningsen Kajita is assistant professor at University of Copenhagen. Her research deals with how architecture and planning can (re)produce social processes focusing on the history and transformation of welfare state large-scale housing. Drawing on emerging ethnographic-architectural methodology she combines knowledge of users’ everyday practices; normative frameworks for the built environment and architects' drawn and written work. Her current project (Im) possible Instructions: Inscribing use-value in the architectural design process activates archival research and ethnographic fieldwork strategies to develop caring techniques for new (speculative) practices (DFF/ Independent Research Fund Denmark GRANT_NUMBER: 9032-00006B - IPD). Heidi is research fellow at Newcastle University (2019-23) and member of the Society of Artists, The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts. She holds a Ph.D. (architecture) from the Royal Danish Academy (2016) and a Diploma in Architecture from University of East London (2001, RIBA 1 & 2). For publications see: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2536-8955
Heidi has since 2001 taught architecture, landscape architecture, urbanism and art at universities and schools in Denmark, Sweden and the UK. For info on practice see personal website: www.bureaus.dk
Barbara Schönig
Bauhaus-Universität Weimar
Barbara Schönig is professor for Urban Planning and the Director of the Institute for European Urban Studies at the Department for Architecture and Urbanism, Bauhaus-Universität Weimar. Before she came to Weimar she taught at Technical University Berlin and Technical University Darmstadt. She studied Urban Planning, German Literature and History of Arts in Berlin and Columbus, Ohio (USA) and received her PhD at Techical University, Berlin.
Her research focuses on critical studies of planning and its role within processes and practices of space production. Fields of research include interdisciplinary housing research, social housing, participation in urban development as well as processes of spatial restructuring of urban, suburban and rural areas.
She has co-founded the book-series "Interdisciplinary Housing Research" (edited in German at transcript-Verlag). More information on publication and research may be found here https://www.uni-weimar.de/de/architektur-und-urbanistik/professuren/stadtplanung/personen/mitarbeiterinnen/barbara-schoenig/
Claske Dijkema
Swisspeace, University of Basel
Claske Dijkema is postdoctoral research fellow at swisspeace, interested in violence in peace times and focuses on European cities. Her work breaks with the tendency of peace and conflict studies to focus on the Global South and civil war contexts. She is interested in the ways in which exceptional spaces are produced and the ways in which security discourse is used to legitimize state violence. Through her work she questions the structures and representations of white supremacy. Part of her work is about visibilising the means in which marginalized actors challenge their marginalisation and are involved in everyday peacebuilding.
She leads a pedagogical project on “Decolonising the Swiss Urban Landscape” as Visiting Lecturer of the Critical Urbanisms Master’s program at the University of Basel (Fall 2021).
Her PhD research at the University of Grenoble-Alpes (Department of Geography) consisted of developing a decolonial approach to marginalized-social housing neighbourhoods in France that deal with different forms of violence, looking in particular at the relationship residents established between the colonial past and present in France, at the experience of second-class citizenship, the embodied experiences of difference in public space and at strategies to challenging the status quo. From 2006 to 2019, she worked as a coordinator at Modus Operandi, a non-profit organization involved in citizen research and training in conflict transformation.
Publications: https://www.pacte-grenoble.fr/membres/claske-dijkema
Nanna Schneidermann
Aarhus Universitet
Nanna Schneidermann is assistant professor in anthropology at Aarhus University, and she does research on social change and popular music, digital technologies, gender and cities in Uganda, South Africa, Denmark and the Faroe Islands.
Since 2014, she has worked with urban transformation in her native Aarhus with a focus on the relationship between urban planning ideals and resident life trajectories in marginalized estates. Her fieldwork in Cape Town (2016-2018) investigated how intimate relations and motherhood is shaped by digital technologies, urban crisis and displacement across generations in former township areas.
Nanna is currently leading KAOS - Center for Collaborative Anthropology and Co-creation, together with Kenni Hede, in a collaborative project towards a youth community house and a folk high school in the housing estate Gellerup in Aarhus, Denmark.
Margherita Grazioli
Gran Sasso Science Institute
Margherita Grazioli is a postdoctoral research fellow in the Regional Sciences & Economic Geography in the Social Sciences Area of the Gran Sasso Science Institute (L'Aquila, Italy). Her main research areas are urban geography, housing policies and urban social movements, nurtured by her activism within the Blocchi Precari Metropolitani collective in Rome. As an activist ethnographer and researcher concerned with qualitative methodologies, she got the PhD title awarded at the School of Business of the University of Leicester (UK) after discussing her doctoral dissertation entitled ‘The right to the city in the post-welfare metropolis. Community building, autonomous infrastructures and urban commons in self-organised housing squats in Rome, Italy’. Key publications include ‘Housing, Urban Commons and the Right to the City in Post-Crisis Rome: Metropoliz, The Squatted Città Meticcia’, to be published by Palgrave Macmillan (2021)
Daniel Sorando
Complutense University of Madrid
Daniel Sorando is a sociologist and an assistant professor in the Applied Sociology Department at Complutense University of Madrid. Previously, he taught at NYU Madrid and was visiting scholar at Brown University (MA, USA). His research focus is on residential segregation and housing, with particular attention to gentrification processes and its link to inequality. On this issue, he is co-author of First we take Manhattan: la destrucción creativa de las ciudades [First we take Manhattan: the creative destruction of cities] (2016). He has published several journal articles and book chapters. Also, he has worked for several public administrations in the field of the sociology of youth and has been a member of different funded R&D projects. Currently, he is member of different research projects on the relation among segregation, residential turnover, welfare, and care regimes.
Caterina Di Giovanni
ISCTE – University Institute of Lisbon
Caterina Di Giovanni is a PhD student in Urban Studies at the ISCTE- University Institute of Lisbon, joined at FCSH-Nova University of Lisbon. Her research is funded by Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia and it focuses on integrated interventions in social housing with a comparative analysis between Portugal and Italy and an interdisciplinary approach between Architecture and Anthropology, also Political Science and Geography. She holds a master’s degree in architecture from University of Palermo (2012) and a postgraduate specialization in Urban Planning at Sapienza University of Rome (2015). In 2017 she contributed to the project “exPERts- Making sense of planning expertise: housing policy and the role of experts in the Programa Especial de Realojamento” and in 2019 she gained the research award “AESOP Young Investigator Training Program”, achieving a visiting scholar at Roma Tre University.
Caterina is currently taking part of international networks such as ETNO.URB – Rede de Etnografia Urbana, UTH - Urban Transition Hub and Rede H – Rede de Estudos sobre Habitação. For publications see: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2713-0118
Jonas Strandholdt Bach
Aarhus University
Jonas Strandholdt Bach is an anthropologist and is currently a postdoctoral research fellow at the Center for Alcohol and Drug Research at the Department of Psychology, Aarhus University, where he is currently working on a project about marginalized alcohol users in a disadvantaged estate in Aarhus. His research interests are, among others, the interfaces between planning and residents, system and citizens, and how care and control, health and autonomy are negotiated in the context of the Danish welfare state.
Before starting on his PhD in 2015, Jonas worked in community work projects in the Danish non-profit housing sector. In his PhD he followed the transformation of the Gellerup estate in Western Aarhus, “from marginalized estate to attractive neighborhood”, interviewing residents and professionals and examining, among other themes, planning, nostalgia, insecurity and resistance, introducing three “registers of imagination” that shape the transformation of the estate dynamically; villagization, creativization and normalization.
Stavros Stavrides
National Technical University of Athens
Dr. Stavros Stavrides, architect, is Professor at the School of Architecture, National Technical University of Athens, Greece, where he teaches graduate courses on housing design (social housing design included), as well as a postgraduate course on the meaning of metropolitan experience.
Extensive research fieldwork in Brazil, Uruguay, Argentina and Mexico focused on housing-as-commons and urban struggles for self-management.
Research topics include urban commons, urban struggles, experience of metropolitan space, housing, spatial theory, architectural design and planning.
His recent publications include Common Spaces of Urban Emancipation (Manchester 2019), Common Space. The City as Commons, (London 2016, Istanbul 2016, Athens 2019), Towards the City of Thresholds (Trento, 2010, Madrid 2016, Istanbul 2016, N. York 2019), Suspended Spaces of Alterity (Athens, 2010) and From the City-as-Screen to the City-as-Stage (Athens, 2002 National Book Award) as well as numerous articles on spatial theory and the urban commoning culture. He has lectured in European and North and South American Universities on urban struggles and practices of urban commoning. Personal homepage: http://courses.arch.ntua.gr/stavrides.html.
Rita Cachado
ISCTE – University Institute of Lisbon
Rita Cachado is an integrated researcher at Centre for Research and Studies in Sociology, in ISCTE – University Institute of Lisbon and member of the Board of the Portuguese Association of Anthropology (2020-2023). She co-coordinates the ETNO.URB Rede de Etnografia Urbana, https://etnourb.hypotheses.org/, and the Research Theme “History of Portuguese anthropology and ethnographic archives (19th-21st century)” in BEROSE International Encyclopedia of the Histories of Anthropology, https://www.berose.fr/article1760.html. With fieldwork in Lisbon, Leicester, Diu (Gujarat) and Maputo, she has published about rehousing, housing policies, Hindu transnationality. She dedicates her current work to ethnographic archives and urban ethnography. Among her publications she highlights Almeida, Sónia Vespeira e Rita Cachado (2019), “Archiving Anthropology in Portugal”, Anthropology Today 35 (1), 22-25, https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/1467-8322.12484; Cachado, Rita, “Beyond Martim Moniz. Portuguese Hindu Gujarati merchants in Lisbon” (2017), Etnográfica, 21 (1): 203-220, http://etnografica.revues.org/4871; and Cachado, Rita (2014), “Locating Portuguese Hindus. Transnationality in Urban Settings”, Sociologia Problemas e Práticas 76, 109-124, DOI 10.7458/SPP2014763330, in http://revistas.rcaap.pt/spp/article/view/3330/3262.
Bjarke Skærlund Risager
Roskilde University
Bjarke is a postdoctoral researcher (Carlsberg Foundation Reintegration Fellow) in the research unit for Space, Place, Mobility and Urban Studies at Roskilde University, Denmark. His main research interests are housing, gentrification, financialization, and social movements and protest. In his current project, he examines the “Ghetto Plan” in Denmark – a set of policies aiming to rid the country of so-called social housing “ghettos”, primarily through marketization and “social mixing” – and the way this is resisted by residents and grassroots groups. Read more here: https://bit.ly/3t771kJ. His work has been published in International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, Globalizations, Radical Housing Journal, and elsewhere.
Murat Ucoglu
York University
Murat Ucoglu received his PhD in Environmental Studies at York University in February 2021. His research focuses on the financialization of housing in Canada and Turkey, urban political economy and affordable housing systems for the cities of future. He is the co-editor of the book Massive Suburbanization: Re(Building) the Global Periphery, and more recently he has been working on the rise of suburban-financial nexus in Brampton and Toronto.
Sónia Alves
University of Lisbon
Sónia Alves is a research fellow at the Institute of Social Sciences of University of Lisbon (https://www.ics.ulisboa.pt/en/pessoa/sonia-alves), and a visiting researcher at the BUILD - Department of the Built Environment, Aalborg University (http://orcid.org/0000-0003-1231-8588). Her work focuses primarily on aspects of comparative planning and urban policy and the differential impact of housing policies upon social groups and areas within cities. Major themes in her research have included analysis of the relationship between planning and housing; and between rent regulation and housing rehabilitation in Portugal and in European housing systems.
Researcher @SustainLis project
Kenni Hede
Aarhus University
Kenni Hede is a PhD-student at the Department of Anthropology at Aarhus University. He does research in audiovisual methodologies, understandings of democracy, Bildung-theory, altruism, gender, and urban transformations and imaginaries in Denmark.
Since 2018, he has worked in various projects focused on 1) urban transformation and crime reduction policies and implementations 2) and the relationship between urban planning ideals and resident life trajectories in marginalized estates in Aarhus Municipality. His current PhD-project focuses on Næstekærlighed (a Danish interpretation of love thy neighbor from The New Testament) and its emergence across different religious traditions. The PhD-project explores notions of Næstekærlighed, Bildung, and local understandings and interpretations of democracy through the establishment of a Danish folk high school in the housing estate Gellerup on the western outskirts of Aarhus, Denmark.
Kenni is currently leading KAOS - Center for Collaborative Anthropology and Co-creation (Forskningscenter for Kollaborativ Anthropologi og Samskabelse), together with Nanna Schneiderman, in a collaborative project in the housing estate Gellerup in Aarhus, Denmark.
Anders Lund Hansen
Lund University
Anders Lund Hansen is an Associate professor and Reader (Docent) in Human Geography at Lund University and Guest Professor at the Department of Philosophy and History of Ideas Aarhus University. Since 2015 he has been the academic director of the master programme in human geography. His main research interests are political economy/ecology, urban political geography, social geography, gentrification, housing, planning and visual methodology. He publishes widely and is a frequent speaker at international conferences. ALH in a member of the Aarhus based research center URO: https://uro.au.dk and he has been PI of the FP7 EU project FESSUD on Financialization of the build environment: https://business.leeds.ac.uk/divisions-economics/dir-record/research-projects/1791/fessud. Moreover, he has been PI of CRUSH – Critical Urban Sustainability Hub (FORMAS Strong Research Environment, 2016-2021) – both projects had a focus on sustainability and housing. For eight years he has furthermore been a board member in the Danish non-profit collaborative housing sector. He was part of the reading group: The Housing Question – Revisited: https://www.acme-journal.org/index.php/acme/article/view/1347. One of his latest collaborative projects was a Swedish Housing Manifest: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LmUm-jHrei0.