Urbanisation – Urbanisation Journal

Urbanisation is a response to a particular moment of 21^st century global urbanisation within an increasingly re-arranged world. The drivers and locations of contemporary urbanisation are after a long historical gap, in the ‘Global South’ i.e. the countries of Asia, Africa and South America. This moment poses challenges for which we possess neither effective knowledge nor adequate practice. Urbanisation emerges out of three interconnected responses to this moment.

The first is to provide a platform to understand contemporary global urbanisation with a firm footprint in the South. In doing so, we see the ‘Global South’ not as a physical location but as a representative of a particular set of challenges and opportunities that determine the central questions of our age and demand critical analysis and effective intervention.

The second is to build on this new knowledge to re-think the epistemological canon of urbanisation and its associated systems and processes. This ‘canon’ built on a 19^th and 20^th century imagination and practice has proved to be particular rather than universal. The journal stands firmly with the ‘southern turn’ in urban theory, building new knowledge from the experiences of cities and regions of the Global South to speak with all cities and settlements and re-think the foundations of current urban theory.

The third is to reflexively engage with and theorise practice. Urban questions refuse simple boundaries of sector or domain in addition to discipline or the assumed ‘theory-practice’ divide. The ‘wicked problems’ of cities, city-regions and hybrid rural-urban settlements are sites that defy most canonical knowledge, techniques, methods, categories and terms. Yet there remain few platforms within which to document, reflect upon, critique and analyse practice, let alone imagine new forms and techniques of practice. Some of this is because of the continuing persistence of hierarchies between forms of knowledge and its production – an artificial separation that this journal explicitly seeks to address.

The Journal

Anchored at the Indian Institute for Human Settlements, Bengaluru, Urbanisation is published on a bi-annual basis (May, November) by Sage Publications India. It is available worldwide online through international journal indices such as SAGE Premiere and HighWire, and in print through Sage’s extensive distribution channels. The current issue can be found here.

Urbanisation aims to publish comparative as well as collaborative interdisciplinary scholarship that will illuminate the global urban condition beginning with a firm footprint in the Global South. A platform that brings together interdisciplinary scholarship on the urban, it is equally interested in critical and reflexive discussions on diverse forms and sectors of urban practice. It seeks to do so not only to inform urban theory, policy and practice but also to enable the construction of diverse forms of knowledge and knowledge production needed to enable us to understand contemporary urban life.

The Journal seeks to:

Promote theorisation of urban processes from the perspective of a wide range of practices that shape urban life.

Publish comparative as well as collaborative interdisciplinary scholarship that will illuminate the global urban condition beginning with a firm footprint in the Global South.

Provide a platform that brings together and puts into conversation interdisciplinary scholarship on the urban.

Provide a platform that allows critical and reflexive discussion from and on diverse forms and sectors of urban practice.

Enable diverse forms of knowledge and knowledge production particularly those that bridge the theory-practice divide as well as disciplinary and methodological boundaries.

Learn from and inform urban policy and practice across a range of domains and sectors.

Current Issue

urbanisation book cover

Access the entire issue here

Volume 2 Issue 2

EDITORIAL

In This Issue

Re-imagining the United Nations’ Response to a Twenty-first-century Urban World
Aromar Revi

GENERAL ARTICLES

A Decentralised Approach to Wastewater Management in the Urbanising Region
Prathiwi Widyatmi Putri

Placing the Urban in its Rural Context: A Mixed Methods Case Study of a Census Town in India
Srilata Sircar

On-the-Go Settlements: Understanding Urban Informality through its Digital Substructure
Swati Janu

WRITING FROM PRACTICE

Cog in the Wheel of Patronage
Deepak Sannan

VISUAL ESSAY

Positing the Polis: Topography as a Way to De-centre Urban Thinking
Filip De Boeck, Sammy Baloji

CLASSICS

NGO Profile: SPARC: Developing New NGO Lines
Environment and Urbanization

REVIEW
I, Daniel Blake
Andrea Gibbons

Call for Papers

Call for Papers: Issue 3(1) (May 2018)

All submissions will be subject to blind peer review.
Submissions should be sent in MS-Word format to submission@urbanisationjournal.com
Please refer to the submission guidelines.
All entries are due by 5pm Indian Standard Time, 15 January 2018.

Call for Papers: Issue 3(2) (November 2018)

All submissions will be subject to blind peer review.
Submissions should be sent in MS-Word format to submission@urbanisationjournal.com
Please refer to the submission guidelines.
All entries are due by 5pm Indian Standard Time, 1 June 2018.

Editorial

Editor

AROMAR REVI

Editor
Director, Indian Institute for Human Settlements

Aromar Revi is Director of the Indian Institute for Human Settlements (IIHS). He is an alumnus of IIT-Delhi and the Law and Management schools of the University of Delhi. An international practitioner, researcher and educator, Aromar has 30 years of interdisciplinary experience in public policy and governance, political economy of reform, development, technology, sustainability and urbanisation.

He is a member of the Leadership Council of the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network (SDSN), co-chair of its urban thematic group, where he leads a global campaign for an urban Sustainable Development Goal, and a Fellow of the India China Institute at the New School University. Aromar is one of South Asia’s leading experts on global environmental change and Climate adaptation and mitigation. He is a Coordinating Lead Author of the IPCC Assessment Report 5 on Urban Areas and co-PI of a 5-year international multi-million dollar Climate Adaptation research programme that spans India and Africa. He’s on the editorial Boards of the International Journal of Urban Sustainable Development (Taylor and Francis) and Urban Climate (Elsevier).

Aromar has led over 100 major research, consulting & implementation assignments in India and abroad; published 60 peer-reviewed publications and books; and lectured and taught at over 35 of the world’s leading Universities and think tanks across 6 continents. He had the distinction in 2014 of twice addressing the United Nations at the General Assembly’s OWG in New York and at TEDx Palais des Nations in Geneva on sustainable cities. He delivered the first Kapuscinski Development lecture in Africa on a similar theme following a distinguished list of global thought leaders.

Editorial Board

OM MATHUR
Senior Fellow and Head Urban Studies, Institute of Social Sciences, New Delhi, India

Om Mathur received his Master’s degree in Economics, Delhi School of Economics, and pursued graduate studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge (USA) and Harvard University, Cambridge (USA).

He is Senior Fellow and Head Urban Studies, Institute of Social Sciences, New Delhi. He was a Distinguished Professor of Urban Economics at the National Institute of Urban Affairs, New Delhi, India. He has held the IDFC Chair in Urban Economics and Finance at the National Institute of Public Finance and Policy, New Delhi for over 15 years.

He served from 1978 to 1984 as Senior Economic Planner at the United Nations Centre for Regional Development, Nagoya, Japan, and from 1975 to 1978, as a United Nations Senior Regional Planning Adviser/Project Manager with the Imperial Government of Iran. He is a Member, of the Prime Minister’s National Review Committee on the Jawaharlal Nehru National Urban Renewal Mission (JNNURM); Member of the Advisory Committee of the ADB-GTZ Programme on City Development Initiative for Asia (CDIA) and is on the Advisory Committee of the World Bank’s Global City Indicators Facility (GCIF).

He has served as the Chair of the Working Group on Urban Poverty constituted by the Planning Commission (India) for determining the approach to urban poverty in the Twelfth Five Year Plan (2012-2017); and also as the Chair of the Working Group on Municipal Finance set up by the Ministry of Urban Development, in connection with the preparation of a report for consideration of the National Development Council.

DAVID SATTERTHWAITE
Editor, Environment and Urbanization; Senior Fellow, International Institute for Environment and Development (IIED), London, UK

David Satterthwaite is Senior Fellow at the International Institute for Environment and Development (IIED) and editor of the
international journal Environment and Urbanization. He is also a visiting Professor at the Development Planning Unit, University College London and was awarded the Volvo Environment Prize in 2004. Most of his work has been on poverty reduction in urban areas in Africa, Asia and Latin America, undertaken with local teams. He has written and edited various books on urban issues, including Squatter Citizen (with Jorge E. Hardoy), Environmental Problems in an Urbanizing World (with Jorge E. Hardoy and Diana Mitlin) and Empowering Squatter Citizen (with Diana Mitlin), all published by Earthscan.

He also co-authored two recently published books on urban poverty with Diana Mitlin -Urban Poverty in the Global South: Scale and Nature and Reducing Urban Poverty in the Global South, both published by Routledge. He also has a particular interest in how climate change can or will add to the stresses and shocks faced by low-income urban dwellers. He is a Coordinating Lead Author for the chapter on urban adaptation in the Inter Governmental Panel on Climate Change’s Fifth Assessment and he also contributed to the IPCC’s Third and Fourth Assessments.

He has advised various international agencies including UNICEF, World Health Organization, OECD, the Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency (Sida), the World Bank, the European Commission, DFID, DANIDA and the Brundtland Commission.

RAHUL MEHROTRA
Professor of Urban Design and Planning, Harvard University, MA, USA

Rahul is Professor of Urban Design and Planning and Chair of the Department of Urban Planning and Design. He is a practicing architect, urban designer, and educator. He is also a member of the steering committee of the South Asia Initiative at Harvard, and curates their series on Urbanisation.

The office of Rahul Mehrotra Associates was founded in August 1990 and has since designed and executed projects that include houses, factories, institutes and office buildings. In addition, the practice has been involved in conservation and master planning projects in the city of Bombay, thereby engaging at varying scales with diverse issues, from interior design and architecture to urban design, conservation and planning.

Among other things, he is also credited for his work in building the LMW Corporate Office in Coimbatore, an Orphanage for Children of the World in New Bombay, the D.J. Institute of Management in Coimbatore, an extension to the Prince of Wales Museum in Bombay, a Rural Development Institute in Tuljapur and a school for hearing-impaired children.

Editorial Committee

Dr AMIR BAZAZ
Lead – Practice, Indian Institute for Human Settlements (IIHS), India

Amir Bashir Bazaz holds a PhD in Management, with a specialization in Public Systems. He works on issues at the intersection of economics, climate change mitigation and sustainable development. He has substantial experience of working with various top-down & bottom-up economy-energy-environment modelling frameworks/architectures. His current research interests are low carbon societies/infrastructure, climate change adaptation, urban-climate change linkages. Amir started his career in the manufacturing industry, working across functional responsibilities of projects, production planning/control and engineering. He has been the Expert Consultant to the Ministry of Environment & Forests, Government of India for the National Communication to the UNFCCC project and taught courses in Development & Environmental Economics during his academic engagements.

AMLANJYOTI GOSWAMI
Head, Legal & Regulation, Indian Institute for Human Settlements (IIHS), India

Amlanjyoti Goswami works on law, policy and governance. He is interested in conceptual questions of urban theory, knowledge epistemologies, legality and its relationships with space, politics and culture. His recent research and teaching work is on the political economy of urban land and land regulation, land acquisition, tenureship, land use and recording frameworks as well as the legal and regulatory frameworks that govern urban and rural development.

Amlan heads Legal and Regulation at IIHS and co-leads the development of the Law and Governance concentration for the proposed IIHS Masters in Urban Practice Programme. He oversees the process of building appropriate legal, institutional and regulatory frameworks and enabling institutional sector development for key sectors in India including urban development, land-related issues, decentralisation, livelihood issues and higher education.

Amlan holds an LL.B and a B.A. (Hons Sociology) from University of Delhi and an LL.M from Harvard Law School. He has over a decade of international and domestic regulatory, policy, research and legal experience. He has consulted with the World Bank in Washington DC; worked in the Banking and Finance team of India’s largest legal practice Amarchand Mangaldas; and practised at the Supreme Court of India in the chambers of Harish Salve on constitutional, environmental and contract law. Amlan also worked on legal, regulatory and policy-related issues at the National Knowledge Commission set up by the then Prime Minister, on questions pertaining to Higher Education in India.

PRASAD SHETTY
Urbanist, School of Environment and Architecture (SEA), Mumbai, India

Prasad Shetty is an urbanist based in Mumbai. He has studied architecture (Mumbai) and Urban Management (Rotterdam). He currently teaches at the School of Environment and Architecture (SEA) and also works with the Mumbai Metropolitan Region—Environment Improvement and Heritage Conservation Society. He is one of the founder members of the urban research collective, CRIT, and the Society for Environment and Architecture.

Prasad’s recent works include: De-Mapping: an installation emerging from the hyper-mapping tendencies of urban study practices (supported by Khoj, Delhi); Bombay Talkies and Other Stories of Malad: a research on the land politics in the suburb of Mumbai (supported by Majlis, Mumbai); Being Nicely Messy: a research on projecting the future mobility of Mumbai (supported by the Audi Urban Futures Initiative); and Gurgaon Glossaries: compiling the terms that are getting formed when the new city of Gurgaon is settling (supported by SARAI, Delhi & the Devi Art Foundation).

KAVITA WANKHADE
Senior Lead – Practice, Indian Institute for Human Settlements (IIHS), India

Kavita Wankhede has a Masters in City Design and Social Science from the London School of Economics and Political Science, and a Bachelors in Architecture from the School of Planning and Architecture, New Delhi. She completed a three-month Urban Knowledge Network Asia (UKNA) Fellowship at the Development Planning Unit, University College London in 2014.

Kavita works as Lead-Practice at the Indian Institute for Human Settlements. Her work cuts across research, teaching, consulting and policy analysis, and her areas of expertise are urban water and sanitation, urban environment, and urban infrastructure. She currently leads the urban water and sanitation team at IIHS. The team has successfully completed a range of research and practice projects including a policy paper on water and sanitation, assessment of a micro-finance sanitation project, action plan for climate change (water and sanitation) for Bengaluru among others.

Kavita co-coordinated the development of IIHS’ interdisciplinary Masters in Urban Practice (MUP) curriculum framework with a team of over 180 leading academics, practitioners and policy makers from across the world. She later co-led the 9-month IIHS Programme for Working Professionals in Urban Development (PWP-UD) that tested and ‘proved’ the interdisciplinary MUP framework and pedagogic approach.

In her career spanning over a decade, Kavita has experience of working with local and state governments, Indian and international educational institutions, NGOs, public- and private-sector institutions and bilateral and multilateral institutions. Some of her key assignments in the past include a comprehensive review of urban sanitation in India for WSP, review of JNNURM from the environmental sustainability lens, and the design of cyclone shelters for the Gujarat government.

Dr GAUTAM BHAN
Lead – Academics & Research, Indian Institute for Human Settlements (IIHS), India

Gautam Bhan holds a PhD in City and Regional Planning from the University of California, Berkeley, an MA from the University of Chicago, and a BA from Amherst College. He teaches urban politics, planning and development at the Indian Institute for Human Settlements, Bengaluru. His writing, research and practice focuses on the politics of poverty in contemporary urban India with a focus on urban displacement, access to affordable housing, and housing policy in India. He has been an active part of urban social movements on sexuality as well as housing rights, and currently advises and trains governmental agencies at local, state and national levels on housing policy.

Gautam is the co-editor of Because I have a Voice: Queer Politics in India (Yoda Press) and co-author of Swept off the Map: Surviving Eviction and Resettlement in Delhi (Yoda Press). He is Sexualities Series editor at Yoda Press. His writing has appeared frequently in Caravan, India Today, Tehelka, Indian Express, the Hindustan Times and the Times of India. He also writes regularly on Kafila.org. His forthcoming book is entitled In the Public’s Interest: Citizenship, Evictions and Inequality in Contemporary Delhi (Orient Blackswan and University of Georgia Press, 2016).

Dr NEHA SAMI
Senior Consultant – Academics & Research, Indian Institute for Human Settlements (IIHS), India

Neha holds a PhD in Urban and Regional Planning from the University of Michigan, and a Masters in Environmental Management from the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies. A consultant at the Indian Institute for Human Settlements, she works on the political economy of land and governance in urban India. Neha is also interested in issues of brownfield redevelopment and planning for climate change. At IIHS, she anchors research of urbanisation and climate change; heads collaborative knowledge networks under the Urban Knowledge Network Asia; and leads work on India’s first integrated metropolitan assessment for Bengaluru.

She has worked with the Boston Redevelopment Authority as an analyst with the Economic Development Division. She has also worked as a consultant with the Environment and Sustainable Development Division of the UN-ESCAP (Bangkok). Her recent writing includes several journal articles in Land Use Policy; International Journal of Urban and Regional Research; and the Journal of Industrial Ecology.

Dr JAYARAJ SUNDARESAN
Senior Consultant, Indian Institute for Human Settlements (IIHS), India

Dr Jayaraj Sundaresan’s research interest lies at the intersection of urban theory, urban practice and urban transformation. His primary research field sites are Cities in India and London in the UK. Thematic issues of interest include urban morphology, historic cities, urban commons, urban planning and design practice, violations and illegalities, ecological transformations, urban politics, participation, urban activism and communal geographies. He has taught at the UCL, LSE, IIHS and NIT-C (India)

Currently he is a post doc research fellow at the DPU (UCL), London and visiting faculty at the IIHS Bengaluru. Among the research projects he has worked include the Future proofing Indian Cities (DPU-UCL), Global Climate Legislation Study (Grantham Institute, LSE), Urban Age Mumbai conference (LSE Cities, LSE). Apart from his academic pursuits, he has also worked with the local governments in London as a consultant on planning, regeneration and urban design policy. At the London Borough of Lewisham, he has helped in the negotiation of more than 80 key projects and wrote the evidence base for tall buildings. With London Borough of Haringey he worked as economic regeneration manager. Between 2001- 2004, he was founder director of an Architecture and Planning consultancy named C-Earth (Centre for Environment Architecture and Human Settlements) based in Kerala, India where he coordinated the urban poverty division. As part of this he had designed and implemented urban housing regeneration and slum rehabilitation/tenure security projects for more than 1000 people for the Kochi Urban Poverty Alleviation Program. Between 1997-1998 he had worked on the heritage conservation of Jaisalmer, Jodhour and Udaipur forts.

Jayaraj Sundaresan holds a PhD in Regional and Urban Planning Studies from the London School of Economics and Political Science (Human Geography), MSc in City Design and Social Science from the London School of Economics and Political Science (Cities program- Sociology), M.Arch in Urban Design and Planning from CEPT University, and B.Arch from Kerala University.

Editorial Team

REKHA RAGHUNATHAN
Rekha Raghunathan earned MBA from the University of Hartford, CT, USA with a specialisation in financial analytics. She has been a part of the Word Lab at IIHS since January 2015, and works with the faculty and researchers to establish and help implement editorial processes across all IIHS teams for in-house publications, working papers, reports and policy briefs. Her focus areas include converting research material into data stories and op-eds for online platforms and non-academic audiences, and doing substantive and copy-editing on several IIHS publications. She conducts writing workshops for external and internal audiences, and teaches writing skills as part of the Urban Fellows Programme.

NISHTHA VADEHRA
Nishtha Vadehra works with the Word Lab at the Indian Institute for Human Settlements (IIHS), Bengaluru, where she is involved in providing editorial support to academics and researchers on long-form academic/research writing and developing book-length work.

Prior to this, she worked with Yoda Press, an independent publishing house based in Delhi. As Senior Editor and Rights Manager, she edited several academic and non-academic titles, helped oversee the book production process and managed author contracts and rights. In addition to this, she has worked as an independent/consulting editor with several organisations like UNDP, Centre for Urban and Regional Excellence, Population Council, GIZ and UNODC, as well as with authors, scholars and researchers.

SHYAMALA SURESH
Shyamala is an Associate with the Word Lab. She earned her Master’s and Bachelor’s degrees in Commerce from Mount Carmel College in Bengaluru. She has been with the Word Lab since December 2014 where she develops and designs content for the online repository of IIHS publications, the Knowledge Gateway. She also edits IIHS in-house publications and helps manage IIHS Cases, an ongoing project on developing innovative teaching and learning resources meant to promote case-based learning. She is also working on setting up segregation and composting systems at IIHS.

Advisors

AbdouMaliq Simone
Urbanist and Research Professor at Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity, Göttingen, Germany

AbdouMaliq Simone is an urbanist and research professor at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity. He is also affiliated with Goldsmiths College, University of London; the African Centre for Cities, University of Cape Town; and the Rujak Center for Urban Studies in Jakarta.

For three decades he has worked with practices of social interchange, cognition, local economy, and the constitution of power relations that affect how heterogeneous African and Southeast Asian cities are lived. He has not only acquired a substantial understanding of urban processes and change in these regions as a body of academic knowledge, but has worked on the concrete challenges of remaking municipal systems, training local government personnel, designing collaborative partnerships among technicians, residents, artists, and politicians. His published work includes For the City Yet to Come (Duke University Press) and City Life from Jakarta to Dakar: Movements at the Crossroads (Routledge).

Adriana Allen
Professor, Development Planning and Urban Sustainability at Bartlett Development Planning Unit, University College London, UK

Adriana Allen is Professor of Development Planning and Urban Sustainability at the The Bartlett Development Planning Unit, UCL, where she leads the DPU Research Cluster on Environmental Justice, Urbanisation and Resilience (EJUR) and teaches in the MSc in Environment and Sustainable Development (ESD).

Originally trained as urban planner in Argentina, she specialised over the years in the fields of urban environmental planning and political ecology. She has over 25 years international experience in research and consultancy undertakings in almost 20 countries in Latin America, Africa and Asia. Both as an academic and practitioner, her work focuses on the interface between development and environmental concerns in the urban context of the global south, and more specifically on fostering transformative links between environmental justice and urban sustainability and resilience.

She is a Visiting Professor at various universities in Latin America and acted a beacon member for the 2006 IV World Water Forum cross-cutting perspective dealing with institutional development and political processes in water provision. She is co-editor of the International Journal of Sustainable Urban Development and a regular reviewer for Urban Studies, Cities, Local Environment, Human Ecology and Natural Resources Forum, among other international academic journals.

Ananya Roy
Professor of Urban Planning and Social Welfare, University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), USA

Ananya Roy is Professor of Urban Planning and Social Welfare and inaugural Director of The Institute on Inequality and Democracy at UCLA Luskin. She holds The Meyer and Renee Luskin Chair in Inequality and Democracy. Previously she was on the faculty at the University of California, Berkeley. Ananya’s scholarship has focused on urban transformations in the global South, with particular attention to the making of “world-class” cities and the dispossessions and displacements that are thus wrought. She also looks at new regimes of international development, and the economies of the poor into new markets for global finance Recent publications include City Requiem, Calcutta: Gender and the Politics of Poverty and Worlding Cities: Asian Experiments and the Art of Being Global, co-edited with Aihwa Ong, Poverty Capital: Microfinance and the Making of Development, was the recipient of the 2011 Paul Davidoff award. Trained as an urban planner, Ananya is critical of ideas and practices that at best ignore, and at worst, perpetuate urbanisms of inequality and separation.

Arif Hassan
Chairperson, Urban Resource Centre, Karachi, Pakistan

Mr. Arif Hasan is a Pakistani architect and planner, activist, teacher and social researcher and the author of a large number of books, research papers and monographs, on planning and development mainly from the point of view of low and lower middle income communities. He has been associated with the Orangi Pilot Project-Research and Training Institute, first as its Principal Consultant and then as its Chairman, since its inception in 1980 and he is also founder Chairperson of the Urban Resource Centre. Both the projects have received considerable national and international recognition and are being replicated in a number of cities in Asia. He is also a founder member of the Asian Coalition for Housing Rights and has taught in Pakistan and European universities and received a number of national and international awards for his work.

Awadhendra Sharan
Associate Professor, Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, New Delhi, India

Awadhendra Sharan is Associate Professor at the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, Delhi. Trained as a historian at Delhi University and University of Chicago, USA, Dr. Sharan’s research interests are in the fields of urban and environmental studies. He is the author of In the City, Out of Place: Nuisance, Pollution and Dwelling in Delhi, c.1850-2000 (OUP, India). His current research is focused on Cultures of Waste and Pollution in Colonial India and Urban Infrastructure in Cities of the Global South.

Dr. Sharan has offered guest lectures at the School of Planning and Architecture, Delhi and at Delhi University. His writings have been published in various research journals and in the Sarai/ CSDS Reader series.

Bert de Vries
Professor, Copernicus Institute of Sustainable Development, Utrecht University, The Netherlands

Between 1990 and 2013 Bert de Vries has been a senior scientist at the Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency (PBL, formerly MNP and RIVM). He has been a member of the TARGETS- and IMAGE-teams on Global Change Integrated Assessment Models (IAM) and has contributed to modelling and scenario construction for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Between 2003 and 2013 he was Professor of Global Change and Energy at Utrecht University. His research expertise and publications are in resource and energy analysis, modelling and policy; climate and global change modelling; and complex systems modelling for sustainable development. As member of the Sustainable Finance Lab he is engaged in research on the relationship between sustainability and the financial system.

Bish Sanyal
Professor, Director of the Special Program in Urban and Regional Studies, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), MA, USA

Professor Bish Sanyal is Ford International Professor of Urban Development and Planning in the Department of Urban Studies and Planning at MIT. He also heads the Hubert H. Humphrey Fellowship Program at MIT and is Director of the MIT Comprehensive Initiative on Technology Evaluation (CITE) as part of USAID’s Higher Education Solutions Network (HESN) to evaluate technologies for the poor. Professor Sanyal has published extensively on cities and city planning in developing countries, particularly, how to integrate the majority of urban population who are poor into the physical and economic fabric of the city. He has also written on internationalization of planning education.

Brian McGrath
Dean, School of Constructed Environments, Parsons The New School for Design, New York, USA

Brian McGrath is Dean of the School of Constructed Environments, Parsons The New School for Design and the founder and principal of Urban-Interface, LLC, and an urban design consultancy fusing expertise in architecture, ecology and social media. McGrath is also a principle researcher in the Baltimore Ecosystem Study, a National Science Foundation’s Long Term Ecological Research. His books and publications include: Urban Design Ecologies Reader, (2012), Digital Modeling for Urban Design (2008), Transparent Cities (1994), Resilience in Ecology and Urban Design (2012), co-edited with Steward Pickett and Mary Cadenasso, Growing Cities in a Shrinking World: The Challenges in India and China (2010), co-edited with Ashok Gurung and Jiyanying Zha. McGrath served as a Fulbright Senior Scholar in Thailand in 1998-99 and an India China Institute Fellow in 2006-2008 and currently is the Research Director in the joint US-EU Transatlantic exchange program Urbanisms of Inclusion. He received his Bachelor of Architecture from Syracuse University and his Masters of Architecture degree from Princeton University.

David Dodman
Acting Head, Human Settlements Group, Team Leader, Cities and Climate Change, International Institute for Environment and Development, London, UK

David Dodman is a development research professional with more than ten years of experience in the fields of urban geography, international development, and climate change. He has held positions in universities and policy research institutions, and has worked in partnership with southern civil society organizations, local and national governments, and international organizations. He holds a D.Phil. in Geography from the University of Oxford, and has published widely in books and peer-reviewed journals. In his current role at the International Institute for Environment and Development (IIED) he is Acting Head for the Human Settlements Group, has developed and implemented a wide-ranging programme of research on urban adaptation to climate change, has led an institute-wide task team on research quality, and has helped shape major organisational initiatives on financial management. He has worked widely in Asia, Africa and the Caribbean, spoken extensively at major international conferences, and has contributed to major international reports including the UN Habitat Global Report on Human Settlements and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Fifth Assessment Report.

Dr. Debra Roberts
Environmental Management Department, Ethekwini Minicipality, Durban, South Africa

Dr. Debra Roberts established and heads the Environmental Planning and Climate Protection Department of eThekwini Municipality (Durban, South Africa). She was a lead author of Chapter 8 (Urban Areas) and a contributing author to Chapter 12 (Africa) of Working Group II of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) Fifth Assessment Report. She is a member of the South African climate negotiating team and has sat on various international advisory bodies focused on climate change issues in cities (e.g. the Rockefeller Foundation’s Asian Cities Climate Change Resilience Network).

Dr. Roberts was vice-chair of UN-Habitat’s HS-NET Advisory Board which oversaw the production of the 2011 “Cities and Climate Change” Global Report and is a founding member of the Alliance for Sustainability and Prosperity for All. She is a member of the Sustainable Development Solutions Network Thematic Group on Sustainable Cities, working towards the establishment of an urban SDG as part of the post-2015 development regime. She was also appointed as a member of the Future Earth Engagement Committee and as thematic policy expert on Africa for UNEP’s GEO6. Dr. Roberts is a fellow of the Watson International Scholars of the Environment Programme and has written widely in the fields of urban open space planning, environmental management and urban climate protection and has received a number of awards for her work.

Devesh Kapur
Director, Center for the Advanced Study of India, Professor of Political Science; Madan Lal Sobti Chair for the Study of Contemporary India, University of Pennsylvania, USA

Devesh Kapur is the Director of the Center for the Advanced Study of India. He is Professor of Political Science at the University of Pennsylvania, and holds the Madan Lal Sobti Chair for the Study of Contemporary India. Prior to arriving at Penn, he was Associate Professor of Government at the University of Texas at Austin, and before that the Frederick Danziger Associate Professor of Government at Harvard University.

His research focuses on human capital, national and international public institutions, and the ways in which local-global linkages, especially international migration and international institutions, affect political and economic change in developing countries, especially India. His book, Diaspora, Democracy and Development: The Impact of International Migration from India on India, published by Princeton University Press in August 2010, earned him the 2012 ENMISA (Ethnicity, Nationalism, and Migration Section of International Studies Association) Distinguished Book Award. His latest book, Defying the Odds: The Rise of Dalit Entrepreneurs (co-authored with D. Shyam Babu and Chandra Bhan Prasad), was published in July 2014 by Random House India.

Eugenie Birch
Professor of Urban Research, School of Design, University of Pennsylvania, USA

Eugénie L. Birch FAICP, RTPI (hon), is the Nussdorf Professor of Urban Research, Department of City and Regional Planning, School of Design, University of Pennsylvania. She is the founding co-director of the Penn Institute for Urban Research, and co-editor of Penn Press’s The City in the 21^st Century series.

Dr. Birch has served as editor, Journal of the American Planning Association, chair, Planning Accreditation Board, president, Association of Collegiate Schools of Planning, Society for American City and Regional Planning History and the International Planning History Society.

Recent publications include Slums: How Informal Real Estate Markets Work (forthcoming, co-edited with Susan Wachter and Shohana Chattaraj), Global Urbanization (2011, co-edited with Susan Wachter), and Women’s Health and the World’s Cities (2011, co-edited with Afaf Meleis and Susan Wachter).

Dr. Birch is currently chair, UN-HABITAT’s World Urban Campaign and president of its special initiative, the General Assembly of Partners.

Dr. Birch holds a Ph.D and Master in Urban Planning from Columbia University and an A.B. cum laude in History and Latin American Affairs from Bryn Mawr College.

Jennifer Robinson
Professor, Department of Geography, University College London (UCL), UK

Jennifer Robinson is Professor of Human Geography at University College London, and Visiting Professor at the African Centre for Cities, University of Cape Town. She has also worked at the University of KwaZulu-Natal, Durban, the LSE (London) and the Open University. Her book, Ordinary Cities (Routledge, 2006) developed a post-colonial critique of urban studies, arguing for urban theorising which draws on the experiences of a wider range of cities around the globe. This project has been taken forward in her call to reinvent comparative urbanism for global urban studies in her recent, Cities in a world of cities article in IJURR and Thinking Cities through Elsewhere, in Progress in Human Geography. Current projects include exploring transnational aspects of Johannesburg and London’s policy making processes and collaborative and community-based research comparing governance of large scale urban developments in London, Johannesburg and Shanghai (with Phil Harrison and Fulong Wu). She has also published extensively on the history and contemporary politics of South African cities, including The Power of Apartheid (Butterworth-Heinemann, 1996).

Jessica Seddon
Founder & Managing Director, Okapi, Chennai, India

Jessica’s research focuses on the interaction of institutions with information ecology to affect aggregate behavior. Ongoing projects look at the political economy of infrastructure in India; institutional design for science-policy collaboration; and the use and misuse of data in policy.

Dr. Seddon has advised a number of state and national government initiatives in India, most recently the Prime Ministers’ National Transport Development Committee and the High Powered Expert Committee on Urban Infrastructure. She is a member of the Advisory Boards of the Wilderhill Global Clean Energy Index (NEX), and Prakti Design. She is also Founder and Managing Director of Okapi Research, a network of professionals focused on institutional design challenges from organization-level to global scales.

Junaid Ahmad
Senior Director, Water Global Practice (GP), World Bank, Washington DC, USA

Junaid Ahmad is the Chief of Staff of the Office of the President at the World Bank. Prior to joining the President’s office in January 2016, Junaid was the Senior Director for the Water Global Practice, a position he held since the creation of the Global Practices in July 2014.

Karen Seto
Associate Dean of Research and Professor of Geography and Urbanisation, Yale School of Forestry & Environmental Studies, New Haven, USA

Professor Seto’s research is on the human transformation of land and the links between urbanization, global change, and sustainability. A geographer by training, her research integrates remote sensing, field interviews, and modeling methods to study land change and urbanization, forecast urban growth, and examine the environmental consequences of urban expansion. She is an expert in satellite remote sensing analysis and has pioneered methods to reconstruct historical land-use and to develop empirical models to explain and forecast the expansion of urban areas. She is a specialist in contemporary urbanization in China and India, and has more than fifteen years of research experience in Asia.

Professor Seto is Co-Chair of the Urbanization and Global Environmental Change Project (UGEC) of the International Human Dimensions Programme on Global Environmental Change (IHDP), and a Coordinating Lead Author for Working Group III of the IPCC Fifth Assessment Report. She also serves on the National Research Council Committee to the U.S. Global Change Research Program (USGCRP), the National Research Council Geographical Sciences Committee, and the U.S. Carbon Cycle Science Steering Group.

Michael Cohen
Director, Studley Graduate Program in International Affairs, Professor of International Affairs, Milano School of International Affairs, The New School, New York, USA

Michael Cohen is an urban and development policy specialist. He worked at the World Bank from 1972 to 1999 and was responsible for much of the bank’s urban policy development during that period. Mr. Cohen has worked in 55 countries and was heavily involved in the World Bank’s work on infrastructure, environment, and sustainable development. His numerous published works include several books on urban development, Africa, and the impact of development assistance. Mr. Cohen has advised governments, NGOs, and academic institutions around the world. He was a member of the Infrastructure Panel and Urban Dynamics Panel of the US National Academy of Science. He has helped the United Nations Human Settlements Programme (UN-HABITAT) prepare its Global Report on Human Settlements in 2005-2012. He is currently the director of The New School’s Observatory on Latin America.

Peter Newman
Professor of Sustainability, Curtin University, Australia

Peter Newman is the Professor of Sustainability at Curtin University. He has written 17 books and over 300 papers. In 2014 he was awarded an Order of Australia for his contributions to urban design and sustainable transport.

Peter has worked in local government as an elected councillor, in state government as an advisor to three Premiers, in the Australian Government on the Board of Infrastructure Australia and in the UN on the IPCC as a Lead Author for Transport. His new book is ‘The End of Automobile Dependence: How Cities are Moving Beyond Car Based Planning’.

Rafael Tuts
Chief, Urban Environmental Planning Branch, UN Habitat, Nairobi, Kenya

Rafael Tuts the Co-ordinatory of the Urban Planning and Design Branch of the United Nations Human Settlements Programme, UN-Habitat, based in Nairobi, Kenya. He is also acting coordinator of the Housing and Slum Upgrading Branch of UN-Habitat. He led UN-Habitat’s contribution to the post 2015 development agenda. Earlier assignments for UN-Habitat include the creation of the Localising Agenda 21 Programme, the implementation of the Global Campaign on Urban Governance as well as leadership of the Training and Capacity Branch and the Cities and Climate Change Initiative. He co-edited Urban Trialogues (2004), reflecting on visioning, action planning and co-production of urban space as a resource for sustainable development. He coordinated the publication International Migrants and the City (2005), co-directed Guidelines for developing eco-efficient and socially inclusive infrastructure (2011) and supervised a guidebook on Urban Patterns for a Green Economy (2012). Before joining UN-Habitat in 1995, he worked for the Department of Architecture, Urbanism and Planning of the University of Leuven and the Housing Research and Development Unit of the University of Nairobi. In 1985, he obtained a Masters of Science degree in Architectural Engineering from the University of Leuven.

Rahul Mehrotra
Professor of Urban Design and Planning, Harvard University, MA, USA

Rathin Roy
Director, National Institute of Public Finance and Policy (NIPFP), New Delhi, India

Rathin Roy took charge as Director NIPFP in May 2013. Prior to joining NIPFP, he has been the Director of Asia Pacific Regional Centre, UNDP, Bangkok, and the Director, International Policy Centre for Inclusive Growth (IPC-IG), UNDP, Brazil. He has also served as the Public Resource Management Advisor, and the Acting Cluster Leader, Inclusive Development, in the Poverty Practice, Bureau for Development Policy (BDP), UNDP. On invitation from the Government of India, he also served as the Economic Advisor to the Thirteenth Finance Commission, a Constitutional body of the Government of India. Recently, he has also been appointed as part-member of the Seventh Central Pay Commission, constituted by the Government of India. He has worked in over 80 countries during and prior to his tenure with UNDP, and is a well known figure in the world of applied macroeconomic and fiscal policy.

Sander van der Leeuw
Professor, Co-Chair, Complex Adaptive Systems, Arizona State University (ASU), Phoenix, USA

Sander van der Leeuw is the emeritus dean of Arizona State University’s School of Sustainability, the first of its kind in the USA. He currently is Foundation Professor in the School of Human Evolution and Social Change and Distinguished Sustainability Scientist at the School of Sustainability at ASU.

Prior to joining ASU, he has taught at Leiden, Cambridge (UK) and Paris (Panthéon-Sorbonne) and traveled the world conducting archaeological studies in the Near East, the Philippines, Syria, Holland, France, and Mexico. His expertise lies in the role of invention, sustainability, and innovation in societies around the world, viewed through a complex adaptive systems lens. From 1992 until 2000 he coordinated a series of interdisciplinary research projects on human-nature interactions in all countries of Southern Europe, funded by the EU, and between 2003 and 2007 a similar trans-disciplinary project on innovation and urban dynamics.

In 2012, the United Nations Environment Program named van der Leeuw the “Champion of the Earth for Science and Innovation” for his work on human-environmental relations.

Sheela Patel
Director, Society for the Promotion of Area Resource Centres (SPARC), Mumbai Mumbai, India

Sheela Patel is the Founder-Director of the Society for the Promotion of Area Resource Centres (SPARC), a Mumbai-based NGO that has been working on housing and infrastructure rights for the urban poor for the last two decades. After getting her Masters in Social Work from the Tata Institute of Social Sciences in 1974, Sheela Patel worked at a community centre called the Nagpada Neighbourhood House and then left to set up her own organisation. She has also been involved in founding and coordinating a number of national and international organisations such as Swayam Shikshan Prayog (SSP), an organisation what works with women’s collectives in over 600 villages in Maharashtra, the Asian Coalition of Housing Rights, and the Asian Women and Shelter Network. She serves on numerous national and international advisory boards and has published widely. In 2000, SPARC was awarded the United Nations Human Settlement Award.

Srinath Reddy
President, Public Health Foundation of India (PHFI), New Delhi, India

Prof. K. Srinath Reddy is presently President, Public Health Foundation of India (PHFI) and formerly headed the Department of Cardiology at All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS). He was appointed as the First Bernard Lown Visiting Professor of Cardiovascular Health at the Harvard School of Public Health in 2009. He is also an Adjunct Professor of the Rollins School of Public Health, Emory University and Honorary Professor of Medicine at the University of Sydney. PHFI is engaged in capacity building in Public Health in India through education, training, research, policy development, health communication and advocacy.

Widely regarded as a leader of preventive cardiology at national and international levels, Prof. Reddy has been a researcher, teacher, policy enabler, advocate and activist who has worked to promote cardiovascular health, tobacco control, chronic disease prevention and healthy living across the lifespan. He edited the National Medical Journal of India for 10 years and is on editorial board of several international and national journals. He has more than 400 scientific publications in international and Indian peer reviewed-journals.

He has served on many WHO expert panels and has been the President of the World Heart Federation (2013-14). He also chairs the Core Advisory Group on Health and Human Rights for the National Human Rights Commission of India and is a member of the National Science and Engineering Research Board of Government of India. He recently chaired the High Level Expert Group on Universal Health Coverage, set up by the Planning Commission of India. He has also served as the President of the National Board of Examinations which deals with post-graduate medical education in India.

Prof. Reddy is a member of the Leadership Council of the Sustainable Development Solutions Network (ww.unsdsn.org), established to assist the United Nations in developing the post-2015 goals for sustainable development. He chairs the Thematic Group on Health in the SDSN.

Susan Parnell
Professor Department of Environmental and Geographical Sciences, African Centre for Cities, University of Cape Town, South Africa

Susan Parnell is Professor of Urban Geography and co-founder of the African Centre for Cities at the University of Cape Town. She has held previous academic positions at Wits University and the School of Oriental and African Studies as well as visiting research fellowships from LSE, Oxford, Durham and the British Academy. She was a Leverhulme Visiting Professor at UCL and is currently Emeka Anyaoku Visiting Chair, University of London. Recent co-edited books include Climate at a City Scale, A Routledge Handbook of Cities of the Global South and Africa’s Urban Revolution.

Tarun Khanna
Jorge Paulo Lehmann Professor, Harvard Business School; Director, South Asia Institute, Harvard University, MA, USA

Professor Tarun Khanna is Director of Harvard University’s inter-disciplinary South Asia Institute, and the Jorge Paulo Lemann Professor at the Harvard Business School. An expert on emerging markets, he writes extensively in economics strategy and management journals, is an occasional newspaper columnist, and was recently elected a Fellow of the Academy of International Business and a Young Global Leader by the World Economic Forum. Tarun Khanna is the author of Billions of Entrepreneurs: How China and India are Reshaping their Futures, and Yours (Harvard Business Press, 2008), and coauthor of Winning in Emerging Markets: A Roadmap for Strategy and Execution (Harvard Business Press, 2010), both translated into multiple languages. He serves as a board member of several publicly traded and venture-backed companies worldwide, as well as of non-profits in the U.S. and India.

Prof. Xuemei Bai
Professor of Urban Environment and Human Ecology, Australian National University, Canberra, Australia

Xuemei Bai is a Professor of Urban Environment and Human Ecology at Fenner School of Environment & Society, Australian National University. Professor Bai’s work focuses on urbanization and urban system sustainability. Her current interests include understanding the structure, function and processes of urban social ecological systems, the drivers and consequences of urbanization, spatial and temporal dynamics and evolution of urban systems, urban energy and material metabolism, climate mitigation and adaptation in cities, urban environmental management, urban policy and governance, and innovative urban experiments and sustainability transition.

She is a Member of Future Earth Science Committee, where she is leading the development of Urban Knowledge Action Network within Future Earth. She is an elected Councilor for the International Society of Industrial Ecology. In the past, she served as a Vice Chair of International Human Dimensional Program on Global Change (IHDP), a lead author for the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment and the Global Energy Assessment, an appointed Member for European Research Council Grant Assessment Panel. She delivered many invited seminars at top notch universities and research institutes worldwide, and was invited as a visiting professor and taught for two years at Yale University. Professor Bai authored/coauthored over 100 publications, including publications in Nature and Science. She serves on the editorial or advisory board of international journals such as Sustainability Science; Environment: Science and Policy for Sustainability; International Journal of Sustainable Cities and Society; Computer, Environment and Urban Systems; Ecosystem Health and Sustainability, etc.