A biannual peer-reviewed journal with a firm footprint in the Global South
A biannual peer-reviewed journal with a firm footprint in the Global South
Get free access to articles from the IIHS Urbanisation archives on the World Habitat Day theme of
‘Engaging Youth to Create a Better Urban Future’.
New Issue
Call for Papers
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Urbanisation is a response to a particular moment of 21st 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 19th and 20th 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.
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.
Get free access to articles from the Urbanisation archives on the World Cities Day theme of ‘Financing Sustainable Future for All’ till 31 October
➔ Land-based Financing in Metropolitan Cities in India: The Case of Hyderabad and Mumbai
Sahil Gandhi and Vidyadhar K. Phatak
➔ The Economics of Climate Mitigation: Exploring the Relative Significance of the Incentives for and Barriers to Low-carbon Investment in Urban Areas
Sarah Colenbrander, Andrew H. Sudmant, Andy Gouldson, Igor Reis de Albuquerque, Faye McAnulla and Ynara Oliviera de Sousa
➔ The Role of Housing Finance Actors in Regenerating Delhi’s Unauthorised Colonies: An Examination of State–Citizen–Market Boundaries
Mukta Naik and Eesha Kunduri
EDITORIAL
GENERAL ARTICLES
Out of Time and in Place: Housebuilding and Urbanisation in a Mozambican Locality
Mattie Cox Wight
Evaluating Urban Services in Neighbourhoods Through the Inequality Lens in Khulna City, Bangladesh: A Geographic Information System Approach
G.M. Towhidul Islam, Ayad Khalid Almaimani and Khan Rubayet Rahaman
Finding Space for Water in Informal Settlements in Dharavi and Dili
Anubhav Goyal and Joana de Mesquita Lima
WRITING FROM PRACTICE
Poverty, Provisioning and the Pandemic: Income and Food Insecurity Among Waste Picker Households During the 2020 Lockdown in Delhi
Aman Luthra, Bharati Chaturvedi and Jonathan Kvilhaug
REVIEW
Book review: Manisha Anantharaman, Recycling Class: The Contradictions of Inclusion in Urban Sustainability
Siddhi Bhandari
Film review: The Archies, Producers: Jon Goldwater, Sharad Devarajan, Reema Kagti, Zoya Akhtar, Director: Zoya Akhtar
Nivedita Tuli and Anasuya Swapna Borah
VISUAL ESSAY
Three Questions: Amlanjyoti Goswami with Shivani Dave
Shivani Dave
POETRY
Three Questions: Amlanjyoti Goswami with Pervin Saket
Pervin Saket
Volume 7 Issue 1S
Special Issue: Cities and Climate Change
Guest Editors: Aromar Revi, Debra Roberts and Amir Bazaz
Table of Contents
EDITORIAL
GENERAL ARTICLES
Urban Climate Politics in Emerging Economies: A Multi-Level Governance Perspective
Fee Stehle, Thomas Hickmann, Markus Lederer, and Chris Höhne
Engaging City Residents in Climate Action: Addressing the Personal and Group Value-Base Behind Residents’ Climate Actions
Thijs Bouman and Linda Steg
Towards Green and Low-Carbon Development in Chinese Cities
Meian Chen, Li Yang, Min Hu, and Diego Montero
WRITING FROM PRACTICE
The State of City Diplomacy
Ian Klaus
Greening Cities from Within: Generating Ecosystem Services Where We Live
Jagdish Krishnaswamy
REVIEW
Book review: Mark Swilling, The Age of Sustainability: Just Transitions in a Complex World
Jasmitha Arvind
Past Events
Past Events
26 September 2024
Webinar on Peer Review Week:
Strengthening Scholarly Publishing in the Global South
For the recent Peer Review Week on the theme ‘Innovation and Technology in Peer Review’, IIHS Urbanisation hosted the next panel discussion in our webinar series.
Through this discussion, we brought to the fore the various concerns of society journal publishers, who self-published and operated on a not-for-profit basis, such as access to funding and infrastructure, and keeping up with trends and technologies in scholarly publishing and peer review. The discussion provided practical solutions, innovative approaches, and collaborative strategies to help address these challenges. By engaging with journal editors and publishing experts from India who had first-hand experience navigating these issues, attendees gained insights into how society journals could leverage new technologies, improve peer review quality, and enhance their visibility and impact in the global academic community.
18 July 2024
Webinar | Migration in Development and Urban Policy
IIHS Urbanisation journal, in collaboration with Publics@IIHS, hosted a panel discussion featuring the contributors of its latest Special Issue, ‘The Future of Urbanisation: Migration Policies in the Post-pandemic World’.
This panel reflected on mainstream academic and policy discourses on migration, urbanisation and development. The panellists discussed how migration and urbanisation policies can better complement one another in the Indian context, particularly in the areas of governance, federalism, labour, social protection, food security, housing and gender. Given increasing inequalities, the speakers will reflect on making urbanisation processes more inclusive for internal migrants, and on the urgent need to integrate the issue of migration in development and urbanisation policies in a post-pandemic world.
29 September 2023
Webinar | Future of Peer Review & Transdisciplinary Conversations in the Global South
As part of Peer Review Week 2023, Urbanisation journal presents a panel discussion on the year’s theme of ‘Peer Review and the Future of Publishing’.
Peer review has undergone a sea change, from impacts on selection of peer reviewers, to the move towards open peer review models, and the increasing and varied adoption of artificial intelligence (AI) in scholarship. The panel discusses these aspects of peer review in the context of transdisciplinary conversations and scholarship from the global South.
Volume 1
Volume 2
Volume 3
Volume 4
Volume 5
Volume 6
- Issue 1: Special Issue: Agrarian Urbanisation: Emerging Entanglements of Land, Labour and Capital, May 2021
- Issue 1 (Suppl): Special Issue: Gender, Social Change and Urbanisation in North India, September 2021
- Issue 2, November 2021
Volume 7
- Issue 1: Special Issue: Urban Inequality and COVID-19: The Crisis at the Heart of the Pandemic, May 2022
- Issue 1 (Suppl): Special Issue: Cities and Climate Change, November 2022
- Issue 2, November 2022
Volume 8
Volume 9
This special edition in Urbanisation seeks to explore the multifaceted relationship between informality and climate change in cities in the Global South. We welcome submissions focusing on the global South and the following themes, including case studies and evidence synthesis:
- Climate impacts and resilience in informal settlements
- Informal economies, vulnerability and resilience
- Informal governance and climate change adaptation
- Informal governance and climate change mitigation
Abstract submission deadline extended
Last date to submit: 20 December 2024
Abstract submissions should be sent to submission@urbanisationjournal.com
Submit to Urbanisation
Submissions to our regular issues are open all-year round and evaluated on a rolling basis.
- Submissions will be subject to double-anonymised peer review.
- Submissions should be sent via https://peerreview.sagepub.com/urb
- Please refer to the submission guidelines before making your submission.
Urbanisation invites submissions for the following sections:
General Articles (4,000–10,000 words)
We invite original research and review articles that
- deepen our understanding of discourses and realities of contemporary global urbanisation at multiple scales—from the global to local;
- offer new ways of reading cities at times of transition, recognition and refraction;
- meet the journal’s core mandate of curating located knowledge from the Global South, that is, the countries of Asia, Africa and South America;
- cross disciplinary boundaries;
- engage with cities of the Global South—not only the southern megacity but also the rapid transitions of small and medium towns and the dynamics of urbanisation in these sites.
Writing from Practice (up to 10,000 words)
Urban questions refuse simple boundaries of theory and practice. To encourage and enable theorising from practice, articles in this section attempt to understand the complexity of doing, acting and intervening in the urban and regional space, across different scales, from neighbourhood to city-region, national to global. This includes a range of formal and informal, client-driven or community-led, deeply local or transnational forms of urban practice across planning, design, policy formulation and implementation, economic and development consulting, project management, activism and advocacy, artistic and literary activity, urban service delivery, engineering, construction and journalism or community engagement, to name just a few. We do not seek staid narratives of ‘best practice’ or just an empirical documentation of projects and actions. Instead, we encourage reflexive contributions that seek to analyse and write from practice rather than just narrate it.
Learning and Pedagogy (4,000–6,000 words)
How can comparative experiences of learning be developed, good lessons shared and disseminated? How must the epistemic experience and endeavour of the urban become part of the teaching–learning experience, where one borrows from other disciplines, as well as encounters its own? These are some of the larger questions that articles in this section engage with.
On Method (4,000–6,000 words)
This section specifically focuses on the methods we must bring to bear to capture the sheer diversity of the urban experience and oeuvre, particularly in the Global South. How can such methods compliment and detract from accepted pedagogies? In the methods of knowing the urban, do prevailing tools of analysis de-ontologise the urban into a field of constant contemporaneity and a never-ending instrumental search for ‘solutions’?
Evaluations and Assessments (4,000–6,000 words)
Refusing a clear and easy distinction between academic work and ‘grey literature’ (such as reports, project evaluation and implementation studies), this section invites writing about work in the field, not just as rich empirical fodder but a space for reflection on the complexity of proposition and intervention.
Visual Essay (3-5 pieces of original work, i.e. paintings/sketches and/or photographs)
These are visual narratives about the city, captured in painting, sketch work, photography and other similar mixed media representations. They are reflections of the urban condition, conveying statements of meaning about life in cities, transitions, moments, domestic spaces, as well as public and private conditions of being.
Poetry (3 poems or 1 long poem. Total length not exceeding three A4 size pages)
This is poetry about place, absence of place, connections, crossing borders and boundaries. This poetry builds bridges, finds emptiness and conveys a world on the page that cannot be found in other forms of writing.
Review (800–1,500 words)
We invite reviews of books, films, exhibitions and other forms of expression that engage with the city as a triggers of conversations, critiques and debates.
Editor
AROMAR REVI
Director, Indian Institute for Human Settlements (IIHS), Bengaluru, India
Aromar Revi is the founding Director of IIHS. He is an alumnus of IIT-Delhi and the Law and Management schools of the University of Delhi.
Aromar is a global expert on Sustainable Development and Co-Chair of the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network (SDSN), from where he helped lead a successful campaign for an urban Sustainable Development Goal (SDG 11) as part of the UN’s 2030 development agenda. He is one of the world’s leading experts on global environmental change, particularly climate change. He is a Coordinating Lead Author of the synthesis chapter on Climate Resilient Development Pathways of the IPCC Working Group Assessment Report 6 on Adaptation, to be released in 2021. He was the Coordinating Lead Author of the 2018 IPCC Special Report on Global Warming of 1.5 °C which Science and Nature have cited as one of the most important scientific reports of 2018.
Aromar is Commissioner of the Lancet Pathfinders Commission that will identify and communicate global, regional and local pathways to a healthy, low carbon future. He is also a member of the Task Force on Global Health Diplomacy and Cooperation of Lancet COVID-19 Commission, that will make recommendations on strengthening global governance and multilateral cooperation to build back better, paying particular attention to global health governance and science diplomacy.
Aromar has been a senior advisor to various ministries of the Government of India, consulted with a wide range of UN, multilateral, bilateral development and private sector institutions and worked on economic, environmental and social change at global, regional and urban scales. He is on the editorial Boards of Nature Sustainable Earth (Springer), npj Urban Sustainability (Springer), the International Journal of Urban Sustainable Development (Taylor & Francis) and Urban Climate (Elsevier). Aromar has published 115 peer reviewed publications and books; lectured and taught at over 90 of the world’s leading universities and think tanks; helped structure, design and review development investments of over $8 billion; and worked on 5 of the world’s 10 largest cities, all of India’s 29 states and in multiple international projects across over a dozen countries.
Editorial Board
OM MATHUR
Senior Fellow, Global Cities Institute, University of Toronto, Toronto, Canada
Om Mathur is a Senior Fellow at the Global Cities Institute, University of Toronto. He was previously Head of Urban Studies, Institute of Social Sciences, New Delhi; Director of the National Institute of Urban Affairs, New Delhi and held the IDFC Chair in Urban Economics at the National Institute of Public Finance and Policy; Director of Multi-level Planning Unit, the Planning Commission of India; United Nations Project Team Leader of Decentralisation Project, Government of Iran; and Senior Economist at the United Nations Centre for Regional Development, Nagoya, Japan. He was a member of the former Prime Minister’s National Review Committee on Jawaharlal Nehru National Urban Renewal Mission, the JNNURM Technical Advisory Group, the High Powered Expert Committee on Urban Infrastructure Investment Requirements and the Advisory Group of Experts on Decentralization (AGRED) of UN- Habitat. Currently, he is a member of the GIZ-ADB Sponsored City Development Initiative for Asia (CDIA) and the City Indicators Programme, hosted at the University of Toronto.
Om Mathur received his master’s degree in Economics, Delhi School of Economics, and pursued graduate studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard University, Cambridge (USA).
DAVID SATTERTHWAITE
Editor, Environment and Urbanization and Senior Associate, International Institute for Environment and Development (IIED), London, UK
David Satterthwaite is Senior Associate at IIED and editor of the international journal Environment and Urbanization. He is also a visiting Professor at the Development Planning Unit, University College London. He was awarded the Volvo Environment Prize in 2004 and was part of the IPCC team honoured with the Nobel Peace Prize in 2007. 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 was a Coordinating Lead Author for the chapter on urban adaptation in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s Fifth Assessment and he also contributed to the IPCC’s Third and Fourth Assessments. His expertise lies in poverty reduction and environmental problems in urban areas and climate change adaptation, including contributions to the IPCC’s Third, Fourth and Fifth 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. He was previously director of IIED’s Human Settlements research group.
RAHUL MEHROTRA
Professor of Urban Design and Planning and John T. Dunlop Professor in Housing and Urbanization, Graduate School of Design, Harvard University, Cambridge, USA
Rahul Mehrotra is Professor of Urban Design and Planning and the John T. Dunlop Professor in Housing and Urbanization. He also serves as Director of the Master in Architecture in Urban Design Degree Program and Co-Director of the Master of Landscape Architecture in Urban Design Degree Program. He is a practising architect, urban designer, and educator. He has long been involved in civic and urban affairs in Mumbai, having served on government commissions for the conservation of historic buildings and environmental issues with various neighbourhood groups and, from 1994 to 2004, as Executive Director of the Urban Design Research Institute in Mumbai.
His Mumbai and Boston based firm, RMA Architects, was founded in August 1990 and has since designed and executed projects that include houses, factories, institutes and office buildings. The practice has also been involved in conservation and master planning projects in Bombay, thereby engaging with diverse issues like interior design and architecture, urban design, conservation and planning, among others.
Mehrotra has written and lectured extensively on issues in architecture, conservation, and urban planning and design in Mumbai and India. He is a member of the Steering Committee of the Laxmi Mittal South Asia Institute at Harvard. In 2012-2015, he led a Harvard University-wide research project with Professor Diana Eck, called ‘The Kumbh Mela: Mapping the Ephemeral Mega City’, which was published as a book in 2014. His research was extended in 2017 in the form of a book titled Ephemeral Urbanism: Does Permanence Matter?. The research was also extended into an invited exhibition at the 2016 Venice Architectural Biennale. Mehrotra’s latest co-authored book is titled Taj Mahal: Multiple Narratives which was published in December 2017. His research on urbanism is focused on evolving a theoretical framework for designing in conditions of informal growth – what he refers to as the ‘Kinetic City’. He has run several studios looking at various aspects of planning questions in the city of Mumbai, under the rubric of “Extreme Urbanism”.
He studied at the School of Architecture, Ahmedabad (CEPT), where he received the gold medal for his undergraduate thesis and graduated with a master’s degree with distinction in Urban Design from Harvard University. He has taught at the University of Michigan (2003–2007) and at the School of Architecture and Urban Planning at MIT (2007–2010).
Editorial Collective
AMIR BAZAZ
Associate Dean – IIHS School of Environment and Sustainability; IIHS School of Systems and Infrastructure | Head – Infrastructure and Climate, Indian Institute for Human Settlements (IIHS), Bengaluru, India
Amir Bashir Bazaz is the Associate Dean of the IIHS School of Environment and Sustainability and the IIHS School of Systems and Infrastructure. He is also Head of Infrastructure and Climate at IIHS. He holds a PhD in Management from the Indian Institute of Management Ahmedabad, with a specialisation in Public Systems. He works on issues at the intersection of economics, climate change mitigation, and adaptation and sustainable development. He has substantial experience in working with various integrated assessment frameworks and modelling arrangements. His current research interests are low carbon societies/infrastructure, climate change adaptation and mitigation (across scales), with specific focus on urban-climate change linkages and climate, energy and environment policy.
Amir has a first degree in Electrical Engineering from Indian Institute of Technology Roorkee and started his career in the manufacturing industry, working across functional responsibilities of projects, production planning/control and engineering. He has previously been the National Expert Consultant to the Ministry of Environment, Forests and Climate Change, Government of India for the Second National Communication to the UNFCCC and taught courses in Development & Environmental Economics during his academic engagements at Symbiosis International University, Pune.
At IIHS, Amir is the Regional Research Lead for a multi-partner, multi-year climate adaptation research project – Adaptation at Scale in Semi-Arid Regions (ASSAR). This project is a part of an IDRC/DfID funded global climate adaptation research program – Collaborative Adaptation Research Initiative in Africa and Asia (CARIAA), operational across the regions of West, South and East Africa as well as South Asia. In addition, Amir is a part of many practice-based engagements at IIHS, notably; on ‘Energy Innovation’ (on a project led by Cambridge University), ‘Sustainability of Ecosystem Services’ (in collaboration with the Nature Conservancy India and Keystone Foundation) and ‘Migration-Climate Resilience dynamics for Indian cities’ (supported by the Swiss Agency of Development & Cooperation). He has been a regular team member for many ‘Disaster and Climate Resilience’ projects at IIHS and teaches regularly in the Urban Fellows Programme and the Urban Practitioners’ Programme.
AMLANJYOTI GOSWAMI
Chief – Legal & Regulation, Indian Institute for Human Settlements (IIHS), Bengaluru, India
Amlanjyoti Goswami heads the Legal and Regulation team at IIHS. He plays a key role in strategic decision making from a legal and regulatory point of view. His work involves transactional practice, advisory opinion and related legal matters. He also works on building appropriate legal and regulatory frameworks and enabling institutional development in key sectors such as land, urban development, decentralisation and higher education.
He heads the Land Governance team at IIHS which works on advisory, practice and research-based aspects of land systems and governance, including political economy of urban land and land regulation, as well as the legal and regulatory framework that governs urban development. He has wide ranging experience in regulation, litigation, policy advisory, research and transactional practice for nearly two decades. An Inlaks Scholar, Amlan holds an LL.M. degree from Harvard University, an LL.B. as well as a B.A. in Sociology from the University of Delhi, where he was a university gold medallist.
CHANDNI SINGH
Lead – IIHS Practice Programme, Indian Institute for Human Settlements (IIHS), Bengaluru, India
Chandni Singh works at the interface of climate change and development in rural and urban geographies within the global South. At IIHS, she works on issues of climate change adaptation, differential vulnerability and wellbeing, disaster risk and recovery, livelihoods transitions, and rural-urban migration. Chandni has worked on climate change projects such as the IDRC/FCDO funded Adaptation at Scale in Semi-arid Regions (ASSAR) and SDC-funded ‘CapaCITIES – Migration, Livelihoods and Climate Resilience’. She has led interdisciplinary, international projects such as IIED-funded ‘Long-term Impacts of Humanitarian Action in Chennai’ (2016-2017), British Academy funded Recovery with Dignity (2018-2021), and Urban and Peri-urban Agriculture as Green Infrastructure (2019-2022). Using a social-ecological systems lens, her work examines human dimensions of global environmental change, pathways for transformational change, and levers for equitable adaptation.
Chandni is a Lead Author of the IPCC’s Assessment Report 6 in 2022 on ‘Impacts, Adaptation, and Vulnerability’ and a Contributing Author of the IPCC’s 2018 Special Report on 1.5°C. Chandni serves on the editorial boards of Regional Environmental Change, Climate and Development, and IIHS’s in-house journal Urbanisation. She is the Domain Editor on ‘Vulnerability and Adaptation’ at WIREs Climate Change.
She has previously worked in research and practice-based organisations such as the University of Reading (UK), Bioversity International (Italy), Pragya, and WWF India across South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa. She has taught postgraduate level courses on climate change adaptation, sustainability, research methodology, and development studies. She is also interested in science communication for lay audiences and is a published poet.
JAGDISH KRISHNASWAMY
Dean – IIHS School of Environment and Sustainability, Indian Institute for Human Settlements (IIHS), Bengaluru, India
As Dean – School of Environment and Sustainability, Jagdish will lead the build-out of the School, providing the strategic direction and operational guidance needed to expand its academic footprint, research activities and network, practice portfolio, and capacity-building initiatives. Jagdish will also help develop the IIHS Kengeri campus and its environs as India’s first Urban Ecological Observatory and strengthen IIHS’s profile in Ecology and Conservation Science.
He is a field ecohydrologist and a landscape ecologist with research and teaching interests in applied statistics, environmental applications of remote sensing and GIS, ecosystem services, ecological restoration, river ecology and climate change. He loves the challenge of understanding complex changes in the environment over time and space. He was the Coordinating Lead Author of the Special IPCC Report on Climate Change and Land.
Jagdish moved to IIHS from the Ashoka Trust for Research in Ecology and the Environment (ATREE), Bengaluru where he has been a faculty member for over 20 years – and collaborated with IIHS teams on multiple projects. He began his career at Development Alternatives, New Delhi where he worked in sustainability and environment. He has been a faculty member at the Wildlife Institute of India and has also been an affiliate teaching faculty at the National Centre for Biological Sciences-TIFR (NCBS-TIFR), Bengaluru where he has been involved with the Masters Programme in Wildlife Biology and Conservation since its inception.
NEETHI P
Senior Consultant – Academics & Research, Indian Institute for Human Settlements (IIHS), Bengaluru, India
Neethi’s interests broadly pertain to globalisation and labour, with a focus on labour informality, analysing diverse informal sectors and their associated workers. Striving to understand the nuances of labour-management relations and everyday labour politics in these informal sectors, Neethi focuses on informality among women workers and also various forms of upcoming informal or alternative labour associations/organisations, and their unique labour response strategies.
Neethi’s research, for over a decade, has covered a wide variety of informal workers/sectors including garment, electronics, ports, home-based work, street vendors, and recently, municipal sanitation workers and sex workers. Her research encompasses issues such as labour-management relations, recruitment strategies, labour control mechanisms, labour response mechanisms, labour-technology relations, emerging forms of labour movements, and formation of alternative labour organisations/associations. While addressing these concerns, Neethi’s approach moves away from economic orthodoxy and borrows from sociological, anthropological, and ethnographic approaches. This allows her to bring out local variability and uneven contours in labour markets whilst charting the complex landscape in which contemporary labour lives, works, and negotiates.
For her doctoral work in this field, she was awarded a Fulbright DPR Fellowship at the University of Georgia for a year. Apart from a string of international peer reviewed journal articles, Neethi also authored Globalization Lived Locally: A Labour Geography Perspective, published under Oxford University Press in 2016. Prior to joining IIHS, Neethi was Assistant Professor at the School of Development, Azim Premji University.
At IIHS, she is involved in designing and carrying out research on various aspects of urban employment.
POOJA SAGAR
Senior Consultant – IIHS Word Lab, Indian Institute for Human Settlements (IIHS), Bengaluru, India
Pooja Sagar is a social science researcher currently working in the area of history and cultures of medicine and health in India. She looks at the intersections of knowledge systems through the lived experiences of ordinary people using oral history methods and archival studies. She is also a writer and educator with interests in personal essays, memoirs and translations. She has conceptualised, taught and managed graduate-level programmes in creative and critical writing with eminent institutions of learning. Her practice also encompasses public installations and readings: Weird Fiction Exhibition (2016), Kritya Poetry Festival (2017), and Oral History of Settler Communities in Andamans (2012), among others. She is an alumnus of the Center for Study of Culture and Society, Bengaluru with over 15 years of work experience in research and teaching. At IIHS, she provides guidance and facilitates the operations of the Word Lab.
Editorial Team
Associate Editors
Lubna Duggal
Consultant – IIHS Word Lab
Ishani Debroy
External Consultant – IIHS Word Lab
Namrata Nirmal
External Consultant – IIHS Word Lab
The Word Lab anchors the production of Urbanisation, in addition to managing the editorial function at IIHS. Its core responsibilities are to communicate the diverse forms of writing and knowledge production at IIHS to a wide public readership; to enable the IIHS community to write more effectively in diverse media; and to systematise a regular flow of publications and knowledge production.
AbdouMaliq Simone
Senior Professorial Fellow, Urban Institute, University of Sheffield, Sheffield, UK
AbdouMaliq Simone is Senior Professorial Fellow at the Urban Institute, University of Sheffield. He works on issues of spatial composition in extended urban regions, the production of everyday life for urban majorities in the Global South, infrastructural imaginaries, collective affect, global blackness, and histories of the present for Muslim working classes. He is also a research associate at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity, visiting professor at the African Centre for Cities, University of Cape Town, research associate with the Rujak Center for Urban Studies in Jakarta, and research fellow at the University of Tarumanagara.
For three decades, he has worked with practices of social interchange, technical arrangements, local economy, and the constitution of power relations that affect how heterogeneous African and Southeast Asian cities are lived. He has worked on remaking municipal systems, training local government personnel, designing collaborative partnerships among technicians, residents, artists, and politicians.
His published work includes New Urban Worlds: Inhabiting Dissonant Times (Wiley) and Improvising Lives: Afterlives of an Urban South (based on three lectures delivered at Cambridge University, November 2017) (Polity).
Adriana Allen
Professor, Development Planning and Urban Sustainability, Bartlett Development Planning Unit, University College London (UCL), UK
Adriana Allen is Professor of Development Planning and Urban Sustainability at the Bartlett Development Planning Unit, UCL, where she founded and led for many years the research cluster on Environmental Justice, Urbanisation and Resilience (EJUR) and the MSc in Environment and Sustainable Development (ESD). In 2019, she became Vice Dean International at the Bartlett, a role from which she works closely with UCL Global Engagement Office, Vice Provost International and Regional Pro-Vice-Provosts. In that capacity, she has sought to consolidate the practice of global engagement through partnerships with equivalence, contributed actively to the development of UCL Global Engagement Strategy 2020–25 and produced a thorough mapping and consultation of the Faculty’s international activity to steer its strategic direction.
She specialised over the years in the fields of development planning, socio-environmental justice and feminist political ecology. She has over 30 years of international experience in research, postgraduate teaching, advocacy and consultancy undertakings in more than 25 countries across the global South. Through the lens of risk, water and sanitation, land and housing, food and health, her work looks at the interface between everyday city-making practices and planned interventions and their capacity to generate transformative social and environmental relations.
She is a regular Visiting Professor at various universities in Latin America, Asia and Africa, co-editor of the International Journal of Sustainable Urban Development, member of the editorial board of Urbanisation and the International Journal of Urban Dynamics, among others.
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, Worlding Cities: Asian Experiments and the Art of Being Global, co-edited with Aihwa Ong, and Poverty Capital: Microfinance and the Making of Development, which was the recipient of the 2011 Paul Davidoff Book 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.
Awadhendra Sharan
Director, Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, New Delhi, India
Awadhendra Sharan is the Director 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). In a more recent work Dust and Smoke: Air Pollution and Colonial Urbanism, India, c.1860–c.1940 (Orient BlackSwan, 2020) Sharan enquires into the history of air pollution in colonial cities, in particular the question of industrial and domestic smoke in Bombay and Calcutta.
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 like City, Culture and Society and in the Sarai/CSDS Reader series. He is also a member of the Executive Committee of Delhi based NGO Ankur: Alternatives in Education.
Bert de Vries
Professor, Copernicus Institute of Sustainable Development, Utrecht University, Utrecht, The Netherlands
Between 1990 and 2013 Bert de Vries was 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 a 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), Cambridge, USA
Professor Bish Sanyal is the Ford International Professor of Urban Development and Planning in the Department of Urban Studies and Planning at MIT. He is also Director of the Special Program in Urban and Regional Studies (SPURS)/ Hubert H. Humphrey Fellowship Program at MIT. He served as Head of the Department of Urban Studies and Planning at MIT from 1994 to 2002 and was the chair of the entire MIT faculty from 2007 to 2009. He recently completed a 10-million-dollar research project (Sole Project Investigator) to create a comprehensive initiative on technology evaluation (CITE) at MIT. At present, Prof. Sanyal is advising the World Bank on a new initiative to evaluate the World Bank’s impact on influencing urban growth in developing countries. Prof. Sanyal’s research covers a range of topics – housing projects and policies in newly industrialising nations, urban informal economy, planning organisations and theories of project implementation, history of planning ideas, and international planning education.
Brian McGrath
Professor of Urban Design, Parsons School of Design, The New School, New York, USA
Brian McGrath is a Professor of Urban Design at the Parsons School of Design, The New School and the founder and principal of Urban-Interface, LLC, an urban design consultancy fusing expertise in architecture, ecology and social media. McGrath is also a Principal Investigator in the Baltimore Ecosystem Study, where he leads the Urban Design Working Group. 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 1998–1999 and an India China Institute Fellow in 2006–2008 and was the Research Director in the joint US-EU Transatlantic exchange program Urbanisms of Inclusion. He received his Bachelor of Architecture degree from Syracuse University and his Master of Architecture degree from Princeton University.
David Dodman
Director General, IHS, Erasmus University Rotterdam, The Netherlands
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 organisations, local and national governments, and international organisations. He holds a D.Phil. in Geography from the University of Oxford, and has published widely in books and peer-reviewed journals. Currently, he is Director General at IHS, Erasmus University Rotterdam. In his previous role at the International Institute for Environment and Development (IIED) he was Acting Head for the Human Settlements Group, where he developed and implemented a wide-ranging programme of research on urban adaptation to climate change, led an institute-wide task team on research quality, and 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
Professor Willem Schermerhorn Chair, Faculty of Geo-Information Science, University of Twente
Dr. Debra Roberts currently holds the Professor Willem Schermerhorn Chair at the Faculty of Geo-Information Science, University of Twente. Prior to this, she was head of the Sustainable and Resilient City Initiatives Unit in eThekwini Municipality in Durban, South Africa. She established and managed the Environmental Planning and Climate Protection Department of the same municipality for 22 years (1994–2016) and was selected as the city’s first Chief Resilience Officer in 2013. Dr. Roberts was a Lead Author of Chapter 8 (Urban Areas) and a Contributing Author to Chapter 12 (Africa) of the Working Group II contribution to the IPCC Fifth Assessment Report. She was elected as Co-Chair of Working Group II for the IPCC’s Sixth Assessment cycle in 2015.
Dr. Roberts was a member of the South African United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) negotiating team until December 2015, 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 and UN-Habitat’s 2011 ‘Cities and Climate Change’ Global Report). She was a member of the Sustainable Development Solutions Network Thematic Group on Sustainable Cities involved in mobilising support for the creation of a city focused SDG (SDG 11). She was also appointed as a member of the Future Earth Engagement Committee and as thematic policy expert on Africa for UNEP’s GEO6 till 2017. She is an Honorary Professor at the University of KwaZulu-Natal in the School of Life Sciences, and is an advisor to the Global Commission on Adaptation. She 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
Starr Foundation South Asia Studies Professor and Asia Programs Director at the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS), Johns Hopkins University, Washington DC, USA
Devesh Kapur is the Starr Foundation South Asia Studies Professor and Asia Programs Director at the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS) at Johns Hopkins University, Washington DC From 2006–2018, he was the Director of CASI, Professor of Political Science at Penn, and held 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. The Other One Percent: Indians in America (co-authored with Sanjoy Chakravorty and Nirvikar Singh), published in October 2016 by Oxford University Press, received widespread acclaim. His latest edited works are Navigating the Labyrinth: Perspectives on India’s Higher Education (with Pratap Bhanu Mehta), published in January 2017 by Orient BlackSwan, and Rethinking Public Institutions in India (with Pratap Bhanu Mehta and Milan Vaishnav), published in July 2017 by Oxford University Press.
Eugenie Birch
Lawrence C. Nussdorf Chair of Urban Research and Education, Penn Institute for Urban Research, Philadelphia, USA
Eugenie Birch is the Lawrence C. Nussdorf Chair of Urban Research and Education at the Penn Institute for Urban Research. She teaches courses in global urbanisation and the doctoral seminar and serves as chair, Graduate Group in City and Regional Planning, co-director, Penn Institute for Urban Research, co-editor, City in the 21st Century Series, University of Penn Press and co-editor, SSRN Urban Research e-journal. With Penn IUR she recently completed a project “Entrepreneurship & Innovation in Connecticut’s Higher Education System,” for the state of Connecticut.
Professor Birch’s current research focuses on global urbanisation with her most recent publications being: Slums, How Informal Real Estate Markets Work, Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania Press (2016; edited with Susan Wachter and Shahana Chattaraj); “Midterm Report: Will Habitat III Make a Difference to Global Urban Development?” Journal of the American Planning Association 84:4 (Fall 2016); “The Institutions of Metropolitan Governance,” in D.A. Gomez-Alvarez, E. Moreno and R. Rajack (eds.), Steering the Metropolis: Metropolitan Governance for Sustainable Urban Development (Nairobi: UN Habitat, 2017); “Inclusion and Innovation: The Many Forms of Stakeholder Engagement in Habitat III,” Citiscape (July 2017); “Implementing the New Urban Agenda in the United States, Building on a Firm Foundation,” Informationen zur Raumentwicklung (Information on Spatial Development) (Summer 2017).
Dr. Birch is president, General Assembly of Partners (GAP), the engagement platform for the implementation of the UN’s New Urban Agenda and associated global agreements, co-chair, Sustainable Development Solutions Network (SDSN) Thematic Group on Cities, and an Associate Editor, Journal of the American Planning Association. In the past, she has been president, Association of Collegiate Schools of Planning; president, Society of American City and Regional Planning History; president, International Planning History Society; and co-editor, Journal of the American Planning Association. She has been a member of the Planning Accreditation Board, having served as its chair from 2004–2006. She has been a member of the editorial boards of Planning Theory and Practice, Journal of Planning History, Journal of Planning Education and Research and Planning Perspectives. In the early 1990s, she was a member of the New York City Planning Commission, and in 2002, she served on the jury to select the designers for the World Trade Center site. She has chaired the Board of Trustees of the Municipal Art Society of New York and is currently a member of the Board of Trustees of the Regional Plan Association of New York.
Dr. Birch holds a PhD 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
Chair of Human Geography, University College London (UCL), UK
Jennifer Robinson is the Chair of Human Geography and Professor of Global Geographies, Urban Geography and Comparative Urbanism at UCL.She also currently organises the second-year field trip to Paris as part of co-convening Practice in Geography. She contributes to postgraduate courses in Thinking Space, Cities Space and Power, and co-convenes a collaborative course with Michael Edwards (BSP) and Just Space on Community Participation in City Strategies. 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. More recent writing extends this argument to develop appropriate methods and tactics for international theorisation of 21st century cities, organised around the conceptualisation of comparative urbanism, and a book on this topic is under preparation. A current ESRC funded research project compares the governance of large scale urban development projects in London, Johannesburg and Shanghai. Other projects explore questions of the geopolitics of policy mobility; international theorisation of global city-regions; and activist research on London’s city strategies. These all take forward methodological experiments for an international urban theory. She has also published extensively on the history and contemporary politics of South African cities, including The Power of Apartheid (Butterworth-Heinemann, 1996).
Junaid Ahmad
Vice President Operations, Multilateral Investment Guarantee Agency (MIGA), Washington DC, USA
Junaid Ahmad is Vice President Operations at MIGA. Junaid, a Bangladeshi national, was formerly the Country Director for the World Bank in India. He joined the World Bank’s Delhi office in 2016. Prior to this, he was the Chief of Staff to World Bank Group President Jim Yong Kim. He joined the World Bank in 1991 as a Young Professional and worked on infrastructure development in Africa and Eastern Europe. He has since held several management positions, leading the Bank’s programme in diverse regions including Africa, the Middle East and North Africa, as well as in India and South Asia.
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. In this role, Junaid has built a strong and collaborative Global Practice and has brought a strong track record of management and leadership in the area of service delivery and international partnerships, combining intellectual and analytical rigour with strategic operational focus. Junaid has championed the Practice’s focus on water and the economy, and emphasised institutions and resilience in water management.
Junaid spent 10 years in the field, first as the Deputy Resident Representative and Principal Economist in Johannesburg, and then as Regional Team Leader of the Water and Sanitation Program in New Delhi. In 2004, he was a team member of the World Development Report (WDR): Making Services Work for Poor People. From 2004-2008, he was the Sector Manager for Social Development in South Asia Region and subsequently for Urban Water & Sanitation before taking on the latter responsibility for the Africa Region in 2010. He was also the Director for Sustainable Development in the Middle East and North Africa Region, a position he held from 2012–2014.
He holds a PhD in Applied Economics from Stanford University, an MPA from Harvard University, and a BA in Economics from Brown University.
Karen Seto
Frederick C. Hixon Professor of Geography and Urbanization Science, Yale School of the Environment, New Haven, USA
Karen Seto is the Frederick C. Hixon Professor of Geography and Urbanization Science. An urban and land change scientist, she is one of the world’s leading experts on contemporary urbanisation and global environmental change. Using a combination of field surveys, satellite data and numerical modelling, her research focus is how urbanisation will affect the planet. She has pioneered methods to reconstruct urban land use with satellite imagery and has developed novel methods to forecast urban expansion. She has conducted urbanisation research in China for twenty years and in India for more than ten. Her research has generated new knowledge on the links between urbanisation and land use, food systems, biodiversity, and climate change.
Professor Seto has served on numerous national and international scientific bodies. She is co-leading the urban mitigation chapter for the IPCC (UN Climate Change) 6th Assessment Report, currently underway, and co-lead the same chapter for the 2014 IPCC 5th Assessment Report. She was co-editor-in-chief of the journal, Global Environmental Change, from 2014 to 2020. Prior to joining Yale, she was faculty at Stanford, from 2000 to 2008, where she held joint appointments in the Woods Institute for the Environment and the School of Earth Sciences. She has received many awards for her scientific contributions, including the Outstanding Contributions to Remote Sensing Research Award from the American Association of Geographers. She was named a “Highly Cited Researcher” in 2018, 2019, and 2020 in recognition of her research papers having ranked in the top 1% of total citations across several fields. Seto is an elected member of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences and the Connecticut Academy of Science and Engineering, and a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. She earned a PhD in Geography from Boston University.
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 the Director of the Studley Graduate Program in International Affairs and Professor of International Affairs, Milano School of International Affairs at The New School. Before joining The New School in 2001, he was a Visiting Fellow of the International Center for Advanced Studies at New York University. From 1972 to 1999, he had a distinguished career at the World Bank. He was responsible for much of the urban policy development of the Bank over that period and, from 1994–1998, he served as the Senior Advisor to the Bank’s Vice-President for Environmentally Sustainable Development. He has worked in over fifty countries and was heavily involved in the Bank’s work on infrastructure, environment, and sustainable development. He is a member of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences Panel on Urban Dynamics.
He is the author or editor of several books, including most recently Preparing the Urban Future: Global Pressures and Local Forces (ed. with A. Garland, B. Ruble, and J. Tulchin), The Human Face of the Urban Environment (ed. with I. Serageldin), Urban Policy and Economic Development: An Agenda for the 1990s, and most recently, Argentina’s Economic Growth and Recovery: The Economy in a Time of Default (Routledge, 2012) and an edited volume, The Global Economic Crisis in Latin America: Impacts and Response (Routledge, 2012). Other publications include articles in 25 Years of Urban Development (Amersfoort, The Netherlands, 1998), Cities Fit for People (Kirdar, ed., 1996), The Brookings Review, Journal of the Society for the Study of Traditional Environments, International Social Science Review, Habitat International, and Finance and Development. He has taught at the University of California at Berkeley, The Johns Hopkins University, and the School of Architecture, Design, and Urban Planning of the University of Buenos Aires. He holds a PhD in Political Economy from the University of Chicago.
Peter Newman
Professor of Sustainability, Curtin University, Perth, Australia
Peter Newman is the Professor of Sustainability at Curtin University. He is an academic who has written 20 books and over 350 papers on sustainable cities with a global reputation and has worked to deliver his ideas in all levels of government. Peter has worked in local government as an elected councillor in Fremantle, in Western Australia’s state government as an advisor to three Premiers and in the Australian Government on the Board of Infrastructure Australia and the Prime Minister’s Cities Reference Group. He is the Coordinating Lead Author for the UN’s IPCC on Transport. In 2014, he was awarded an Order of Australia for his contributions to urban design and sustainable transport particularly for his work in saving and rebuilding Perth’s rail system. In 2018/19 he was the WA Scientist of the Year. He is also the Editor-in-Chief of the Springer journal Sustainable Earth.
Rafael Tuts
Director, Global Programme Division, UN-Habitat, Nairobi, Kenya
Raf Tuts is Director of the Programme Division at UN-Habitat, based at its Headquarters in Nairobi, Kenya. He is overseeing the work of UN-Habitat’s seven thematic branches and four regional offices. Earlier assignments with UN-Habitat included coordinator of the Urban Planning and Design Branch, focusing on promoting compact, integrated and connected cities that are inclusive and resilient to climate change. He was also Acting Coordinator of the Housing and Slum Upgrading Branch, Coordinator of the Cities and Climate Change Initiative and Chief of Training and Capacity Building Branch. He started his work at UN-Habitat as Manager of the Localising Agenda 21 Programme, working on strategic and action planning in secondary cities in Kenya, Morocco, Vietnam and Cuba. He further coordinated UN-Habitat’s engagement in formulating the Sustainable Development Goals, including SDG 11. He is Honorary Professor at the Department of Architecture and Urbanism of the University of Leuven, Belgium. In 1985, he obtained a Master of Science degree in Architectural Engineering from the University of Leuven.
Sander van der Leeuw
Director Emeritus, Julie Ann Wrigley Global Institute of Sustainability, Arizona State University (ASU), Tempe, USA
Sander van der Leeuw is Director Emeritus at the Julie Ann Wrigley Global Institute of Sustainability, ASU and Director of the ASU-Santa Fe Institute Center for Biosocial Complex Systems.
Prior to joining ASU, he had teaching appointments at the universities of Leiden (1972–1976) and Amsterdam (1976–1985) in the Netherlands, Cambridge University (1985–1995) in the UK; and the University of Paris I (Pantheon-Sorbonne; 1995–2004) in France. In July 2001, Professor van der Leeuw was appointed Secretary-General of the French Conseil National de Coordination des Sciences de l’Homme et de la Societe (National Council for the Coordination of the Humanities and Social Sciences). This was followed by an appointment as Deputy Director for Social Sciences at the CNRS (2002–2003) and at the National Institute for the Sciences of the Universe, in charge of a programme similar to the Long Term Ecological Research programme in the US. In 2003, he was appointed chair of the Department of Anthropology at ASU, where he became Founding Director of the School of Human Evolution and Social Change, an interdisciplinary unit based around anthropology that focuses on some of the major challenges of the 21st century, and subsequently Chair of the Consortium for Biosocial Complex Systems and Dean of the School of Sustainability. He was an external professor at the Santa Fe Institute (USA; 2000–2019), is a correspondent of the Royal Dutch Academy of Arts and Sciences since 1995 and held a Chair at the Institut Universitaire de France (2002–2006). He is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and of the Beijer Institute of Environmental Economic of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. In 2012 he was awarded the “Champion of the Earth for Science and Innovation” prize by the United Nations Environment Programme. His expertise lies in archaeology and emerging technologies.
Sheela Patel
Director, Society for the Promotion of Area Resource Centres (SPARC), Mumbai, India
Sheela Patel is the Founder-Director of SPARC, a Mumbai-based NGO that has been working on housing and infrastructure rights for the urban poor for the last two decades. Patel is widely recognised—nationally and internationally—for seeking urgent attention to the issues of urban poverty, housing, and infrastructure onto the radar of governments, bilateral and international agencies, foundations and other organisations. She is one of the many founders of Slum Dwellers International: a transnational social movement of the urban poor, whose board she chairs presently.
Patel has contributed as an author to many articles on the work that the Alliance and SDI does and participates in local national and international events on their behalf, occasionally serving on committees for policies on issues impacting the urban poor. In 2000, she received the United Nations Habitat Award and in 2006, she received an award for Outstanding Contribution towards Mumbai Vision 2015 by Observer Research Foundation. In 2009, she received the David Rockefeller Bridging Leadership Award and in 2011, she was conferred with the prestigious Padmashree award. Patel was a Policy Fellow Resident at The Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Center in 2016.
Srinath Reddy
Honorary Distinguished Professor, Public Health Foundation of India (PHFI), New Delhi, India
Prof. K. Srinath Reddy is presently Honorary Distinguished Professor at PHFI and formerly headed the Department of Cardiology at All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS). Under his leadership, PHFI has established five Indian Institutes of Public Health (IIPHs) in different regions of India, to advance multidisciplinary public health education, research, health technologies and implementation support for strengthening health systems. He was appointed as the First Bernard Lown Visiting Professor of Cardiovascular Health at the Harvard School of Public Health in (2009–2013) and presently serves as an Adjunct Professor of Epidemiology at Harvard University (2014–2023). He holds advisory positions in several national and international bodies and recently published a book Make Health in India: Reaching A Billion Plus. 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. He is the first Indian to be elected to the National Academy of Medicine, USA and was awarded several prestigious international and national doctorates and fellowships. He was President of the World Heart Federation (2013–2015). He is a Padma Bhushan awardee. He is also an Advisor to the Governments of Odisha, Punjab, Haryana and Andhra Pradesh on Public Health. He served as physician to two Prime Ministers of India.
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 the 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 (2013–2014). 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.unsd, 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. Prof. Reddy is a member of the Global Panel on Agriculture and Food Systems for Nutrition. He also co-chaired the Health Ministry Steering Committee on Health Related Effects of Air Pollution. He has served as member of the Lancet Commissions on Health professional education for the 21st century, investing in health, alleviating the access abyss in palliative care and pain relief and high quality health systems.
Susan Parnell
Global Challenges Research Professor, School of Geography, University of Bristol, Bristol, UK
Susan Parnell is a Global Challenges Research Professor in the School of Geography at the University of Bristol and Emeritus Professor at the African Centre for Cities (ACC) at the University of Cape Town. She has held previous academic positions at Wits University and the University of London (SOAS). She was a Leverhulme Visiting Professor at UCL in 2011–2012, Emeka Anyaoku Visiting Chair University College London in 2014–2015 and Visiting Professor at LSE Cities in 2017–2018.
She has been actively involved in local, national and global urban policy debates around the 2030 Sustainable Development Goals and is an advocate for better science policy engagement on cities.
Parnell is the author of numerous peer-reviewed publications that document how cities, past and present, respond to policy change. Her most recent books include the co-authored Supporting City Futures: The Cities Support Programme and the Urban Challenge in South Africa (ACC, 2020), Building a Capable State: Post Apartheid Service Delivery (Zed, 2017) and the co-edited The Urban Planet (Cambridge, 2018). She is currently on the Board of the International Institute for Environment and Development (IIED) and the ACC and had previously served on several NGO structures.
Prof. Xuemei Bai
Distinguished Professor, Urban Environment and Human Ecology, Fenner School of Environment and Society, Australian National University (ANU), Canberra, Australia
Xuemei Bai is a Distinguished Professor, Urban Environment and Human Ecology, Fenner School of Environment and Society, ANU. Distinguished Professor Bai joined ANU in 2011, as a professor of Urban Environment and Human Ecology at the Fenner School of Environment and Society. Prior to ANU, she was a Senior Principal Research Scientist at CSIRO, visiting professor at Yale University, and senior researcher at environmental research institutes in Japan. She is a Visiting Professor at The University of Tokyo.
Professor Bai’s research focuses on several frontiers of urban sustainability science and policy, including drivers and consequence of urbanisation, structure, function, processes, and evolution of urban socio-ecological systems, urban metabolism, urban sustainability experiments and transition, cities and climate change, and urban environmental policy and governance, and cross scale translations between planetary level boundaries and targets into cities. She has authored/co-authored over 100 publications, including several in Nature and Science. She served as a Lead Author for the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, the Global Energy Assessment, and is a Lead Author for IPBES Global Assessment and IPCC AR6. She delivered invited lectures/seminars at top academic institutions as well as many international conferences and science/policy forums. She supervised award-winning PhD and Honours students.
Professor Bai was an inaugural member of the Science Committee of Future Earth, where she has been leading the development of the Urban Knowledge-Action Network, and a Council member of International Society of Industrial Ecology. She was the Vice Chair of the Science Committee of the International Human Dimensional Program for Global Environmental Change (IHDP); Science Steering Committee of IHDP Industrial Transformation Core Project; and Steering Committee of US National Academies Sustainable Cities Initiative. She served on the European Research Council assessment panels for Consolidator and Advanced grants, and was a member of Global LafargeHolcim Award Jury for 2018. She is a Deputy Editor of Global Sustainability, and serves on the Editorial Board of Current Opinion of Environmental Sustainability; Environment; Computer, Environment and Urban Systems; Ecosystem Health and Sustainability; Urbanisation; International Journal of Sustainable Cities and Society. She is a member of Earth Commission, where she co-leads its Working Group 5 on cross-scale translation of integrated planetary level targets into cities and businesses. She has been a Fellow of the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia since 2017, and was named one of the World’s 100 Most Influential People in Climate Change Policy in 2019. She is the 2018 Laureate of the Volvo Environment Prize.