Ayona DATTA is Reader in Urban Futures in the Department of Geography, King’s College London. Her broad research interests are in the geographies of urbanization, gender citizenship and urban futures in the global north and south. She is author of ‘The Illegal City: Space, law and gender in a Delhi squatter settlement’ in 2012, co-editor of ‘Translocal Geographies: Spaces, places, connections’ in 2011 and co-editor of ‘Mega-Urbanization in the Global South: Fast Cities and New Urban Utopias’ in 2017. She is working on another co-edited book (Manchester University Press) on ‘Utopian Urban Futures’ due in 2018. Ayona is currently working on two research projects ‘Smart Cities: Provincialising the urban age in India and South Africa’ (CoI) funded by Swiss National Science Foundation and ‘Disconnected infrastructures and Violence Against Women: Innovating digital technologies in low-income neighbourhoods to produce safer Indian Cities’ (PI) funded by the British Academy Global Challenges Research Funds. Ayona is author of several peer reviewed journal articles, op-eds in the Guardian, openDemocracy and ConversationUK as well as producer/director of two films on Mumbai’s urban transformations ‘City bypassed’ and ‘City forgotten’. She is co-editor of two journals – Urban Geography and Dialogues in Human Geography; and on the editorial boards of Antipode; Gender, Place and Culture and EPD: Society and Space.

​

​

Robert WILBY is a Professor of Hydroclimatic Modelling in the Department of Geography at Loughborough University, UK. His research focuses on the management of climate risks to freshwater systems and urban environments. He co-developed the Statistical DownScaling Model (SDSM) – a public domain climate scenario tool that has been used in numerous risk assessments, including for water resources, fluvial flooding and tidal surge, air quality and urban heat stress. He was a contributing author of the second UK Climate Change Risk Assessment. His latest book Climate Change in Practice seeks to provoke readers into thinking more deeply about the technical, socio-economic and moral aspects of improving resilience to climate hazards.

​

​

Manuel B. AALBERS  is coordinator of the ERC-funded Real Estate/Financial Complex research project. He is trained as a human geographer, sociologist and urban planner and is currently associate professor of Social and Economic Geography at KU Leuven / University of Leuven (Belgium). Previously, Manuel held positions at the University of Amsterdam and Columbia University (New York) and was a guest researcher at New York University, City University New York, the University of Milan-Bicocca and at the University of Urbino (Italy). His main research interest is at the intersection of real estate (including housing), finance and states. Manuel has published on redlining, social and financial exclusion, neighbourhood change (including decline and gentrification), the privatization of social housing and the Anglophone hegemony in academia. He is the author of Place, Exclusion, and Mortgage Markets (Wiley-Blackwell, 2011) and The Financialization of Housing (Routledge, 2016) as well as the editor of Subprime Cities: The Political Economy of Mortgage Markets (Wiley-Blackwell, 2012). He is the associate editor of the Encyclopedia of Urban Studies (Sage, 2010) and of geography journal TESG. He is also on the board of the journals Urban Studies, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, Belgeo and Geografie. 

​

​