PROF. OLA SÖDERSTRÖM
University of Neuchâtel,
Switzerland
PRINCIPAL INVESTIGATOR
Ola Söderström is Professor of social and cultural geography at the University of Neuchâtel, Switzerland. His work focuses on global dynamics of urban development, urban material culture, urban visual cultures and tactics of urban living. His recent work has investigated critical forms of mobility (Critical Mobilities, Routledge, 2013), trajectories of urban globalization through relational comparisons of cities of the Global South (Cities in Relations, Wiley-Blackwell, 2014), smart urbanism and relations between urban living and psychosis.
PROF. AYONA DATTA
University College London,
United Kingdom
CO-INVESTIGATOR
Ayona Datta is Professor in Human Geography in the Department of Geography at University College London. Her research interests are in the postcolonial urbanism, gender citizenship, and urban futures. She is author of ‘The Illegal City: Space, law and gender in a Delhi Squatter settlement‘ (2012); co-editor of ‘Mega-Urbanisation in the Global South: Fast cities and new urban utopias of the postcolonial state‘ (2017) and ‘Translocal Geographies: Spaces, places, connections‘ (2011).
Follow Ayona at ayonadatta.com
DR. NANCY ODENDAAL
University of Cape Town,
South Africa
LOCAL ACADEMIC PARTNER
Nancy Odendaal is associate professor in city and regional planning at the University of Cape Town in South Africa. She is based in the School of Architecture, Planning and Geomatics and has a working relationship with the African Centre for Cities. Nancy’s work focuses on three distinct but overlapping areas of interest. Her primary research is on urban infrastructure. She has published extensively on the relationship between smart technologies, urbanity in the global South and social justice. As the former convener of the Association of African Planning Schools (AAPS) and its incoming chair, as well as chair of the Global Planning Education Association Network (GPEAN), she is active in working on planning education and curricula reform. Her publications in this regard focus on the challenges of training built environment professionals in response to African urbanization challenges. As a spatial planner, she has written on the efficacy and transformational potential of spatial planning in the global South.
DR. DIGANTA DAS
Nanyang Technological University,
Singapore
LOCAL ACADEMIC PARTNER
Diganta Das is an assistant professor of geography at Humanities and Social Studies Education Academic Group, NIE, Nanyang Technological University. Diganta is a human geographer whose work focuses on issues of urban development in South Asia, especially around smart city development, urban policy mobility and experience of producing high-tech spaces. He has published in the area of urban policy mobility, production of smart/high-tech spaces in India, and on changing urban waterscapes of South Asia. He is currently the chair of Regional Planning and Development Specialty Group (RDPSG) of American Association of Geographers (AAG) and is active in working on urban and regional planning issues. He is also active regionally around South and Southeast Asia in organizing conferences through Southeast Asian Geography Association (SEAGA) where he is one of the executive members.
PROF. GILLIAN ROSE
University of Oxford,
United Kingdom
ADVISORY BOARD
Gillian Rose is Professor of Human Geography at the University of Oxford and a Fellow of the British Academy. Her current research interests focus on contemporary digital visual culture and on so-called ‘smart cities’. She is the author of Visual Methodologies (Sage, fourth edition 2016), as well as a number of papers on images, visualising technologies and ways of seeing in urban and domestic spaces. She is currently leading the ESRC-funded project Smart Cities in the Making: Learning from Milton Keynes; her particular interest is how digital visualisations operationalise smart cities (SCiM-MK.org).
DR. FEDERICO CAPROTTI
University of Exeter,
United Kingdom
ADVISORY BOARD
Federico Caprotti is an Associate Professor in human geography at the University of Exeter: he is interested in sustainable cities. He currently leads the ‘Smart Eco-Cities for a Green Economy (SMART-ECO)’ research consortium (http://www.smart-eco-cities.org), funded by the ESRC, China’s NSFC, and the national research funding agencies of France, Germany, and the Netherlands. Federico also leads an ESRC Urban Transformations project on energy transitions in South African municipalities. Federico has recently co-edited (with Li Yu) Sustainable Cities in Asia (Routledge, 2017), and in 2015 he published Eco-Cities and the Transition to Low-Carbon Economies (Palgrave).
