Andy Altman  | Deputy Mayor

Andrew Altman is the Deputy Mayor of Philadelphia having served for five years as the planning director for Washington D.C. under Mayor Anthony A. Williams, and as the first President and Chief Executive Officer of the Anacostia Waterfront Corporation that was founded to guide the ambitious regeneration of the capital's waterfront. This project has been recognised as one of the boldest and most innovative planning initiatives currently in the United States. Altman is a Visiting Fellow at the Brookings Institution where he will serve as a principal researcher and advisor to the Metropolitan Policy Program. At Brookings he will work closely with Bruce Katz on the development of a new transformative agenda for cities. Altman has been the recipient of numerous fellowships including the Loeb Fellowship at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design and a Lady Davis Fellowship at the Technion, Israel Institute of Technology. Altman holds a Masters in City Planning from M.I.T.

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Sophie Body-Gendrot | Director

Sophie Body-Gendrot is a Professor of political science and of American studies, the Director of the Center of Urban Studies at Université-Sorbonne-Paris IV and a CNRS researcher. For several years, she chaired a European network on the dynamics of violence in 18 European countries and was the editor in chief of the French Review of American studies. Specializing in cross-national comparisons on urban violence and security, her research focuses also on the role of the state and public policies, social efficiency, the built environment, citizen participation and inclusive cities. Her most recent books (in English) are: Cultures of violence in Europe (co-ed. P. Spierenburg, New York forthcoming); The Social Control of Cities: A Comparative Perspective (Oxford, 2000), Social Capital and Social Citizenship (co-ed M. Gittell, Lexington MA, 2003 and (in French) Sortir des banlieues. La tyrannie des territories (Paris, forthcoming). La peur détruira-t-elle la ville (Paris, forthcoming). La ville et l’urbain. L’état des savoirs, (co-ed. T. Paquot, M. Lussault) Paris La découverte (2003). La société américaine après le 11 septembre (Paris, 2002);Villes : la fin de la violence (Paris, 2001). A frequent visiting scholar at New York University, she has published numerous articles in Europe and in the US.

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Lindsay Bremner | Chair

Lindsay Bremner is currently Chair of Architecture at Temple University in Philadelphia, USA. She formerly held the same position at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, where she is currently completing her senior doctorate entitled Writing the City into Being: Johannesburg 1993 – 2007. Bremner has written and lectured extensively on the transformation of Johannesburg since the end of apartheid. Her publications include the book Johannesburg: One City Colliding Worlds and contributions to blank___ architecture apartheid and after, under siege: four African cities and against the wall. In 2007, she co-curated the exhibition Johannesburg: Emerging / Diverging Metropolis in Mendrisio, Switzerland with Pep Subiros. Bremner’s current research interests include a project on Philadelphia entitled Archeology of the Present and on the cities of the Indian Ocean entitled Folded Ocean. She was a visiting professor of architecture at MIT in 2005.

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Richard Brown | Urban Policy Consultant

Richard Brown is a freelance consultant and writer on urban policy.  His work covers urban governance, urban regeneration and planning, with a focus on developing partnerships and strategies for complex urban change programmes.  His clients and collaborators include the UK Government, Greater London Authority and London School of Economics.  Before establishing his own practice in 2006, Richard set up and worked at London’s Olympic Delivery Authority and Greater London Authority.  At the Greater London Authority, Richard worked as private secretary to London Mayor Ken Livingstone and set up the Architecture and Urbanism Unit, as well as leading the GLA’s work on the London 2012 bid and Thames Gateway development programmes.  Richard has also undertaken research and published reports on urban regeneration and local political governance.  He has degrees from the universities of Oxford and London.

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Amanda M. Burden | Director

Amanda Burden, Chair of the New York City Planning Commission, received the prestigious Design Patron award at the 2004 National Design Awards at the Smithsonian's Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum. Prior to her appointment as Chair, Burden was a member of the City Planning Commission, Director of Planning at the Center for Court Innovation, Coordinator for Planning and Development at the Midtown Community Court Project, Vice President of Planning and Design at the Battery Park City Authority, and Vice President of Architecture and Design at the NYS Urban Development Corporation. An urban planner and civic activist, Burden is an honorary member of the AIA, American Institute of Architects, and a member of the AICP, the American Institute of Certified Planners. Burden received a BA at Sarah Lawrence College and an MS in Urban Planning at Columbia University Graduate School of Architecture.

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Fabio Casiroli | Professor of Transport Planning

Fabio Casiroli, born in Milan in 1950, is a freelance specialist who has been working in the field of territorial and transport planning since 1975. He's been a contract professor in Transport Planning since 1998 in the Faculty of Civil Architecture at the Polytechnic of Milan after teaching experiences in Cagliari, Palermo and Venice. He has participated in research projects for universities, CNR (Research National Center), European Union and Banco Interamericano de Desarollo. He has worked in Europe, Latin America, Africa and Asia on studies, plans and projects on both urban and regional scale. From several years he's providing specialist consultancy for some of the most notable contemporary architects on large projects in Italy and abroad. Recently he was responsible at the Venice Architecture Biennale 2006 for the sections "Mobility", where he presented studies on 12 world megacities, and "Europe Networks". He's member of the Mo.Ve. (Mobility Venice) Scientific Committee and of the Macro Town Planning Laboratory of the Milan Polytechnic.

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José Castillo | Architect

Jose Castillo is a practicing architect and urbanist living and working in Mexico City. He is the principal and founder alongside Saidee Springall of arquitectura 911sc, an independent architectural and urban practice. Among their built works are the SA236 housing complex and the JS32 offices. Currently they are building competition-winning projects for the expansion of the Spanish Cultural Center in the Historic Centre of Mexico City (with Javier Sanchez), and the new campus for the CEDIM school of architecture and design in Monterrey (with Fernanda Canales). Castillo’s work and writings have appeared in several publications including Praxis Journal, Bomb, Arquine, Architectural Record, 2G, and Domus. He is a professor at the University of Pennsylvania’s School of Design and the Universidad Iberoamericana’s School of Architecture in Mexico City. Since 2005, Castillo has curated and participated in exhibitions including Mexico City Dialogues: New Architectural Practices at the Center for Architecture in New York City; Tourism is Life, at the Rotterdam Architecture Biennale, Living the (Mega)City, at the São Paulo Biennale, Mexico City: The space of potentiality, at the 2006 Venice Biennale, Mexico City EAST: Territories of Growth at the Canary Islands Biennale, and Peripheral Landscapes at the 2007 Rotterdam Biennale, Visionary Power.

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Xianming Chen | Dean of the Center for Urban and Global Studies

Xianming Chen is Raether Distinguished Professor of Sociology and International Studies and the Dean and Director of the Center of Urban and Global Studies at Trinity College, US. Chen is also Professor at the School of Social Development and Public Policy at Fudan University, Shanghai.

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Frank Duffy | Founder
DEGW, London and New York

Gerald Frug | Louis D. Brandeis Professor of Law

Gerald Frug is the Louis D. Brandeis Professor of Law at Harvard Law School. Educated at the University of California at Berkeley and Harvard Law School, he worked as a Special Assistant to the Chairman of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, in Washington, DC, and as Health Services Administrator of the City of New York. In 1974 he began teaching at the University of Pennsylvania Law School, before joining the Harvard law faculty in 1981. Jerry’s specialty is local government law. He has published dozens of articles on the topic and is the author, among other works, of Dispelling the Myth of Home Rule (with David Barron and Rick Su, 2004), A casebook on Local Government Law, 3rd edition (with David Barron and Richard T. Ford, 2001), and City Making: Building Communities without Building Walls, (1999).

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Hermann Knoflacher | Professor of Transport Planning

Professor Hermann Knoflacher holds the chair in Transport Planning and Traffic Engineering at the University of Technology in Vienna. He has a civil engineering and a natural science degree as well as a PhD in Transportation Engineering from the University of Vienna. In 1968 Knoflacher established the Institute of Transport Science, in the Austrian Transport Safety Board which carried out studies on transportation planning, traffic safety and human behaviour. He headed the institute until 1985. In 1971 he established a consultancy company, which has completed over 250 research projects as well as carrying out a range of transport plans for Austrian cities and regions, and national and international bodies. He has taught at the University of Technology in Vienna since 1972 and was Guest Professor at universities in Europe, Japan and in the US. He was also advisor to the Minister of Transport for over eight years. He was member of the advisory groups for the EU Commission for Telematics in the 4. FP and for Intrermodality and Sustainable Mobility in the 5. FP. Member and Chairman of Road Research working Groups of the OECD and PIARC, expert for the WHO. He is member of the European Academy for Science an Art, Chairman of the Club of Vienna and member of many international and national research and science organizations. Hermann is the author of over 500 scientific publications on transport planning, traffic safety and transport policy. He was the author of Harmonie von Stadt und Verkehr (Harmony between City and Transport), Landschaft ohne Autobahnen ((Landscape without Motorways), Stehzeuge, Der Stau ist kein Verkehrsporblem (Congestion is not a Transport Problem) and co author of Handbuch der Verkehrspoltik (The Transport Policy Handbook) and Generalverkehrsplanug und Verkehrsinfrastrukturplanung (General Traffic Planning and Infrastructure Planning). His main research fields are human behaviour in the artificial environment, the effects of technical modified structures on individual and social habits, effects of technical artefacts on deep-rooted evolutionary levels on human behaviour.

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Rem Koolhaas | Principal

Rem Koolhaas founded the Office for Metropolitan Architecture in 1975 together with Elia and Zoe Zenghelis and Madelon Vriesendorp. He graduated at the Architectural Association in London and in 1978 published Delirious New York, a Retroactive Manifesto for Manhattan. In 1995, his book S,M,L,XL summarized the work of OMA and established connections between contemporary society and architecture. He is heading the work of OMA and AMO, the conceptual branch of OMA focused on social, economical and technological developments and exploring territories beyond architectural and urban concerns. Rem Koolhaas is a professor at Harvard University where he conducts the Project on the City.

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Dieter Läpple | Professor

Dieter Läpple is Professor of Urban and Regional Economics and Director of the Institute for'Urban and Regional Economics and Sociology at the HafenCity University Hamburg. He has worked as Lecturer and Visiting Professor in Berlin, Amsterdam, Paris, Aix-en-Provence/Marseille and Leiden, among other places. He is a full member of the German Academy for Urban and Regional Planning, Vice-president of Salzburg Congress on Urban Planning and Development as well as being a member of several international research networks. Läpple was appointed as Urban Expert on Labour Market of the Urban Age Programme. His current research focuses on the restructuring of the economic bases of cities and regions, the global-local-interplay, the urban labour markets and urban time-space configurations.

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Guy Nordenson | Engineer

Guy Nordenson, Professor at Princeton University, began his career as a structural engineer drafting for Buckminster Fuller and Isamu Noguchi. In 1987 he established Ove Arup & Partners' New York office, where he was a director until 1997, when he formed his own office. Nordenson has collaborated on structures ranging from power stations in China to a glass cantilever stair in New York. Recent projects include Steven Holl Architects' new MIT Simmons Hall residence; The Museum of Modern Art with Taniguchi and Associates; and New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York with SANAA architects. Nordenson is active in earthquake engineering. He is co-founder of the Structural Engineer's Association of New York and organised the inspections of 400 buildings in the restricted zone around the World Trade Center after 9/11. In 2004 he co-curated an exhibition on Tall Buildings at MOMA, and saw the books WTC Emergency Building Damage Assessments and Tall Buildings published.

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Enrique Norten | Architect

Enrique Norten is an architect and currently holds the Miller Chair of Architecture at the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia. He is the founder of TEN Arquitectos, and has worked extensively in Mexico City and New York. He has received the Mies van der Rohe Award, a Gold Medal from the Society of American Registered Architects, and the Leonardo da Vinci World Award of Arts by the World Cultural Council, along with numerous other honours. He has held the O’Neal Ford Chair in Architecture at the University of Texas, Austin, and the Lorch Professor of Architecture Chair at the University of Michigan. He was Professor at Universidad Iberoamericana in Mexico City. Norten has served on numerous award juries including for the World Trade Center Site Memorial Competition in New York City, and the Holcim Award.

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Enrique Peñalosa | former Mayor of Bogotá
City of Bogota

Enrique Peñalosa has worked in government, academia and the public sector. As Mayor of Bogotá, Colombia, between 1998 and 2001, Enrique led a profound transformation of the city, giving it a different vision which was adopted by its citizens. He discarded elevated motorway proposals and instead restricted private car use and implemented TransMilenio, the world’s most successful bus-based transit system. He banned cars from pavements and constructed and reconstructed hundreds of kilometres of them. He also conceived and created an extensive network of protected bicycle-paths and greenways as well as the 23-kilometre long Porvenir Promenade through Bogotá’s poor Southwest. Enrique implemented a massive slum improvement programme, prioritizing children, with quality nurseries, schools, libraries and parks. Bogotá’s city centre was reborn with plazas, the transformation of Jimenez avenue into a lively pedestrian space and the new Third Millenium 23-hectare park, which replaced a crime-ridden dilapidated area. He also initiated creative social exercizes such as an annual Car Free Day. Following his term as Mayor, Enrique became a visiting scholar at New York University and has done extensive lecturing and consulting on urban planning and management throughout the world. He returned to Colombian politics in 2004 and is currently running once again for mayor of Bogotá. Enrique holds a BA from Duke University, a Master’s from the IIAP in Paris and a DESS from the University of Paris 2.

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Anne Power | Professor of Social Policy

Anne Power is Professor of Social Policy at the LSE. In 1997, Anne became Deputy Director of LSE's Centre for the Analysis of Social Exclusion (CASE). She is a member of the UK government's Neighbourhood, Cities and Regions Analysis Panel and of the Sustainable Development Commission. She is a visiting fellow at the Brookings Institution in the United States of America, and with Bruce Katz is developing a Europe-wide and American network of Weak Market Cities, aiming to help regenerate urban communities in a more sustainable way. Her books and publications include: One size doesn't fit all (2002); Estates on the Edge (1999); The Slow Death of Great Cities? Urban abandonment or urban renaissance (with Katharine Mumford 1999); Jigsaw Cities: Big Places, Small Spaces (with John Houghton 2007) and City Survivors (forthcoming).

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Saskia Sassen | Helen and Robert Lynd Professor of Sociology, Columbia University

Saskia Sassen is now the Lynd Professor of Sociology at Columbia University after a decade at the University of Chicago and London School of Economics. Her recent books are Territory, Authority, Rights: From Medieval to Global Assemblages ( Princeton University Press 2006) and A Sociology of Globalization. (Norton 2007). She has now completed for UNESCO a five-year project on sustainable human settlement for which she set up a network of researchers and activists in over 30 countries; it is published as one of the volumes of the Encyclopedia of Life Support Systems (EOLSS) (Oxford, UK: EOLSS Publishers) [http://www.eolss.net ]. Her books are translated into sixteen languages. She has written for The Guardian, The New York Times, Le Monde Diplomatique, the International Herald Tribune, Newsweek International, the Financial Times, among others.

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Richard Sennett | Professor of Sociology

Richard Sennett is a sociologist and the School Professor of Social and Cultural Theory at the LSE and Bemis Professor of Social Sciences at MIT. His research interests include the relationship between urban design and urban society, urban family patterns, the urban welfare system, the history of cities and the changing nature of work. He has served as a consultant on urban policy to the Labour party and is a frequent commentator in the press. His books include The Culture of the New Capitalism, (Yale, 2006), Respect in an Age of Inequality, (Penguin, 2003), The Corrosion of Character (1998), The Fall of Public Man (1996), Flesh and Stone (1994). He is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Royal Society of Literature, the Royal Society of the Arts, and the Academia Europea. He is past President of the American Council on Work and the former Director of the New York Institute for the Humanities. Sennett was closely involved in the Mayors' Institute in the USA which has inspired the European Mayors' Conference organized by the LSE Cities Programme.

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Ed Soja | Distinguished Professor of Urban Planning

Edward Soja is Distinguished Professor of Urban Planning at UCLA and Centennial Professor of Sociology at LSE. His interests have focussed on making connections between the spatial disciplines of geography, architecture and urban and regional studies, and in promoting a critical spatial perspective in the social sciences and humanities. Concentrating in particular on Los Angeles, he has published widely on processes of urban restructuring and the transformation of the modern metropolis. His most recent research has ranged from developing new approaches to regional governance in Catalonia to studies of labour-community-university coalition building and what he describes as the search for spatial justice. His major books include Postmodern Geographies: The Reassertion of Space in Critical Social Theory (1986), Thirdspace: Journeys to Los Angeles and Other Real-and-Imagined Places (1996), and Postmetropolis: Critical Studies of Cities and Regions (2000).

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Deyan Sudjic | Director

Deyan Sudjic is Director of the Design Museum in London. Founded in 1989, the Design Museum is the UK’s cultural champion of design and has won international acclaim for exhibitions of modern design history and contemporary design. Before joining the Design Museum in August 2006, Deyan was Dean of the Faculty of Art, Architecture and Design at Kingston University, Visiting Professor at the Royal College of Art, and the Observer design and architecture writer. He was Director of Glasgow 1999, UK City of Architecture and in 2002 he was Director of the Venice Architecture Biennale, which attracted more than 100,000 paying visitors for the first time in its history. Deyan was for several years Visiting Professor at the Academy of Applied Art in Vienna, running a course in Design History and Theory. From 2000 to 2004 he was Editor of Domus, the international magazine of art, architecture and design, and he was Founding Editor of Blueprint magazine from 1983 to 1996. Deyan has published many books on design and architecture, including monographs on the work of the Japanese fashion designer Rei Kawakubo and the British-based designer Ron Arad. His most recent books are, The Edifice Complex (London 2005) and Future Systems (London, 2006). Deyan was appointed as a CABE commissioner in March 2006. In 2004 he was awarded the Bicentenary Medal of the Royal Society of Arts for the promotion of design, and was made an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Institute of British Architects. He was made an OBE in 2000.

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Geetam Tiwari | Chair and Associate Professor

Dr Geetam Tiwari is TRIPP Chair and Associate Professor for Transport Planning Transportation Research and Injury Prevention Programme (TRIPP), Indian Institute of Technology Delhi, India, with a Ph.D. from the University of Illinois, Chicago. Her professional experience is in the areas of transport planning, traffic engineering and safety. Teaching at the Indian Institute of Technology in Delhi since 1990, she has published over 60 research papers on transportation planning and safety and has edited four books. Tiwari received the Stockholm Partnerships Award for local impact, innovative thinking and a potential for replication or transferability for TRIPP. In 2002, she received the Center for Excellence grant from Volvo Research and Education Foundation, Sweden for Sustainable transport in Less Motorised Countries. She has been an invitee in the Urban Age conference series by London School of Economics 2005-2006 and Principal Voices programme on urbanization sponsored by CNN-Time and Shell company in 2006.

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Tony Travers | Director

Tony Travers is Director of the Greater London Group, a research centre at the London School of Economics. He is also Expenditure Advisor to the House of Commons Select Committee on Education and Skills, a Senior Associate at the King's Fund and a member of the Arts Council of England's Touring Panel. He was, from 1992-1997, a Member of the Audit Commission and has worked for a number of other Parliamentary select committees. Travers was a member of the Working Group on Finance, Urban Task Force in 1998-1999. He has published a number of books on cities and government, including, Paying for Health, Education and Housing, How does the Centre Pull the Purse Strings (with Howard Glennerster and John Hills) (2000) and, most recently, The Politics of London: Governing the Ungovernable City (2004).

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Lawrence Vale | Ford Professor of Urban & Environmental Planning

Lawrence Vale is Professor Urban Design and Planning and Head of the Department of Urban Studies and Planning at M.I.T. He holds degrees from Amherst M.I.T., and the University of Oxford. Vale is the author or editor of six books examining urban design and housing. These include Architecture, Power, and National Identity (winner of the 1994 Spiro Kostof Book Award for Architecture and Urbanism from the Society of Architectural Historians), From the Puritans to the Projects: Public Housing and Public Neighbors (2001 "Best Book in Urban Affairs" Award from the Urban Affairs Association), and Reclaiming Public Housing: A Half Century of Struggle in Three Public Neighborhoods (2005 Paul Davidoff Book Award from the Association of Collegiate Schools of Planning). He is also Co-Editor, with Sam Bass Warner, Jr., of Imaging the City (2001), and co-editor, with Thomas J. Campanella, of The Resilient City: How Modern Cities Recover From Disaster (Oxford University Press, 2005).

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Anthony Williams | Former Mayor of Washington D.C

Anthony A. Williams is Chief Executive Officer of Primum Public Realty Trust, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Friedman, Billings, Ramsey Group, Inc. He co-founded Primum Public Realty Trust in 2007 with FBR as a real estate entity focused on buying and leasing back government and not-for-profit real estate. Prior to joining FBR, Mr. Williams served two terms as the fourth Mayor of the District of Columbia from January 1999 through December 2006. While in office, Mayor Williams was elected president of the Washington, DC-based National League of Cities in December 2004. Anthony Williams served as the District of Columbia Chief Financial Officer (CFO) from October 1995 through June 1998. As CFO and Mayor, he led the District to financial recovery. Williams restored fiscal accountability for District agencies and balanced the city's budget. His work put the city on track for the return to self-government—two years earlier than projected—and delivered a surplus of $185 million in fiscal year 1997. Prior to serving as Mayor, Mr. Williams was appointed by President Clinton and confirmed by the Senate to serve as the first CFO for the US Department of Agriculture as well as a founder and Vice Chairman of the U.S. CFO Council. He served as the Deputy State Comptroller of Connecticut, where he was responsible for the management of 250 separate funds and the state's budget and accounting services. In 1997, Governing Magazine named him Public Official of the Year. He is also on the award jury for the 2007 Opus Prize.

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Alejandro Zaera Polo | Joint Director

Alejandro Zaera Polo studied at the E.T.S. of Architecture in Madrid and received a masters (MARCHII) degree from Harvard Graduate school of Design in 1991. Together with Farshid Moussavi he founded Foreign Office Architects in 1992. FOA is an international practice of architecture and urban design, dedicated to the exploration of contemporary urban conditions, lifestyles and construction technologies. Projects realized include the Yokohama International Port Terminal in Japan, and the Barcelona Forum Park in Spain. Besides his architectural work Alejandro is currently the Dean of the Berlage Institute and lectures at several architectural schools around the world. His critical and theoretical work has been published in international magazines and a recent monograph on the work of the practice has appeared as part of the 2G series, a major publication on the Yokohama Terminal has been published by Actar.

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