Dr. Timon McPhearson is Associate Professor of Urban Ecology, Director of the Urban Systems Lab, and research faculty at the Tishman Environment and Design Center at The New School. He studies the ecology in, of, and for cities to advance resilience, sustainability, and justice. He publishes in scientific journals such as Nature, Nature Climate Change, and BioScience, in books (e.g. Urban Planet, forthcoming from Cambridge University Press), and in popular press (e.g. The Nature of Cities). He is also a Research Fellow at The Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies and Associate Research Fellow at Stockholm Resilience Centre, Stockholm University, and co-leads the U.S. National Science Foundation “Urban Resilience to Extreme Weather Related Events” Sustainability Research Network (UREx SRN) in the US and Latin America.
Adriana Allen is Professor of Development Planning and Urban Sustainability at the The Bartlett Development Planning Unit (DPU), University College London (UCL) She is the Co-Chair of UCL Grand Challenge for Sustainable Cities, leads the DPU Research Cluster on Environmental Justice, Urbanisation and Resilience (EJUR) and teaches the practice-based component of the MSc in Environment and Sustainable Development (ESD). She has over 30 years of international experience in research, postgraduate teaching and consultancy undertakings in over 20 countries in Asia, Africa, Latin America and the Middle East. Her work adopts a political ecology perspective to investigate and promote transformative links between socio-environmental change, justice and sustainability in urban and peri-urban contexts. She recently published a co-edited volume on Environmental Justice and Urban Resilience in the Global South (Palgrave, 2017), which offers a critical exploration of the various forms of quotidian and formal urban learning and planning that shape the urban sustainability nexus of power, injustice and the environment.
Chris Zevenbergen is a Professor at the Water Engineering Department of IHE Delft and at the Department of Hydraulic Engineering, Faculty of Civil Engineering of the TU Delft, The Netherlands. He is a visiting professor at the Southeast University (SEU), China. He has a strong affinity with the ecological, socio-economic, institutional aspects of urban planning and water management. He has worked extensively on application of theories of resilience to flood risk management systems, including the theory of socio-ecological resilience.
Chris Zevenbergen has published/edited five books (of which one text book on Urban Flood Management, Taylor & Francis) and more than 100 scientific publications in the field of environmental engineering and urban flood management. He has founded and chairs the Flood Resilience chair group (FRG) of IHE Delft (formerly UNESCO-IHE).
Isabelle Anguelovski is Director of BCNUEJ, an ICREA Research Professor, a Senior Researcher and Principal Investigator at ICTA and coordinator of the research group Healthy Cities and Environmental Justice at IMIM. She obtained a PhD in Urban Studies and Planning from MIT before returning to Europe in 2011 with a Marie Curie International Incoming Fellowship.
Situated at the intersection of urban planning and policy, social inequality and development studies, her research examines the extent to which urban plans and policy decisions contribute to more just, resilient, healthy, and sustainable cities, and how community groups in distressed neighborhoods contest the existence, creation, or exacerbation of environmental inequities as a result of urban (re)development processes and policies. She explores how environmental gentrification processes lead to new forms of locally unwanted land uses (LULUs), how municipalities protect vulnerable communities from climate risks and inequality, and the initiatives and obstacles to transitioning towards a low-carbon economy within European urban regions.
Gonzalo Lizarralde’s work focuses on understanding project processes, risks, low-cost housing, and informality in urban settings. He is interested in the causes and consequences of rapid urban transformation triggered by natural disasters, climate change, socio-political conflicts, and economic instability. His research has impacted housing and urban policy in Haiti, Cuba, Chile, Colombia and other countries of the Global South. Since 2017, he is the holder of the Université de Montréal Fayolle-Magil Construction Research Chair in Architecture, the Built Environment and Sustainability. He is also the director of the IF Research Group (grif) and the Canadian Disaster Resilience and Sustainable Reconstruction Research Alliance (Oeuvre durable). He is one of the founders of i-Rec, an international network of specialists in disaster risk reduction and post-disaster reconstruction. He is the author of «The Invisible Houses: Rethinking and Designing Low Cost Housing in Developing Countries» and «Rebuilding After Disasters: From Emergency to Sustainability» He is a Member of the College of New Scholars, Artists and Scientists of the Royal Society of Canada.