Louis I. Kahn Visiting Professor - Yale School of Architecture

Born in Rome in 1973, Pier Vitorio Aureli graduated in Architecture at the IUAV in Venice. He earned his PhD at the TU Delft in 2005. Aureli’s main research focus is the relationship between architectural form, political theory and urban history. He teaches at the Architectural Association in London where is both Diploma Unit Master and Director of the PhD Program ‘City-Architecture’. Currently he is Louis I. Kahn Visiting Professor at Yale School of Architecture. He has taught at Columbia University and Berlage Institute in Rotterdam.

Associate Professor, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Rafi Segal is an architect and Associate Professor of Architecture and Urbanism at MIT. Segal’s practice and research engages in design on both the architectural and urban scale. His projects include the Ashdod Museum of Art, Villa 003 of the ORDOS 100 Project, the Kitgum Peace Museum in Uganda, as well as the winning proposal of the international competition for the National Library of Israel in Jerusalem. Among the current projects, Segal is designing communal neighborhoods for kibbutz Hatzor in Israel that propose a hybrid model of designed/ self -built housing in a shared-private ownership system. Segal is co-editor of In Search of the Public: Notes on the Contemporary American City (2013); Cities of Dispersal (2008), Territories—Islands, Camps, and Other States of Utopia (2003); A Civilian Occupation: The Politics of Israeli Architecture (2003) and has exhibited his work widely, most notably at Storefront for Art and Architecture; KunstWerk, Berlin; Witte de With, Rotterdam; Venice Biennale of Architecture; MOMA in New York; and at the Hong Kong/Shenzhen Urbanism Biennale. His writings and exhibitions have provided a critical contribution to architecture’s role in the peripheries of our cities.

Director of Design Studies, School of Design, Carnegie Mellon University

Cameron Tonkinwise is the Director of Design Studies at the School of Design at Carnegie Mellon University. He also directs the School of Design's Doctoral research program. Cameron has a background in philosophy and continues to research what designers can learn from philosophies of making, material culture studies and sociologies of technology. His primary area of research is sustainable design. In particular, he focuses on the design of systems that lower societal materials intensity, primarily by decoupling use and ownership - in other words, systems of shared use. Cameron has published a range of articles on the role of design, and in particular, service design, in the promotion of the sharing economy and collaborative consumption

Doina Petrescu, Constantin Petcou

Atelier d'architecture autogérée (aaa - Studio for Self-managed Architecture) is a practice based in Paris co-founded by architects, Constantin Petcou and Doina Petrescu in 2001. aaa acts as a platform for collaborative research and action on the city and much of their work is carried out with other specialists, artists, researchers and institutional partners such as universities, arts organisations and NGOs, as well as the eventual users of their spaces.Doina Petrescu is Professor of Architecture and Design Activism at the University of Sheffield. Her cross-disciplinary research addresses outstanding questions in architecture and urban planning, focusing on issues of civic participation and gender and the relations between co-production and resilience. Constantin Petcou is a Paris-based architect whose work stresses the intersection between architecture, urbanism, service design and semiotics.

Professor of Geography, School of Environment and Development, University of Manchester

Erik Swyngedouw is Professor of Geography at the University of Manchester in its School of Environment and Development. He received his PhD entitled “The production of new spaces of production” under the supervision of David Harvey at Johns Hopkins University (1991). From 1988 until 2006 he taught at the University of Oxford and was a Fellow of St. Peter’s College. He moved to the University of Manchester in 2006. Swyngedouw has published several books and research papers in the fields of political economy, political ecology, and urban theory and culture. He aims at bringing politically explicit yet theoretically and empirically grounded research that contributes to the practice of constructing a more genuinely humanizing geography.

Professor of Human Geography, University of Manchester

Maria Kaika holds a D.Phil. in Geography from the University of Oxford, and an MA in Architecture from the National Technical University of Athens as well as professional qualifications as an architect. Dr Kaika’s research on urban political ecology contributes to the promotion of a dialogue between geography, urban studies, environmental history & planning. Her previous academic posts include: Fellow, St. Edmund Hall, Oxford; Director of Studies in Human Geography at St Hugh's College, Oxford; University Lecturer, Oxford University School of Geography; Junior Research Fellow, Linacre College, Oxford; Lecturer in Human Geography at St Peter's College Oxford. She is Editor of the International Journal of Urban and Regional Research. In 2012, she was appointed City of Vienna Visiting Professor.

Associate Professor, School of Architecture, NTUA

Stavros Stavrides is associate professor at the School of Architecture, National Technical University of Athens Greece, where he teaches a graduate course on social housing, as well as a postgraduate course on the meaning of metropolitan experience. He has published five books (as well as numerous articles) on spatial theory: The Symbolic Relation to Space (Athens, 1990), Advertising and the Meaning of Space (Athens, 1996), The Texture of Things (Athens, 1996) and From the City-as-Screen to the City-as-Stage (Athens, 2002 National Book Award), Suspended Spaces of Alterity (2010) and Towards the City of Thresholds (In English, 2010). His research is currently focused on forms of emancipating spatial practices and urban commoning.

Co-Founder, Cohabitation Strategies

Miguel Robles Duran is Urbanist, faculty member in the Design and Urban Ecologies graduate program at The New School/Parsons in New York, Senior fellow at "Civic City", a post-graduate design/research program based in HEAD Geneva, Switzerland and cofounder of "Cohabitation Strategies", an international non-profit cooperative for socio-spatial development based in New York and Rotterdam, The Netherlands. Robles-Durán has wide international experience in the strategic definition/coordination of trans-disciplinary urban projects, as well as in the development tactical design strategies and civic engagement platforms that confront the contradictions of neoliberal urbanization. He recently co-edited/authored the book "Urban Asymmetries: Studies and Projects on Neoliberal Urbanization" that reviews the dire consequences that neoliberal urban policies have had upon the city and discusses possible alternatives to market-driven development. Robles-Durán's areas of specialization are design/research interventions and strategies in uneven urbanization and areas of social urban conflict, urban political-economy and urban theory.

Dpr-barcelona is an architectural research practice based in Barcelona founded by Ethel Baraona Pohl and César Reyes Nájera, dealing with three main lines: publishing, criticism and curating. Their work operates on the field of architecture, political theory and the social milieu. Their [net]work is a real hub linking several publications and actors on contemporary architecture and theory. Their research and theoretical work is linked to leading publications in architectural discourse, as part of the editorial team of Quaderns d’arquitectura i urbanisme, and as Archis advisors for Volume magazine, among others. Curators of the third Think Space programme with the theme 'Money'; they recently curated the exhibition Adhocracy ATHENS at the Onassis Cultural Center, 2015.

Ethel Baraona Pohl. Critic, writer and curator.

César Reyes Nájera. PhD on Bio-climatic construction systems and materials.

www.dpr-barcelona.com | @dpr_barcelona

Director of Urban Environment Laboratory NTUA

Nikos Belavilas is an Architect eng. NTUA (1985),  PhD NTUA (1991) and an Associate Professor of urban planning and urban history, in the School of Architecture of the NTUA. He is the Director of the Urban Environment Laboratory of the NTUA .His research interests focus on the city and the environment. This includes the historical aspects of the city and its incorporation into the current urban debate, the reuse of derelict urban areas, the built environment and the quality of life. He is the Research Coordinator of the Lavrion Cultural-Technological Park rehabilitation project (1994-1997) and Project Manager of the Hermoupolis Industrial Museum (1998-2001). He has written extensively on the subjects of Aegean Sea settlements and paysage, industrial heritage, rehabilitation of historical cities and environment, and has won prizes in Greek and European urban design competitions. His work includes 6 books, and numerous articles in scientific publications and magazines.

Research Associate - Urban Environment Laboratory NTUA

Polina Prentou is an architect, MSc urban planner and PhD Candidate School of Architecture NTUA on the field of gendered approaches of urban social movements in Athens. Research associate of Urban Environment Lab NTUA with participation on the projects “Hellinikon Metropolitan Park”, “Network of Day Nursery in Athens” etc. Her research interests combine the gendered approaches to the conception and use of urban spaces with the social and environmental aspects of urban (mega) projects.

Lecturer, School of Architecture, NTUA

Nikos Anastasopoulos, PhD is a researcher architect and academic, lecturer at NTUA, Athens. Areas of research and action include the commons, degrowth, sustainability, systems and complexity theory, and alternative communities and eco-communities in Europe, the US, Israel and NZ. He is co-founder of the not-for-profit organization, TREE and the Koino-Athina, member of the P2P Foundation. Has served as President of the Marathon National Park in Greece, and is involved in activist movements on the commons worldwide, a topic for which he has lectured and written widely. As a Prometeo Researcher, (IAEN, Quito, Ecuador, 3-12/2014) he contributed with policy papers for the FLOK Society project and he conducted research on sustainability, Buen Vivir and the management of the commons, and their impact on urban environments.

Editor-in-chief, The Funambulist

Léopold Lambert is an architect and editor-in-chief of The Funambulist. His editorial and authored work attempts to examine the political relationship between architecture and the bodies, in particular in Palestine and in the Paris banlieues. He is the author of Weaponized Architecture: The Impossibility of Innocence (dpr-barcelona, 2012), Topie Impitoyable: The Corporeal Politics of the Cloth, the Wall, and the Street (punctum books, 2015) and La politique du bulldozer: La ruine palestinienne comme projet architectural israélien (forthcoming B2 Editions, 2016). 

http://thefunambulist.net/

Independent Filmaker & Journalist

Ana Naomi de Sousa is an independent filmmaker and journalist interested in politics and spatial practices. She was one of the series producers behind "Rebel Architecture" for Al Jazeera English, the international news channel where she was previously based as an in-house producer. In addition to the mainstream media, her work has been shown globally and in diverse forums including architecture exhibitions, film festivals, urbanism conferences, and university lecture halls. She collaborates on media with the Forensic Architecture agency at Goldsmiths, University of London, and is working on a feature-length documentary about public space architecture, risk and power.