Keynotes
Adriana Allen
Adriana Allen is Professor of Development Planning and Urban Sustainability at the Bartlett Development Planning Unit at University College London. She is Co-Chair of the Gran challenge of Sustainable Cities and Co-editor of the International Journal of Urban Sustainable Development (IJUSD). Her research has focused on the production, reproduction and transformation of urban environmental (in)justices. Through the articulation of an urban political ecology and regulation theory perspective, her work looks at the interface between insurgent practices and planned interventions and their capacity to generate transformative spaces, places and social relations. In addition she has worked on citizenship and the governance of service provision. Looking into at questions of hydric justice and the scope of service co-production to deliver not just improved access to basic services such as water and sanitation but above all to forge mechanisms for inclusive citizenship. Furthermore her focus on resilience, vulnerability and adaptation to climate change, calls for and actual responses to climate variability in the urban global south are prompting new debates on the way in which concomitant challenges are socially constructed by scientists, governments and citizens, who should respond to them and how and who is worst affected and why.
Benjamin Davy
For more than 20 years, Ben Davy has been a professor of land policy, land management, and municipal geoinformation at the School of Spatial Planning, University of Dortmund (Deutschland). Born in 1956 in Wien (Austria), he graduated from law school in 1980. He gradually became a planner while working as research assistant and associate professor at the School of Architecture and Spatial Planning, TU Wien. His first book in English, which he wrote as the Joseph Schumpeter Fellow at Harvard Law School (1994–95), deals with the pitfalls of monorational concepts of environmental justice in the siting of hazardous waste facilities. Essential Injustice (1997) presents an early version of what Ben Davy is calling “polyrationality”. Addressing many voices and many rationalities, polyrational planning demands that we “plan it without a condom” (title of an article in Planning Theory 7[3] 301–317). He is teaching BSc and MSc courses on planning theory, land policy, property, food injustice, real estate assessment, border studies, and (occasionally) selfies. His favorite research strategies are doubt, curiosity, and more doubt. Humor is also OK. Ben Davy is Essay Editor of Planning Theory, co-editor of Town Planning Review, and a member of the editorial board of the Journal of the American Planning Association and Planning Theory and Practice. He has been a mentor in the AESOP PhD workshops in Wien (2005), Manchester (2009), Belfast (2013), Stare Lesna (2015), and Aveiro (2017). As co-founder of the International Academic Association on Planning, Law, and Property Rights (PLPR), he has been Vice President and President of PLPR from 2010 to 2016. In 2017, Ben Davy was elected Vice President and currently is the President of the Association of European Schools of Planning (AESOP). Websites: www.aesop-planning.eu/members/individuals/en_GB/benjamin-davy; www.bodenpolitik.de
Roger Keil
Roger Keil is a German-Canadian political scientist and urban researcher. He is a professor at the Faculty of Environmental Studies at York University in Toronto. He is the former director of the CITY Institute and the director of Canadian Centre for German and European Studies at York University in Toronto. He holds a doctorate in Political Science from Frankfurt University. His research focuses on the essential processes of urban development, especially on the political management of global cities. Furthermore, his research also deals with the suburbanisation phenomena and the concept of “in-between city”. He has carried on numerous research on urban political ecology.
Astrid Ley
Astrid Ley is a professor for International Urbanism at the Institute for Urban Planning and Design and course director of the international master program Integrated Urbanism and Sustainable Design (IUSD), University of Stuttgart. She also works as an urban development consultant and trainer to bilateral and international development agencies (oikos human settlement research group). She holds a degree in architecture and urban design from RWTH Aachen and a PhD from TU Berlin. Prior to her position in Stuttgart she was urban development research analyst at the German Advisory Council on Global Change (WBGU) and senior urban researcher in a DFG funded research project on “Housing for the Urban Poor: From Local Action to Global Networks” as well as lecturer at Habitat Unit, TU Berlin. Her professional life started as a project coordinator at the “Bundesweite Servicestelle Lokale Agenda 21”, Agenda-Transfer, in Bonn which led to a continues interest in localizing sustainable development in the context of the complexity of cities. Her expertise and publication record include topics related to the urbanisation in the Global South, housing processes, the role of local governance, participation, co-production and civil society.
