Second RC21-IJURR-FURS
‘Comparative Urban Studies’ School

Isa Baud Isa Baud is professor of international development studies at the Department of Geography, Planning and international Development Studies at the University of Amsterdam, and heads the Masters IDS and research group Governance and Inclusive Development there. Main interests include how urban governance networks deal with social inequalities, and how e-based knowledge sources can contribute to more inclusive processes of urban governance. At UvA she is responsible for designing and teaching graduate programs concerning aspects of Human Geography of Developing Countries, with particular reference to poverty and development issues as well as new ways of analyzing urban poverty issues. She co-edited with de Wit, J. (2008). New Forms of Urban Governance in India: Shifts, modes, networks and contestation. Sage, Thousand Oaks, Delhi, London. She published extensively authored and co-authored contributions on Indian cities in Environment & Urbanization Asia, Habitat International, Urban Studies, Cities, Development and Change.

Talja Blokland (MA sociology, Erasmus University Rotterdam and PhD social sciences University of Amsterdam) is professor of Urban and Regional Sociology at Humboldt University at Berlin. Before she moved to the US as  a visiting scholar at Yale University with a Niels Stensen Stipend after her PhD, then to  Manchester University, UK. She returned to Holland as a Fellow of the Royal Netherlands Academy of the Arts and Sciences. She was then Gradus Hendriks Professor in Community Development at Erasmus University and senior researcher and program director at the OTB Institute for Urban, Housing and Mobility Studies at the Technical University Delft. Blokland is book reviews editor of the International Journal of Urban and Regional Research and served on the international editorial board of Sociology. 

Ewald Engelen is Professor of financial geography at the University of Amsterdam. He was trained as a political philosopher and wrote a Ph.D. thesis about corporate democracy. After a number of post-doc positions, he moved to the field of economic geography, focusing in particular on the intricate interactions between welfare state restructuring and financial markets. Engelen was awarded a five year grant (VIDI-grant) by the Dutch Council for Scientific Research (NWO) to investigate the effects of financial internationalization on the historical financial centre of Amsterdam. Engelen’s main research topic is contemporary capitalism in its wide variety of manifestations. Among his most relevant publications we have: (2010) ‘Geographies of Financialization in Disarray; The Dutch Case in Comparative Perspective‘, in: Economic Geography 86(1): 53-73 (Konings & Fernandez); (2009) ‘Stock Exchange Virtualisation and the Decline of Second Tier Financial Centres – The Cases of Amsterdam and Frankfurt’, pp. 29, in: Journal of Economic Geography 9(5): 679-696 (with M.H. Grote); (2008) ‘The Rise of Activist Investors and Patterns of Political Responses. Lessons on Agency’, p. 26. in: Socio-Economic Review 6(4): 611-636 (with M. Konings & R. Fernandez).

James Holston is professor of anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley. His research examines the worldwide insurgence of democratic urban citizenships and right to the city movements. He is the author of The Modernist City: An Anthropological Critique of Brasília (University of Chicago Press) and editor of Cities and Citizenship (Duke University Press), as well as essays on citizenship, law, democracy, violence, urban architecture and planning, critical ethnography, and new religions. His recent book, Insurgent Citizenship: Disjunctions of Democracy and Modernity in Brazil (Princeton University Press, 2008) examines the insurgence of democratic citizenship in the urban peripheries of São Paulo, Brazil, its entanglement with entrenched systems of inequality, and its contradiction in violence under political democracy. He is currently preparing an edited volume with Teresa Caldeira, entitled Peripheries: Decentering Urban Theory, and a book that documents through photographs and interviews the autoconstruction of houses and neighborhoods in the urban peripheries of São Paulo. At UC Berkeley, he is also the co-director of the Social Apps Lab, an initiative that produces applications for mobile media with the aim of harnessing the participatory energies of game-play to generate an engagement of citizens in social issues and new opportunities to investigate the city.

Patrick Le Galès, is CNRS Research Professor of Politics and Sociology, at Sciences Po Paris, Centre d’études européennes. He is part time visiting professor at King’s College London (one term in 2010 and 2011. He is the head of Sciences Po ‘Cities and territories” research group. He is the former editor of the International Journal of Urban and regional Research. Among his research interests we have European cities and great global metropolis, the urban making of social order, mobility and rooting, urban politics, public policy and sociology of the state, networks, government and governance, decentralization, local and regional economies. Among his publications we have: (2002) European Cities: Social Conflicts and Governance, Oxford, Oxford University Press; (2010) Cities (with G. Therborn) in the “Handbook of European Societies”; (2010) “Governing cities”, in Handbook of cities, Sage. (2011) (with A. Andreotti and J Moreno Fuentes) Controlling the urban fabric. The complex game of distance and proximity in European upper-middle classes’ residential strategies. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research

Philip Kasinitz is Professor of Sociology at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York where he directs the Ph.D. Program in Sociology. He is the former President of the Eastern Sociological Society. He received his B.A. from Boston University on 1979 and his Ph.D. from New York University in 1987. He is the author of Caribbean New York: Black Immigrants and the Politics of Race (Cornell University Press, 1992), the editor of Metropolis: Center and Symbol of Our Time (N ew York University Press, 1995), co-editor (with Josh DeWind and Charles Hirschman) of Handbook on International Migration (Russell Sage Foundation, 1999). With John Mollenkopf and Mary Waters, he was co-principle investigator of the New York Second Generation project. As such he co-edited (with Waters and Mollenkopf) Becoming New Yorkers: Ethnographies of The New Second Generation (Russell Age Foundation 2004), and co-authored (with Waters, Mollenkopf and Jennifer Holdaway) Inheriting the City: The Children of Immigrants Come of Age (Russell Sage Foundation and Harvard University Press 2008), which received the 2009 Mirra Komarovksy Book Award from the Eastern Sociological Society and the 2010 Distinguished Publication Award from the American Sociological Association. He is currently working on a book on broad impacts of immigration on the United States and heading a project (with Sharon Zukin) on the cultural significance of small retailing and commercial neighborhoods in major world cities.

Yuri Kazepov, is professor of Urban Sociology and Compared Welfare Systems at the University of Urbino “Carlo Bo”. In 1995-96 he has been Jean Monet Fellow at the European University Institute (Fiesole, I) and held visiting professorships at the University of Bremen (1998) and University of Lund and Växjö (2008). He is a founding board member of the Network for European Social Policy Analysis (ESPAnet) and the President of RC21 of the International Sociological Association. Among his publications we have (2005) Cities of Europe. Changing contexts, local arrangements and the challenge to social cohesion, Blackwell, Oxford (ed.), (2008) The subsidiarisation of social policies: Actors, processes and impacts. Some reflections on the Italian case from a European perspective, in “European Societies” (2010) “Rescaling social policies towards multilevel governance in Europe”, Ashgate, Farnham.

Anouk de Koning is a postdoc researcher at the Amsterdam Institute for Social Science Research (AISSR), University of Amsterdam, where she is engaged in a project on social fear and conflict in Amsterdam’s public spaces. This research explores what in the Netherlands has come to be seen as the most important arena for societal conflict: urban public space. Through in-depth qualitative research in Amsterdam, this research examines when, why and by whom public social life is experienced as comfortable and safe, or threatening and conflict-ridden, and how such senses of safety and danger impact the ability of different urbanites to fully enact their citizenship. She has recently published a study based on her previous urban ethnographic research in Cairo: Global Dreams: Class, Gender and Public Space in Cosmopolitan Cairo (American University in Cairo Press, 2009). This study elaborates how, in Egypt’s new liberal era, young middle-class professionals navigate Cairo’s increasingly divided landscape, and discusses the rise of a young upper-middle class presence in the work, leisure, and public spaces of the city.

John Mollenkopf is Distinguished Professor of Political Science and Sociology and Director of the Center for Urban Research at The Graduate Center of the City University of New York.  His current work includes a variety of comparative projects, many of which focus on immigrant political incorporation.  With Manuel Pastor of the University of Southern California, he is leading a team of scholars comparing how immigrants are framed, sometimes negatively, in six metropolitan areas of the U.S.  With Maurice Crul of the University of Amsterdam, he is editing a volume of essays comparing the trajectories of disadvantaged immigrant minority groups in fifteen European cities as well as New York and Los Angeles across a variety of domains, including schooling, labor market experiences, and civic and political identity and engagement.  In the coming year he will be writing up a study of the impact of immigration on electoral participation and coalition-formation in New York and Los Angeles.  His recent co-authored book on the immigrant second generation, Inheriting the City, won the 2010 Distinguished Book Award of the American Sociological Association.=

Clara H. Mulder is professor of Spatial Demography at the Department of Geography, Planning and International Development Studies of the University of Amsterdam. From March 1, 2011, she will occupy a similar chair at the Population Research Centre of the University of Groningen. Up to the summer of 2010, she was the principal investigator of the research programme ‘Residential choice in a family and socio-spatial context’, which was funded by the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research. Her research interests include households and housing, leaving the parental home, household formation and dissolution, home-ownership, residential mobility and family relations. She has published in a wide variety of journals including Demography, Journal of Marriage and Family, Urban Studies, Environment and Planning A, and Population, Space and Place.

Jennifer Robinson is Professor of Human Geography at University College London and Honorary Visiting Professor in the African Centre for Cities at the University of Cape Town. She has also worked at the Open University in the UK and University of Natal, South Africa. Her recent book, Ordinary Cities: Between Modernity and Development (2006) offers a post-colonial critique of urban studies, explaining and contesting urban theory’s neglect of cities of the global South. It argues the case for urban studies to draw on the diversity of urban experiences across the globe in developing more general accounts of cities. She is currently working on re-grounding comparative methods to support a more properly international urban studies, and developing a comparative research project on the politics of city strategies. 

Mike Savage is Professor of Sociology at the University of York, having previously worked for 15 years at the University of Manchester, where he had been Head of the Department of Sociology and Director of the ESRC Centre for Socio-Cultural Change (CRESC). He has long been interested in the relationship between social inequality and urban form. His doctoral thesis, 'The dynamics of working class politics' 
examined how political protest in early 20th century Britain needed to be contexutalised through local labour and housing market structures.
His co-authored 'Globalisation and Belonging' has examined how the middle classes are becoming more identified and attached to residential location, in ways which can be socially exclusive.

Jeremy Seekings is Professor of Political Studies and Sociology at the University of Cape Town (in South Africa), and is a regular Visiting Professor at Yale University (in the USA).  He has been co-editor of IJURR since 2005.  He is the Vice-President of RC21 for Africa. He is the author or co-author of several books, including The UDF: A History of the United Democratic Front in South Africa, 1983-2001 (2000), Class, Race and Inequality in South Africa (2005) and Growing Up In The New South Africa: Childhood and Adolescence in Post-Apartheid Cape Town (2010).  He has also written widely on South African cities, including on urban politics and violence, welfare policies, inequalities, identities, and the construction of community. He recently completed a project on the construction of community in new, racially-mixed low-income public housing neighbourhoods in South Africa.

AbdouMaliq Simone is an urbanist with particular interest in emerging forms of social and economic intersection across diverse trajectories of change for cities in the Global South.  Simone is presently Professor of Sociology at Goldsmiths College, University of London and Visiting Professor of Urban Studies at the African Centre for Cities, University of Cape Town. His work attempts to generate new theoretical understandings based on a wide range of urban practices generated by cities in Africa, the Middle East and Southeast Asia, as well as efforts to integrate these understandings in concrete policy and governance frameworks.  Key publications include, In Whose Image: Political Islam and Urban Practices in Sudan, University of Chicago Press, 1994, and For the City Yet to Come: Urban Change in Four African Cities, Duke University Press, 2004, and City Life from Jakarta to Dakar: Movements at the Crossroads, Routledge, 2009.

Jeroen van der Waal is assistant professor at the department of sociology, Erasmus University Rotterdam, the Netherlands. He recently obtained his PhD (cum laude) with a thesis entitled Unravelling the Global City Debate. Economic Inequality and Ethnocentrism in Contemporary Dutch Cities. His research interests comprise the impact of economic globalization on social inequality in cities, on which he published in Urban Studies (2009, 2010), and the political ramifications of cultural change in western societies, on which he published in journals such as British Journal of Criminology (2008), International Political Science Review (2007), Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion (2009), Journal for European Social Policy (2010), and Politics & Society (2007).