PARTICIPANTS
David Harvey
is Distinguished Professor of Anthropology and Geography at the Graduate
Center of the City University of New York (CUNY), Director of The Center for
Place, Culture and Politics, and author of numerous books. Harvey’s
contributions to critical analyses of capitalism center on the relationship between
urbanization and financialization; the role of geographical thought in imperial
formation; and the history, present and future of anti-capitalist struggle.
Sharon Zukin
is Professor of Sociology at Brooklyn College and at the CUNY Graduate Center.
Zukin is the author of books on cities, culture and consumer culture, and a
researcher on urban, cultural and economic change. She received the Lynd
Award for Career Achievement in urban sociology, from the American
Sociological Association, and the C. Wright Mills Book Award for Landscapes of
Power.
Andy Merrifield
is a Marxist scholar on urbanism and politics. Merrifield has published articles in
various left-wing publications, including New Left Review and The Nation. He is a
leading proponent of the idea of The Right to the City. His latest book, The
Urbanization of Injustice, was edited with Erik Swyngedouw.
Don Mitchell
is Distinguished Professor of Geography at the Maxwell School of Syracuse
University. Mitchell’s focuses on the production of landscape, particularly as it
relates to laborers and the working classes, as well as the production and
meaning of public space, in relation to the homeless.
Margit Mayer
is Professor at the Graduate School of North American Studies,
John-F.-KennedyInstitut für Nordamerikastudien, and of the Free University in Berlin. Mayer
focuses on social movements in the post-Neo-liberal city.
Peter Marcuse
is Professor Emeritus of urban planning at Columbia University. Marcuse has
written extensively on The Right to the City and the Occupy movement. His most
recent publication is titled Of States and Cities: The Partitioning of Urban Space.
Ayreen Anastas
is an artist. Anastas uses text, film, video, audio and the internet to create work
that focuses on legal and discursive shifts around differing notions of security and
the subsequent effects on everyday life. He is a principal organizer, along with
Rene Gabri, of 16 Beaver Group, a New York artist community space.
Martha Rosler
is an artist. Rosler uses video, photo-text, installation, and performance to create
works that center on everyday life and the public sphere. Her themes themes
include architecture and the built environment, including from housing,
homelessness, and systems of transport.
Miguel Robles-Durán
is Director of the Design and Urban Ecologies program at Parsons The New
School for Design. His work as co-founder of Cohabitation Strategies, a
Rotterdam-based foundation/cooperative for architecture and urbanism, focuses
on the design of interventions and strategies in uneven urban developments and
areas of social urban conflict and has been widely published and exhibited.
Rene Gabri
is an artist. Gabri is interested in the complex mechanisms which constitute the
world around us, where he works within the relationships of cultural practice,
social thought and politics. He is a principal organizer, along with Ayreen
Anastas, of 16 Beaver Group, a New York artist community space.
Andrew Ross
is Professor in Department of Social and Cultural Analysis at New York
University. Ross is a writer for The New York Times, Artforum, The Nation,
Newsweek and The Village Voice, and the author of numerous books including
Bird on Fire. His work focuses on labor and the urban environment.
William Tabb
is Professor Emeritus of Economics at the CUNY Graduate Center. Tabb focuses
on political economy, the history of economic thought, and Globalization. He has
recently published The Restructuring of Capitalism in Our Time.
Erik Swyngedouw
is Professor of Geography at Manchester University. His work includes political
ecology of capitalist societies, urban governance, democracy and political power,
water and water resources and the dynamics of urban and regional change, and
the politics of globalization. Recent books include Urbanizing Globalization,
Social Power and the Urbanization of Water – Flows of Power, and In the Nature
of Cities.
William Morrish
is a Professor of Design and Urban Ecologies at Parsons The New School for
Design. Morrish is an architect and urban designer that focuses on housing,
infrastructure and ecological systems. He also works on issues of human
settlement and community design with UN Habitat.
Jeanne van Heeswijk
is an artist. Van Heeswijk creates contexts for interaction in public spaces
through social involvement. With her work Van Heeswijk stimulates and develops
cultural production and creates new public (meeting-)spaces or remodels existing
ones. She collaborates often with artists, designers, architects and governments,
as well as lectures on urban renewal, participation and cultural production.
John Krinsky
is Associate Professor of Political Science at The City College of New York.
Krinsky is a sociologist and urban planner that focuses on Marxism and social
movements. His work involves how people learn to talk, act, and strategize
around politics, with a particular focus on grassroots and labor organizing.
Nik Heynen
is Associate Professor of Geography at University of Georgia. Heynen focuses
on urban political Ecology, environmental justice, food studies and social
movements. He has co-edited books such as Neoliberal Environments: False
Promises and Unnatural Consequences and In the Nature of Cities: Urban
Political Ecology and the Politics of Urban Metabolism. Heynen’s current book
project is a study of the politicization of anti-hunger programs, with focus on the
Black Panthers.
Neil Brenner
is Professor of Urban Theory at the Harvard Graduate School of Design.
Brenner’s research focuses on uneven spatial development, the generalization of
capitalist urbanization, and processes of state spatial restructuring. He is the
author of New State Spaces: Urban Governance and the Rescaling of Statehood,
Cities for People, Not For Profits: Critical Urban Theory, and The Right to the
City, co-edited with Peter Marcuse and Margit Mayer.
Melissa Wright
is Professor of Geography and Women’s Studies at Penn State University.
Wright researches Mexico-U.S. border where she focuses on the emergence of
an international social movement that protests violence against women. She also
examines how violence in northern Mexico, along with the federal militarization of
urban space, has affected public life along both sides of the border.
Tom Angotti
is Professor of Urban Affairs and Planning at Hunter College and the Graduate
Center, City University of New York, and Director of the Hunter College Center
for Community Planning & Development. Angotti is the author of New York For
Sale: Community Planning Confronts Global Real Estate. He is co-editor of
Progressive Planning Magazine, and Participating Editor for Latin American
Perspectives and Local Environment.
Linda McDowell
is Professor of Human Geography at the University of Oxford. McDowell is an
economic geographer who focuses on the connections between economic
restructuring, labor market changes, as well as class and gender divisions in
Great Britain. She has been at the forefront of feminist perspectives on
contemporary social and economic change.
Mirriam Greenberg
is Associate Professor of Sociology and Director of the Urban Studies Research
Cluster at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Greenberg is the author of
Branding New York: How a City in Crisis was Sold to the World. She is currently
collaborating on a new book, Crisis Cities, that addresses the question of
interrelated crises through an analysis of the 9/11 and Hurricane Katrina
disasters.
Richard Walker
is an urban geographer and Professor Emeritus of Geography at Berkeley.
Walker’s recent work focuses on the transformation of California’s countryside
into a leading agrarian complex of world capitalism. Recent publications on
agriculture include The Conquest of Bread: 150 Years of Agribusiness in
California, and The Country in the City: The Greening of the San Francisco Bay
Area, on the local environmental movement.
Teddy Cruz
is Professor in public culture and urbanism in the Visual Arts Department at
UCSD in San Diego. Cruz focuses on the border San Diego-Tijuana, where he
has been developing a practice and pedagogy that integrates theoretical
research and design production. He works with community-based nonprofit
organizations (Casa Familiar) on housing and its relationship to an urban policy
more inclusive of social and cultural programs for the city.