Linda McDowell
Trustee 2001-2009, Chair 2009-2016; Trustee 1995-1997
Linda McDowell moved to Oxford University in 2004, as a professor in the School of Geography and as a fellow of St John’s College. She has also taught geography at the Open University, Cambridge, LSE and UCL, and held visiting positions at UCLA, and Exeter University. Her research interests are in socio economic change in the UK, post World War II migration and divisions of labour, and feminist theory and methods. Her books include Working Lives (2013 Wiley-Blackwell) and Migrant Women’s Voices (2016 Bloomsbury). She has published papers in sociology and history as well as in geography journals and her work has been translated into Spanish, Korean, and Turkish among other languages.
She has been a board member of IJURR and one-time book reviews editor, as well as a trustee of the Foundation, acting as the treasurer and the chair at different times. She has also edited Area and Antipode, and been on the board of several other journals, including Economic Geography, Gender, Place and Culture and the Service Industries Journal.
Enzo Mingione
Trustee 2001-2011
Enzo MINGIONE is Professor Emeritus at the University of Milano-Bicocca. Professor of Sociology until November 2017 and Dean of the Faculty of Sociology (2004-2010). He has been President of the Research Committee on Urban and Regional Development, one of the founders of the International Journal of Urban and Regional Research and a trustee of the Foundation of Urban and Regional Studies. Fields of interest: urban sociology, poverty, welfare, labour markets, economic sociology. Among his books: Social Conflict and the City, Blackwell, Oxford (1981); Beyond Employment, with Nanneke Redclift (eds), Blackwell, Oxford (1985); Fragmented Societies, Blackwell, Oxford (1991); (ed) Urban poverty and the Underclass, Blackwell, Oxford (1996).
Michael Harloe
Trustee 2001-2008
Michael Harloe was Vice Chancellor of the University of Salford from 1997 to 2009. He was formerly Professor of Sociology, Dean of Social Sciences and Pro-Vice-Chancellor Research at the University of Essex. He has served on the Council of the UK Academy of Social Sciences.
He has worked for many years on issues of urban and regional development and has published numerous articles and books on this subject. For over 20 years he was the Founder Editor of the leading international journal in this field – the International Journal of Urban and Regional Research. He is a Visiting Professor at the London School of Economics and a Visiting Fellow at Kellogg College, Oxford.
Chris Kesteloot
Trustee 2001-2009
Chris Kesteloot is emeritus professor at the Division of Geography and Tourism of the University of Leuven (KU Leuven) and at the (French-speaking) University of Brussels (ULB). He also has been a Research Director at the Flemish Fund for Scientific Research. He has taught on urban geography, social and economic geography of China, of Japan and the history of geographical thought. Most of his publications consider relations between economic changes and urban space, ethnic minorities, housing and the impact of urban residential environments on issues of social integration and exclusion, for which he uses the concept of modes of economic integration (Polanyi). This concerns mainly Brussels and Belgium – framed in a comparative West-European perspective -, as well as China. From 2013 on, he added rural and development issues to his teaching and research interests, focusing on land tenure, land reforms, food sovereignty and livelihood analysis. Since his retirement, Chris Kesteloot is still teaching in the Brussels Academy, a citizens’ urban open university.
Chris Pickvance
Trustee 1998-2002, Chair 2002-2009
Chris Pickvance (1944-2021) played a pivotal role in the establishment of today’s global network of urban and regional research through the medium of the International Journal of Urban and Regional Research (IJURR) and the International Sociological Association Research Committee on the Sociology of Urban and Regional Development (RC21).
After a brief period as a lecturer in Manchester Chris was appointed to a post at the University of Kent where he remained for the rest of his career, retiring reluctantly at the age of 67 as an Emeritus Professor of Urban Studies.
Margit Mayer
Trustee 1996-1998
Margit Mayer has been professor for comparative and North American Politics at Freie Universität Berlin (1989-2014), since 2014 Senior Fellow at the Center for Metropolitan Studies Berlin. Her research focuses on urban and social politics as well as social movements. She has published on various aspects of contemporary urban politics, urban theory, (welfare) state restructuring, social movements, and migrant organizing.
Ray Pahl
Chair 1995-2002
Ray Pahl (1935–2011) was a renowned urban scholar. Ray was initially a geographer, studying at Cambridge and then sociology at the LSE. He then spent most of his academic life at the University of Kent at Canterbury in the UK, where he was appointed initially as a lecturer and then promoted in 1972 as the Professor of Sociology. He later moved to Essex University, where he was part of the team that established the British Household Panel Study.
Ray was key to the establishment of FURS (former name of the Foundation) in 1995, acting as its first chair. He was also a member of the editorial board of the International Journal of Urban and Regional Research and President of the Research Committee 21 (urban sociology) of the International Sociological Association.