Gabriel Feltran
Trustee 2020-2024
Gabriel Feltran is an urban ethnographer and research Professor at CNRS attached to CEE Sciences Po. He was previously Coordinator of the Postgraduate Program in the Department of Sociology of the Federal University of São Carlos, Researcher at the CEBRAP (Centro Brasileiro de Análise e Planejamento). He holds a doctoral degree in Social Sciences by the State University of Campinas (doctoral séjour at École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales) and was invited Scholar at University of Oxford and Goldsmiths College (2019), Humboldt University (2017), CIESAS Golfo (2015). Author of “Entangled City: crime as urban fabric in São Paulo (Manchester University Press, 2020.” His current projects include Cocaine trafficking to France: Investigation into the value chain from the ports of Le Havre and Rotterdam, The financialization iceberg: a transnational and trans-scalar ethnography of debts in illegal markets (Asia, South America and Europe) and GLOBALCAR (ANR-FAPESP): a transnational research on the economies of stolen vehicles (Europe, Africa and South America).
Charlotte Lemanski
Trustee 2017-2024
Charlotte Lemanski (B.A. Dunelm, MSc LSE, DPhil Oxon) is Professor of Urban Geography in the Department of Geography at the University of Cambridge. Her research explores everyday urban inequality in the global South, primarily through the lens of infrastructure (housing and services), urban governance and citizenship. Her primary empirical case study is South Africa, where she is currently researching climate apartheid and the just urban transition through water and energy access in Cape Town and Johannesburg.
Prof Lemanski developed the concept of infrastructural citizenship, which theorises how citizenship (perceptions, identities, practices) is mediated through infrastructure, in material and political terms, for both citizens and the state (see Citizenship and Infrastructure, published by Routledge in 2019). She has published extensively in human geography, urban studies and area studies journals (e.g. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, Urban Studies, Geoforum, Africa, International Development Planning Review), and her research has recently been funded by the British Academy, Leverhulme Trust, Isaac Newton Trust, Alborada Trust, CRASSH, and the ESRC.
Prior to this position, Prof Lemanski was Senior Lecturer in Geography at University College London (2007-2014), and a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Cape Town (2006-07).
Ayona Datta
Trustee 2020-2022
Ayona Datta is Professor in Urban Geography in UCL. Her broad research interests are in postcolonial urbanism, smart cities, gender citizenship and urban futures. In particular, her research is on how cities seek to transform themselves through utopian urban visions of the future and their impacts on everyday social, material and gendered geographies. She uses interdisciplinary approaches from architecture, planning, feminist and urban geography, combining qualitative, digital/mapping and visual research methods to examine urbanisation and urban development as experiments in urban ‘futuring’. For her contributions to understanding of smart cities through fieldwork she received the Busk Medal from Royal Geographical Society (with IBG) in 2019. She was nominated as the Geography Section President by the British Science Association (BSA) in 2023 and elected as Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences in 2025.
Julie-Anne Boudreau
Trustee 2016-2023
Julie-Anne Boudreau is Doctor of Urban Planning from the School of Public Policy and Social Research of the University of California at Los Angeles. Julie-Anne Boudreau held the Canada Research Chair in urbanity, insecurity, and political action from 2005-2015 at the Institut national de la recherche scientifique (INRS) in Montreal. She is currently Senior Researcher at the Instituto de Geografia of the Universidad nacional autonoma de Mexico (UNAM), where she founded PATIO Lab, a space for participatory research on violence and cutting-edge sensitive mapping methodologies. She was Editor of the International Journal of Urban and Regional Research (IJURR) from 2010-2015. In Mexico City, Hanoi, Paris and Montreal, her work promotes participatory, comparative and ethnographic research. Drug users, radical activists, domestic workers, artists, students, migrants, she explores the constitution of political subjectivities and their relationship to space, particularly among young people.
She published Global urban politics: Informalization of the State, in 2017 (Polity Press). Her most recent book (coauthored with Joëlle Rondeau) is Youth Urban Worlds: Aesthetic Political Action in Montreal (Studies in Urban and Social Change, Wiley, 2021).
Mike Raco
Chair 2016-2022
Trustee 2015-2016
Mike Raco is currently Head of School in The Bartlett School of Planning, University College London. Professor of Urban Governance and Development. He has published widely on the topics of urban governance and regeneration, urban sustainability, social diversity, and the politics of urban and regional economic development. He is currently leading a team at UCL that is working on a collaborative ORA-ESRC funded project on investment flows and residential development in London, Paris and Amsterdam named WHIG?: What is Governed in Cities. Recent works include: The Future of Sustainable Cities: Critical Reflections (with John Flint, Policy Press, Bristol); State-led Privatisation and the Demise of the Democratic State: Welfare Reform and Localism in an Era of Regulatory Capitalism (Routledge, London); and Regenerating London: Governance, Sustainability and Community in a Global City (with Rob Imrie and Loretta Lees, Routledge, London. He formerly lectured at King’s College London and the Universities of Reading and Glasgow.
Alex Loftus
Treasurer 2015-2022
Alex Loftus is a Professor of Political Ecology in the Department of Geography at King’s College London. Prior to coming to King’s, Alex studied at the University of Edinburgh, Queen’s University in Ontario, and the University of Oxford, completing his DPhil in the latter on the political ecology of water struggles in Durban, South Africa. Alex then spent seven years as an RCUK Academic Fellow and Lecturer at Royal Holloway, University of London. As an urban political ecologist, Alex is interested in the socio-ecological relations out of which cities are constituted. Such interests have led to explorations of the infrastructural politics of London, international struggles for the right to water and, more broadly, around a philosophy of praxis. He is the author of Everyday Environmentalism: Creating an Urban Political Ecology and co-editor of Gramsci: Space, Nature, Politics (Wiley), The Right to Water: Politics, Governance and Social Struggles (Routledge), and Water Politics: Governance, Justice and the Right to Water (Routledge).