Prof Tuna Taşan-Kok (Chair)
Tuna Taşan-Kok (B.A., MSc., Ph.D. Amsterdam) is Professor of Urban Governance and Planning in the Department of Geography, Planning and International Development Studies, University of Amsterdam. Her research mainly focuses on urban governance, particularly focusing on entrepreneurial and property-led forms of urban development dynamics, and spatial organisation through social relations. She has been leading and co-leading major international research projects, including the recently completed PARCOUR (Public Accountability to Residents in Contractual Urban Redevelopment), and DIVERCITIES (Governing Urban Diversity: Creating Social Cohesion, Social Mobility and Economic Performance in Today’s Hyper-diversified Cities). She recently co-coordinates an Open Research Area Funded project called WHIG (What is Governed in Cities: Residential Investment Landscapes and the Governance and Regulation of Housing Production) in collaboration with UCL (London) and Science-Po (Paris). She has published widely in international peer-reviewed journals, and has been contracted by prestigious academic publishers. She has worked for several universities including TUDelft, KULeuven, and METU, and maintains an extensive international research network with whom she actively collaborates with.
Prof Tom Goodfellow (Treasurer)
Tom Goodfellow is a Professor in the Department of Urban Studies and Planning and an Associate Researcher at the Urban Institute, University of Sheffield. His research concerns the political economy of urban development in Africa, and he has published on a range of topics including urban conflict and violence, urban informal economies, land value capture, infrastructure and housing. Recent and current research includes projects on Chinese influence on urban development in Ethiopia and Uganda (ESRC), life in urban peripheries in Ethiopia and South Africa (ESRC-NRF), and a multi-country comparative study of migration and urban conflict (ARUA-GCRF). His is co-author of Cities and Development (Routledge, 2016) and has published widely in international journals, including an article that won the IJURR prize for best article in International Journal of Urban and Regional Research in 2017. Before coming to Sheffield, he was an LSE Fellow at the Department of International Development at the London School of Economics and Political Science.
Dr Daniel Agbiboa
Daniel E. Agbiboa is Assistant Professor of African and African American Studies at Harvard University, where he co-chairs the Urban Conversations series. He earned a DPhil from the University of Oxford and an MPhil from the University of Cambridge. His research focuses on hybrid governance and security provision in urban Africa, especially how state and nonstate forms of order and authority interpenetrate and shape each other. His articles have appeared in leading journals, including the International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, Urban Studies, Journal of Modern African Studies, African Studies Review, African Affairs, Public Culture, and Perspectives on Politics. He is the author of They Eat Our Sweat: Transport Labor, Corruption and Everyday Survival in Urban Nigeria (Oxford University Press, 2022), which was a finalist for the Society for Economic Anthropology (SEA) Book Prize. He is also the author of Mobility, Mobilization, and Counter/Insurgency: The Routes of Terror in an African Context (University of Michigan Press, 2022), which won the International Studies Association (ISA) Lee Ann Fujii Best Book Award and the ISA Best Global South Scholar Book Award (Peace Section). Agbiboa is the recipient of the 2023 Clarence Stone Scholar Award given by the American Political Science Association (Urban & Local Politics section). He is a member of the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, fellow of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, and recipient of the H.F. Guggenheim Distinguished Scholar Award.
Prof Gabriel Feltran
Gabriel Feltran is an urban ethnographer. Gabriel is Director of Research at CNRS (National Scientific Research Centre – France) and Professor of Sociology at the Centre for European Studies and Comparative Politics (CEE Sciences Po). He is also a researcher at the CEBRAP (Brazilian Centre for Analysis and Planning). 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), He currently coordinates three collective Research Projects: i) ‘The Car Theft Project’, working with a team of 10 researchers, following trajectories of stolen cars in São Paulo and its connections to legal-illegal transnational economies; ii) The city margins project – the emergence of violence in social life, especially the dynamics of homicide rates in São Paulo, Brazil and Latin America; iii) Marginal music and sociology, arguing that Urban Sociology could learn from the lyrics and the music produced in the urban outskirts. Author of Entangled City: crime as urban fabric in São Paulo (Manchester University Press, 2020.
Dr Emma Jackson
Emma Jackson is a Senior Lecturer in Sociology at Goldsmiths, University of London, where she specialises in urban sociology and ethnography. She is also the director of the Centre for Urban and Community Research (CUCR). Her research explores the relationship between everyday practices of belonging and the production of spaces and places in cities. She is the author of ‘Young Homeless People and Urban Space: Fixed in Mobility’ (2015), co-author of ‘Go Home? The Politics of Immigration Controversies’ (2017), ‘The Middle Classes and the City: a study of Paris and London’ (2015) and co-editor of ‘Stories of Cosmopolitan Belonging: Emotion and Location’ (2014). Emma previously worked at King’s College London and the University of Glasgow, where she held an Urban Studies Foundation Research Fellowship (2012-2014) before joining Goldsmiths in 2015. She is an editor of The Sociological Review.
Prof Charlotte Lemanski
Charlotte Lemanski (B.A. Dunelm, DPhil Oxon) is a 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, land and services), urban governance and citizenship. Her primary empirical case studies are India and South Africa.
She recently completed a British Academy GCRF ‘Cities and Infrastructure’ (2018-2019) project exploring domestic energy innovation for low-income households in India and South Africa, involving primary fieldwork with public, private and community-based energy stakeholders in Cape Town and Bangalore. This inter-disciplinary project was co-led with Cambridge colleagues in the fields of architecture, engineering, and management studies, and with international partners at the Indian Institute for Human Settlements and the University of Cape Town.
Dr Lemanski is currently completing a long-term project connecting infrastructure and citizenship. Her recent edited collection, Citizenship and Infrastructure, was published by Routledge in 2019. She has published extensively in human geography, development studies, 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, Dr Lemanski was Senior Lecturer in Geography at University College London (2007-2014), and a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Cape Town (2006-07).
Prof Barbara Lipietz
Dr. Barbara Lipietz is Professor of Urban Development Planning at the Development Planning Unit and Vice Dean International of the Bartlett Faculty of the Built Environment.
Dr Champaka Rajagopal
Champaka Rajagopal is a practicing urbanist with a passion for critical and innovation thinking. She is a reflexive practitioner, an experiential thinker, learner, researcher and educator. She was accorded a doctoral degree from the University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands, in Planning and International Development Studies (2021), has a Master’s Degree in Urban Design from the University of California at Berkeley, USA (2002) and an undergraduate degree in the architecture of the built environment from the Centre for Environment Planning and Technology, Ahmedabad, India (1997).
In her two decades of practice across cities in the global South and North, with international donors, national-state governments, businesses, markets and communities she has advanced design of policies, regulatory processes, instruments and mechanisms that are open and respond to place. Since 2004, she has co-led large statutory plans, including the Draft Development Plan for Greater Mumbai 2034 and Revised Master Plan 2015, Bangalore, where the focus was to remove regulatory rigidity and regulatory capture. Resulting from practice is her article, Reciprocity as Regulation, Exploring Methodologies in Urban Design for the Historical Pete, Bangalore, published in Ed, Harriss-White, Basile, Lutringer, Mapping India’s Capitalisms, Old and New, Springer, 2015. She has co-authored series of news articles on problems in urban planning through the years. In 2021, the Urban School SciencesPo, Paris invited her to deliver the Inaugural Lecture, along with Emmanuelle COSSE, Former Union Minister for Housing, France.
In scholarly research, she engages with multiple interpretations of the entrepreneurial state through history, and the theory of incomplete contracts, to investigate the production and distribution of financial risks in transport infrastructure projects governed by public-private-partnerships.
Dr. Rajagopal is Founder, Director, The Entrepreneurship and Partnerships Lab, and Professor Affliliate, Urban School, SciencesPo, Paris.
Dr Li Wan
Li Wan is Associate Professor in Urban Planning and Development, University of Cambridge. Dr Li Wan is the Director for the MPhil in Planning, Growth and Regeneration programme at the Department of Land Economy. He is a co-investigator at the Centre for Smart Infrastructure and Construction (CSIS); Fellow & Director of Studies in Land Economy at Gonville and Caius College.
Cambridge University profile / Website of Dr Li Wan's Research Group
Sarah Daisy (Company Secretary and Administrator)
Sarah Daisy is the Foundation’s Company Secretary and Administrator. Please contact for any enquiries about Studentship awards or Writing up grants.