Kashiefa Achmat
Community Partner | The Housing Assembly, South Africa

Kashiefa is an activist in the housing assembly and assists workers in her community, with work issues related to the workplace. She belongs to a women’s organisation, the Rita Edwards Collective, which involves regular workshops with women in the community and solidarity efforts with women on farms.

Atyeh Ashtar

Principle Investigator | University of Memphis, USA 

Atyeh (Ati) Ashtari is an Assistant Professor of City and Regional Planning at the University of Memphis. She completed her Urban Planning doctoral degree at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign in 2024. Coming from an extensive interdisciplinary background, Atyeh’s research interests center community as the main unit of analysis and emphasis. They broadly lie within the realms of intersectional humane urbanism; sustainable community-based development; community economies; participatory action research; critical feminist theories, methodologies, and storytelling. She has authored several publications and has done research in Iran, the United States, and Ecuador.

Mohammad Azaz

Community Partner | River & Delta Research Center, Bangladesh

Mohammad Azaz is a Bangladeshi researcher and environmental organizer working on various crucial environmental, urban, and climate justice issues. His work centers the livelihoods and struggles of communities across rural and urban areas facing social exclusion and climate injustice in the Ganges-Brahmaputra-Meghna basin areas. His research critically addresses transboundary water politics. He is the founder of the River and Delta Research Centre (RDRC) and is a member of the Just Urban platform.

Maria Luiza Ballarotti

Researcher | Architect and Urban Planner | Graduate Student | Federal University of Paraná

Maria Luiza Ballarotti is a Brazilian architect and urban planner, currently pursuing a master’s degree in Urban Planning at UFPR. She is part of the Plantear Collective, where she contributes to territorial planning and land regularization processes alongside organized communities in urban and rural areas. Her primary research interests include Food Sovereignty as a planning framework, the development of territorially-oriented public food policies, rural-urban agri-food territories, family farming and traditional peoples’ agriculture, and the application of Urban Planning instruments and Master Plans and their spatial impacts.

Nandita Banik

Researcher | Graduate Student | University of Memphis, USA

Nandita Banik is an architect from Bangladesh who graduated from Chittagong University of Engineering & Technology & is currently doing her master’s in City and Regional Planning at the University of Memphis. She has a fervent interest in community development and is driven by a passion for fostering inclusive and thriving neighborhoods. With a design background and research experience, her goal is to leverage regional perspectives and collaborate to develop research experiences.

Silvia N. R. Baptista

Community Partner | The West Zone Solidarity Web, Brazil

A Black feminist researcher of quilombola origin, she is a member of the Popular Collective of Women and Web of Solidarity of the West Zone of Rio de Janeiro (Brazil). She has an academic background in pedagogy and is also a specialist in phytomedicine management from the Drug Research Institute of the Oswaldo Cruz Foundation (Farmanguinhos-Fiocruz). Her MA degree is from the Institute of Scientific Information and Technological Communication in Health of the Oswaldo Cruz Foundation (ICICT/FIOCRUZ).

Sarah M. Bassett

Co – Principle Investigator | Arizona State University, USA

Sarah M. Bassett is a Professor of Practice in the School of Public Affairs, Emergency Management & Homeland Security program at Arizona State University and co-Director of the Resilient Visions (RV) CoLab. She specializes in a transdisciplinary practice that addresses the social and spatial effects of natural and technological hazards, with an emphasis on how communities adapt to and manage their risk from these uncertain conditions. This work combines place-based practices, spatial computing, and policy advocacy, what she has termed a storytelling for policy advocacy methodology, to connect local needs with long-range planning and policy change in support of humane urbanism.

Koni Benson

Co – Principle Investigator | University of Western Cape,

South Africa

Koni Benson is a lecturer in the Department working in the areas of Gender History, Urban History, Public History, and Oral History.  Her research focuses on mobilisation, demobilisation, and remobilisation of struggle history in southern Africa’s past and present. Her PhD drew on over 60 life narratives of women’s organized resistance to forced removals and for housing from the peak of apartheid to the present.  Since 2006 she has worked with various archives and collectives coproducing life histories of self-organization and unfolding political struggles for access to land, public services, and the commons (such as water, housing, and education) in South Africa. 

José Ricardo Vargas de Faria

Co – Principle Investigator | Federal University of Parana, Curitiba, Brazil

José Ricardo Vargas de Faria is a professor and researcher in Urban Planning and Policy at the Federal University of Paraná. Throughout his academic and professional experience, he has focused on planning methodologies and theories, the analysis and overcoming of socio-spatial inequalities, and the power relations and conflicts in planning and public management processes. This has led him to activism and studies on participatory democracy, self-management, and popular and community organizations. His concerns are analyzed through the lens of the political economy of space production, emphasizing the role of the State and social struggles in either reproducing or transforming class and power relations.

Luisa Fernandes

Research Assistant | Graduate Student | University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

Luisa Fernandes is an architect and urbanist (Federal University of Ceará) and second year masters student in Urban Planning at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. She works as a popular technical assistant with communities and social movements in Fortaleza, Brazil as a member of Quintau Coletivo (co-founder) and Taramela Assessoria Técnica (associate member). Her praxis and research focus on community engagement and participatory processes, urban contexts of socio-environmental vulnerability and the counter-hegemonic production of spatial knowledge. 

Victor Font

Co – Principal Investigator | Lecturer at University of Illinois – Media and Cinema Studies, USA 

Victor Font founded his own audiovisual company in the ’90s. He has been in the probusiness for more than 25 years. As principal of Prodimag his professional work has involved direction, production, postproduction, and services for worldwide production companies. In 2004 he founded Intermedio, a cinema distribution company, releasing titles for retail and home DVD, including theatrical and rights for TV. Intermedio catalog includes over 200 movie titles and books, some of which have been locally and internationally aw

Clarissa Freitas

Co – Principle Investigator | Universidade Federal de Ceara, Fortaleza, Brazil

Associate Professor at the Institute of Architecture, Urbanism and Design at the Federal University of Ceará. Clarissa Freitas works professionally for the cause of the right to the city and the environment through action research with urban social and environmental movements, often using the generation of geographic data to highlight territorial injustices. She researches the possibilities of transformative approaches to urban planning, such as Insurgent Planning. She worked on the Popular Plan of the ZEIS of Bom Jardim, on the Land Regularization Plans of 3 communities in Fortaleza and on Participatory Municipal Master Plans in the state of Ceará. She develops extension research with the Tutorial Education program of the Architecture and Urbanism course at UFC, and with the postgraduate program in Architecture, Urbanism and Design at UFC.

Adriana Gerônimo

Co – Principle Investigator | Fortaleza, Brazil

Adriana Geronimo, Black woman, raised in the outskirts of Fortaleza, mother, LGBT, social worker, activist for decent housing, human rights activist and ecosocialist. Councilwoman of Fortaleza for the PSOL, president of the human rights committee of the Fortaleza city council and member of the special committee of the Fortaleza Master Plan.

Jordi González Guzmán

Co – Principle Investigator | UPF Barcelona, Spain

Jordi González Guzmán, after a year carrying out the first Tenant Survey with the Institut de Recerca Urbana de Barcelona (IDRA) , the doctoral program begins with a scholarship at the University of Leeds (UK), in the research group Social Justice, Cities and Citizenship (2019 -2023). Jordi’s thesis, Tenants Against Corporate Landlords , focuses on the new cycle of post-2008 real estate speculation and the contentious politics of the tenant movement in Barcelona.

Erin Hernandez

Research Assistant | Graduate Student | University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign 

Erin Hernandez is a second-year Master’s student in Urban Planning at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. They focus their studies on mobility justice, public policy, and labor movements, with a particular focus on the experiences of women, queer, and transgender communities.

Efadul Huq

Co – Principle Investigator | Smith College and Agitate! Unsettling Knowledges Editorial Collective, USA

Efadul Huq’s research analyzes relationships between socioecological change and regional development that shape livelihoods and ecosystems across urban and rural regions in the context of global displacements and climate change. Huq’s current research, harnessing the flexibility of mixed methods ranging from spatial analysis to qualitative and quantitative approaches, examines the relationships between wetland habitations and conversions under a globally connected urban climate governance in Bangladesh.