Conference Presenters

Emily Barrett is a doctoral student in the Community Research and Action program at Vanderbilt University. She received her Bachelor of Arts in Geography from Syracuse University (2016) and her Master of Arts in Geography from the University of Kentucky (2020). Intersecting geography and urban planning, Emily’s research broadly examines the opportunities and challenges of using participatory methods and data-driven narratives within politically contentious discussions of gentrification and urban development. 

Aretousa Bloom is a postdoctoral researcher at the Department of Social and Economic Geography at Uppsala University, Sweden. Her research interests include urban governance, housing policy, the politics of debt, and the relationship between art, money and financialization. Aretousa completed her doctoral degree in Planning and Public Policy at Rutgers University in 2019, where she wrote her dissertation on the marketization of state-led housing production in London.

Hung-Ying Chen read her Ph.D. in Human Geography (2018) at Durham University (UK). In 2019, she was the recipient of the 2019 AAG UGSG Doctoral Dissertation Award. After completing her Ph.D. degree, she joined the H2020 ERC-funded project DenCity as a postdoctoral research associate in the Department of Geography of Durham University from 2018 to 2021. Having been trained as an urban planner and urban economic geographer, her research interests sit at the intersection of urban sociotechnical politics, fiscal-financial geographies, and the governance of urban densities. Her ongoing research projects explore the sensorial politics of density with themes on urban geopolitics, housing densification, and street economy. Her recent publications appear in Regional Studies, the CITY, Urban Geography, and Eurasian Geography and Economics. Hung-Ying will start a new position as an assistant professor at the International College of Innovation of the National Chengchi University (Taiwan) in August 2021.

Ying-Hui Chiang is an assistant professor in the Department of Land Economics, National Chengchi University, Taiwan. Her research interests include real estate mass appraisal, housing policy, and real estate market and investment analysis. Ying-Hui’s research focuses on the Taiwan housing market, with a primary emphasis on the policy impact of housing price and advances in residential mass appraisal. She has published peer-reviewed papers in international and Taiwan high-ranking refereed journals including Land Use Policy, International Real Estate Review, Journal of Planning Education and Research, Journal of Property Research, Habitat International, City and Planning, Journal of Housing Studies, and Transportation Planning Journal. She held a grant from the Ministry of Science and Technology in Taiwan in support of the research project “Using Big Data to Examine Social Housing Policy- the Measure of Affordability and Spatial Inequality.” She is currently the co-principle investigator of the Cathay Real Estate Price Index.

Bridget Fisher is an urban development researcher with a background in government and public affairs. She directs SCEPA’s Critical Finance Project, which investigates the effects of the financialization of municipal finance. She came to higher education from government, having served as chief of staff for a member of the New York City Council and press secretary for a member of the U.S. Congress. She received her master’s degree in public administration with a focus on urban economic development from CUNY’s Baruch College.

Nicolás Herrera holds a Master in Urban Planning, a Master in Real Estate, and a Diploma in Corporate Finance at the University de Chile. He holds 13 years of experience in urban and real estate consulting and urban research. He currently teaches at postgraduate level in University of Chile, University of Santiago, and Los Andes University.

Robert Lake is Professor Emeritus in the Edward J. Bloustein School of Planning and Public Policy at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey. His current research focuses on the politics of urban land markets, collaborative and community-based planning, the financialization of urban policy, and pragmatist approaches to the politics of knowledge production. He is the author or editor of eight books, most recently The Power of Pragmatism: Knowledge Production and  Social Inquiry(2020) and Land Fictions: The Commodification of Land in City and Country (2021).

Flávia Leite is a Research Associate at the Schwartz Center for Economic Policy Analysis (SCEPA) at The New School and a Ph.D. candidate in City and Regional Planning at UC Berkeley. She holds an MSc in Urban Policy Analysis and Management from the New School (2017) and a BA in economics from the University of São Paulo (2014). Flávia has worked in the private and public sectors both in Brazil and in the US with real estate, housing, and economic development projects. Her research interests include real estate, public finance, housing, and land markets in the Global South.

Ernesto López-Morales is an Associate Researcher at the Centre for Social Conflict and Cohesion Studies (COES;www.coes.cl) and an Associate Professor in the Department of Urban Planning, University of Chile, where he teaches courses and advises thesis students at undergraduate, master, and doctoral levels, as well as postdoctoral researchers. His research approach is critical and interdisciplinary, focused on issues of gentrification, land and housing markets, financialization, anti-displacement social contestation, and counter-hegemonic housing production. He has published several articles, books, and columns, in Spanish, English, and Portuguese languages. He has also led research projects on gentrification and neighborhood change in Chile, Argentina, Brazil, and Mexico, in collaboration with local scholars and activists. He currently runs a research project named “Housing appreciation in the Greater Santiago Metropolitan Area: Causes, Geographical distribution, and Effects on fertility” supported by Chile’s National Agency of Scientific Research (ANID) along with an interdisciplinary team of researchers and students.

Gordon MacLeod’s research examines how the emerging urban world is managed through new horizons of governance that increasingly appear to solicit land privatization and the dislocation of vulnerable communities from housing and place; a close examination of who governs cities and metropolitan regions, and how these arrangements are shaping a scandalously uneven distribution of wealth, jobs, housing, infrastructure, and services; and, further, how these ecologies are shaped by the shifting geography of state power and the political struggles that unfold around questions of distribution, justice, territory and identity. His interest in these domains feature in a number of academic journals, including Antipode, City, Environment and Planning A, Environment and Planning C: Government and Policy, Geoforum, Geografiska Annaler B, European Urban and Regional Studies, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, Progress in Human Geography, Regional Studies, Society and Space, Space and Polity, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, and Urban Studies. MacLeod’s research has been funded by the ESRC, British Academy, and the Leverhulme Trust.

Kathe Newman is a Professor in the Urban Planning and Policy Development Program at the Edward J. Bloustein School of Planning and Public Policy, Program Director of the Urban Planning and Policy Development Program, and Director of the Ralph W. Voorhees Center for Civic Engagement. Dr. Newman holds a Ph.D. in Political Science from the Graduate School and University Center at the City University of New York. Her research interests include political economy and urban change, community food security and social welfare governance, housing insecurity, urban redevelopment, gentrification, and foreclosure.  Dr. Newman has published articles in Urban Studies, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, Urban Geography, Urban Affairs Review, Urban Geography, Shelterforce, Progress in Human Geography, Housing Studies, GeoJournal, and Environment and Planning A. She is an Associate Editor at Environment and Planning A.

Kei Otsuki is an Associate Professor in International Development Studies at Utrecht University in the Netherlands. She holds a PhD in Development Sociology from Wageningen University and MSc and BA degrees from the University of Tokyo. Prior to Utrecht University, she worked at United Nations University as a Research Associate. Her research interests center on equitable and sustainable development, environmental justice, and the remaking of geopolitics of development, especially regarding impacts of investment-induced displacement and resettlement on new land and resource frontiers. She has conducted field research on new settlement experiences in Latin America, especially Brazil, and Kenya, Ghana, and Mozambique, as well as in Japan. She is currently leading a number of international research projects including two on conservation and new extractivism-induced displacement and resettlement projects in Mozambique; and a new initiative to address displacement and resettlement induced by urban infrastructure development in the global Southern cities.

Sara Safransky is a human geographer and Assistant Professor in the Department of Human & Organizational Development at Vanderbilt University. Her current research focuses on land and housing justice, critical property studies, postindustrial cities, urban greening, and the politics of collective memory work. Sara’s recent articles include “Geographies of Algorithmic Violence” (International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 2020) and “Grammars of Reckoning” (EPD: Society and Space, 2021). She is the co-editor of A People’s Atlas of Detroit (Wayne State University Press, 2020).

Claudia Sanhueza is an economist from the University of Chile and holds a PhD in Economics from Cambridge University. She is the Director of the Center for Economics and Social Policy at Universidad Mayor. Her research topics cover a broad spectrum of social policies, highlighting her contributions on issues of economics of education, labor economics, multidimensional poverty, economic inequality, and urban studies. She has published extensively on these issues.

Mi Shih is an associate professor in the Urban Planning and Policy Development Program at the Edward J. Bloustein School of Planning and Public Policy, Rutgers University. Her research includes two major areas. Using mixed methods, the first area explores informal housing, the politics of land value creation and capture, and the relationship between the role of the developmental state and democratic planning in Taiwan. The second area uses ethnographic methods to understand displacement, peri-urban transformation, social and political governance of land conflicts in Shanghai and Guangzhou, China. Mi has published articles in Urban Studies, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, Planning Theory & Practice, Urban Geography, Journal of Planning Education and Research, Planning Practice & Research, Environment and Planning A. She is currently working on several case studies that explore the intersection between technocratic planning, land politics, and democratic participation in state-led urban development.

André Sorensen is Professor in the Department of Geography and Planning, University of Toronto. His current research examines urban institutions, institutional change, and temporal processes in urbanization and urban governance from a comparative and historical institutionalist perspective, with a focus on urban land and property development, infrastructure management, megacities, and the emergence of increasingly differentiated property and planning systems in urban settings. He has published over 60 papers and chapters, and co-edited 5 books, most recently the International Handbook of Megacities and Megacity-Regions. His monograph ‘The Making of Urban Japan: Cities and Planning from Edo to the 21^st Century’ (Routledge 2002) was awarded the book prize of the International Planning History Society in 2004. His paper ‘Taking Path Dependence Seriously’ (2015) published in Planning Perspectives 30 (1)17-38, won the Association of European Schools of Planning Best Paper Award in 2016.

Rachel Weber is a professor in the Urban Planning and Policy Department at the University of Illinois at Chicago where she teaches courses and conducts research in the fields of economic development, real estate, urban politics, and public finance.  She is the co-editor of the Oxford Handbook of Urban Planning, a compilation of 40 essays by leading urban scholars. Her latest book, From Boom to Bubble: How Finance Built the New Chicago (University of Chicago Press) won the Best Book Award from the Urban Affairs Association in 2017. She is the author of over 45 peer-reviewed journal articles, as well as numerous book chapters and published reports. In addition to her academic responsibilities, she has served as an advisor to planning agencies, political candidates, and community organizations on issues related to financial incentives, property taxes, and neighborhood change. She was appointed to then-presidential candidate Barack Obama’s Urban Policy Committee in 2008 and by Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel to the Tax Increment Financing Reform Task Force in 2011.

Laura Wolf-Powers is an Associate Professor of Urban Policy and Planning at Hunter College, part of the City University of New York. She has been teaching economic and community development to graduate students since 2002, publishing extensively in academic journals and for practitioner audiences. Recent research projects include a critical examination of land value capture practice with an eye to harnessing value capture for reparative interventions; work on the implications of the “maker movement” for urban economic development policy; and University City: History, Race, & Community in the Time of the Innovation District, a book about university-led redevelopment and neighborhood change in West Philadelphia in two eras. She serves on the editorial boards of Metropolitics and of the Journal of the American Planning Association and as an academic advisor to the Urban Manufacturing Alliance, the Pratt Center for Community Development, and the Western Queens Community Land Trust.

Twitter: @wolf_powers