Scientific Committee
Iñaki Ábalos
Iñaki Ábalos is professor in residence in Harvard University GSD and chaired professor of ETSAM. He was appointed “Buell Book Fellow” and “Visiting Professor” at Columbia University (New York, 1995), “Diploma Unit Master” at the Architectural Association in London and “Professeur Invite” in the EPF Lausanne 1998. He was “Jean Labatute Professor” at the University of Princeton (New Jersey, 2004-2007),“Visiting Professor” at Cornell University (Ithaca, 2007-2008), and Professor at BIArch (Barcelona, 2010-2012), “Kenzo Tange professor” GSD Harvard (2009), “Visiting critic” in Architecture and Urban Design GSD Harvard (2010-2012), “Professor in Residence” GSD Harvard (2012-), Chair of the Department of Architecture GSD Harvard University (2013-).
Nuria Benach
Nuria Benach is a Professor of Human Geography at the University of Barcelona. Her research interests lie in exploring new trends in geographical thought, discourses on urban transformations, and the socio-spatial construction of diversity. Specifically, she has conducted research on urban representations during periods of intense transformation, such as the changes in Barcelona’s image during the Olympic Games, the impact of migratory waves, and the consequences of mass urban tourism. Some of her recent publications include “Richard Peet: Geography against Neoliberalism” (Icària, 2012), “Les transformations du centre historique de Barcelona: des espaces-réserve versus des espaces de résistance?” in Marges urbaines et néoliberalisme en Méditerranée (Presses de l’Université François Rabelais, 2014), and Imatges, símbols i mites de la Barcelona del 92 (Geocrítica, 2015).
Anna Bugajska
Anna Bugajska is Associate Professor and the Head of the Language and Culture Studies Department at the Jesuit University Ignatianum in Cracow, with her research affiliated to the General and Applied Ethics Department at the same university. She obtained her Ph.D. at the Jagiellonian University in Cracow (the Faculty of Philology), and her postdoctoral degree (habilitacja) at the University of Silesia, Katowice (the Faculty of Humanities). Currently, she gives classes on biopolitics and ethics, as well as utopian studies. She gave talks and classes at many European universities (e.g., Oxford University, Cambridge University, Universidad Complutense de Madrid). She is a member of Utopian Studies Society-Europe, and a HEST group Humanization in Health, and cooperates with a number of organizations and centers on the topics related to new technologies (e.g., Centre for Axiology of New Technologies and Social Change, Future Law Lab). She specializes in interdisciplinary study of biotechnological utopias and dystopias.
Massimo Cacciari
Massimo Cacciari is one of the most famous living Italian Philosophers. In 1985, he became professor of Aesthetics at the Architecture Institute of Venice. In 2002, he founded the Department of Philosophy at the University of Vita-Salute San Raffaele in Milan, where he was appointed Dean of the Department in 2005. Cacciari has founded several philosophical review. In 1976, he was elected to the Italian Chamber of Deputies, where he was a member of the Parliamentary commission for industry (1976–1983). He has been mayor of Venice twice. Some of his books: Architecture and Nihilism: On the Philosophy of Modern Architecture, Yale University Press (1993), The Necessary Angel, State University of New York Press (1994), The Unpolitical. Essays on the Radical Critique of Political Reason, Yale University Press (2009), Europe and Empire: On the Political Forms of Globalization, Fordham University Press (2016), The Withholding Power. An Essay on Political Theology, Bloomsbury Academic (2018).
Adriana Cavarero
Adriana Cavarero teaches philosophy of politics at the University of Verona, Italy, and is a visiting professor at New York University. Her field of research includes classical, modern and contemporary thought, with a special focus on the political significance of philosophy. Two main concerns shape her approach to the Western philosophical tradition. First, the 'thought of sexual difference', a theoretical perspective that enables the deconstruction of Western textuality from a feminist standpoint. Second, the thought of Hannah Arendt, reinterpreted in its most innovative categories: birth, uniqueness, action and narration. Cavarero resists both the solitary abstraction of the philosophical Subject, and the volatile fragmentation of the postmodern subject, in the name of the living uniqueness of a self being generated through plural relationships with other human beings, and the acceptance of the constraints of individuality and the body.
Adela Cortina
Adela Cortina is an Emeritus Professor of Moral and Political Philosophy and serves as the Academic Director of the ÉTNOR Foundation (Ethics of Business and Organizations). She is also a member of the National Commission on Assisted Human Reproduction, as well as the Advisory Council of the Ministry of Health and Consumption and the Advisory Committee on Ethics in Scientific and Technological Research. In 2008, she became the first woman to join the Royal Academy of Moral and Political Sciences. She has been awarded honorary doctorates by several Spanish and foreign universities and has served as a visiting professor at the University of Louvain-la-Neuve, the Vrije Universiteit in Amsterdam, the University of Notre Dame (USA), and the University of Cambridge.
Nathaniel Coleman
Nathaniel Coleman is Reader in History and Theory of Architecture at Newcastle University, UK. He previously taught in the US, worked as an architect in NY and Rome, and studied architecture at the Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies and RISD, and Urban Design at CCNY. His PhD was awarded by the University of Pennsylvania, where he worked with Jospeh Rykwert. He leads design studios and theory seminars, concentrating on the limits and possibilities of architectural neo-avant-gardes. His books include Materials and Meaning in Architecture: Essays on the Bodily Experience of Buildings (2020), Lefebvre for Architects (2014), and Utopias and Architecture (2005); and Imagining and Making the World: Reconsidering Architecture and Utopia (2011), as editor. After working on Utopia and Architecture since the 1990s, Coleman’s focus has shifted toward reconstructing architecture through the invention of anarchist spatial practices.
Francisco Colom
Francisco Colom is a Research Professor at the Center for Human and Social Sciences of the Higher Council for Scientific Research (CSIC) in Spain. Doctorate in Philosophy from the Complutense University of Madrid and Diploma in Political Science and Constitutional Law from the Center for Political and Constitutional Studies of Madrid, with post-graduate studies at the Free University of Berlin and post-doctorate at McGill University (Montreal, Canada). President of the Ibero-American Association of Political Philosophy between 2000 and 2005. Among his latest publications are: Tristes patrias. Más allá del patriotismo y el cosmopolitismo (Anthropos, 2019), El espacio político (Anthropos 2015, with A. Rivero), The Traditions of liberty in the Atlantic World. Origins, Ideas and Practices (Brill 2016, with A. Rivero) and Forma y política de lo urbano. La ciudad como idea, espacio y representación (Bogotá, Editorial Crítica - Grupo Planeta, 2016).
Manuel Delgado
Manuel Delgado Professor at the University of Barcelona; tenure professor of Social Anthropology at this University since 1986, as well as coordinator of the research groups GRECS, Grup de Recerca en Exclusió i Control Socials and GRACU (Grup de Recerca en Antropologia del Conflicte Urbà). He has worked on the construction of collective identities in urban contexts, religious violence and social appropriations of public spaces. Among his latest publications are the books Ciudad líquida, ciudad interrumpida (1999), El animal público (Premio Anagrama de Ensayo, 1999), Luces iconoclastas (Barcelona, 2001), Disoluciones urbanas (2002), La ciudad mentirosa (2008), El espacio público como ideología (2011) and Ciudadanismo (2016).
Ibán Díaz-Parra
Ibán Díaz-Parra is PhD in Human Geography and bachelor in Geography and Social and Cultural Anthropology. He is a postdoctoral researcher in Human Geography at University of Seville. He has been a researcher at National Autonomous University of Mexico and at University of Buenos Aires. His research focuses on socio-spatial processes and conflicts, gentrification, spatial segregation and urban movements in Andalusian and Latin-American cities. He has published some books and many scientific papers on these topics (Eure, Andamios, Norte Grande, Urban Studies, Progress in Human Geography, etcetera). He is currently the coordinator of the Ibero-American Network of Research in Urban Contention. https://www.conflictosurbanos.org/
Kenneth Frampton
Kenneth Frampton is a British architect, critic and historian. He has been the Ware Professor of Architecture at the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation at Columbia University, New York. Frampton studied architecture at Guildford School of Art and the Architectural Association School of Architecture, London. Frampton has also taught at Princeton University School of Architecture (1966–71) and the Bartlett School of Architecture, London, (1980). He has been a member of the faculty at Columbia University since 1972, and that same year he became a fellow of the Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies in New York (whose members also included Peter Eisenman, Manfredo Tafuri and Rem Koolhaas) and a co-founding editor of its magazine Oppositions. Some of his books: Studies in Tectonic Culture: The Poetics of Construction in Nineteenth and Twentieth Century Architecture (1995), Labour, Work and Architecture (2002) and Modern Architecture: A Critical History (Fifth Edition, 2020).
Elizabeth Grosz
Elizabeth Grosz has taught in Philosophy, Architecture, Gender, and Literature programs at Duke, Rutgers, SUNY Buffalo and SUNY Stony Brook Universities in the United States, and at The University of Sydney, The University of Technology Sydney, and Monash University in Australia. She has also taught regularly in Norway. She is the author of several books on feminist theory, politics, psychoanalysis, and French philosophy, particularly the work of Lacan, Irigaray, Foucault, Derrida and Deleuze.
Yuk Hui
Yuk Hui is a Hong Kong philosopher and professor of philosophy at the Erasmus University Rotterdam. He is known for his writings on philosophy and technology. Hui has been described as one of the most interesting contemporary philosophers of technology. Hui studied Computer Engineering at the University of Hong Kong, wrote his doctoral thesis under the French philosopher Bernard Stiegler at Goldsmiths College in London and obtained his Habilitation in philosophy of technology from Leuphana University in Germany. Hui has taught at the Leuphana University, Bauhaus University, and has been a visiting professor at the China Academy of Art and the University of Tokyo. He has been the convenor of the Research Network for Philosophy and Technology since 2014 and sits as a juror of the Berggruen Prize for Philosophy and Culture since 2020.
Rachel Kallus
Rachel Kallus is architect and town planner, holding professional degree from MIT and Ph.D. from the Technion (Israel Institute of Technology). She is professor emerita at the Faculty of Architecture and Town Planning in the Technion, the founder and former academic head of the Technion Social Hub. Her scholarly work leans on critical theory in the social sciences, gender and cultural studies, to examine the sociopolitical aspects of spatial production, and the reciprocity between policy measures (planning) and design interventions (architecture) with the cultural and intellectual environments.
Neil Leach
Neil Leach is an architect, curator and writer. He is currently Visiting Professor at Harvard University GSD, Professor at the European Graduate School, Gao Feng Professor at Tongji University, and Adjunct Professor at the University of Southern California. He has also taught at SCI-Arc, Architectural Association, Columbia GSAPP, Cornell University, Dessau Institute of Architecture, IaaC, London Consortium , Royal Danish School of Fine Arts, ESARQ, University of Nottingham, University of Bath and University of Brighton. His research interests fall broadly into two fields, critical theory and digital design. He has also been co-curator of the Fast Forward>> exhibition at the Architecture Biennial Beijing 2004, the Emerging Talents, Emerging Technologies exhibition at the Architecture Biennial Beijing 2006, and the (Im)material Processes: New Digital Techniques for Architecture exhibition at the Architecture Biennial Beijing 2008.
Belinda López Mesa
Belinda López Mesa has a tenured Professorship at the University of Zaragoza in the area of Architectural Constructions. She got her degree in Architecture from the University of Seville in 2000, and the PhD degree from the Swedish university Luleå University of Technology in 2004. She has devoted her professional career to teaching and research at Luleå University of Technology in Sweden (2000-2004), Universitat Jaume I in Castellón (2004-2010) and University of Zaragoza (since 2010 and continues). Specializing in sustainability and energy efficiency in buildings renovation and urban regeneration, she has supervised four defended theses, participated in over 40 research projects and contracts with companies, and has more than 85 publications. She is the director of the Cátedra Zaragoza Vivienda since its creation in 2011. She is the main researcher of the GIA group since its creation in 2017.
Fernando López Ramón
Fernando López Ramón Professor of Administrative Law at the University of Zaragoza, with six recognized six-year research periods. Graduated in Law from the University of Zaragoza with Extraordinary Prize, and Doctorate from the University of Bologna with the Vittorio Emanuele II Prize. He obtained the chair of Administrative Law at the University of Barcelona in 1986. Since 1988 he has worked at the University of Zaragoza, having been Dean of the Faculty of Law of that university between 2000 and 2003. He has been an expert of the Council of Europe, Director of the Master in Urbanism, Observatory of Environmental Policies and the Aragonese Journal of Public Administration, as well as president of the Ecology and Development Foundation. Among his published books the following stand out: Introducción al Derecho urbanístico (2005), Política ecológica y pluralismo territorial (2009) y Sistema jurídico de los bienes públicos (2012).
Carlos Naya
Carlos Naya is Architect with a doctorate in architecture from the University of Navarra, having been director of Studies (1996-02), director of the Department of Theory, Projects and Urban Planning (2015-19), deputy director of strategic projects (2019-21) and currently director from the Higher Technical School of Architecture of the University of Navarra, making this dedication compatible with his work as an architect until 2010. He has taught Culture and Fashion at the ISEM Fashion Business School and collaborated with the Master’s Degree in Estudios de Comisariado del Museo of the University of Navarra. He is a visiting professor at various national and American universities and has been a visiting scholar at Columbia University (New York).
Paula Cristina Pereira
Paula Cristina Pereira is the Principal Researcher of the Philosophy and Public Space Research Group of the Institute of Philosophy (UI&D/FIL/00502) and Professor at the Philosophy Department at the Faculty of Arts and Humanities, University of Porto (Portugal) and she is Director of the Doctoral Program in Philosophy. She has been a visiting Professor in several European Universities, as well as in Brazilian and Mozambican Universities. Since 2007, her research has focused on the human and urban condition; on the philosophy of the city and public space from the perspective of the common and common goods. She has published eight books, book chapters and multiple papers in national/ international journals.
Manuel Perez Romero
Manuel Pérez Romero is Pérez Romero is the Chair of the Center for Sustainable Cities and the Academic Director of the future Bachelor in Urban Studies at IE University. He has been a professor at IE Univesity since 2010. In addition, his teaching experience includes 15 years at Alcalá de Henares School of Architecture and 2 years at Madrid School of Architecture. Between 2018-2020 he was appointed Board Member of the International Practice Committee of the American Institute of Architects. Pérez Romero is founding member of nodo17 group, a Madrid based group of architects, urban designers and ecologists operating within the fields of urbanism, landscape, architecture, engineering, information and ecology.
Juan Pro
Juan Pro is Professor of Modern and Contemporary History at the Autonomous University of Madrid, currently on secondment to the Escuela de Estudios Hispano-Americanos (School of Spanish-American Studies) in Seville (CSIC). He has been a member of the Academia Europaea since 2020. He is currently director of the HISTOPIA research Group and has been coordinator of the Red Trasatlántica de Estudio de las Utopías [Transatlantic Network of Utopian Studies] since it was established in 2014. His main lines of research have centred on the construction of the State and the comparative history of Spain and Latin America in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Currently, he works on the cultural history of politics, paying particular attention to the history of utopias.
Franco Riva
Franco Riva is full professor in the Faculty of Letters and Philosophy of the Catholic University of Milan, where he teaches Moral Philosophy, Ethics, Social Ethics and Public Space, Anthropology. The motif of otherness guides his research along the lines of the other thought and of a concrete phenomenology (Kierkegaard, Buber, Marcel, Ricoeur, Lévinas, etc.), but with careful attention to classical sources. The main and intertwined cornerstones of the research, with monographic approaches, are the issues of the body and the word (analogy, dialogue), the phenomenologies of the contemporary, the foundations of the interhuman, the tension between interpersonal relationships and public space, ethics, the social and democracy. He is the author of numerous volumes, with various awards and recognitions. Participates in different interdisciplinary perspectives (ethical-political, urbanity and architecture, media, medicine, pedagogy, hermeneutics and religion) and social activities, especially regarding the world of work and the city.
Paul Graham Raven
Paul Graham Raven is a writer and critical futures researcher, whose research is concerned with how the stories we tell about times yet to come shape the lives we end up living. A former Marie Skłodowska-Curie Postdoctoral Fellow, he's also an author and critic of science fiction, an occasional journalist and essayist, and a collaborator with designers and artists. He currently lives in Malmö with a cat, some guitars, and sufficient books to constitute an insurance-invalidating fire hazard.
María Rubert de Ventós
María Rubert de Ventós is a Spanish architect, winner of the 2004 National Urban Planning Award. She received the title of architect in 1981 at the Escuela Técnica Superior de Arquitectura de Barcelona (ETSAB), where she earned her doctorate in 1991. Rubert has focused on heritage, public and green spaces, mobility, and transport, especially in the cities of Barcelona, Madrid, and Cartagena, where she has designed management and layout plans. Some of his books includes La ciudad no es una hoja en Blanco: hechos del urbanismo (2000) and Metro, Galaxias metropolitanas (2001) with Josep Parcerisa, or Cities 2: Mediterranean (2018) with Eulàlia Gómez. Among other works, she was co-designer of the expansion of the Palacio de las Cortes in 1994 and was project director for the Olympic Village on Barcelona's Avinguda Diagonal. In 2011, she was appointed full professor of the ETSAB Department of Urban and Territorial Planning in 2011, becoming the country's first woman to reach that rank in the subject.
Cesar Sarabia
César Sarabia is General Director of Public Space and Activities of the Logroño City Council. Civil Engineer from the University of Cantabria, Masters in Direction and Integral Management of Construction Companies from the National University of Distance Education (UNED), Postgraduate Diploma in Construction of Railway Infrastructures from the Polytechnic University of Catalonia and graduated in Higher Course of Concessions, Public-Private Collaborations and Management of Infrastructures, Equipment and Services (CICCP+Structuralia). He currently works as head of the Mobility Area of the Logroño City Council since 2015.
Nick Srnicek
Nick Srnicek is a Senior Lecturer in Digital Economy at King's College London. He is the author of After Work: A History of the Home and the Fight for Free Time (Verso, 2023 with Helen Hester), Platform Capitalism (Polity, 2016), and Inventing the Future: Postcapitalism and a World Without Work (Verso, 2015 with Alex Williams).Prior to joining King’s in 2017, Nick previously taught at University of Westminster, University of West London, UCL, and City, University of London. He was also an editor of Millennium: Journal of International Studies. His current research is continuing this focus by examining the political economy of AI and looking at how (beyond automation) AI will affect the power dynamics of contemporary capitalism.
Saskia Sassen
Saskia Sassen, is a Dutch-American sociologist noted for her analyses of globalization and international human migration. She is Robert S. Lynd Professor of Sociology at Columbia University in New York City, and Centennial visiting Professor at the London School of Economics. After being a post-doctoral fellow at the Center for International Affairs at Harvard University, Sassen held various academic positions in and outside the US. She studied the impacts of globalisation such as economic restructuring, and how the movements of labour and capital influence urban life. Sassen observed how nation states begin to lose power to control these developments, and she studied increasing general transnationalism. She identified and described the phenomenon of the global city. Her 1991 book bearing this title made her a widely quoted author on globalisation.
Heidi Sohn
Heidi Sohn is Associate Professor of Architecture Theory at the Architecture Department of the Faculty of Architecture and the Built Environment, TU-Delft. She received her doctoral degree in Architecture Theory from the Faculty of Architecture, TU-Delft in 2006 for her dissertation The Emergence of Urban Monsters: Postmodern Sublime and the Subconscious of Architecture. She is academic coordinator and head of the Architecture Philosophy and Theory Group at the Architecture Department. She is member of the Ecologies of Architecture and of the Borders & Territories research groups. Her research interests are multiple and eclectic, ranging from the topological spectrum (utopia-heterotopia-dystopia); monster theory; the turns and shifts in postmodern theoretical landscapes; migration, border phenomena and related processes of material and spatial becoming; diverse cartographic practices and symptomatology; to worlding, geophilosophy and the convergence of new materialism, posthuman agencies and material-discursive practices.
Ana Tostões
Ana Tostões is an architect, architecture critic and historian, and is president of Docomomo International and Editor of the Docomomo Journal (www.docomomo.com). She is a Full Professor at Técnico, University of Lisbon, where she teaches Theory of Architecture and Critical History, and coordinates the Architectonic Culture research group. She has been invited professor at universities worldwide, such as the University of Tokyo, École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, Katholik University Leuven, Escola Tècnica Superior d'Arquitectura de Barcelona and Escuela Técnica Superior de Arquitectura – Universidad de Navarra. Since 2013, she has been professor of the Architectural PhD program at the Faculty of Architecture University of Porto (FAUP). She has a degree in Architecture (ESBAL, 1982), a Master’s degree in History of Art (UNL, 1994), holds a PhD (IST-UL, 2003) on culture and technology in Modern Architecture, and was awarded the X Bienal Ibero-Americana de Arquitectura y Urbanismo Prize 2016. She also works as a critic in Journals and Newspapers, notably writing a weekly architectural column for the Portuguese daily the Público.
Jorge Velázquez Delgado
Jorge Velázquez Delgado: PhD, Researcher and Professor of the Philosophy department, at Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana-Iztapalapa, Mexico City. His topics of interest are Political Philosophy, Renaissance and Baroque philosophy, Democracy, Neoliberalism and Neoconservatism, and Mexico and Latin American philosophy. His recent publication include: “La férrea voluntad utópica de la Modernidad en la rebelión utópica de los indignados” in Utopía y poder en Europa y América, Tecnos. (2015), “El realismo político en la utopía de Juan Luis Vives” in Tomás Moro y Vasco de Quiroga, EUNSA (2018), and Realismo Político y utopía (2021).
Albena Yaneva
Albena Yaneva is Professor of Architectural Theory and Director of the Manchester Architecture Research Group (MARG) at the Manchester Urban Institute. She holds a DEA from Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales and a PhD from Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Mines de Paris (2001). She has been Visiting Professor at Princeton School of Architecture (2013), Parsons, New School (2015) and Politecnico di Turino (2018). She held the prestigious Lise Meitner Visiting Chair in Architecture at the University of Lund, Sweden (2017-2019). She is also the recipient of academic grants of the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts in Chicago (2003), the British Academy (2008), the EU (2008-2010), the Swedish Research Council (2019-2021) and the ESRC (2021-2022).
Angela Yiu
Angela Yiu is a professor of modern Japanese literature at Sophia University. Her areas of research include modernism, urban literature, cross-border literature, Sino-Japanese literary studies, war and postwar literature, utopian studies, and contemporary literature. She is the editor of Three-Dimensional Reading: Stories of Time and Space in Japanese Modernist Fiction, 1911-1932 (2013). Her recent publications include: “Beachboys in Manchuria: An Examination of Sōseki’s Mankan tokorodokoro” in Review of Japanese Culture and Society (2019) and “Literature in Japanese (Nihongo bungaku): An Examination of the New Literary Topography by Plurilingual Writers from the 1990s” in Japanese Language and Literature (2020).
