EDWARD HOLLIS

is Reader in Interior Design at Edinburgh College of Art, the University of Edinburgh. He is the author of ‘The Secret Lives of Buildings’ (Portobello Books, 2009) and ‘Memory Palace: a book of Lost Interiors’ (Portobello 2013) both collections of short stories about architecture, interiors, and the many ways in which they change over time. He is also co-investigator on The Invisible College a research network experimenting with the ways in which people engage with with the ruins of a modernist masterpiece, St Peter's Seminary in Cardross, Glasgow.

His favourite cities – Banaras, London, Berlin are all broken: decaying wrecks of themselves or growing rapidly out of control, whose disorder invites and requires their citizens not just to inhabit them, but to intervene in their remaking.

STACEY HUNTER

is an architectural researcher at the University of Edinburgh and a co-editor of the New Cultures of Urban Citizenship web magazine The New Metropolitan. Her doctoral thesis (2014) is the first comprehensive account of Scotland’s New Urbanism. Her independent curatorial work connects design thinking and practice to the everyday life of cities.

Stacey’s favourite cities are those which remain ‘unfinished’ and offer the possibility of social change.

TAHL KAMINER

is Lecturer in Architectural Design and Theory at the University of Edinburgh. He co-founded and edited the journal Footprint. His publications include the monograph Architecture, Crisis and Resuscitation (Routledge, 2011) and the anthologies Houses in Transformation (NAi, 2008), Urban Asymmetries (010, 2011) and Critical Tools (Lettre Voilee, 2012).

Tahl loves congested, dirty cities which lack parking, but doesn’t recommend creating them.

CHRISTOPH LINDNER

is Professor of Media and Culture at the University of Amsterdam, where he writes about cities, visual culture, creative practices, and globalization. His books include Imagining New York City (Oxford University Press, 2015) and the edited volumes Inert Cities: Globalization, Mobility and Suspension in Visual Culture (IB Tauris, 2014) and Paris-Amsterdam Underground (Amsterdam University Press, 2013).

His favourite city is Amsterdam Schiphol Airport, where he feels most at home somewhere between check-in and boarding.

IGOR ŠTIKS

is a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at the Edinburgh College of Art, the University of Edinburgh. Before joining the ECA, he was a senior research fellow at the CITSEE project (School of Law, University of Edinburgh, 2009-2014) and the editor of CITSEE’s web magazine Citizenship in Southeast Europe. Together with Jo Shaw he edited the collections Citizenship after Yugoslavia (Routledge, 2013) and Citizenship Rights (Ashgate, 2013), and, with Srećko Horvat, Welcome to the Desert of Post-Socialism: Radical Politics after Yugoslavia (Verso, 2015). His novel A Castle in Romagna received the Award “Slavic” for Best First Book in 2000. His second novel Elijah’s Chair (2006) received both the Award “Gjalski” and the Award of “Kiklop” for the Best Fiction Book of the Year in Croatia and it has been translated into a dozen European languages.

Igor has lived extensively in cities as diverse as Sarajevo, Zagreb, Paris, Chicago, Edinburgh and Belgrade. The historic and intimate relationship between city and citizenship is at the heart of his research and imagination.

PENNY TRAVLOU

is a Lecturer in Cultural Geography and Theory (Edinburgh School of Architecture & Landscape Architecture, Edinburgh College of Art, University of Edinburgh). Her research is inter-disciplinary with a particular focus on theories of space and place, politics of public space, digital culture, networks and ethnography. In the last five years, she’s been carrying a rhizomatic ethnography of network communities of digital artists looking at creativity as a commons through creative practices of collaboration, sharing and peer production. “Following a rhizome” makes her life a bit nomadic: she constantly travels between Rome, Berlin, London, Athens and other places in between.

Her favourite cities are labyrinthine and underground.

PETER VERMEERSCH

is a Professor of Politics and Slavic Studies at the University of Leuven (Belgium) and a writer who currently lives in Brussels but often travels to revisit the cities where he previously lived: Warsaw, Prague, Venice and Budapest. He has published widely on Europe, ethnic politics, minorities, and democratic renewal. His most recent book Ex. Over een land dat zoek is (Ex. About a Country that’s Gone) was published to strong reviews by De Bezige Bij in Amsterdam in 2014 and uses a broad panorama of everyday encounters and coincidences throughout the former Yugoslavia to weave a literary narrative about the postwar experience in this region.

Peter has written about Warsaw and described it as a place one can pine for. But the city he really loves is Brussels, that bric-à-brac place in the centre of a country that often forgets how to treasure its capital.

RICHARD J WILLIAMS

is Professor of Contemporary Visual Cultures at the University of Edinburgh, where he has worked since 2000. He is co-investigator with Igor Stiks on the New Cultures of Urban Citizenship project. He has published very widely on cities and urban culture, most recently the book Sex and Buildings, published by Reaktion in 2013.

Richard’s favourite city is Los Angeles: ‘It shouldn’t work, but in its own peculiar way, it does. The climate and landscape are fantastic.’