Luca Pattaroni holds a Ph.D. in Sociology from EHESS (Paris). He is Maitre d’Enseignement de Recherche at the Laboratory of Urban Sociology of the EPFL where he leads the research group “Urban (In)hospitalities”. He has been Visiting Professor at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro and Visiting Scholar at the University of Columbia. Investigating urban conflicts, counterculture and radical housing, subaltern migration or yet the impact of social acceleration on everyday life, his work explore the renewed forms of emancipation and oppression and more broadly the contentious articulation between the expression of differences and commoning in contemporary cities. In 2009, he was co-awarded the APERO prize for the best article in urban planning.Amita Bhide is Professor and Dean, School of Habitat Studies, Tata Institute of Social Sciences. She has been teaching and researching at the Institute for over twenty years. She has been deeply involved in issues of urban poverty, livelihoods, and advocacy linked to the same in Mumbai and in other cities in India. She has contributed to social movements and to various committees of the state government on the subjects of housing and poverty. Her recent work at the School of Habitat Studies has been on urban governance reforms, housing, and land issues with a focus on small and medium towns and urban violence.Christine Lutringer is Executive Director and Senior Researcher at the Albert Hirschman Centre on Democracy, Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies, Geneva. She is also affiliated with the Universities of Basel and Edinburgh for the Swiss National Science Foundation project “Reversing the Gaze: Towards Post-Comparative Area Studies”. Her work explores democratic practices in the context of the mobilization of new social and political actors. In particular, it examines social movements and their influence on democratic politics and policy-making at the local level.
