Staff
Executive
Programme Team
Who's who | Staff
Executive
Ricky Burdett
Director, LSE Cities and Urban Age
Professor of Urban Studies, London School of Economics and Political Science
Global Distinguished Professor, New York University
r.burdett [at] lse.ac.uk
Ricky Burdett is Professor of Urban Studies at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) and director of LSE Cities and the Urban Age programme. He is a Global Distinguished Professor at New York University. He was Chief Adviser on Architecture and Urbanism for the London 2012 Olympics and now advises the Olympic Legacy Park Company. He was architectural adviser to the Mayor of London from 2001 to 2006. In addition to leading innovative research on global cities, Burdett has curated numerous exhibitions including ‘Global Cities’ at Tate Modern, was Director of the 2006 Architecture Biennale in Venice and chairman of the Jury for the 2007 Mies van der Rohe Prize. He is architectural adviser to the cities of Genova and Parma, and a member of the Milan Expo 2015 steering committee. He is a Council member of the Royal College of Art and sits on the Mayor of London’s Promote London Board. He is co-editor of Living in the Endless City and a regular contributor to journals, books and media programmes on contemporary architecture and urbanism.
Philipp Rode
Executive Director, LSE Cities, London School of Economics and Political Science
p.rode [at] lse.ac.uk
Philipp Rode is Executive Director of LSE Cities and Senior Research Fellow at the London School of Economics and Political Science. He is Ove Arup Fellow with the LSE Cities Programme and co-convenes the LSE Sociology Course on 'City Making: The Politics of Urban Form'. As researcher and consultant he manages interdisciplinary projects comprising urban governance, transport, city planning and urban design. Rode organised Urban Age conferences in partnership with Deutsche Bank's Alfred Herrhausen Society in ten cities bringing together political leaders, city mayors, urban practitioners, private sector representatives and academic experts. The focus of his current work is on cities and climate change which includes his role as coordinating author of the cities and buildings chapters for UNEP's Green Economy Report. He manages the Urban Age research efforts and recently co-authored 'Transforming Urban Economies' (2011) and 'The Global MetroMonitor' (2010); and published the reports 'Cities and Social Equity' (2009) and 'Integrated City Making' (2008). He has previously worked on several multidisciplinary research and consultancy projects in New York and Berlin and was awarded the Schinkel Urban Design Prize 2000.
Fran Tonkiss
Academic Director, Cities Programme, LSE Cities, London School of Economics and Political Science
f.tonkiss [at] lse.ac.uk
Fran Tonkiss is Reader in Sociology, and Director of the Cities Programme. She joined the Department of Sociology at LSE in 2004, and previously has taught at Goldsmiths College, and at the City University, London. Her research and teaching is in the fields of urban and economic sociology. Her interests in urban studies include cities and social theory, urban development and gentrification, urban divisions and public space. In economic sociology, her research focuses on markets, capitalism and globalisation, trust and social capital. Publications in these fields include Space, the City and Social Theory (Polity, 2005), and Contemporary Economic Sociology: Globalisation, Production, Inequality (Routledge, 2006). She is the co-author of Market Society: Markets and Modern Social Theory (Polity, 2001, with Don Slater), and co-editor of Trust and Civil Society (Macmillan, 2000, with Andrew Passey). She is an editor of the British Journal of Sociology, and a member of the editorial board of Economy and society.
Fran Tonkiss supervises doctoral students undertaking research on urban development, economic and spatial restructuring, public space, urban economies and governance.
Ute Weiland
Deputy Director, Alfred Herrhausen Society, Deutsche bank
ute.weiland [at] db.com
Since September 2003 Ute Weiland has been in charge of press and political contacts of Alfred Herrhausen Society, Deutsche Bank's socio-political think tank. In 1997 she co-founded the Erich Pommer Institute for Media Law and Media Management at the University of Potsdam and was its assistant managing director until 2003. Born in the former Eastern Germany, she graduated from the Academy of Music in Weimar. After unification she became chief of staff to the Secretary of State for education in Saxony. Ute Weiland is a member of the German-Israeli Young Leaders Exchange of the Bertelsmann Foundation and young leader of the Atlantik Brücke.
Programme Team
Karl Baker
BA (Hons) MSc
Researcher, LSE Cities, London School of Economics and Political Science
k.s.baker [at] lse.ac.uk
Karl Baker recently graduated from the MSc City Design and Social Science programme at the LSE. He also holds a BA (Hons) in Political Science from Victoria University, Wellington. He has previously worked as a policy adviser for New Zealand's Ministry of Transport where he advised governments on priorities for transport infrastructure investment. He has worked on improving project evaluation methods to better understand the impact of transport infrastructure on the social, environmental and economic performance of cities.
In London he has worked as a research consultant, collaborating with architectural offices and book publishers to connect city design with broader issues of global political economy and environmental sustainability. His Masters thesis on 'Conspicuous Production' investigated the potential of small-scale manufacturing industries for leading processes of regeneration in post-industrial urban contexts. He continues to research how urban design and planning policy can support small-scale industry in London.
Andrea Colantonio
BA MA PhD
Research Officer, LSE Cities, London School of Economics and Political Science
a.colantonio [at] lse.ac.uk
Dr Andrea Colantonio is an urban geographer and economist who specialises in the investigation of the complex linkages between urban growth, sustainability and the geographies of development in both developing and developed countries. From 2006 to 2009, he was lead researcher and project manager for a major international study concerning social sustainability and urban regeneration in EU cities, including Cardiff, Rotterdam, Turin, Barcelona and Leipzig, which was carried out in cooperation with the European Investment Bank. His main research interests are in the areas of economic and social development, institutional governance and urban growth, with special emphasis on sustainability policy, planning and assessment methods.
Sarah Davis
BA (Hons) FCCA
Management Accounts Coordinator, LSE Cities, London School of Economics and Political Science
s.j.davis [at] lse.ac.uk
Sarah Davis joined the Urban Age in June 2009. She manages and operates the finance activities of the programme. She acts as accounts co-ordinator for all accounting and daily financial procedures, as well as providing daily & management accounting support to management. She has previously worked as an accountant for National Air Traffic Services (NATS), the Automobile Association (AA), Thorn EMI and Foster Wheeler. She holds a BA(Hons) in Sociology from the University of Reading and is a qualified Chartered Certified Accountant. She is married with three children.
Graham Floater
Senior Visiting Fellow, LSE Cities, London School of Economics and Political Science
g.floater [at] lse.ac.uk
Graham Floater is a Senior Visiting Fellow at the London School of Economics and Programme Director of the Stern programme on the Economics of Green Cities. He is Director of the Climate Centre, a group of researchers and consultants who specialise in the low carbon economy.
Previously, he was deputy director at the Department of Energy and Climate Change and a senior advisor to the Prime Minister. He led various Reviews for No.10 including the Eliasch Review on international financial frameworks to reduce global deforestation and the Lazarowicz Review on global carbon trading. He led the creation of the UK's £1 billion Low Carbon Industrial Strategy covering clean technology, energy efficiency and transport, and later went on to coordinate a review of the UK’s energy delivery landscape, including the creation of the Green Investment Bank and reform of Ofgem.
He oversaw the Stern Team on the economics of climate change, and represented Lord Stern on the steering board of China’s Economics of Low Carbon Development. He held various positions in HM Treasury including private secretary to a Cabinet Minister and head of European economic negotiations. At the European Commission, he was an EU trade negotiator in the WTO.
He has a first class degree in natural science from Oxford University, a postgraduate degree in economics from Cambridge University, and a PhD in population risk modelling from Queensland University.
Eileen Herden
BA MSc
Researcher, LSE Cities, London School of Economics and Political Science
e.herden [at] lse.ac.uk
Eileen Herden holds a BA in Political Science and International Studies with Distinction from the University of Wisconsin and has recently completed her MSc in Social Policy at the London School of Economics. She has worked in various levels of government in the US and Germany - including as a research assistant in both the German Bundestag and the Office of the Wisconsin State Governor, and as a CDS/DAAD scholar in the state government of North Rhine-Westphalia. Her work primarily falls within the realm of social policy with a particular focus on housing studies and geographic methods.
Cristina Inclan-Valadez
BA MSc
Research assistant, LSE Cities, London School of Economics and Political Science
m.c.inclan-valadez [at] lse.ac.uk
Cristina Inclan-Valadez has been working over seven years as a researcher and consultant on public health projects, particularly related to road safety and urban mobility, and its links to city planning. She holds a BA in Social and Political Science, and an MSc in Public Health, both completed in Mexico. She is currently a PhD student in Urban and Regional Planning in the department of Geography at the LSE, focusing on the ways of life in large-scale housing projects that are changing the peripheral landscapes in Mexican cities.
Adam Kaasa
BA (Hons) MSc ATCL
Communications and Outreach Manager, LSE Cities, London School of Economics and Political Science
a.r.kaasa [at] lse.ac.uk
Adam Kaasa joined the Urban Age in 2006 and now manages all aspects of the communications and outreach events and publications for LSE Cities. He is an MPhil/PhD Candidate at the Cities Programme, LSE focussing on the circulations of ideas about architecture and urbanism, with a specific focus on urban forms and modernities, their effect on the built form of Mexico city, and emerging ideas of urban citizenship. He is also the London Coordinator for the NYLON seminars and conferences, a transatlantic intellectual working group between universities in and around London and New York, and teaches in the Sociology Department at the LSE. Previously, he worked on several international development projects ranging from capacity building for HIV/AIDS youth organisations in Guyana, working with a small community health centre in Mexico, and engaging with cross cultural education models in Sri Lanka. As a researcher he has completed several projects and publications on the city, on gender and sexuality, and on cultural and urban theory. He holds an MSc in Cites, Space and Society from the LSE, a BA (Hons) in Sociology from the University of Alberta, Canada and is an Associate of Trinity College London in Speech and Drama.
Jens Kandt
Researcher, LSE Cities, London School of Economics and Political Science
j.kandt [at] lse.ac.uk
Jens Kandt works as a researcher at LSE Cities, London School of Economics and Political Science, where his work focuses on quantitative geographic analysis of mega-city regions around the world. He has studied at University of Kaiserslautern (Germany) and Indian Institute of Technology, Madras (India), and has obtained his Master’s degree (Dipl. Ing.) in spatial planning from University of Dortmund (Germany). He is particularly interested in patterns of urbanisation in developing countries and emerging economies.
Marina Montero Carrero
BSc MSc (Imperial College London) MSc (Universidad Politécnica de Valencia)
Researcher, LSE Cities, London School of Economics and Political Science
m.montero-carrero [at] lse.ac.uk
Marina Montero Carrero recently completed the MSc in Sustainable Energy Futures at Imperial College London, collaborating with the University of Texas at Austin with regards to her MSc Thesis in Carbon Capture and Storage. She holds a BSc and MSc in Industrial Engineering at the Universidad Politécnica de Valencia, with specialization in energy. As part of her Engineering degree, she also studied one year at the Royal Institute of Technology (Stockholm) and carried out her MSc Thesis at the von Karman Institute for Fluid Dynamics (Brussels).
Max Nathan
BA (Hons) MSc PhD
Research Fellow, LSE Cities, London School of Economics and Political Science
m.a.nathan [at] lse.ac.uk
Dr Max Nathan is a Research Fellow at LSE Cities and at the Spatial Economics Research Centre (SERC), where he works on urban economics and economic development issues. He completed an economic geography and spatial economics PhD in LSE's Geography Department in Autumn 2011. His doctorate, which received funding from the ESRC and DCLG, looks at the economics of cultural diversity in British cities, and links between immigration, diversity and innovation.
He has 12 years' experience working in think tanks, consultancy and public policy environments. Most recently he worked at the UK Department of Communities and Local Government as an external Senior Policy Adviser, covering a range of policy issues including localism, regeneration, innovation and economic development. In 2005 he helped set up the Centre for Cities think tank, where he ran the research programme for three years, and is now a member of the Centre's Research Advisory Board. He is also an Associate Fellow at the Institute for Public Policy Research.
He blogs on urban policy at http://squareglasses.wordpress.com. He also enjoys photography: his pictures have variously appeared in The Wire magazine, Londonist, Der Spiegel and Getty Images.
Antoine Paccoud
BA MSc
Researcher, LSE Cities, London School of Economics and Political Science
a.m.paccoud [at] lse.ac.uk
Antoine Paccoud joined the Urban Age in 2008 as a Researcher. As such, he is responsible for data collection and background research for the various projects undertaken by the Urban Age. His background is in Economics and Political Science - with a BA (Hons) from McGill, Montreal - as well as Development and Geography - with an MSc in Urbanisation and Development from the LSE. He is currently in the Urban and Regional Planning PhD program in the Department of Geography at the LSE. His research is focused on understanding the nature of Urban Events, i.e., spatial changes to the city fabric that fundamentally transform a city. This is to be based on a comparative study of Haussmann's comprehensive redevelopment of Paris in the late 19th century and the development of Manhattan, NYC in the second half of the 20th century.
Nicolas Palominos
Researcher, LSE Cities, London School of Economics and Political Science
n.palominos [at] lse.ac.uk
Nicolas received his architectural degree in 2004 from the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile in Santiago. After practicing independently and working with Rodrigo Perez de Arce doing projects for several public institutions, he worked for the Chilean government implementing a Neighborhood Upgrading Programme. The last 3 years he has been advisor of Housing and Urban Planning for the General Comptroller Office of the Republic of Chile. This year he is a full-time student of the MSc in City Design and Social Science at LSE. His research fields of interest are public policy, citizenship and the political and economical making of the city.
Victoria Pinoncely
BA (Hons) MA MSc
Researcher, LSE Cities, London School of Economics and Political Science
v.a.pinoncely [at] lse.ac.uk
Victoria Pinoncely recently completed the MSc in Regional and Urban Planning Studies at the London School of Economics. Prior to the LSE, she has pursued bi-lingual, bi-national and pluri-disciplinary university studies in France and in the UK, covering the fields of political science, sociology and economics. She holds a B.A. (Hons) in Politics and International Relations from the University of Kent and a Master in Political Science from the Institute of Political Studies of Lille. Her main research interests are urban governance, social and economic development and urban health and well-being, the focus of her MSc dissertation. She has worked in the public, private and volunteering sectors. In addition to French and English, she speaks some German and Spanish.
Emma Rees
BA (Hons)
Executive and Admin Assistant, LSE Cities, London School of Economics and Political Science
e.j.rees [at] lse.ac.uk
Emma Rees has gained valuable experience over the last couple of years in various agencies of the NHS. This included administrative roles for the NHS in a major hospital and more recently employment within the Deanery of the University of London. She has had the opportunity to travel extensively overseas and spent four of her schooling years in Malaysia, taught at a summer school in Madrid and worked and travelled around Australia. In addition to this she holds a BA in English and History from the University of Southampton.
Andrea Rota
BA MSc
Web Editor, LSE Cities, London School of Economics and Political Science
a.rota [at] lse.ac.uk
Andrea Rota joined the Urban Age in 2009 and has been working on the Urban Age website, assisting with the development of new content, bringing legacy information in line with modern web standards and improving the web information workflow, in order to make research information more easily accessible to a wider public. He has been working for over a decade as a consultant on information infrastructures and content management systems entirely based on free software. He is currently an MPhil/PhD student in the department of Sociology at the LSE, focusing on the role of the Internet in everyday life for young university students in London. He holds a BA in Philosophy (Milano, Italy) and a MSc in Methods for social research (Firenze, Italy).
Jonas Schorr
MSc MA
Communications and Outreach Assistant, LSE Cities, London School of Economics and Political Science
j.schorr [at] lse.ac.uk
Jonas Schorr recently completed a two-year dual Masters programme in Global Media & Communications through the London School of Economics and Fudan University in Shanghai, one of China's most reputed Journalism Schools. He became interested in urban affairs and social media through his research on the public communication of inter-city cooperation, ie. the "Urban Age" discourse, as well as place branding. He has a background in Corporate Communications, in which he completed a Bachelor’s Degree at a leading German business school in Dortmund. Jonas grew up in Berlin and has since lived and studied abroad in France, Singapore, the United Kingdom and China and in addition to German and English speaks French and some Mandarin Chinese. For the past five years, beside his studies, he also founded and ran his own web design and programming agency with a team of classmates and young professionals.
Myfanwy Taylor
MPhys MSc
Researcher, LSE Cities, London School of Economics and Political Science
m.m.taylor [at] lse.ac.uk
Myfanwy Taylor is currently working as a Research Officer on Cities, Health and Well-being - the focus of the 2011 Urban Age conference in Hong Kong. Her main role involves leading a variety of research activities on this theme, and shaping the programme for the Hong Kong conference. She joined LSE Cities in 2010 as a researcher on the Next Urban Economy, while she was completing a Master's in Urban Studies at University College London. Her research activities build on her background as policy advisor within the UK Government, working mainly on housing policy within the Department for Communities and Local Government. She also spent a year in the Cabinet Office, supporting No.10, Cabinet and Cabinet Committees on a range of domestic policy issues. She begins her PhD studies at UCL in 2012, while also continuing to develop research and publications on urban health and well-being at LSE Cities.
Sadiq Toffa
Researcher, LSE Cities, London School of Economics and Political Science
m.s.toffa [at] lse.ac.uk
Sadiq Toffa is an architect, urban designer, and civil society advocate trained in Africa and Europe. His experience folds practice, teaching, and research within the focus of metropolitan publics, cosmopolitan knowledges, and emergent urbanisms in the Global South, the latter particularly through interdisciplinary work in the systems of production and organisation within the informal city. His current PhD research, titled ‘After Modernity? Pluralism, Text, and the City’, posits urban studies in concert with theoretical and conceptual insights gleaned within the humanities (particularly philosophy, history, and literature), the arts (as aesthetic theory and visual methodology), and the social sciences (particularly within sociology and anthropology), to offer new and enhanced analytical lenses and modes of inquiry towards the understanding of contemporary discourses and projections within the Global city of late modernity. These diverse foundations are cohered within international case studies and cultural communities in the cities of Venice, Zanzibar, and Cape Town.
Sabina Uffer
Research officer, LSE Cities, London School of Economics and Political Science
s.m.uffer [at] lse.ac.uk
Sabina Uffer has recently submitted her PhD in regional and urban planning in the LSE's Geography Department. Her research interests include urban theory, governance, uneven development, housing provision, and institutional investment. Her PhD focused on the production and politics of urban space, investigating the reorganisation of Berlin's housing provision and its uneven consequences.
Since 2008, she has taught Methods in Spatial and Social Analysis at the Department of Geography. From 2011, she will also teach LSE100.
Before coming to the LSE, she worked as a research associate at the Institute of Political Science at the University of Zurich and for the Laboratory of Urban Sociology at the Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne. She holds a Master in Political Science from the University of Geneva.
Katherine Wallis
BA (Hons)
Centre Administrator, LSE Cities, London School of Economics and Political Science
k.m.wallis [at] lse.ac.uk
Katherine Wallis' administrative experience reaches across the public, private and charitable sectors, with a particular focus on culture and heritage. She has worked internationally, including in Italy and Albania, and most recently has been working at Zamyn, an agency for social development, and volunteering at the Museum of London Archaeology Service.