Editorial Team
Dr. Feras Hammami, editor in chief
Department of Conservation, University of Gothenburg, Sweden
Feras Hammami is associate professor of Conservation based at the University of Gothenburg, Sweden. He holds a PhD in Planning and Decision, with a specialization in urban and regional studies from the Royal Institute of Technology, Sweden. His research concerns the politicisation of cultural heritage, with a specific interest in the politics of identity, security, resistance, and peacebuilding. He worked with heritage and planning in relation to sites located in, among others, Sweden, Palestine and Botswana.
Dr. Ayşegül Can
Istanbul Medeniyet University, Türkiye
is a lecturer at Istanbul Medeniyet University in Türkiye in the Department of Urban and Regional Planning. She received her PhD in urban studies from the University of Sheffield. Her research interests include gentrification, housing, urban resistance movements, social injustice in marginalized areas, and precariousness in higher education. Apart from her editorial role in PlaNext-Next Generation Planning, she holds several other editorial positions in journals such as Radical Housing Journal and International Development Planning Review. She is also on the editorial advisory board/committee in CITY and RGS-IBG book series.
LEDIO ALLKJA
Institute for Habitat Development - POLIS University, Albania.
Ledio Allkja is a researcher in spatial planning at Co-PLAN, Institute for Habitat Development, within POLIS University in Tirana, Albania. He holds a PhD from the Vienna University of Technology focusing on Europeanization of Spatial Planning Systems. His prior studies include a MSc from Radboud University Nijmegen on European Spatial and Environmental Planning and BA from UWE-Bristol in Property Development and Planning. His research work focuses on spatial planning system in Western Balkans, financial instruments of land development and more recently on disaster risk reduction. Ledio is the elected Chair of AESOP Young Academics Network Coordination Team for the period 2021-2022.
DENIZ ERDEM-OKUMUS
City and Regional Planning Department, Yildiz Technical University, Türkiye
Deniz Erdem-Okumus is an Assistant Professor at the Faculty of Architecture, Yildiz Technical University (YTU), and an Executive Board Member of the International Center for Urban Studies (ICUS) at YTU. She holds a BSc. in Urban and Regional Planning (2011), BSc. in Landscape Architecture (2014), MSc. in Urban Planning (2014), and a Ph.D. in Urban and Regional Planning (2022) with a specialisation on urban climate at the Istanbul Technical University (ITU). Prior to her current role, she worked as a visiting researcher (2020-2021) at the Chair of Design Informatics, The Architectural Engineering and Technology Department, TU Delft. The main areas of expertise are urban climate change, urban heat island/cool island concepts, climate mitigation/adaptation, thermal comfort, heat vulnerability, applied urban science, geospatial data analytics, and GIS/WebGIS. Research interests include computational urban planning and design approaches, generative form-finding procedures, and gamification for urban planning and design.
MILAN HUSAR
Slovak University of Technology in Bratislava
Milan Husar is a lecturer and researcher at Spectra Centre of Excellence of the EU at Department of Spatial Planning, Institute of Management, STU Bratislava. Within the Institute of Management he serves as Deputy director for international relations. He acts as the chairman of the Working Group for assessing the compliance of the study program with the standards for the Spatial Planning study program. He is a member of the STU Gender Equality Working Group. He has participated in a number of national international research projects covering topics of smart cities, biodiversity protection and spatial planning. He has a PhD. Degree in spatial planning (2016). For the past 10 years he had been invited for multiple lecturers at Middle East Technical University at the Department of City and Regional Planning and other European universities and research institutes. As a Fulbright Scholar spent 6 months at Arizona State University working in Centre Behavior, Institutions and the Environment founded as a sister centre of the Vincent and Elinor Ostrom Workshop in Political Theory and Policy Analysis at Indiana University, as well as other research stays across Europe.
Dr ELISA (LIZZY) PRIVITERA
The University of Toronto Scarborough, Canada.
Elisa (Lizzy) Privitera is a Postdoc researcher at the Urban Just Transitions cluster at the University of Toronto Scarborough (Canada). She is the co-leader of the Listening Project, a community-based research initiative that aims to work with community partners to understand and envision equitable transitions. Elisa holds a Ph.D. in Urban and Environmental Planning and Design (University of Catania), with a focus on small data and risk landscapes. She has worked both as a researcher and practitioner in environmental and spatial justice in Canada, Italy, California, and Sweden. She has been granted several grants, including a Fulbright scholarship. Furthermore, she believes in the importance of collectively self-organizing to support young researchers. For these reasons, she has been on the coordination team of the AESOP Young Academics Network and is a member of the "PlaNext-Next Generation Planning" editorial team.
SILA CEREN VARIŞ HUSAR
Middle East Technical University, Ankara, Turkey.
Sıla Ceren Varış Husar has a PhD in urban planning from Middle East Technical University, Ankara, Turkey. Her dissertation focused on regional innovation and its relation to space, people, and institutions. Most currently, she works as a postdoctoral researcher and Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellow at the Spatial Planning Department in Slovak University of Technology. Her research project is on regional innovation capacity and human agency in CEE countries with a special focus on Slovakia. She is the current chair of the AESOP Young Academics Network Coordination Team and the coordinator of AESOP Memories Project.
Dr. Chandrima Mukhopadhyay
Visiting Faculty, CEPT University, Summer Winter School, India
Chandrima Mukhopadhyay has a PhD from School of Architecture, Planning and Landscape, Newcastle University, UK. She has been working for AESOP-YA network since 2011. She has taught at the Faculty of Planning, CEPT University, India in the past. She was a visiting scholar for MIT-UTM Malaysia Sustainable Cities Program during 2017-18. She is currently working as a Senior Research Associate at School of Arts and Science, Ahmedabad University, India for the OPTIMISM project.
Agnes Matoga
University of Kaiserslautern-Landau
Agnes Matoga is a geographer and urban researcher with expertise in social transformation and demographic change. Her research focuses on governance changes and adaptation in times of crises, experimental approaches and transformative research as well as incorporating theories and methods from critical geography, ethnography and urban studies. She is co-leader of the Horizon Europe Prefigure project that aims to upscale policy, market, technical and social bottom-up innovations for energy transitions to secure affordable, accessible and energy efficient housing for all.
Dr. Francesca Leccis
The University of Cagliari in Sardinia, Italy
Francesca Leccis is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Department
of Civil and Environmental Engineering and Architecture (DICAAR) at
the University of Cagliari in Sardinia, Italy. Her prior
collaborations include working with a DICAAR research group on the
SOSLabs and GIREPAM projects.
She earned her cum laude MSc degree in Architecture from the
University of Cagliari in 2012 and subsequently achieved an MSc with
Merit in International Real Estate and Planning from University
College London in 2015. Her primary areas of interest and research
revolve around sustainable urban and regional planning, a focus she
substantiated in her doctoral thesis for the PhD in Civil and
Environmental Engineering and Architecture, she was awarded cum laude
in 2017, along with the conferment of the Doctor Europaeus certificate.
