Writers

Hector Fernando Burga was born in Lima, Peru, and currently lives between Miami, Florida and Berkeley, Calif. He is a doctoral candidate in the Department of City and Regional Planning at UC Berkeley and a Graduate Fellow at the Center for Research on Social Change. An architect and urban designer by training, his research focuses on metropolitan Miami, where he investigates how empowered immigrant communities challenge institutional planning practices through material, legal and cultural claims to the city. These interrogations are framed by an understanding of critical urban theory, ethnographic methods and professional practice. He is also the co-founder of Up-Lab, a Design Think Tank Startup based in Miami.

George Carothers was born into the international household of a development practitioner and a tropical medicine specialist. He trained as an urban planner in Waterloo and later worked as a researcher of urban studies in Toronto. He is currently a doctoral student at the University of Cambridge in the Department of Geography, investigating the linkages between world city building, informality and cultures of resistance within globalizing cities. George holds a master's degree from the Bartlett School of Planning, University College London, where he explored processes of participatory planning in informal settlements in India. His research and interests in urbanism have taken him to numerous cities, villages and huts around the globe. He works with URBZ in Dharavi.

Min Li Chan hails from Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, and has most recently lived in Hong Kong, New York and San Francisco. She is perennially curious and passionate about the intersection of technology, entrepreneurship, public policy, international development, anthropology and design. Upon graduating from Stanford University in electrical engineering, Min Li joined Google, traveled and worked across cities in Asia Pacific on a range of initiatives, including technologies for emerging economies, NGOs and open web developers. Previously, Min Li has contributed to iinnovate, a podcast on innovation and entrepreneurship and Solutions Magazine, a publication on social entrepreneurship. Min Li is currently based in the San Francisco Bay Area. When not traveling and observing the way people live and use technology, she is a self-professed music geek and enjoys playing music, walking in and photographing urban spaces and people, and connecting with fellow global nomads.

Natalia Echeverri was born in New York City but grew up in Bogota, Colombia. She is a candidate for the joint Masters in Architecture and City Planning at the University of California, Berkeley. She studied architecture at the Universidad de Los Andes in Bogota and graduated with a B.A. from the University of Washington in Seattle in 2001. In 2008, she received the J.K. Branner Traveling Fellowship, which allowed her to travel around the world researching the topic “Neoliberal Fragments: Speculations in the Urban Landscape.” Her graduate thesis, “After the Crash: Reinventing Suburbia,” has been short-listed for the exhibition Parallel Cases in the 4th International Architectural Biennale in Rotterdam in September 2009.

Anna Fogel works for ShoreBank International, an international consulting firm in Washington, D.C., that works to expand access to finance, focusing on microfinance, housing finance and small business finance. She was previously a Trustman Traveling Fellow and studied low-income housing development in India and Israel for a year. She spent six months in India evaluating the sustainability of the design and financing of slum redevelopment programs. She then worked in Israel on the beginnings of community participation in planning in Jaffa. She returned to the USA to work on Obama’s campaign in Youngstown, Ohio, where she witnessed a rustbelt city’s housing challenges. She worked with housing advocacy organizations in New York, Boston and DC while earning her BA at Harvard College where she wrote a thesis on the design of a low-rise, high-density housing project in Brooklyn.

Melissa Garcia Lamarca spent her formative years in Mexico City, subconsciously piquing her fascination of cities, especially issues of space, place, community, equity, social change and sustainability. She explored these themes through studies in geography, economics and international development (McGill) community economic development (Concordia) and more recently through a Masters in Building and Urban Design in Development (University College London). Currently based in Palma de Mallorca, Spain, Melissa has grown up a nomad, working and living in many places around the world; her longest ‘home’ was Montreal, working on sustainability issues at Concordia University for many years and with Sustainability Solutions Group, a workers cooperative consulting firm helping create more sustainable institutions and places. She was Traveling Faculty with the IHP's Cities in the 21st Century programme in 2011 and is now a Teaching Fellow at UCL's Development Planning Unit.

Rebecka Gordan is a journalist focusing on the social aspects of architecture, design and city planning. She is an editor and reporter at Arkitekten, the journal of the Swedish Association of Architects, and editor for New Urban Topologies, an international urban exchange project. She is the author of a forthcoming book on informal housing in India. Previously, Rebecka was assistant editor at The Architect's Newspaper in N.Y. and a contributor to the 2010 yearbook of the Swedish Museum of Architecture. She received a B.A. in Modern Urban History and an M.A. in Journalism from Stockholm University.

Ali Madad is a designer, writer, educator, hierophant and principal in New York and Los Angeles based SCTY, a multi-disciplinary art and design practice dedicated to the manifestation of creative disruptions. His work focuses on the both the theoretical and public role design plays within culture and public space. He has been a Visiting Assistant Professor of Communication Design at Pratt Institute since 2004 and was a Visiting Artist at Cooper Union in 2009.

Vivien Park is a Hong Kong-born, Chicago-based installation and new media artist. After working for several years as an interaction and graphic designer for the high-tech industry in Seattle, Vivien returned to the academic setting in 2005 to complete her degree in painting and drawing at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Fascinated by topology, place and non-place, she explores these ideas in site-specific installations that draw references from architecture, construction materials, and her experiences in the corporate world. Vivien has exhibited in various group and solo shows in Chicago. She designs next-generation user experiences for Motorola during the day, and occasionally VJs for electronic music shows under the name gravitymax.

Jordi Sánchez-Cuenca is a Spanish urban planner, trained in Barcelona’s School of Architecture and London’s Development Planning Unit. He has lived and worked in Barcelona, Hanoi, London, Nagercoil, Pondicherry and Palma de Mallorca, and had short work experiences in Accra, Belo Horizonte, Ho Chi Minh City, Madrid, Mumbai, Nanjing and Pune. Jordi is currently working in Quito, Ecuador, coordinating 3 ministries and 5 UN agencies in the implementation of an innovative water and sanitation programme. Jordi is a particularly stubborn supporter of participatory democracy and environmental sustainability, and he’s constantly looking for new opportunities to be challenged on these issues.

Katia Savchuk spent a year and half as a documentation consultant for SPARC, an Indian NGO supporting urban poor communities to access secure shelter, and co-organized Urban Typhoon Koliwada, a participatory planning workshop in Mumbai's largest informal settlement. She subsequently worked as a private investigator at the James Mintz Group in San Francisco, conducting due-diligence, anti-corruption and litigation-related investigations around the world. Her writing has appeared in Environment and Urbanization, PBS MediaShift, SF Public Press, Palo Alto Weekly, Ethical Traveler and Let's Go Travel Guides. She has a B.A. in Social Studies from Harvard and is completing an MSc in Urbanisation and Development at LSE. She is chief editor for Polis.

After a decade doing immigrant rights and housing justice work in California and New York, Alex Schafran is now a doctoral student in the Department of City and Regional Planning at UC Berkeley, where his main focus is attempting to understand (and articulate) the connection between the shifting geographies of race and class segregation in the American metropolis, neoliberal urban policy and the urban crises of the postwar era and today. He continues to work as a practicing planner and advocate with the Richmond Equitable Development Initiative, a partnership of community-based organizations and non-profit advocates working for social justice and equitable development in Richmond, CA, and remains active on the steering committee of Planners Network. In order to remind himself not to take himself (or any of us) too seriously, he maintains a blog dedicated to urban satire, where he actively welcomes contributions.

Peter Sigrist is a PhD student in City and Regional Planning at Cornell University. He is currently working on a historical study of public parks in Moscow. His interests include adaptive reuse, horticulture, art, and walking around in cities. He is author of the blog Civic Nature.

Andrew Wade grew up among the cornfields of Maryland, studied architecture at McGill University in Montréal and design for development at University College London. His professional life has grown by working for small architectural firms in London while serving on the board of directors of the UK chapter of the American Institute of Architects and leading the evolution of their film series. He is currently the postgraduate teaching assistant for the MSc Building and Urban Design in Development programme in the Bartlett's Development Planning Unit, where he attempts to decode the agency of design in forming coordinated strategies for development in the Global South.

Summer Interns

Dylan Bulkeley-Krane will be a senior at Stanford University majoring in Urban Studies. He is director of Stanford’s Speakers Bureau, through which he has invited a variety of fascinating and influential people to campus (including Thomas Friedman, Perez Hilton, Wolf Blitzer, and James Franco). Within the Urban Studies department, Dylan is concentrating on Cities in Comparative and Historical Perspective, with a special interest in the cultural and social dynamics of large metropolitan centers. He is focusing on San Francisco, Chicago and Washington, D.C. as major case studies, and in the fall he is heading to Paris to study abroad. Previously, Dylan was a research assistant for the Sociology Department, analyzing the political effects of boarding houses on America’s first congressmen in Washington, D.C. In addition to his academic work, Dylan loves politics, cooking, and exploring new places.

Dylan Crary is an aspiring urbanist. He was born and raised on the east side of Los Angeles, where his love for city exploration and taco connoisseurship was born. He is an undergraduate in the Department of City and Regional Planning at UC Berkeley studying housing and local government. He recently returned from a semester with IHP’s Cities of the 21st Century program comparing urban issues through experiential learning in New York, Delhi, Dakar, and Buenos Aires. He is currently an intern with the Los Angeles Housing Department’s Policy and Planning Unit.

Melanie Friedrichs was born in Washington, D.C., and has lived most of her life in Bethesda, Maryland. In the fall, she will begin her final year at Brown University, where she studies economics and pursues interests in social entrepreneurship and development studies. From January to May 2011, she traveled to New York, India, Senegal, and Argentina with Polis writer Melissa Garcia Lamarca and fellow interns Julia Waterhous and Dylan Crary on an around-the-world comparative urban studies program. In her free time, she is an avid ultimate frisbee player.

Yolanta Siu spent most of her life in a quiet, suburban neighborhood in Southern California but has fond feelings for large cities due to close ties with her busy hometown of Hong Kong. She is currently a second year-student at UC Berkeley, working towards a bachelor’s degree in urban studies. She is particularly interested in the ways in which design impacts how people interact with the built environment and the role of technology in shaping cities.

Sosseh Valentine Taimoorian is a fourth-year undergraduate at UC Berkeley, with a major in urban studies and minor in global poverty and practice. She is currently conducting fieldwork in Washington, D.C., where she hopes to engage with and critique methods of funneling aid to developing countries. Previously, Sosseh was a student researcher for the School of Public Health and the Institute of Transportation Studies, conducted ethnographies on cities across California, and reported on topics like the Rwandan genocide, commodification along the U.S.-Mexico Border, and institutional causes of poverty in Jamaica. Sosseh enjoys discovering underground hip-hop artists, delving into the spoken-word scene, and listening to the countless stories the world has to offer.

Julia Waterhous is from the family-friendly, middle-class, suburban town of Corvallis, Oregon, where she was thoroughly bored and hence decided to pursue her undergraduate degree at Boston University, where she studies journalism and psychology. She is spending the summer interning at Seattle Weekly. Julia recently returned from a semester abroad with the International Honors Program studying urban planning and public policy in Delhi, Dakar, and Buenos Aires, which sparked an interest in sustainable food production, land and housing rights, and the rights of the poor, particularly urban recyclers. She continues to look for ways to humanize issues and remind people that, in a globalized world, our actions affect not only the planet but the people everywhere.