Speakers

Prof. Dr. Anupama Kundoo’s internationally recognised and award-winning architecture practice started in 1990, demonstrates a strong focus on material research and experimentation towards an architecture that has low environmental impact and is appropriate to the socio-economic context. Kundoo has built extensively in India and has had the experience of working, researching and teaching in a variety of cultural contexts across the world: TU Berlin, AA School of Architecture London, Parsons New School of Design New York, University of Queensland Brisbane, IUAV Venice and ETSAB Barcelona. She is currently Professor at UCJC Madrid where she is Chair of ‘Affordable Habitat’. She is also the Strauch Visiting Critic at Cornell University. Kundoo’s work extends to urban design and planning projects, with her background in rapid urbanisation related development issues, about which she has written extensively. She taught urban management at the TU Berlin and recently proposed her strategies for a future city for Africa, as part of the Milan Triennale 2014. She is the author of ‘Roger Anger: Research on Beauty/Recherche sur la Beauté, Architecture 1958-2008’ published in Berlin by Jovis Verlag in 2009. Her latest publication is a book chapter ‘Rethinking affordability in economic and environmental terms’ in the Routledge book ‘Inclusive Urbanisation: Rethinking Policy, Practice and Research in the Age of Climate Change’, 2015. Prof. Dr. Anupama Kundoo was born in Pune, India in 1967. She graduated from Sir JJ College of Architecture, University of Mumbai in 1989, and received her PhD degree from the TU Berlin in 2008. In 2013 Kundoo received an honourable mention in the ArcVision International Prize for Women in Architecture for ‘her dedication when approaching the problem of affordability of construction and sustainability in all aspects’. Her latest installation, ‘Building Knowledge, An inventory of strategies´ is currently exhibited at the 15th Venice Architecture Biennale. external page www.anupamakundoo.com  

Peter Cachola Schmal is the director of Deutsches Architekturmuseum (DAM) in Frankfurt am Main since 2006. He was both the General Commissioner for the German contribution to the 7th International Architecture Biennal 2007 in São Paulo and for the German Pavilion at the 15th International Architecture Exhibition 2016 La Biennale di Venezia with the contribution "Making Heimat. Germany, Arrival Country". Oliver Elser is the curator for that show (realized in cooperation with Anna Scheuermann). He works at the DAM since 2007. His exhibitions include: ‘The Architecture Model: Tools, Fetish, Small Utopia’ (2012), ‘The 387 Houses of Peter Fritz’ at the Venice Art Biennale 2013, and ‘Mission: Postmodern. Heinrich Klotz and the Wunderkammer DAM’ (2014). Together they will talk about building for refugees and the current housing shortage in Germany.

Dr. Graham Tipple has over 40 years of experience in housing and urban development issues in developing countries at national and regional (city) level, particularly as they affect the poor majority. He spent seven years working in Africa (Zambia and Ghana) and 30 years at the University of Newcastle upon Tyne. He has published over a hundred papers on urban policy in Africa and the developing world in general, he is joint editor with Ken Willis of “Housing the poor in the developing world: methods of analysis, case studies and policy”, London: Routledge (1991), author of “Extending themselves: user-initiated transformation of government-built housing in developing countries”, Liverpool: Liverpool University Press (2000), and joint author with Suzanne Speak of “The missing millions: homelessness in developing countries”, London, Routledge (2009). Has been a consultant on housing issues to the World Bank, UN-Habitat, UNCRD, ILO, The Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, DFID (South Africa), CSIR (South Africa), South African Cities Network, Comic Relief and UK companies. Recent consultancies include six national urban housing sector profiles; State of Cities work in Iraq, Syria and South Africa; advising on housing and slum upgrading in Sub-Saharan Africa, affordable housing finance, and stocktaking urban housing in Sub-Saharan Africa, particularly Ethiopia. He has recently written the report on which the Housing chapter in the World Cities Report, 2016, is based.

Claudio Acioly is the Head Capacity Building at UN-Habitat (United Nations Human Settlements Programme). He is an architect and urban planner, a development practitioner with more than 30 years of experience in planning, design, management, implementation and evaluation of housing and urban development policies and projects in over 25 different countries. His career spanned from theory and practice in a continuum from active professional engagements to academic works in post-graduation education and problem-solving courses linking urban planning, housing, urban regeneration and slum upgrading. Next to his practical experience, he also wrote, published and lectured extensively on several city and urban development topics building an extensive academic curriculum. He is the author of books and articles dealing for example with housing development, planning and designing slum upgrading, urban informality, urban densities, strategic planning and participatory urban management.

Dr. Jennifer Duyne Barenstein is a social anthropology specialized in socio-cultural dimensions of housing, urban development, informal settlements, resettlement, and post-disaster reconstruction. As a senior researcher at the University of Applied Sciences of Southern Switzerland she founded and the World Habitat Research Centre, a centre of competence specialized in interdisciplinary research and consultancies on socio-economic, cultural, environmental, and technical dimensions of the built environment. Dr. Jennifer Duyne Barenstein directed several international research projects on in India, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Argentina, Nicaragua with funding from the Swiss National Science Foundation and the Swiss Agency for Development Cooperation (SDC). At present she is the team leader of the Housing Recovery and Reconstruction Platform (HRRP) in Nepal on behalf of UN and SDC. Based in Kathmandu she is also the project director of an ongoing research project on “Towards an inclusive urban reconstruction policy development process in Nepal” funded by the International Institute for Environment and Development (IIED), London. She is the author of several publications on informal settlements, resettlement, housing and post-disaster reconstruction and one of the lead authors of “Safer Homes, Stronger Communities, A Handbook for Reconstruction after Natural Disasters’ published by the World Bank in 2010. 

Prof. Dr. Nabil Bonduki is architect and town planner, formed by the University of São Paulo (1978), master's degree (1987) and doctorate (1995) in Urban Environmental Structures. Bonduki is full professor of urban planning in the University of São Paulo and city councilman at City of São Paulo (2013-2016). He was Superintendent of Popular Housing (1989-1992) and coordinated twice the elaboration of the Strategic Master Plan of the City of São Paulo (2002 and 2014). He rendered consultancy for several cities at Brazil in the elaboration of master plans and housing plan. He worded in the coordination of the National Plan of Housing (2007-2008). He worded in the housing plan in Cape Verde and Mozambique and he went work as a Nacional Secretary of Urban Environment of the Ministry of Environment (2011-2012). Bonduki has experience in the area of housing, urban and regional planning, urban history, environment policy and cultural policy. Bonduki has hundreds of papers published in books, newspapers and vehicles of social communication and 13 published books, among the ones which Origins of the Social House in Brazil (Estação Liberdade 1998), now in the 6a edition, and Pioneers of the Social House, in three volumes, that it received the “Prêmio Jabuti”, the more important book prix in Brazil.

Prof. Milica Topalovic is Assistant Professor of Architecture & Territorial Planning at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology ETH Zurich. She held research professorship at the ETH Future Cities Laboratory in Singapore from 2011-15, and was head of research at the ETH Studio Basel Contemporary City Institute from 2006-11. Her research and teaching focus on territorial urbanization, in particular the relations between cities and their hinterlands. She graduated with distinction from the Faculty of Architecture in Belgrade and received a Master’s degree from the Dutch Berlage Institute with thesis on Belgrade’s postsocialist urban transformation. Since 2000, she worked on projects in different spatial scales and visual media. She collaborated on urban design and urban planning competitions and studies with offices in the Netherlands, Belgium and Switzerland. She lectured and exhibited at the Architectural Association, Shenzhen Biennale of Architecture and Urbanism, Milan Polytechnic, Kunsthal Rotterdam, deSingel in Antwerp, Munich’s Haus der Kunst and the Swedish Architecture Museum, among others, She contributed essays on urbanism, architecture and art to magazines and publications including Oase, San Rocco and AD. With ETH Studio Basel she authored and edited Belgrade. Formal / Informal: A Research on Urban Transformation showing informality in the global north, and the Inevitable Specificity of Cities, on territory, power and difference in cities and urban regions such as Hong Kong, Casablanca and the Nile Valley. She is currently working on the forthcoming book Hinterland: Singapore Beyond the Border, and conducting research and design studios on European Countryside.

Dr. Margrit Hugentobler received her Ph.D in Urban, Technological and Environmental Planning and a M.S.W. degree from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor  (USA). She has worked as a researcher and senior scientist at ETH Wohnforum – ETH CASE since 1992, and has been the director of the interdisciplinary research group on architecture, society and the & built environment between 2009 – 2015. Her research focuses on housing qualities, access to housing for different groups, urban density and sustainable urban development. For more details please click here.

Dr. phil. Marie Antoinette Glaser is Director of the ETH Wohnforum – ETH CASE at the Department of Architecture at ETH Zurich. She researches and teaches as cultural anthropologist and lecturer at the ETH Wohnforum – ETH CASE Centre for Research on Architecture, Society & the Built Environment since 2004. She is scientific director and Co-convenor of the interdisciplinary Master of advanced studies course MAS ETH in Housing. Her research approach contains cultural studies in architecture, social and cultural history of Housing, social sustainability; Housing and poverty. For more details please click here.

Prof. Dipl.–Ing. Regine Keller is Full Professor of Landscape Architecture and Public Space at the Department of Architecture, Technical University of Munich (TUM). Her current research focuses, amongst many other things, on "Informal Settlements" recently in Madrid.