Director
- Director, LSE Cities
- Professor of Urban Studies, LSE
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Ricky Burdett
Ricky Burdett is Professor of Urban Studies at LSE and Director of the Urban Age and LSE Cities, a global centre of research and teaching at LSE which received the Queen’s Anniversary Prize for Higher and Further Education 2016-18. He is a member of the Mayor of London’s Cultural Leadership Board, Council Member of the Royal College of Art and a Trustee of the Norman Foster Foundation. He was Director of the Venice International Architecture Biennale and Curator of the Global Cities Exhibition Tate Modern in London. He was a member of the UK Government Airport Commission (2012-2015) and a member of UK Government’s Urban Task Force. In 2014, Burdett was a Visiting Professor in Urban Planning and Design at the Graduate School of Design, Harvard University and Global Distinguished Professor at New York University (2010-2014). Alongside his academic activities, Burdett acts as a consultant to national and city governments, private companies and philanthropic agencies. He was Chief Adviser on Architecture and Urbanism for the 2012 London Olympics and Adviser on Architecture and Urbanism, Mayor of London (2001-2006). He is co-editor of ‘Shaping Cities in an Urban Age’ (2018), ‘The SAGE Handbook of the 21st Century’ (2017), ‘Living in the Endless City’ (2011) and ‘The Endless City’ (2007). Burdett was appointed CBE in the 2017 New Year’s Honours list for services to urban design and planning.
Executive director
- Executive Director, LSE Cities
- Associate Professorial Research Fellow, LSE
- Co-Director, Executive MSc in Cities, LSE
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Philipp Rode
Philipp Rode is Executive Director of LSE Cities and Associate Professorial Research Fellow at the London School of Economics and Political Science. He is co-director of the LSE Executive MSc in Cities and co-convenes the LSE Sociology Course on ‘City Making: The Politics of Urban Form’. He holds a PhD from the Department of Sociology at the LSE that focused on urban governance and integrated policy making. As researcher, consultant and advisor he has been directing interdisciplinary projects comprising urban governance, transport, city planning and urban design at the LSE since 2003. The focus of his current work is on institutional structures and governance capacities of cities as part of an international collaboration with UN-Habitat/Habitat III and on city-level green economy strategies, which includes co-directing the LSE Cities research for the Global Commission on the Economy and Climate. He has previously led the coordination of the chapters on Green Cities and Green Buildings for the United Nations Environment Programme’s Green Economy Report. He is Executive Director of the Urban Age Programme and since 2005 has organised Urban Age conferences in partnership with Deutsche Bank’s Alfred Herrhausen Gesellschaft in over a dozen world cities, bringing together political leaders, city mayors, urban practitioners, private sector representatives and academic experts. He manages the Urban Age research efforts and recently co-authored Towards New Urban Mobility: The case of London and Berlin (2015), Cities and Energy: Urban morphology and heat energy demand (2014), Transforming Urban Economies (2013) and Going Green: How cities are leading the next economy (2012).
Cities Programme director
Centre staff
- Professorial Research Fellow, LSE Cities, LSE Cities
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- Outreach Manager, LSE Cities
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- BA (Hons)
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- Management Accounts Coordinator, LSE Cities
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- MSc, PhD
- Assistant Professorial Research Fellow, LSE Cities
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- MSc (Res)
- MEng
- Research Officer, LSE Cities
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- BA (Hons)
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- Policy Fellow, LSE Cities
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- Executive MSc Programme Administrator, LSE Cities
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- Research Fellow, LSE Cities
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- Researcher
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- Researcher, LSE Cities
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- Executive MSc Programme Manager, LSE Cities
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- MSc
- Researcher, LSE Cities
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- Senior Research Fellow, LSE Cities
- Deputy Director of the Executive MSc in Cities
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Jo Beall
Professor Jo Beall is a Professorial Research Fellow at the LSE and has conducted research in Africa and Asia on urban development and governance as well as cities in situations of conflict and state fragility. She is a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences and was recently awarded an Honorary Doctorate by the Open University. She has written numerous books and articles on a wide range of topics.
Emily Cruz
Emily Cruz is the Outreach Manager at LSE Cities, overseeing all of the Centre’s events and outreach activity. She is an experienced project manager and administrator, and has worked for 20 years in the public and educational sectors. Over this time she has coordinated and delivered publications, exhibitions, conferences and events in the fields of architecture, urban design and art: working as the Architecture Foundation’s Exhibition Coordinator; as Publications and Events Manager for the LSE’s Urban Age Programme, in Liverpool Biennial’s development team and as the London Manager of Theatrum Mundi at LSE Cities.
Sarah Davis
Sarah Davis joined LSE Cities in June 2009. She manages and operates the finance activities of the Centre, acting as accounts co-ordinator for all accounting and daily financial procedures as well as providing 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.
Nuno Ferreira da Cruz
Nuno Ferreira da Cruz is an Assistant Professorial Research Fellow Research Fellow at LSE Cities and the Coordinator of the New Urban Governance project. Upon completing his MSc, and while working in the private sector, he won a PhD Studentship awarded by the Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology. After this, his research activities resulted in the publication of several journal articles on a wide range of policy issues, including local governance, transparency and sustainability indicators, performance measurement and benchmarking, management and delivery of urban services, corporatisation, privatisation and public-private partnership arrangements, and a number of interrelated topics. His latest research efforts have been focused on network urban governance. As a consultant, Nuno has been a frequent collaborator with Transparency International (TI). Among other consultancy projects, he was responsible for developing several Local Government Transparency Indices. Moreover, he was the Principal Investigator responsible for piloting TI’s Local Integrity System (LIS) Tool in Portugal. Nuno has also been lecturing and convening training workshops related to both his research and consultancy efforts. He is a member of the Editorial Board of Urban Affairs Review.
Alexandra Gomes
Alexandra Gomes is a Research Officer and responsible for coordinating LSE Cities’ spatial analysis across a range of projects. She is currently completing her PhD at UCL Bartlett School of Planning, where she is developing a multi-sensory approach to urban spatial analysis, while working as a teaching assistant at the Bartlett Planning UCL.
At LSE Cities she coordinated the Resource Urbanisms project, and supported other projects that include Shaping Cities in An Urban Age (book), Urban Age Africa newspaper, Yangon analytics, RAMSES (a project funded by the European Commission) and Urban Age Delhi.
Prior to joining LSE Cities she worked as a Research Assistant at The Bartlett School of Planning and Geography Departments at UCL. She holds an MSc (Res) in Sociology and Development Planning from ISCTE-IUL and an MEng in Urban Engineering from IST-UL (Portugal). In Portugal she also worked in spatial planning, sustainable transport mobility and spatial analysis at CESUR – Instituto Superior Tecnico, Lisbon University.
Catarina Heeckt
Catarina Heeckt is a Policy Fellow at LSE Cities. She works on policy oriented research projects that inform and influence decision-making, particularly in relation to sustainable mobility, low-carbon urban development and urban governance. She joined LSE Cities in 2012 to work on the Economics of Green Cities programme and has since contributed to a significant number of reports, projects and policy initiatives, including work on the co-benefits of urban climate action for C40, developing a comparative urban analytics database for Yangon with the International Growth Centre, and coordinating the inputs of 20 global governance experts to the New Urban Agenda agreed at Habitat III. Catarina is the Project Manager for LSE Cities’ contribution to the Coalition for Urban Transitions. In this capacity her current research focuses on the role that national transport policies can play in shaping compact and connected urban development. Catarina is also closely involved with LSE Cities executive teaching efforts. Catarina holds an MSc in Environmental Policy and Regulation from the LSE and a BA (Hons) in Political Science and International Development from McGill University.
Laurence Horstman
Laurence Horstman joined the team in 2016 to support the launch of the new Executive MSc in Cities, and previously worked with the Department of Government at LSE. He is a graduate of Theatre, Film and Television with a strong interest in documentary and multimedia performance. Laurence has worked as a soundtrack advisor and sound designer for documentary feature film and BBC television and broadcasts a monthly radio show on NTS Radio.
Julia King
Julia King is a Research Fellow at LSE Cities and the coordinator for numerous research strands including ‘Streets for All’ a research project commissioned by the Greater London Authority and on-going work on urban governance in India. She currently teaches on the Cities Masters Programme at LSE, and runs a design studio at Central Saint Martins. Trained as an architect her research, design practice and teaching focus on sanitation and housing in the context of rapid urbanisation, inequitable infrastructure developments and urban micro-culture in the UK and India. Her work has been exhibited internationally including the 2016 Venice Architectural Biennial, the Southbank Centre and Somerset House. She was awarded a Royal Commission for 1851 grant (2017-2019) to develop design solutions cross cutting the sanitation chain from toilet to co-designed community infrastructure. She has won numerous awards for her work and practice including Emerging Woman Architect of the Year (2014), NLA Award (2016) and shortlisted for a Deutsche Bank Urban Age Award (2014) and Civic Trust Regional Award (2016). She has authored chapters in Home Economics (2016) and Infrastructure Space (2017) and co-authored a chapter in The SAGE Handbook of the 21st Century City (2017).
Meghna Mohandas
Meghna Mohandas is currently pursuing her postgraduate degree in the MSc. City Design and Social Science program at LSE. She holds an undergraduate degree in architecture from the School of Planning and Architecture, Bhopal, India. She has previously worked with two non-profit organizations (SELCO Foundation and the Indian Housing Federation) in India where she worked on developing housing solutions for low-income communities. Meghna won the third prize in the Berkeley Essay Writing Competition (by University of Berkeley, California) 2015 for her article “Vermillion of Hope”, and has worked as a contributing author for Vowels India magazine where she wrote about the intersection of architecture and informality. She has also attended various courses on architecture and planning, including a short-term program on Urban Planning at Aalto University, Finland. She is currently working as a part-time Research Assistant on the “Experiencing Density” project at LSE Cities.
Do Young Oh
Do Young Oh is a Researcher at LSE Cities, currently working on the Metropolitan Indicators project. He is also a Visiting Fellow at LSE Saw Swee Hock Southeast Asia Centre. He holds a PhD in Regional and Urban Planning from the LSE and MSc in International Planning from UCL. His research interests focus on comparative urbanism and postcolonialism. His doctoral thesis investigated the evolving university-city relationship through a comparative analysis of East Asian urbanisation processes. Prior to joining the LSE, Do Young worked in the fields of architecture and urban planning in Seoul, New York, and Prague. He was also a founding partner of ONplan, an urban planning consultancy now based in Prague.
Jim Osborne
Jim Osborne joined LSE Cities in August 2016 as Executive MSc Programme Manager. Prior to that he worked as a postgraduate education administrator in Imperial College’s Faculty of Medicine, where he assisted the Associate Dean for Science and Postgraduate Education on a number of Faculty initiatives. He received his PhD in English Literature from the University of Southampton in 2015.
Akil Scafe-Smith
Akil is a UCL Graduate, holding a master’s in building and Urban Design in Development from the Bartlett Development Planning Unit. He is the co-founder of RESOLVE, an interdisciplinary design collective that aims to address multi-scalar social challenges by combining architecture, art, technology and engineering. RESOLVE have delivered numerous projects, workshops, and talks, in London and across Europe as well as working with UCL Engineering Outreach and the Access Project to pilot projects that introduce young people from under-represented backgrounds to STEM subjects and concepts in interdisciplinary design.
In 2018 Akil became part of the first cohort of Public Practice, an initiative supported by the Mayor of London that places a new generation of planners within local government to shape places for the public good. Under this initiative he worked as a Project Officer for Placemaking in the London Borough of Croydon’s Spatial Planning Team and conducted research into how Local Authorities can better facilitate meanwhile use projects for long-term community benefit.
Savvas Verdis
Savvas Verdis is a Senior Research Fellow at LSE Cities, the Deputy Director of the Executive MSc in Cities and the founder of challengecircles.com. Until recently he was Director of Infrastructure Economics at Siemens Cities. At the LSE, he manages the Executive Education programmes, which include: tailored learning experiences for organisations; the Executive Summer School programme on London and Global Cities; and the Executive MSc in Cities. He previously worked in the advisory service of LSE Cities and led the research of the ninth Urban Age conference in Rio de Janeiro. He has consulted numerous city and national governments on their infrastructure strategies in countries such as Australia, Brazil, Ethiopia, Germany, the Netherlands, Russia and Turkey. From 2009 to 2012, he was founder and CEO of Property Analytics, an algorithm-based property rating website that ranked residential properties in London and New York. He received his PhD from Cambridge University in 2007.
Tim White
Tim White joined LSE Cities in 2016 to work on the ‘Experiencing Density’ project, which explores the day-to-day life of residents in London’s new high-density housing. He is also an ESRC-funded PhD candidate on the Cities Programme at LSE, where he is tracing the proliferation of corporatized ‘co-living’ spaces in urban centres. Tim’s work examines urban change – focusing particularly on housing, class and community. Tim holds an MPhil in Planning, Growth and Regeneration from Cambridge University, and a Geography degree from King’s College London.
