Keynote speakers

Sabine Knierbein (European Urban Studies (PhD), Internationale Urbanistik (PD)) is an Associate Professor for Urban Culture and Public Space and the Head of the Interdisciplinary Centre for Urban Culture and Public Space. She works at the Institute of Spatial Planning of the Faculty of Architecture and Planning at Technische Universität Wien in Austria. Sabine further holds a Journey(wo)man’s certificate as a landscape gardener and is a Chartered Engineer in Landscape Architecture / Open Space Planning. She has worked as Visiting Professor for Urban Political Geography (2020) and a Visiting Researcher (2021) at the Social Geography Lab (LAGeS) at the University of Florence as well as a Visiting Researcher at the Institute of Urban Design at Hafen City University Hamburg (2022). She is a founding member and advisory board member of the AESOP Thematic Group of Public Spaces and Urban Cultures.

Sabine explores everyday life and urbanization; urban politics, the political and democracy; disruptive precarity, unsettlement and crises; social inequality and intersectional urban research methodology and more recently also democracy theory, dissidence and alter politics. Sabine has co-edited the books Public Space and the Challenges of Urban Transformation (2014), Public Space and Relational Perspectives (2015), City Unsilenced (2017), Public Space Unbound (2018), Care and the City (2021), and Unsettled Urban Space (2023), all published with Routledge. Two monographs entitled Everyday Life and Urban Studies (Routledge, forthcoming 2026) and Lived Space and Urban Studies (planned for 2027) are currently in the making.

Päivi Kymäläinen is a Professor of Social Policy at Tampere University, Finland. Her position is linked with Tampere University’s profilation area STUE (Sustainable Transformation of Urban Environments) and the question of socially sustainable cities. Päivi is also a Docent of Legal and Urban Geography, and leads the Research Network for Justice, Space and Society (JUSTSPACES). She is currently a PI in the research projects Housing Precarity (2024–2028), Forest Rights (2024–2027) and Space, Justice and Everyday Democracy (2022–2026). She has previously worked at the Universities of Turku and Oulu and at the Helsinki University of Technology, served as a visiting professor/scholar in Nordic (NTNU, Roskilde University, Uppsala University) and North American (Simon Fraser University, University of Pennsylvania) universities, and has been a Fulbright Senior Scholar at Syracuse University, US.

Päivi’s research interests include urban inequality, everyday democracy, housing precarity and place/law relations. She approaches these questions mostly through everyday life and practices, and in the contexts of alternative communities, suburban neighborhoods and urban public spaces.

Ross Beveridge is an interdisciplinary urbanist who has taught and published widely on urban forms of politics and democracy in diverse global contexts. Currently he is a Senior Lecturer in Urban Studies in the School of Social and Political Sciences at the University of Glasgow and a Visiting Researcher at the Georg-Simmel Centre for Urban Studies at the Humboldt University of Berlin.

Ross’s recent co-authored book, How Cities Can Transform Democracy (2022, Polity Press) presents a novel way of seeing democracy, shifting perspectives from institutions to practices, from jurisdictional scales to spaces of collective urban life, and from fixed communities to emergent political subjects. He is also co-founder and co-editor of the Urban Political Podcast which facilitates international dialogues on urban scholarship and activism.