OUR TEAM
Guy Baeten is Professor of Urban Studies at Malmö University and is the Director of the Institute for Urban Research. He has previously worked at the universities of Lund, Oxford, Leuven and Strathclyde. Guy Baeten is interested in urban development projects and urban sustainability. He is the principal investigator of the FORMAS Strong Research Environment CRUSH — Critical Urban Sustainability Hub. He is involved in two research projects on smart cities with case studies in Toronto, Copenhagen, Stockholm and Antwerp that are running between 2018 and 2020. He is also part of a project that investigates histories of the sustainability concept in Malmö urban planning.
Chiara Valli, PhD, is an urban geographer interested in housing and planning and their relations to social justice. She is currently employed as a postdoc researcher in the project ‘Smart cities for city officials’ at the Institute for Urban Research at Malmö University and she is one of the organisers of this program. Besides Smart Cities, Chiara’s research interests include: housing, housing financialisation, gentrification, segregation, Business Improvement Districts (BIDs), labour precarity, urban activism, participatory and visual research methodologies. She has conducted fieldwork in Italy, US, and Sweden.
Adriana de la Peña is research assistant at the Institute for Urban Studies at Malmö University. She has experience working in the public sector in Mexico, specifically in smart city projects. Currently, her work focuses on the Smart Cities for City Officials project and the Beyond Smart Cities Today conference, happening in Malmö in June 2022. Her research interest is to analyse the drivers of digitalisation projects in cities and how discourses are adopted and transformed.
ASSISTANTS
LIVIA DEL DUCA
Livia Del Duca has a Masters in Urban Studies from Malmö University. Her background is in Architecture. Her current research interests include housing issues such as housing commodification, grassroots housing movements, welfare state provision and neoliberal urban planning.
MARK CONNA- UGHTON
Mark Connaughton has a Masters in Urban Studies from Malmö University. He has a bachelor’s degree in linguistics and sociology, while his research interests include migration and housing, housing financialisation, territorial stigma and related interventions, as well as urban loneliness.
Institute for Urban Research
Smart Cities for City Officials is offered by the Institute for Urban Research, a university-wide research centre that brings together all urban research at Malmö University.