TEMA T fellowship programme "Urban and Regional Climate Transition"

Prince Guma is an interdisciplinary social and political scientist whose work sits at the intersection of critical urban studies, infrastructure studies, and technology studies, with a focus on development, political economy, and social justice. He earned his PhD in 2021 from the Department of Human Geography and Spatial Planning at Utrecht University, where his research explored the diffusion and adoption of new plans, ideas, and technologies in urban and infrastructure domains. He is currently an Honorary Research Fellow at the British Institute in Eastern Africa, where he previously served as Assistant Country Director.

From 2008, Prince spent three years working with regional institutions on programs aimed at building capacity and promoting justice. In 2012, he transitioned into academia, initially focusing on public-sector management and civic governance before shifting to the geographies of the built environment, the digital, and the urban. Driven by a commitment to addressing key social challenges through collaboration and the application of science in real-world contexts, his work seeks to open new avenues for exploration, contribute fresh insights from the global South, and expand possibilities for alternative theorization. He serves on the editorial boards of Urban Geography, Dialogues in Urban Research, Digital Geography and Society, Erdkunde, and UCL Press Urban Africa Book Series.

Jacob Park is a Visiting Professor, Trilateral Research Chair in Transformative Innovation, University of Johannesburg (South Africa) and Associate Professor, Vermont State University (USA).

As an interdisciplinary business school/management studies scholar whose research and teaching interests lie at the intersection of technology innovation, entrepreneurial management, urban/regional development, and climate change/sustainability sciences, I am excited to spend January 2025 as a TEMA T visiting fellow engaging the Technology and Social Change and the wider Linköping University community with the multiple dimensions of what I refer to as “sustainable” urban infrastructure, with a special focus on climate change/sustainable development financing.

I contribute to a wide of global sustainability science efforts, most notably as the Coordinating Lead Author on the UNEP Global Environment Outlook (GEO-7) project and as the Chair of IUCN/World Conservation Union Commission on Environmental, Social, and Economic Policy (CEESP) on the Business, Best Practice and Accountability Thematic Group.

Peter Walsh is a judicial decision maker (Commissioner) in the Land and Environment Court of New South, a specialist environmental Superior Court in Australia. Peter hears contested legal appeals relating to land use, building development and resource management projects.

Prior to joining the Court, Peter was a city planner working both in private practice and academia. He remains a Fellow of the Planning Institute of Australia. His doctorate linked socio-technical transitions conceptions to city planning reform in Sydney.

Peter’s central research interest is in how city planning, and related governance systems, might transform to better enable more equitable and sustainable outcomes for cities subject to population growth. He has observed how, in planned system reform efforts, the institutional settings (“rules of the game”) can be inclined to favour those already empowered and push against the most vulnerable. He is attracted to scholarship’s examination of the intricacies of this problem setting and its uncovering of empirically based implementation practicalities (mindful of Johan Schot’s claim: “there’s nothing as practical as good theory”). A second area of research interest is in the bridging of socio-technical transitions conceptions with environmental policy legal scholarship.

Elina Hasanen is a social scientist with a current focus on mobility transition. She is currently based at the Active Life Lab research unit, South-Eastern Finland University of Applied Sciences, and Spatial Planning and Transportation Engineering research group, Aalto University, Finland.

Dr Hasanen’s main area of expertise is in the social and cultural aspects of physical activity, particularly in youth and childhood. Her current research interests include active travel, equal accessibility, and physical activity environments in both urban and rural settings. In her work she has integrated perspectives from sociology, youth studies, and human geography. Her ongoing project also combines these perspectives, when looking at change in the everyday travel practices of young people in urban and rural areas. Elina also has a special interest in cycling, including its municipal and regional governance and policy processes. She has collaborated with multidisciplinary teams and participated in multisectoral projects involving actors from sport, education, urban planning, and traffic sectors.

Suyash Jolly is a Senior researcher (Researcher IV) at the Department of Human Geography and Regional Development, University of Ostrava, Czech Republic and is also an affiliated member of CIRCLE, Lund University.

He is currently working on the long-term sustainability transformation and climate change adaptation in old and peripheral industrial regions in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE). Suyash has extensive research experience working on diverse research projects and case studies related to socio-technical transitions and transformative regional development in India and Nordic countries, including the High North in the Arctic, Austria, France, and Switzerland. He has worked before at the Division of History of Science, Technology and Environment, KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm and the Department of Human Geography, Lund University in Sweden and at the Green Transition and Transformative Action Group, Nordland Research Institute, Bodø in Norway. Suyash was initially trained as an innovation studies and sustainability transitions scholar with a master's and PhD in innovation sciences from the Department of Industrial Engineering and Innovation Sciences, Eindhoven University of Technology, The Netherlands. He also has additional training in Science, Technology and Society Studies (STS) from the Netherlands Graduate Research School of Science, Technology and Modern Culture (WTMC). Suyash specializes in qualitative case study research, and many of his scientific contributions have focused on understanding the role of agency and structural institutional change.

Andrew Karvonen is Professor of Urban Design and Planning at Lund University where he conducts research on the sociotechnical aspects of urban development. He combines ideas and approaches from Science & Technology Studies and Urban Studies to study infrastructural configurations, digitalization agendas, and experimental approaches to sustainable urban development. He has published his research in Urban Studies, the International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, Urban Geography, and several other journals. Most recently, he co-edited a compendium titled ‘Artificial Intelligence and the City: Urbanistic Perspectives on AI’ (Routledge 2024).

Charlotte Cator is a critical urban scholar with a background in philosophy, (business) economics and urban studies. Her work revolves around questions of just and sustainable social, economic and urban transformations. She approaches these questions through qualitative methods and a broad range of urban, political and social theory to disentangle the interrelations between urban politics, political economy and ecology.

Charlotte is a research assistant at the Department of Business Humanities and Law, Copenhagen Business School, where she finished her PhD in 2024 and where she currently teaches courses on re-imagining capitalism, alternative organizing, social entrepreneurship and philosophy of science. In September 2025, she will start a postdoctoral project at Urban Studies, University of Glasgow, where she will conduct a comparative study of waste as an urban phenomenon in Glasgow and Mexico City. She is interested in how urban communities generate, deal with and potentially avoid waste in urban collective life, as well as how these local practices are implicated in the global political economy of waste, in which continuing international waste trade and dumping create inequalities.

Tineke van der Schoor works as an Associate Professor in Sustainable Heritage at Hanze University of Applied Sciences in Groningen, the Netherlands. She has been investigating community energy for more than ten years and has been involved in several projects, working together with local energy cooperatives. In this regard, she published on citizen-led heating networks, net congestion, development of cooperative energy providers and the role of municipalities supporting community energy initiatives. A second research interest is energy efficiency in the built environment, including energy renovation and energy efficient restoration of historic buildings. She was guest editor for a special issue on energy renovation with Urban Planning. Furthermore, she has published on the combined assessment of heritage values and sustainability values. The role of local stakeholders and the valuation of lay persons has also been an important research interest. In this respect, she has investigated local heritage groups in a diversity of settings, such as the protected landscape of the Drentse Aa and on the island of Ameland.

Presently her main focus is on sustainable heritage, which refers both to preserving heritage for future generations as well as making heritage buildings more energy efficient. Currently she is involved in a project focusing on the preservation and reuse of historic farms and rural protected landscapes. At Hanze University she has started a Heritage Lab, where students can work on a wide range of assignments from the heritage sector in an interdisciplinary setting. Topics include reuse and sustainability of historic buildings, but also digitalisation, interactive media and serious gaming for heritage.

She is now working on a project on the effects of climate change on heritage buildings, comparing approaches, policies and practical tools in different parts of Europe.

Nils Markusson works as Senior Lecturer in the politics of environmental technology at Lancaster Environment Centre, Lancaster University, UK. His research has focused empirically on carbon capture and storage technology and climate engineering, and drawn conceptually on innovation studies, science and technology studies, and cultural political economy.

Nils has studied extensively the risk that the pursuit of carbon removal technology might undermine overall climate mitigation efforts. This has included a being lead-editor of a special issue on ‘Mitigation Deterrence and Carbon Removal in the Age of Net Zero’, in the journal Environmental Science & Policy. He is currently preparing to write a book synthesising this work and arguing for cultural political economy as a theoretical perspective for studying the politics of environmental technology.

Current interests also include 1) how the hard-to-abate-ness of some industrial sectors is, and has been, socially constructed, and 2) the relation between the growing interest in carbon removal technology and the emboldening of the political far right.

Pia Laborgne is a sociologist and sustainability researcher at the Karlsruhe Transformation Centre for Sustainability and Cultural Change/KIT-ITAS in Karlsruhe, Germany. Her work focuses on urban sustainability transformations with a focus on energy and food systems, e.g. in terms of local governance, participation, knowledge co-creation and transdisciplinary research. In order to contribute to the co-creation of sustainability transformations, she is particularly interested in exploring how we can design transdisciplinary transformative research in an inclusive, engaging and motivating way to empower and involve many different people, perspectives, needs and ideas.

Current projects include the coordination of the international Belmont Forum project "Co-Creation of Sustainable Food Supply Chains through Cooperative Business Models and Governance (CO-SFSC)" and the Innovation Campus Sustainability project "Strengthening and Consolidation of Innovation Communities to Implement the Recommendations of the Climate Citizens' Council of the Freiburg Region".

Pia is coordinator and board member of the Urban Europe Research Alliance (UERA) and co-chair of the UERA TWG 4 "Governance & Participation" as well as vice-coordinator of the European Sociological Association Research Network 12 Environment and Society and member of the Management Committee of the COST Action NEXUSNET.

Karime Sánchez is an interdisciplinary researcher whose work bridges the natural and social sciences. She is currently a Ph.D. researcher affiliated with the Laboratory of Chemical and Environmental Engineering (LEQUIA) at the University of Girona, Spain. Her doctoral research critically examines how legal frameworks, societal perceptions, and political interests shape the acceptance of urban decentralized water systems, such as rainwater harvesting and on-site water reuse, across diverse socioeconomic and environmental contexts.

Her core research interests include water governance, political ecology, environmental justice, and the social acceptance of water technologies. She has actively participated in interdisciplinary environmental research projects in Spain and Chile, focusing on the socio-ecological resilience of traditional agricultural systems, cultural strategies to address water scarcity in rural areas, and nature-based solutions in urban contexts.

Committed to creating a societal impact beyond academia, she is also actively involved in volunteer initiatives, including as a managing member of Servus Scholarships (Colombia) and as part of the Teaching Innovation Network on Human Rights, Peace, and Sustainability at the University of Girona.

Marc Dijk (PhD) is associate professor and research coordinator at the Maastricht Sustainability Institute, Maastricht University. His main research interests are sustainable innovation and policy, sustainability assessment and societal transformations towards sustainability. 

Marc is currently working on action-research projects in Living Labs focused on learning, upscaling, and social exclusion (SummaLab, EmbedterLabs, SPECIFIC), and on circular business model innovation (Circular-X). Previously, he was principal investigator and project coordinator of SmarterLabs, an action- research project focussed on upscaling and social exclusion in Smart City Living Labs.

He has published various articles and book chapters on innovation and transition in mobility, cities, businesses, and energy. Together with colleagues, he develops and teaches an integrative approach to sustainability assessment. It combines the understanding of stakeholders (perspectives, practices, etc.) with systems analysis of the issue (Qualitative Systems Analysis, Life Cycle Analysis, etc.), and usually a mixed-method approach.

Pauline Heger is a communication scientist and PhD candidate at the Technical University of Dresden, where her research focuses on the social acceptance of green innovations in urban environments. She is also a research assistant at the Center for Advanced Internet Studies (CAIS) in Bochum, Germany. As part of the Digital Democratic Innovation team at CAIS, she works on projects related to smart cities and digital decision-making, exploring how governance frameworks, societal trends, and local conditions shape public perceptions of new technologies.

Pauline has a particular interest in the emotional and place-based dimensions of urban change, examining how individuals' connections to urban spaces influence their acceptance or resistance to technological and infrastructural change. Her current research focuses on how citizens interact with heating transition technologies through experimental public participation formats. These formats aim to combine expert knowledge with lay perspectives, allowing lay citizens' perspectives to inform the planning of green infrastructure.

She holds a B.A. in Comparative Literature and Cultural Studies from the University of Bonn and an M.A. in Digital Media Communication from RWTH Aachen University.