Ayda Eraydin is Professor in the City and Regional Planning Department at Middle East Technical University, Turkey. She is the Chair of the PhD Supervisory Committee and coordinator of the Postgraduate Program in Regional Planning of the same department. She has initiated, coordinated and been involved in some large-scale national and international research projects on various urban and regional issues since 1986. Her research interests are local economic development, socio-spatial dynamics of cities and regions and planning theory and practice. She has published on various aspects of urban and regional development, including the socio-spatial implications of economic restructuring on urban areas, resilience thinking in urban planning and recently on governing urban diversity.

Klaus Frey is Professor of the Federal University of ABC, Brazil, in the Postgraduate Programmess in Territorial Planning and Management as well as in Public Policies. He coordinated the latter from 2013 to 2017. He was visiting Professor at the Master in Urban Management at University Unipiloto of Colombia, and at the Postgraduate Programme "Programming and Management of the Political and the Social Services' at University Milano-Bicocca. He is a researcher at the Brazilian National Research Council (CNPQ), working specifically on the following subjects: local and metropolitan governance, institutional analysis, policy networks, democracy and participation, public policy analysis, environmental governance and policy.