Peter Marcuse, a planner and lawyer, is Professor Emeritus of Urban Planning at Columbia University in New York City. He has a J.D. from Yale Law School, and a Ph. D in planning from the University of California at Berkeley. He practiced law in Waterbury, CT, for twenty years, specializing in labor and civil rights law, and was majority leader of its Board of Aldermen, chaired its anti-poverty agency, and was a member of its City Planning commission. . He was thereafter Professor of Urban Planning at UCLA, and President of the Los Angeles Planning Commission and member of Community Board 9M in New York City... His fields of research include city planning, housing, the use of public space, the right to the city, social justice in the city, globalization, and urban history, with some focus New York City. He has taught in both West and East Germany, Australia, the Union of South Africa, Canada, Austria, Spain, Canada, and Brazil, and written extensively in both professional journals and the popular press. His most recent publication is Peter Marcuse, ed., with Neil Brenner and Margit Mayer, Cities For People, Not For Profit:
Critical Urban Theory And The Right To The City, London: Routledge, 2011. He also has a blog on critical planning at pmarcuse.wordpress.com. His current projects include a historicallygrounded political history of urban planning, the formulation of a theory of critical planning, including the attempt to make critical urban theory useful to the U.S. Right to the City Alliance, and an analysis and proposals to deal with the subprime mortgage foreclosure crisis in the United States.
Cynthia Myntti is Professor of Public Health Practice at the American University of Beirut (AUB). She earned her doctorate in social anthropology from the London School of Economics (1983), and has graduate degrees from AUB (MA, 1974), Johns Hopkins University (MPH, 1986) and Yale University (M Arch 2004). Cynthia worked as a program officer for the Ford Foundation in Cairo and Jakarta, and has held university teaching positions in London, Minneapolis, Sanaa and Beirut. She is the author of “Paris along the Nile: Architecture in Cairo from the Belle
Epoque” (American University in Cairo Press) and numerous scholarly articles on women’s and children’s health, and university-community partnerships. Since 2006, Cynthia has directed the Neighborhood Initiative at AUB. The Neighborhood Initiative mobilizes faculty, staff and students of AUB to apply their knowledge to solving the problems of the university’s Ras Beirut neighbors. Current projects fall under three themes: the Urban Environment; Community and Well-Being; Neighborhood
Diversity.
