Graduated from the School of Architecture at TU München in 1967 and received a PhD from TU Wien in 1971. Appointed as Professor by the School of Planning at Universität Dortmund in 1974, he was Director of Research of the Institut für Raumplanung until 1993. From then until his retirement in 2006, he held the Jean Monnet Chair of Spatial Planning in Europe. He is an honorary professor at the Bartlett School of Planning, University College London and a visiting professor of the Dong Nam University in Nanjing, China. He is an elected member of the German Academy of Spatial Planning (ARL) and an honorary member of AESOP and the RTPI in London. In 1994 he received an Honorary PhD from the University of Newcastle-upon-Tyne in the UK. As a visiting professor he has taught at universities in Europe, the US and in China. In 1987 he founded AESOP and was its first president from 1987 to 1990. Since his retirement in 2006, he has resided in Potsdam, travelling frequently to China and relentlessly writing on territorial planning in Europe and in China, regional restructuring in the Ruhr, and on creative knowledge and smart city development.

Graduated and received his PhD from Vienna University of Technology. His academic career took him to Oxford Polytechnic, Delft University of Technology, University of Amsterdam, Radboud University Nijmegen before returning to Delft University of Technology, where he is now emeritus Professor of spatial policy systems in Europe and a guest researcher. He was a British Council Scholar, an Australian-European Fellow, a Fulbright Scholar, a Fellow of the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study in Social Science and Humanities, a European Fulbright Scholar and a Fellow of the Bellagio Rockefeller Center. Publications include ‘Planning Theory’ (1973/1984), ‘Critical Rationalism and Planning Methodology’ (1986), ‘Rule and Order: Dutch Planning Doctrine in the Twentieth Century’ (with A. van der Valk, 1994), ‘The Making of the European Spatial Development Perspective’ (with B. Waterhout, 2002) and ‘Cohesion, Coherence, Cooperation: European Spatial Planning in the Making, 2010). In 1993 he became an Honorary Member of the RTPI and in 2008 an Honorary Member of AESOP. Blenkinge Institute of Technology in Sweden and the University of Groningen in the Netherlands both awarded him honorary doctorates. He lives in Delft in the Netherlands.

Professor emeritus in the School of Architecture, Planning and Landscape at Newcastle University, UK. She held degrees in geography and in planning from University College London, University of Westminster and the London School of Economics. She was a specialist in planning theory and the practice of planning and urban regeneration policies. Her research focused on how planning strategies work out in practice and on partnership forms of neighbourhood regeneration experiences. In more recent years, she had been adopting a sociological institutionalist approach to explore spatial strategy making, urban governance and civil society initiatives. Her most prominent books include Collaborative Planning: Shaping Places in Fragmented Societies (1997, 2nd edition 2006), Urban Complexity and Spatial Strategies (2007) and Making Better Places (2010). She was awarded the OBE in 1999, became an Honorary Fellow of the Association of European Schools of Planning in 2004, and was awarded the RTPI Gold Medal in 2006. She has been made a Fellow of University College London, an Honorary Fellow of Oxford Brookes University and has honorary degrees from Chalmers University, Gothenburg, Sweden and Newcastle University, UK. Until she passed away in 2024, she served as vice-chair of the Glendale Gateway Trust, where she lived.

Graduated and received his PhD from the university of Leuven, Belgium. He was a full professor at the university of Leuven from 1987 to 2007, a visiting professor at a number of European Universities and a visiting research fellow at the University of West Australia, Perth.

Louis Albrechts is a corresponding member of the German Academy for Research and Planning, the founder and editor of European Planning Studies, a member of the editorial board of several international journals, chair of the first two World Planning Schools Congresses (Shanghai and Mexico City), chair of the third joint AESOP/ACSP congress in Leuven, second president of the Association of European School of Planning, chair of UN-Habitat HS advisory board and chair of the planning commission in his hometown. He was also in charge of the strategic plan for Flanders (1992-1996) and did the scientific coordination for the Flanders transport plan (1999-2000). He is the author/editor of 16 books, and has contributed some 90 chapters to international books and over 60 articles to leading international journals with blind peer review. His current research and writings focus on the practice and nature of strategic spatial planning, diversity and creativity in planning, public involvement in planning and bridging the gap between planning and implementation. He lives in Beringen in Belgium.

Founding President of the International Academic Association on Planning, Law and Property Rights which evolved out of AESOP’s first Thematic Group. With degrees in social science, planning, and law from Canadian and Israeli universities, Alterman specialised in cross-national comparative analysis of planning laws, land use regulations, land rights, and housing policies. Based at the Technion – Israel Institute of Technology, she currently holds emeritus (non-retired) status, and is a Senior Researcher at the Neaman Institute for National Policy Research. Her publications encompass several international books and 170 academic papers and reports. Alterman serves on the Editorial Boards of leading academic journals and she has been a visiting professor at major American and Dutch universities. She serves as a consultant and speaker for UN-Habitat, OECD, the World Bank, the Chinese government, academic institutions in China and a variety of other public or academic bodies in Israel and internationally. She is among the 16 academics selected for the book Encounters in Planning Thought: Autobiographical Essays from Key Thinkers in Planning, Ed. Beatrix Haselsberger, Routledge 2017.

Emeritus professor of urban and regional planning at the University of Amsterdam. He graduated in spatial planning and sociology. He was a researcher at the Dutch think tank, the Scientific Council for Government Policy (1980 -1995). Salet was a professor of governance at TU Delft from 1994 to 1996 when he was appointed in Amsterdam. He chaired the Program Group Urban Planning from 1998 until his retirement in 2016. From 1998 to 2003, he chaired the Amsterdam research institute of the Metropolitan Environment. Willem Salet chaired the AESOP academic prize paper competition and was the association’s President from 2007 to 2009. In 2016, he was awarded an AESOP Honorary Membership.

Willem Salet is specialised in metropolitan governance and spatial planning. He takes an institutional perspective in planning studies, including cultural, political and legal aspects of place and environment. He published numerous books and papers and coordinated international studies into urban development, governance and strategic urban projects. He coordinated research on behalf of the European Science Foundation, National Scientific Organisation (NWO), Volvo Research, ministries, and professional agencies. In cooperation with an international group of researchers, he is calling for a turn in planning studies with ‘Institutions in Action’, a handbook and monograph, to be published later in 2017 (Routledge).

Graduated from the School of Architecture and received his PhD in Spatial Planning from the Vienna University of Technology. He started his academic career there as research assistant at the Institute of Urban Design and Spatial Planning, later becoming Assistant Professor and Honorary Professor for Regional Planning and Regional Development. He was elected at UT Vienna as Deputy and Vice President (Rector), fulfilling the role from 1999 to 2011, with changing responsibilities including finances, infrastructure and university development. During a break from the university in 1991 and 1992, he worked as Deputy Head of the Planning Department of the projected World Exhibition Vienna – Budapest, which was later cancelled. Returning from the experience of this huge international project, he successfully established yearly international student planning projects as part of the planning course at his university, in close cooperation with various universities in Europe, the US and Israel. The fall of the Iron Curtain - also along the Austrian borders - gave him the chance to concentrate on research, lecturing and publishing on the issues of cross-border planning and endogenous development in these long-neglected border regions. He was a member of the AESOP Congress Committee between 2003 and 2007, heading the organisation of the AESOP Congress in 2005, and Congress Officer of AESOP ExCo from 2012 until 2016.

Professor Simin Davoudi is the 6th holder of the Chair of Town Planning at School of Architecture, Planning & Landscape, and Co-Director of Newcastle University’s Centre for Researching Cities. She is former President of AESOP, a Fellow of the RTPI and Royal Society of Arts, a Fellow and Council Member of the Academy of Social Sciences, and a Trustee of TCPA. Simin has served on the ESRC Strategic Advisory Network and as an expert advisor for several UK government departments, EU directorate generals, research councils and planning schools in the UK, Europe and Hong Kong, and international research projects. She led the UK Office of Deputy Prime Minister’s Planning Research Network and was a panel member of the Research Excellence Framework (REF 2014). She has held visiting professorships at universities in USA (Virginia Tech), Netherlands (Amsterdam and Nijmegen), Sweden (BTH), Australia (RMIT), Finland (Tampere) and Austria (BOKU). She has conducted over 35 research projects funded by the UK, European and international research bodies. Her research and scholarship focus on the intersection between power, knowledge, democracy, justice and care relation to: cities, spatial planning, environmental policies, climate resilience, spatial imaginaries, and civil society actions. In exploring how and why certain concepts gain discursive dominance, she has unpicked concepts as: polycentricity, evidence-based planning, city-region, space and place, environment and nature, resilience, knowledge and knowing, imagination and imaginaries, care and justice, and civil society and social movement. She has studied their etymology, genealogy, contested meanings, and the ways in which they are interpreted and appropriated historically and ideologically. Simin has published over 200 academic papers and thirteen books of which two are major reference books: the 16th edition of Town and Country Planning in the UK (2024, Routledge) and the Routledge Companion of Environmental Planning (2019).