Core Team
Özlem Celik is a Collegium Fellow at Turku Advanced Studies Institute (TIAS), University of Turku and a visiting scholar at the University of Helsinki. Özlem’s research concerns the political economy of urban development and change, with a focus on housing, green and climate financialization, role of the state, urban social movements and green transitions in the Nordic cities. Özlem’s previous research has focused on the financialisation of housing, role of the state in housing provision, and the limitations and possibilities of spatial politics of solidarity through commoning practices in Turkey. Özlem is a qualitative researcher, interested in using participatory and collaborative methodological approaches in engagement with housing movements and activist groups. Özlem is the Co-founder and co-director of NUPE and Urban and Regional Political Economy Working Group. For more details: https://ozlem-celik.com/about
Lina Olsson is Associate Professor at the Department of Urban Studies at Malmö University, and a member of the Institute for Urban Research, IUR. Her research focuses on the urban political economy of urban and regional development, in particular, municipal land policy, public transportation, and regional development policy. Her present research deals with municipal-led green financialisation of urban development, mobility justice, and public transportation as a human right.
Mika Hyötyläinen is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Institute for Housing and Urban Research, Uppsala University. Mika studies the connections of urban inequality, the increasing entrepreneurialism in municipal land policy, and the retrenchment of state housing policy in Finland. His work is now published in a new monograph titled Urban Inequality in Finland: Land, Housing and the Nordic Welfare State by Edinburgh University Press. Mika also explores themes such as property rights, land rent theory and the potentials of alternative property arrangements such as the urban commons. He is the co-editor of a recent Routledge anthology titled The Political Economy of Land: Rent, Financialisation and Resistance. In 2024 Mika is starting a new research project focusing on municipal finance, land value capture and local state rentierism in the Nordic urban context. His project is funded by the Kone Foundation.
Erik Jönsson is Associate Professor at the Department of Human Geography, Uppsala University. His research focuses on the intersection of landscape geography and political ecology. He is currently exploring social sustainability in Norra Sorgenfri as well as the history and current utilisation of the People’s Parks. In hisprevious research he has combined political ecology, STS, and future studies to explore research environments and future visions within the “cellular-agricultural” field.
Defne Kadıoğlu is a Project Researcher at the Department of Urban Studies, Malmö University, and a member of the Institute of Urban Research, IUR. Defne is an urban political sociologist with an interest in urban policy, housing and urban political economy. In particular she has worked on gentrification processes and their intersection with territorial stigma and racism in Germany. She also worked in the context of Turkey, in particular on the political and social dimensions of urban transformation projects in formal and informal Istanbul neighborhoods. Currently she is conducting comparative projects on urban policy, racialized territorial stigma and housing in the context of the Swedish and German welfare states.
Panu Lehtovuori is the Professor of Planning Theory at the Tampere University, School of Architecture, and the co-head of Urban Planning Research Group. Lehtovuori’s research interests focus on contemporary forms of public urban space, new urban design approaches and the resource-efficiency of built environment. Lehtovuori is co-founder and LAB lead at SPIN Unit international urban agency. Currently, he is involved in launching Tampere Urban Research Network for Sustainability (TURNS), a university-level collaborative platform for critical and progressive research and practice.
Lorena Melgaço is an Associate Senior Lecturer at the Department of Human Geography at Lund University. Her research interests include the micropolitics of socio-spatial and technological peripheralisation in the postcolony; the intersections of technological dependency, capitalist production of space, and the socio-environmental crisis: smart cities; and the challenges of planning education and practice from a decolonial perspective.
Sami Moisio is Professor of Spatial Planning and Policy in the Department of Geosciences and Geography at the University of Helsinki. His recent books include Geopolitics of the Knowledge-Based Economy (2018, Routledge) and The Urban Field: Capital and Governmentality in the Age of Techno-monopoly (2024, Agenda Publishing, together with Ugo Rossi).
Nordic Urban Political Economy 