Charles Landry is an international authority on the use of imagination and creativity in urban change. He is currently a fellow at the Robert Bosch Academy in Berlin. He invented the concept of the Creative City in the late 1980's. Its focus is how cities can create the enabling conditions for people and organizations to think, plan and act with imagination to solve problems and develop opportunities. The notion has become a global movement and changed the way cities thought about their capabilities and resources.

Charles helps cities identify and make the most of their potential by triggering their inventiveness and thinking and by opening up new conversations about their future. His aim is to help cities become more resilient, self-sustaining and to punch above their weight.

Acting as a critical friend he works closely with decision makers and local leaders in the short and longer term.. He stimulates, facilitates and inspires so cities can transform for the better. He helps find apt and original solutions to seemingly intractable dilemmas, such as marrying, social creativity, innovation and tradition, or balancing wealth creation and social cohesiveness, or local distinctiveness and a global orientation. His overall aim is to help cities get onto the global radar screen.

Erik Swyngedouw

Professor Swyngedouw is a recognized leading international expert in environment-society relationships and the analysis of the capitalist space economy, with an emphasis on socio-environmental conflict, water politics, political economic crisis and urban political movements. He is author of "Social Power and the Urbanization of Water" (Oxford University Press, 2004). He also co-edited "In the Nature of Cities" (Routlede, 20006). He recently co-edited (with Japhy Willson) The Post-Political and its Discontents: Spectres of Radical Politics Today (Edinburg University Press, 2014). His new book with MIT-Press, Liquid Power, focuses on water and social power in 20^th century Spain and was published in April 2015.