Susan Moore is Associate Professor in Urban Development and Planning at the Bartlett School of Planning, University College London. Originally from Toronto, Canada and trained as an environmentalist, planner, and urban geographer, her research has focused on relational geographies of urban and suburban development, with a particular focus on development cultures in context. She has written extensively on the New Urbanism and other urban development and governance models and the formation and circulation of so-called best practices. Most recently, she has collaborated with geography and media colleagues from Birkbeck, University of London in examining the use of social media platforms in relation to processes of local urban change and community governance. She is also co-author of several papers and book chapters on the phenomenologies of Platform Urbanism and a co-researcher in a collaborative, international project on urban data cultures.

Scott Rodgers is Senior Lecturer in Media Theory in the Department of Film, Media and Cultural Studies at Birkbeck, University of London. His research specialises in the relationships between media and cities and the geographies of communication. One of Scott’s longstanding interests is in the relationships of journalism and urban public life, on which he is currently completing a book. More recently, his research has turned toward the convergence between digital platforms and the making of contemporary urbanism, locality and publicness. He has been involved in an extended research project (with Susan Moore, UCL, and Andrea Ballatore, Birkbeck) into the ways that everyday uses of social media platforms are remediating how publics – including professionalised fields such as urban planning – experience and articulate urban transformation. Scott is also in the early stages of a project exploring how the ideals and architectures of platforms companies are beginning to inform urban regeneration projects.