Samah Mohamed El Khateeb leads the smart and future cities laboratory for sustainable urban solution (SFCL Lab) in Cairo. Samah’s role in the project is the principal investigator and the local facilitator for the workshops. She will lead the project in Egypt and will responsible with the PhD candidates to establish the networks in Egypt, engage with the urban moral leaders, authorities, hotspots for environmental problems, and users. She will also work with her team in the SFCL lab to prepare for the project and document the development. In addition to supervising the project development, budget and organizing workshops, and doing all travel and accommodation facilities for the team.

Mennatullah Hendawy is a Research Associate and PhD Candidate at the Chair of Urban Design, TU Berlin. She is also a Visiting Researcher at the Leibniz Institute for Research on Society and Space in Erkner, Germany and an affiliated Assistant Lecturer at the Department of Urban Planning and Design in Ain Shams University in Cairo, Egypt. Mennatullah works on the intersection of urban planning, mediatisation, and justice where she focuses on the way knowledge, power, and agency are manifested in and co-construct cities, justice, and the public sphere. The project is relevant to her current Phd thesis on the mediatisation of planning and how digital media becomes a question of justice. Mennatullah’s role in the project is a social justice and urban communication expert.

Katrien Pype is an anthropologist focused on technology & urban life in Kinshasa. Her writings challenge the western-centric discourses about Smart City development. She advocates a “smartness from below” perspective in order to find socially appropriate tech-solutions in Africa. She is currently working on a book project on technology & the city in Kinshasa and leads a team of 3 PhD students and 1 postdoctoral scholar studying the dialectics between technology cultures & urbanity in DR Congo, Kenya and Sudan. She is also working with an interdisciplinary team on “smartening” up the city of Gulu, northern Uganda. Katrien’s role in the project is attending to the social and cultural sensibilities of various communities within Cairo - paying explicit attention to the religious, generation-related, and gendered dimension of interacting (during the workshop and the designathon). She will also ensure that these dimensions are given sufficient attention in the final version of the charter.

Stephanie Sherman is a Phd Candidate at the University of California San Diego, working at the intersection of speculative and social design. Her thesis focuses on the genealogy of platform automobility and how this legacy prefigures imaginaries of autonomous systems and ecological interdependence. She has produced Designathons in collaboration with The UCSD Design Lab, The San Diego Department of Regional Governments and MIT City Science. Stephanie’s role in the project is a design futures expert and the Designathon facilitator. http://stephaniesherman.net