Advisory board

Manuel B. Aalbers is professor of Human Geography at KU Leuven (Belgium) where he leads a research group on the intersection of real estate, finance and states. He is the author of Place, Exclusion, and Mortgage Markets (Wiley-Blackwell, 2011) and The Financialization of Housing: A Political Economy Approach (Routledge, 2016) as well as editor of Subprime Cities (Wiley-Blackwell, 2012). He has also published on redlining, social exclusion, neoliberalism, corporate financialization, the privatization of social housing, neighbourhood decline and gentrification.

Yvonne Franz is a Postdoc Researcher & Lecturer at the Department of Geography and Regional Research & at the Department of Sociology (both University of Vienna). She is the Scientific Director of the Postgraduate Programme “Cooperative Urban and Regional Development” at the Postgraduate Center at University of Vienna and Core Member of the Research Platform “Urban Futures”. Yvonne investigates multi-scalar and multi-actor constellations of urban transformation, with particular emphasis on the influence of urban neighbourhoods. As an urban geographer, she provides theoretical and empirical expertise on urban revitalisation, gentrification, super-diversity and social innovation by using a comparative approach. Currently, she is working on participation and enhancing governance in the INTERREG Central Europe project “GEtCoheSive”.

For TransHerit, she will contribute her expertise in interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary research approaches along with her local knowledge on Vienna.

Maria Gravari-Barbas has a degree in Architecture and Urban Design (University of Athens, 1985) and a PhD in Geography and Planning (Paris IV – Sorbonne, 1991). She was Fellow at the Urban Program of Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, USA (1990). She is the Director of the EIREST, a multidisciplinary research team dedicated to tourism studies, with main focus on cultural heritage, development, and urban-tourism evolutions. Since 2009 she is the director of the UNESCO Chair of Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne University and the coordinator of the UNITWIN network ‘Tourism, Culture, Development’. She is the Chair of the Self Steering Committee of Cultural Heritage of Una Europa and of the Joint Doctoral Committee of the PhD on Cultural Heritage of Una Europa. Her published works include:

Tourism and architectural simulacra, Routledge, (2021) ; Tourism Dynamics in Everyday Places: Before and After Tourism, Routledge, 2021;  A research Agenda for Heritage Tourism, Elgar (2020), Le patrimoine mondial, Mise en tourisme, mise en images, L’Harmattan (2020), Lieux ordinaires, avant et après le tourisme, PUCA (2018), Tourism and Gentrification in Contemporary Metropolises.  International Perspectives, Routledge (2017), World Heritage Sites and Tourism. Global and Local Relations, Routledge (2017).

Walter Matznetter was Assistant and Assistant Professor at  the Department of Geography and Regional Research of the University of Vienna (1979-2017) - where he continues to teach. His research is in urban geography, urban planning and housing studies, with a comparative focus on European cities and welfare states – published in Urban Studies, BELGEO, Critical Housing Analysis, Housing, Theory and Society, and City. With Robert Musil, he is the editor of a book on European metropolises (Mandelbaum, 2011) and a special section on Peripheral Metropolises in Southeast Europe (MÖGG, 2020), and contributed to The Handbook of Housing Studies (SAGE, 2012), and to edited volumes on Polycentric Metropolises (Rohn, 2016), a reader on Housing Research (Transcript, 2020), and Vertical Cities (Edward Elgar, 2022).