Susan S. Fainstein is a Senior Research Fellow in the Harvard Graduate School of Design. Her research interests include planning theory, urban theory, urban redevelopment, and comparative urban policy focusing on the United States, Europe, and East Asia. Among her publications are The Just City; The City Builders: Property, Politics, and Planning in London and New York; and Restructuring the City; and Urban Political Movements. She has co-edited volumes on urban tourism (The Tourist City and Cities and Visitors), planning theory (Readings in Planning Theory), urban theory (Readings in Urban Theory), and gender (Gender and Planning) and has authored over 100 book chapters and articles in scholarly journals. She received the Distinguished Educator Award of the Association of American Schools of Planning (ACSP), which recognizes lifetime career achievement, the Davidoff Book Award of the ACSP, and has been a resident fellow at the Rockefeller Foundation Center for Scholars at Bellagio.

Sharon Zukin is Professor Emerita of Sociology at Brooklyn College and at the CUNY Graduate Center. She has published extensively on transformations of urban life and urban living over the past half century. Her books include The Innovation Complex: Cities, Tech, and the New Economy; Loft Living; The Culture of Cities; Landscapes of Power; and Naked City: The Death and Life of Authentic Urban Places.  Zukin has been a Broeklundian Professor at Brooklyn College; a visiting professor at the University of Amsterdam, the University of Western Sydney, and Tongji University; and a distinguished fellow in the Advanced Research Collaborative at the CUNY Graduate Center. She received the Lynd Award for Career Achievement in urban sociology from the American Sociological Association and won the C. Wright Mills Book Award for Landscapes of Power.

M. Christine Boyer is the William R. Kenan Jr. Professor of Architecture and Urbanism at the Princeton School of Architecture. Her interests include the history of the city, city planning, preservation planning, and computer science. Among her notable publications are Dreaming the Rational City: The Myth of American City Planning 1890-1945; The City of Collective Memory; Not Quite Architecture: Writing around Alison and Peter Smithson; Manhattan Manners: Architecture and Style 1850-1900; and CyberCities. Boyer received an award from the Department of Art and Archaeology Publication Fund, for the publication of Le Corbusier: Homme de Lettres (1910-1947).