Michael Ball is Professor of Urban and Property Economics in the School of Real Estate and Planning, Henley Business School, University of Reading. His books include Markets and Institutions in Real Estate and Construction (Blackwell Publishing, 2006) and the co-authored textbook, The Economics of Commercial Property Markets (Routledge, 1998). He jointly chairs the housing economics group of the European Network for Housing Research; led the expert advisory panel on housing markets and planning for the UK government's Communities and Local Government department from 2007 to 2010. He has produced a series of reports for the UK government which have focused on the economics of the housebuilding industry; the impact of regulation and land-use planning on housing supply; and the consequences of the economic downturn on housing supply. His recent research has focused on issues related to inter-relations between markets and institutional frameworks, specifically concerning housing supply, the private rented sector, and specialist housing for the elderly.

Bo Bengtsson is a Professor of Political Science at Uppsala University, Sweden, where he divides his time between the Department of Government and the Institute for Housing and Urban Research. He has published extensively in the field of housing policy and politics, and in recent years also on integration politics and ethnic organization. He has analysed housing policy and politics on the macro level in perspectives of citizenship, rights, and universal vs selective housing regimes. On a micro level he has explored the role of housing organisations, and the conditions of tenant participation and collective action in housing. He has been keynote speaker at a number of international conferences and is a member of the editorial board of Housing, Theory and Society.

Christopher Bitter is an Assistant Professor of Urban Design and Planning at the University of Washington in Seattle and is affiliated with the Runstad Center for Real Estate Studies. He earned his doctorate in Geography at the University of Arizona, and, prior to pursuing an academic career, he worked for many years as a real estate and urban economist in the private sector. His current research focuses on clarifying the implications of demographic change for cities and housing markets and the market context for more compact and sustainable forms of urban development.

Gideon Bolt is an Assistant Professor of Urban Geography at the Faculty of Geosciences of Utrecht University, the Netherlands. His research focuses on urban policy, residential segregation and neighbourhood choice. He was (co-) guest editor of three recent special issues on this theme: Combating residential segregation of ethnic minorities (Journal of Housing and the Built Environment, 2009) Housing policy and (de)segregation: An international perspective (Housing Studies, 2010), and Linking integration and residential segregation (Journal of Ethnic[Page x]and Migration Studies, 2010). Dr Bolt is an editor of Journal of Housing and the Built Environment and Tijdschrift voor de Volkshuisvesting (Housing Sector Journal).

Tim Butler is Professor of Geography at King's College London and the Vincent Wright Professor in the Centre for European Studies at Sciences Po. He is the author of several books on the gentrification of London and most recently (with Chris Hamnett) of Ethnicity, Class and Aspiration: Understanding London's New East End (Policy Press, 2011). He has also edited two books on the regeneration of East London and one (with Michael Savage) on Social Change and the Middle Classes (UCL Press, 1995). He is the author (with Paul Watt) of Understanding Social Inequality (Sage, 2007). He has edited a book on social mixing and urban regeneration (with Gary Bridge and Loretta Lees) Mixed Communities: Gentrification by Stealth? (Policy Press, 2011 and University of Chicago Press, 2012). He has authored several articles on gentrification and more recently on the geography of education and specifically on school choice. He is currently involved in a joint ESRC–ANR research project (with Gary Bridge and Marie Hélène Bacqué) on the Middle Class, Social Mixing and the City (MiCCY), comparing the relations between the middle classes and the city in London and Paris. He is a trustee and treasurer of the Foundation of Urban and Regional Studies (FURS) and a Board Member of the Research Committee (RC21) on urban and regional research of the International Sociological Association and a member of the Editorial Board of the London Journal.

David Clapham is Professor of Housing in the School of City and Regional Planning at Cardiff University in the UK. Recent books include The Meaning of Housing (Policy Press, 2005). He is also editor of the journal Housing, Theory and Society published by Routledge. His current research interests include homelessness, the application of social theory to housing, housing for disadvantaged people, and the inter-disciplinary analysis of the housing market.

William A.V. Clark is Professor of Geography at the University of California Los Angeles with a joint appointment in Statistics. His research focuses on demographic change, models of residential mobility and the sorting processes that bring about residential segregation in the urban mosaic. He has been a visiting scholar at the Universities of Amsterdam, Utrecht, Victoria University Wellington and St Andrews, Scotland. He is an honorary member of the Royal Society of New Zealand and a member of the National Academy of Sciences of the USA. He has published extensively on both internal and international migration, including most recently Immigrants and the American Dream: Remaking the Middle Class (2003).

Suzanne Fitzpatrick completed her PhD on youth homelessness at the University of Glasgow in 1998 and subsequently held a number of posts in the Department of Urban Studies at the University of Glasgow. From 2003 to 2010, Suzanne was Joseph Rowntree Professor of Housing Policy and Director of the Centre for Housing Policy at the University of York, and took up her current post as Professor of Housing and Social Policy at Heriot-Watt University in July 2010. Suzanne specialises in research on homelessness and housing exclusion, and much of her work has an international comparative dimension. Suzanne is Editor of the International Journal of Housing Policy.

Ray Forrest is Professor of Urban Studies in the School for Policy Studies, University of Bristol, UK and Chair Professor in Housing and Urban Studies, City University of Hong Kong. He has been Head of the School for Policy Studies at Bristol (2001–2004), co-Director of the ESRC Centre for Neighbourhood Research (2001–2005), and Acting Head of the Centre for East Asian Studies (2007–2008). He is a founding member of the Asia-Pacific Network of [Page xi]Housing Researchers. His research interests focus on social change and social division in the contemporary city. His most recent book (co-edited with Yip, Ngai-ming) is Housing Markets and the Global Financial Crisis – The Uneven Impact on Households.

George Galster is the Clarence Hilberry Professor of Urban Affairs at the Department of Geography and Urban Planning, Wayne State University, Michigan. He earned his PhD in Economics from MIT. He has published over 150 scholarly articles, primarily on the topics of metropolitan housing markets, racial discrimination and segregation, neighborhood dynamics, and urban poverty. His authored and edited books include Homeowners and Neighborhood Reinvestment, The Maze of Urban Housing Markets, The Metropolis in Black and White, Reality and Research, Why NOT in My Back Yard?, Life in Poverty Neighborhoods, and Quantifying Neighborhood Effects.

Kenneth Gibb is a Professor in Housing Economics at the University of Glasgow. Current research interests include the economics of social housing, behavioural economics and urban housing market analysis. He has published widely in journals such as Housing Studies, Housing, Theory and Society, Environment and Planning A and C, Journal of Housing Economics, Real Estate Economics, International Journal of Housing Markets and Analysis and the Journal of Property Research. He is co-editor of Sage's forthcoming Reader in Housing Economics (with Alex Marsh). He is also the editor-in-chief of Urban Studies.

Chris Hamnett is Professor of Geography at King's College London. He is the author of several books, including Unequal City, London in the Global Arena (Routledge, 2003) and Winners and Losers: Home Ownership in Britain (Taylor & Francis, 1999). He is co-author (with Tim Butler) of Ethnicity, Class and Aspiration (Policy Press, 2011) and co-author of number of other books on the housing market. He has held a variety of visiting positions, including Sciences Po, Paris; the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Studies; Nuffield College Oxford, and George Washington University. In addition to his previous work on gentrification, social polarisation and housing in London, he has recently published several articles with Tim Butler on education in London and is currently working on ethnic change in secondary schools in England and the impact of government policies on housing benefit in Britain.

Phillip Jones is Chair of Architectural Science and Head of School at the Welsh School of Architecture, Cardiff University. He also chairs the Wales Low Carbon Research Institute (LCRI), which is a consortium of six universities in Wales representing energy research across a broad range of subjects. His teaching and research activities are in the field of energy use, environmental design and sustainability in the built environment. He is a visiting professor at Chongqing University and Tianjin University. He chaired the EU COST Action C23 ‘Low Carbon Urban Built Environment’, which produced the European Carbon Atlas (2009).

Roderick Lawrence is a Professor of the Faculty of Social and Economic Sciences at the University of Geneva and heads the Human Ecology Group at the Institute of Environmental Sciences. He has been an Associate Member of the New York Academy of Sciences since 1997. His recent research and publications focus on interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary contributions to tackle housing and urban planning while promoting health and quality of life. He has been a Scientific Advisor to the World Health Organization on housing and health and also to the WHO Healthy Cities project.

Julie Lawson is a Senior Research Associate for the Australian Housing and Urban Research Institute. Her interests include international comparative research, urban development, land and housing policy and social housing finance. She has worked for institutes and universities (OTB TU Delft, RMIT University, University of NSW, University of Sydney, University of Amsterdam and Institute of Housing and Urban Studies, Erasmus), the United Nations (Habitat, Nairobi), the Dutch and Australian government as well as city governments and community organisations. Julie has published numerous investigations on housing finance and urban planning including International Measures to Channel Investment Towards Affordable Housing (AHURI, 2010) and International Trends in Housing and Policy Responses (AHURI, 2007). She is on the editorial advisory board of Housing Theory and Society and is author of Critical Realism and Housing Research (Routledge, 2006) as well as numerous articles in the field of path dependence, comparative historical analysis such as Path dependency and emergent relations (Routledge, 2010), Comparative housing research in the new millennium (UNSW, 2010) and Comparing the causal mechanisms underlying housing networks over time and space (Springer, 2001). She is currently based in Geneva, Switzerland and is writing about federal state structures and designing a bond financing instrument to channel investment towards limited-profit housing.

Chris Leishman is Professor of Housing and Urban Economics at the University of Glasgow. His work centres on modelling housing markets, including determination of house prices, rents, development activity, tenure choice and affordability. He specialises in working with large scale micro and macro datasets, econometric modelling and simulation models. A particularly imporant aspect of his work involves bridging academic research and sophisticated modelling approaches with the needs of policy makers and advisors. As such, a great deal of his career has been spent working on public sector policy-related research projects. Chris is currently Editor-in-Chief of the leading housing journal Housing Studies.

Duncan Maclennan is an applied economist with interests in cities, neighbourhoods and housing. He is currently the Director of the Centre for Housing Research and Professor of Economic Geography at the University of St Andrews and Adjunct Professor at RMIT, Melbourne. He was previously at the University of Glasgow and Directed the ESRC Centre for Housing Research there from 1984–99. He has also held major posts in public policy as adviser to the First Minister of Scotland and as Chief Economist (DSE) in the Government of Victoria (Australia) and at Infrastructure Canada: (Federal Government of Canada).

Walter Matznetter is Assistant Professor at the Department of Geography of the University of Vienna, Austria. In 2004, he was a Fulbright Visiting Professor at the University of Minnesota, USA. His research is in comparative urban and housing research, mainly within Europe. He is (co-) author and/or (co-) editor of eight books and 54 articles, mainly in German, and some in English, such as European Integration and Housing (1998, Routledge, with Mark Kleinman and Mark Stephens). He is currently co-editing a special issue of BELGEO, on international student migration (in English), and a book on European metropolises (in German, 2011, Mandelbaum).

Geoffrey Meen is currently Professor of Applied Economics and Head of the School of Politics, Economics and International Relations at the University of Reading. He also holds an Adjunct Professorship at RMIT University, Melbourne. Prior to joining the University of Reading, he worked in the private sector and in the Government Economic Service. Professor

Meen specialises in quantitative housing market analysis at different spatial scales. He has published in most of the major academic journals in housing, and in numerous policy publications, as well as being author of Modelling Spatial Housing Markets: Theory, Analysis and Policy (Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2001).

Alexis Mundt is research associate at the Vienna-based IIBW – Institute for Real Estate, Construction and Housing Ltd. He received universal training in economics and history at the University of Vienna and the Vienna University of Economics and Business. His areas of research include the history of the welfare state, social policy evaluation, international housing policy and social housing. He has worked on a number of projects that have investigated and evaluated housing policy in Austria and Europe.

Sako Musterd is Professor of Urban Geography and Director of the Centre for Urban Studies at the University of Amsterdam, the Netherlands. His main research interests are in the fields of spatial segregation, integration and neighbourhood effects. He has written and (co-)edited a dozen books in this field, including Urban Segregation and the Welfare State (Routledge, 1998); Neighbourhoods of Poverty (Palgrave MacMillan 2006); Mass Housing in Europe (Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), and wrote extensively in international scientific journals as well (http://dare.uva.nl/author/musterds). He is a member of the editorial/management/advisory boards of the journals Urban Geography; Urban Studies; International Journal of Urban and Regional Research; and Housing Studies.

David A. Plane is Professor of Geography and Regional Development at the University of Arizona, Tucson. His research focuses on migration systems, population distribution in the United States, and the modelling of spatial interaction. A Fellow of the Western Regional Science Association and of the Regional Science Association International, he has served as President of the Association of Pacific Coast Geographers, the Population Specialty Group of the Association of American Geographers, the Pacific Regional Science Conference Organization, and the North American Regional Science Council. He co-authored, with Peter Rogerson, the highly acclaimed text: The Geographical Analysis of Population: With Applications to Planning and Business.

Hugo Priemus is Professor Emeritus in Housing at OTB Research Institute for the Built Environment, Delft University of Technology. He was educated in architecture (Delft) and general economics (Erasmus University, Rotterdam). He was Dean of the Faculty of Architecture and Dean of the Faculty of Technology, Policy and Management of TU Delft. He has written many books and journal articles on housing, spatial planning, urban development and infrastructure, and planning. He has conducted advisory work for the United Nations, the World Bank, the European Commission, the Dutch Parliament, Dutch Ministries and local governments.

Steven Rowley is Associate Professor and Head of the Department of Property Studies, Curtin Business School, Curtin University, Perth. Steven is also Director of the Australian Housing and Urban Research Institute's Western Australian Research Centre. Steven holds a PhD in property valuation and has published numerous reports for the UK Government, as well as book chapters and papers in journals such as Urban Studies and Town Planning Review. He is currently working on research aimed at increasing the supply of affordable housing in metropolitan and regional Australia.

Maarten van Ham is Professor of Urban Renewal at the OTB Research Institute for the Built Environment, Delft University of Technology, the Netherlands. His research interest can be broadly defined as the causes and consequences of family migration: Why do people move residence and what are the consequences of moving for the housing, household and labour career? Maarten is an expert on neighbourhood effects, residential mobility, housing and tenure choice, urban and neighbourhood change, segregation, population and household change, and the geography of labour markets. He has published widely in these areas, and currently has projects in the UK, Sweden, Germany, Estonia and the Netherlands.

Ronald van Kempen is Professor of Urban Geography at the Faculty of Geosciences of Utrecht University, the Netherlands. His research focuses on urban spatial segregation, divided cities, the effects of housing and urban policy on neighbourhoods and residents, urban enclaves, high-rise housing estates, social cohesion and residential mobility, especially of low-income and minority-ethnic groups. He has co-edited a number of special issues of international journals on this theme (Urban Studies, Housing Studies, Urban Geography, Housing, Theory and Society, Journal of Economic and Social Geography). He also co-edited Restructuring Large Housing Estates in Europe (Policy Press), Mass Housing in Europe (Palgrave Macmillan) and Globalizing Cities (Blackwell).

Christine M.E. Whitehead is an internationally respected housing economist. She is currently Professor in Housing in the Department of Economics, London School of Economics. Until the end of 2010 she was also Director of the Cambridge Centre of Housing and Planning Research, which celebrated its 20th anniversary last September. Her latest book with Sarah Monk, Making Housing More Affordable, published by Wiley Blackwell, was launched at the celebratory conference. She has been working in the fields of housing economics, finance and policy for many years, covering both UK and international issues. She was awarded an OBE for services to housing in 1991.

Judith Yates is currently an Honorary Associate in Economics at the University of Sydney, following a career of more than 30 years in academia. Her research has been in the fields of housing economics, finance and policy and, in the past few years, has focused on housing affordability, the supply of low-rent housing and housing taxation. She has served on numerous government advisory committees and on a number of boards and is currently a member of the government's National Housing Supply Council and on the board of the not-for-profit National Housing Company.