Contested Airport Land

Irit Ittner is working as a senior researcher in the Programme Environmental Governance at the German Institute of Development and Sustainability in Bonn. Her research interests include unplanned urbanisation, land tenure, social navigation, and processes of transformation in coastal West African and European cities. Irit published on the airport land in Abidjan in Afrika Focus (2021), Urban Forum (2022), and Afrique Contemporaine (2023).

Sneha Sharma works as a junior project manager at the ICON Institut in Cologne after having conducted research at the University of Bonn (2015-2022). Her lived experiences growing up in the busy streets of Kolkata, India, shaped her interest in urban sociology and ethnographic methods. Sneha published Waste(d) collectors: Politics of urban exclusion in India (2022). Her work on spatial transformation, affordable housing, and urban renewal in the airport villages of Mumbai were published in Geoforum (2023).

Isaac Khambule is a professor of political economy at the University of Johannesburg, South Africa. He was previously an associate professor of political economy at the Wits School of Governance, University of the Witwatersrand, where he taught decision-making in public institutions and worked as a senior lecturer at the University of KwaZulu-Natal. Isaac?s research interest is in the relationship between the state, institutions, and development, with a particular focus on the role of the state in economic development and the entrepreneurial state.

Hanna Geschewski is a doctoral researcher in Human Geography at the Chr. Michelsen Institute (CMI) and the University of Bergen in Norway. Her research focuses on the socio-ecological dimensions of displacement and resettlement in South Asia, with a particular interest in human-land relations. Her work on the unfinished airport project in Nijgadh, Nepal, co-authored with M. Islar, was published in the Journal of Political Ecology (2022).