Fellows

The Geddes Institute for Urban Research runs a Geddes Fellows program in which a select number of practitioners in different aspects of urbanism and urban inquiry are invited to Dundee to participate in Geddes Institue projects and to initiate their own. They also participate in School of the Environment programs through specialist lectures. Past Fellows have included Richard Le Gates, Professor of Urban Studies, San Francisco State University. Current Fellows include Alona Martinez Perez (University of Ulster) and Paul Guzzardo, independent media activist (St. Louis and Buenos Aires).

Alona Martinez Perez

Alona Martinez Perez is a Spanish Architect and Urban designer. Originally from Bilbao, she qualified as an Architect at Sheffield University, and received her Masters of Science and Postgraduate Diploma in Urbanism at Edinburgh College of Art.

She was appointed regional Convener of the Urban Design Group for the Scottish Region in 200, and was selected for her work as one of the hundred Academicians of the Academy of Urbanism.

She is currently a Lecturer in Planning, specialising in Placemaking and Urbanism, at the University of Ulster. She has lectured on architecture and urban design in the UK, Spain, Italy, Ireland and Finland, and is a visiting tutor at ETSAB (Barcelona), University of Edinburgh and Dundee.

Previously she was research director for the Geddes Institute for Urban Research (University of Dundee) where she directed one of the Geddes Institute's major initiatives, the Task Force on Cities & their Regions and was a Design Tutor in the University of Dundee School of Architecture.

She has also been in private architectural practice for number of years in Scotland and the north of England.

Paul Guzzardo

Paul Guzzardo is a designer and lawyer based in St. Louis and Buenos Aires. Guzzardo maps the devolving state of the American public sphere. He is interested in epistemology and where urban designers, traditional creative practitioners and collectors fit, and or don't, in a zoomed out digitized culture. His research is out on the street. It's where he designs protocols for data sampling. He uses the street as a platform to assemble networks to critique the network. And he looks to the street as the place to probe how we're being changed by the sweep of information technologies. His design praxis includes: nightclubs, outdoor multimedia projections, street-front media-labs, street theater, remix concerts, gallery installations and documentary film. He exploits these venues and disciplines to design epistemic gear _ maps_ for navigating through this digital minefield. His writings have appeared in blogs, academic monograms and popular journals, including AD Architectural Design, Urban Design (UK), and Displaced with Michael Sorkin and George Ranalli. As a Fellow, Guzzardo has been involved in Exploring the Digital City and the Cartographers Dilemma, in which, with Lorens Holm, he has been working on recursive urbanism.