David Simon is Professor of Development Geography at Royal Holloway, University of London. He has published extensively on many dimensions of urbanisation and urbanism, the development-environment interface, and the interrelationships between theory, policy and practice. From 2014-19 he was also Director of Mistra Urban Futures, an international research centre on sustainable cities based at Chalmers University of Technology, Gothenburg, Sweden, which worked through transdisciplinary co-production methods in local research platforms and smaller partnerships in 7 cities on four continents.