Trading Places

Stephen Berrisford is an independent consultant specialising in the legal and policy frameworks governing urban land and development. He is trained as a lawyer and urban planner, with degrees from the Universities of Cape Town and Cambridge. He works primarily in southern and eastern Africa as well as on global initiatives for agencies such as UN-Habitat, Cities Alliance and the World Bank. Stephen is an adjunct associate professor at the African Centre for Cities at the University of Cape Town and visiting professor at the University of the Witwatersrand. He was the governance coordinator for the Urban Land Markets Programme Southern Africa (Urban LandMark), a UK aid-funded think tank focused on making urban land markets in southern Africa work better for the poor.

Dr Caroline Wanjiku Kihato is an independent researcher and writer. In 2011, she received a MacArthur award on Migration and Development and spent a year as a visiting fellow at Georgetown University in Washington DC. Her career has involved both teaching and conducting research in the academy and the non-profit sector in South Africa. Since 2006, she has worked with Urban LandMark as a regional theme coordinator. She was previously a policy analyst at the Development Bank of Southern Africa and a senior lecturer in the School of Architecture and Planning at Wits University. She is the co-editor of Urban Diversity: Space, Culture and Inclusive Pluralism in Cities Worldwide published by Johns Hopkins. Her forthcoming book In Between City:Migrant women’s experiences in Johannesburg will be published by Palgrave Macmillan in September 2013.

Rob McGaffin is a town planner and land economist. He has worked as town planner with the City of Cape Town and the Gauteng Department of Economic Development and has worked in property finance at several financial institutions. He was the coordinator for the markets theme at Urban LandMark. He currently lectures in the Department of Construction Economics and Management at the University of Cape Town and is a Mistra Urban Futures researcher with the African Centre for Cities.

Dr Mark Napier is a principal researcher at the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research in Pretoria. He was programme director of Urban LandMark from 2006 to 2013. Mark, an architect by profession, graduated from the University of KwaZulu-Natal, and studied housing at postgraduate level at the University of Newcastle upon Tyne. He has spent time in government, setting up a research unit in the national Department of Human Settlements. He has researched and published in the areas of housing extensions, home-based enterprises, environmental aspects of informal settlements, and land and housing markets.

Lauren Royston is an independent consultant at Development Works, specialising in land and housing, and development planning, with a current emphasis on urban tenure security in South Africa and the southern African region. A development planner by training, Lauren has worked in the non-governmental and public sectors. She has a long association with a community of inner city residents in Johannesburg and their legal advisors, whom she supports on resisting eviction, housing policy advocacy, and facilitating community participation. She was theme coordinator of the tenure theme area at Urban LandMark and is manager of the Tenure Security Facility Southern Africa, where she advocates for urban tenure security in informal settlement upgrading.