Michel Ben Arrous Editor & Author

Liora Bigon (PhD in Architecture, the University of Manchester) is an urban (planning) historian. She specialises in (post-)colonial urban history and planning cultures in sub-Saharan Africa, with an emphasis on West Africa. A senior staff member at Holon Institute of Technology, she has published widely in these fields. Her latest book – Grid Planning in the Urban Design Practices of Senegal (with Prof. E. Ross, Springer, 2020) – included an in situ survey of a dozen important Senegalese Sufi urban localities.

Michel Ben Arrous is an architect by training (Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, EPFL) and a doctor in geography (PhD, Université de Rouen). North Africa born, he served as a journalist in Southern and West Africa prior to a long companionship with CODESRIA (the Dakar-based Council for the Development of Social Science Research in Africa). He has lectured and published extensively on the history of geographic ideas and fantasies in their relation to citizenship crises, media and conflict, urban cultures and the production of space and place.