Our team
Philip Hubbard
Project lead
Phil Hubbard is Professor of Urban Studies at King’s College London. Over a thirty-year career he has published widely on urban issues, with a particular focus on the role of planning and regeneration as it informs the life chances of different populations. In recent years he has been a key voice in debates surrounding gentrification in the UK, with projects having charted the expansion of the gentrification frontier and assessing its impact on housing affordability and adequacy. His books have included The Battle for the High Street (2017, Palgrave) on issues of retail change and gentrification, and an overview of urban theory, Key ideas in geography: the City (2e edition, 2018, Routledge).
Katherine Brickell
Project co-investigator
Katherine Brickell is Professor of Urban Studies at King’s College London and is best known for her feminist-oriented research on precarious home and working lives. She has a decade of research experience with homeless families living in temporary accommodation in London, Greater Manchester, and Dublin. Her public-facing book Debt Trap Nation: Family Homelessness in a Failing State will be published in Autumn 2025 by Agenda (with co-author Mel Nowicki). Katherine is particularly committed to collaborative and engaged research and is co-researcher of the scoping report Geographers and Legal Impact (2022, Royal Geographical Society) and forthcoming book Scholar-Activism in Legal Geography: Rising for Social Justice in the World of Law (2026, LSE Press).
Iliana Ortega-Alcázar
Research and Innovation Associate
Iliana Ortega-Alcázar is an Associate Lecturer at Birkbeck College, University of London. She has also lectured at the London School of Economics and Political Science, and Brunel University of London. Iliana has previously held posts as a Research Fellow at the University of Southampton and at Queen Mary University of London. She was also a Research Associate in The Urban Age Programme at the London School of Economics and Political Science. Her book Autoconstrucción de vivienda: espacio y vida familiar en la Ciudad de México was published by PUEC-UNAM and FLACSO in 2016. Iliana holds a PhD in Sociology from the London School of Economics and Political Science.
Ella Harris
Research and Innovation Associate
Ella Harris is an academic and independent researcher with expertise in creative methods and ‘crisis cultures’. She’s interested in how creative and inventive approaches to research can develop understanding of complex, intersecting crises with a particular focus on ‘compensatory’ forms of housing like tiny homes, micro housing and pop-up accommodation. Ella’s books include Rebranding Precarity (Zed Books, 2020), Encountering the World with i-Docs (Bristol University Press, 2025), Reconstructing the American Dream (Intellect Press, 2025 with Mel Nowicki, Tim White and Cian Oba Smith) and the edited collection The Growing Trend of Living Small (Routledge, 2022, with Mel Nowicki and Tim White). Ella’s creative outputs include the co-created interactive documentary The Lockdown Game (press the remote to start!) and a card deck allowing young people to share their views on social and cultural infrastructure.
Jon Reades
Project co-investigator
Jon Reades is Professor of Geographic Data Science and Head of Department in the Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis, UCL. After nearly a decade in the technology sector as consultant and developer, Jon left industry to pursue a PhD at the Bartlett School of Planning with a focus on economic geography and ‘big data’; his doctoral research eventually saw the light of day nearly ten years later as the interview-led Why Face-to-Face Still Matters: The persistent power of cities in the post-pandemic era (2021). After doing pioneering work with mobile phone and smart card data, Jon shifted his focus to open and reproducible workflows, and the code underpinning much of his current teaching and research can be found at jreades.github.io. He has a long-standing research interest in housing and neighbourhood issues.
Eleanor Wilkinson
Project co-investigator
Eleanor Wilkinson is a feminist cultural and social geographer, and currently Interdisciplinary Senior Research Fellow in the Faculty of Social Sciences, University of Sheffield. Her research is concerned with the political life of emotions and affect, with a particular focus on intimate life, power and ideology. Her work explores the various ways in which normative ideals of the ‘good life’ are constructed and examines what happens when these ideals are not met. Eleanor’s research contributes to debates on critical loneliness studies, LGBTQ+ lives and queer futures, and precarity, housing and home: her previous work has included studies of young people’s experience of shared housing under conditions of austerity.
Helen Carr
Project co-investigator
Helen Carr is Professor of Property Law and Social Justice in the Law School at the University of Southampton. Helen's research interests are in the conflicts and injustices connected with property law and housing inequality, drawing on social-legal and feminist approaches. Her research has tackled questions of hazardous and insecure housing in the private rental sector, statutory overcrowding and homelessness in both urban and rural contexts. Her publications include the co-edited volume Law and the Precarious Home: socio-legal perspectives on the precarious home (Hart publishing, 2018)
Ruth Neville
Research and Innovation Associate
Ruth Neville is a spatial data scientist specialising in population geography and demography, with a focus on migration and mobility. Her PhD research investigated international student mobility and the socio-economic, cultural, economic, and institutional factors shaping migration flows, with an emphasis on the impact of external shocks such as Brexit and the COVID-19 pandemic. Her work employs advanced methodologies, including machine learning forecasting models and spatial interaction model to predict and measure population trends. She has also contributed to projects that leverage innovative spatial data sources, such as digital trace data, to analyse population movements during crises.