Sensing and Sensibility: Politics and Technology in the Contemporary City

Javier Arbona is a geographer researching the spatial legacies of militarization and violence. He is currently a Chancellor’s Postdoctoral Fellow in the American Studies Program at the University of California, Davis. Arbona is working on a book manuscript titled “The City of Radical Memory: Spaces of World War II Home Front Repression and Resistance in the San Francisco Bay Area.” In addition, Arbona is a founding member of the DEMILIT landscape arts collective. DEMILIT has produced works for the Headlands Center for the Arts, Deutschlandradio, the 2012 New City Reader at the Istanbul Design Biennial, and the Art Gallery at UC San Diego. Arbona holds architecture and urbanism degrees from Cornell University and MIT, and a PhD in geography from UC Berkeley.

Ingrid Burrington writes, makes maps, and tells jokes about power, politics, and the weird feelings people have about both. She’s currently a fellow at the Data and Society Research Institute and a member of Deep Lab. Her writing has previously appeared in Creative Time Reports, TechPresident, and San Francisco Art Quarterly. She lives on a small island off the coast of America.

Laura Forlano is an Assistant Professor of Design at the Institute of Design at IIT where she is Co-director of the Critical Futures Lab. From 2012–13, she was a Visiting Scholar in the Comparative Media Studies program at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Her research is focused on the intersection between emerging technologies, material practices and the future of cities. She is co-editor with Marcus Foth, Christine Satchell and Martin Gibbs of From Social Butterfly to Engaged Citizen: Urban Informatics, Social Media, Ubiquitous Computing, and Mobile Technology to Support Citizen Engagement, which was published by MIT Press in 2011. She received her Ph.D. in communications from Columbia University.

Douglas Pancoast is a graduate of the University of Kansas School of Architecture and Urban Design (BArch 1991) and Cranbrook Academy of Art (MFA Arch 1995). He has worked for firms including Richard Meier and Partners, 1100 Architect, BlackBox Studio at SOM, and agency.com. His work has been shown in the Chicago-based exhibitions Art in the Urban Garden, Mystique: Space, Technology, and Craft and Speculative Chicago; and in Scale at the Architectural League of New York and the National Building Museum, Washington, DC. His projects have been featured in Architectural Record, Architecture, A.P.+, and The Architectural Review, and in the book Young Architects: Scale.

Iker Gil is a founding partner at MAS Studio, editor in chief of the nonprofit MAS Context, and executive director of the SOM Foundation. Iker has edited or coedited several books including Radical Logic: On the Work of Ensamble Studio and Shanghai Transforming. He has curated multiple exhibitions including Nocturnal Landscapes, Poured Architecture: Sergio Prego on Miguel Fisac, and BOLD: Alternative Scenarios for Chicago, part of the inaugural Chicago Architecture Biennial. He was Associate Curator of the US Pavilion for the 2018 Venice Architecture Biennale and cocurator of Exhibit Columbus 2020–2021. He was the 2024 Morgenstern Visiting Chairs at the Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT) and has taught at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC), University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC), and the Escola da Cidade (São Paulo).