Kristen Biehl is an Assistant Professor at Sabancı University Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences and a researcher at Sabancı University Gender and Women’s Studies Center of Excellence (SU Gender). She holds a D.Phil in Social and Cultural Anthropology from the University of Oxford. For the last 15 years she has been involved both academically and professionally in intensive research within the migration and asylum field in Turkey. Her research interests include ethnographically studying transformations of urban society and space through migration and diversification processes, examining the governing effects of migration and asylum policy frameworks, and more recently of comparing the gender awareness and approaches of civil society initiatives working in the migration and environmental fields. Kristen is Principal Investigator for the Re-ROOT project in Turkey and is co-leader of Work Package 2 on Site Research together with Susanne Wessendorf.

Marhabo Saparova is a researcher at Sabanci University Gender and Women’s Studies Center of Excellence. For the ReROOT project, Marhabo conducts research in urban neighborhoods in the district of Fatih in Istanbul.

Reiner Staubach (Dr. rer. pol.) is spatial planner and professor of Planning-oriented Sociology, Planning Methods & Theory, at the Faculty of Architecture, Interior Design and City-Planning, Technische Hochschule Ostwestfalen-Lippe, University of Applied Sciences and Arts in Detmold.

Dennis Zilske is a spatial planner (TU Dortmund University) with more than 12 years of experience working for Planerladen in a broad variety of projects, most of them with the aim to involve people from the more vulnerable and in traditional forms of participation often times neglected groups.

Co-Project Investigator at ILS, Dortmund/Germany, field study Dortmund-Nordstadt; co-lead of work package 4 (arrival platforms) Heike Hanhörster is Senior Researcher at ILS—Research Institute for Regional and Urban Development in Dortmund, Germany. Her research interest covers place-based processes of social inclusion and exclusion and people’s encounters with difference.

I am postdoc researcher at ILS and site researcher within the ReROOT project for the German site Dortmund-Nordstadt.