Our Team
Adam Eldridge is a sociologist whose research sits at the intersection of leisure, urban, and cultural studies. His work focuses on cities at night, particularly in regard to how policy, mobility, and urban change shapes the ways cities are lived, managed and experienced. He is the co-author of Planning the Night Time City (2009) with Marion Roberts and co-editor of Exploring Nightlife: Space, Society and Governance (2018) with Jordi Nofre.
Maria has a degree in Architecture and Urban Design (University of Athens, 1985) and a PhD in Geography and Planning (Paris IV – Sorbonne, 1991). She was Fellow at the Urban Program of Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, USA (1990). She is the Director of the EIREST, a multidisciplinary research team dedicated to tourism studies, with main focus on cultural heritage, development, and urban-tourism evolutions. From 2008 to 2017 she was the director of the Institute for Research and High Studies on Tourism (Institut de Recherches et d’Etudes Supérieures du Tourisme, IREST) of Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne University. Since 2009 she is the director of the UNESCO Chair of Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne University and the coordinator of the UNITWIN network ‘Tourism, Culture, Development’. She is the author of several books and papers related to Tourism, Culture and Heritage.
Sébastien is a geographer, member of EIREST, and director of IREST Tourism (Institut de Recherches et d’Etudes Supérieures du Tourisme, IREST) of Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne University. His researches in the field of tourism deal with heritage and tourism development in Great Paris and its surroundings (banlieues), the crossings between informal economies and tourism, the numeric turn through the issue of observation (big data and social networks) and regulations, heritage from below, tourism and regulations. He started researches on tourism and employment. He’s participating to the destination contract Paris augmenté, with various public stakeholders from Grand Paris.
Maja completed her doctoral thesis Branding Post-Conflict Cities and Nations in 2017, which sparked a keen interest in the intersection of architecture and tourism, particularly the role of residents in shaping the new narratives and a destination’s response to conflict. With a degree in Architecture, she led her own design studio prior to joining academia. She is currently mostly involved in teaching and research but remains active with architectural practice, as a consultant to a number of place branding organisations and design practices. Over the course of her doctoral research, she worked as a research associate on projects such as investigating risk perception in post-disaster destinations and the Leverhulme Trust funded ‘Constructing Post-War Britain’. Maja currently teaches on undergraduate and postgraduate architecture, urban planning, and tourism programmes and supervises postgraduate and doctoral dissertations. She regularly presents her work at national and international conferences, organises workshops and symposiums, curates exhibitions, is involved in teaching and learning programme development, and an invited guest lecturer and critic. Her current research is on the intangible heritage of the displaced communities and tools of representation in a nation’s heritage discourse.
Robert Maitland is Professor Emeritus of City Tourism at the University of Westminster, London, and Visiting Professor in the Department of Geography of Tourism and Recreation, University of Warsaw, Poland. An urban economist who read Economics at the University of Cambridge, then studied City Planning at the University of Nottingham, his work has long focused on how tourism shapes cities and cities shape tourism.
He directed a pioneering research project for Her Majesty’s Government (HMG) in the 1990s that for the first time evaluated the role of tourism in urban regeneration. Subsequent work for HMG included a review of national policy for leisure and tourism; an evaluation of the effectiveness of national tourism organisations, and of the marketing activities of VisitBritain; a review of public interventions in the UK tourism sector; and acting as tourism advisor to the UK’s National Audit Office.
Johannes studied urban planning and urban studies in Germany, Italy and the United States and holds a PhD in Urban Planning from Columbia University, New York. His research interests cover urban and planning theory, urban (development) politics, urban tourism and leisure consumption. Previous positions he held include a guest professorship at the Brandenburg University of Technology Cottbus-Senftenberg (2013-2015), a visiting professorship at the Politecnico di Milano (2014) and, most recently, a lectureship at Cardiff University (2015-2018), where he acted as course director of the BSc Urban Planning & Development programme. Some of his most recent publications include the co-edited volume Protest and Resistance in the Tourist City (Routledge, 2016) as well as the journal articles ‘Destination’ Berlin Revisited. From (New) Tourism towards a Pentagon of Mobility and Place Consumption (Tourism Geographies, 2016) and, co-authored with Claire Colomb, Urban tourism as a source of contention and social mobilisations: A critical review(Tourism Planning & Development). In addition to being active in teaching and research, Johannes is a founding member of the Berlin-based urbanist collective u-Lab, Studio für Stadt und Raumprozesse and member of the curatorial board of the International Building Exhibition Stuttgart Region IBA2027.
Ilaria is a reader in events and tourism in the school of architecture and cities, University of Westminster, London. Her research interests include urban tourism; cultural events; creative industries; and urban regeneration. After completing her PhD on ‘tourism development in creative, non-central areas in East London’ in 2010, Ilaria worked as a researcher on a Joseph Rowntree Foundation funded project on youth leisure, and as a lead investigator on a IOC funded project on the impact of the London 2012 Olympics on small creative organisations in East London. Her more recent research focuses on off-the-beaten track experiences of Olympic cities; Christmas themed spaces in cities; and urban tourism policy in the context of the Covid19 pandemic. Prior to joining the University of Westminster, Ilaria worked at the Lille Development Agency, France, and later as a senior lecturer in tourism at Anglia Ruskin University in Cambridge, UK.
Andrew is the co-lead of the Tourism and Events Research Group at the University of Westminster and Director of the PhD Programmes across the School of Architecture and Cities. He has a background in geography and his main research interests are in urban tourism and city events. He is the co-editor of Destination London, an innovative open access book about the expansion of the visitor economy in London that was published in 2019. His work on tourism examines UK cities but he has also published work on city tourism in Barcelona, Oslo and Valletta. His work on events includes two widely read monographs: Events and Urban Regeneration: the Strategic Use of Events to Revitalise Cities (Routleldge, 2012) and Events in the City: Using Public Spaces as Event Venues. (Routledge, 2016). Currently, Andrew is one of the Principal Investigators on the HERA funded project Festivals, Events and Inclusive Public Spaces in Europe.
