David Simon

Simon points to an uncomfortable asymmetry: almost all the literature on urban climate adaptation is written with cities that have a complete land registry, a municipal budget and reliable mapping in mind. Accra, Kampala and Dar es Salaam lack all three, and on top of that half the population lives in settlements that officially do not exist. A flood plan that ignores those districts is not merely incomplete: it leaves out precisely the people who flood.

His answer is knowledge co-production. Instead of the university studying the city and delivering a report, researchers, municipal officers and residents' organisations define the question together from the start and share the results. It is slower and less glamorous, but it produces data the council can use and the neighbourhood recognises as its own.

A British geographer, Simon is professor of development geography at Royal Holloway, University of London, and from 2014 to 2019 directed the international centre Mistra Urban Futures, based in Gothenburg with platforms in Cape Town, Kisumu, Sheffield and Skåne. That post let him test co-production on four continents at once and compare the results.

Rethinking Sustainable Cities (2016) and Urban Planet (2018), the latter co-edited with Thomas Elmqvist and others, are his reference works, and his research fed directly into the drafting of Sustainable Development Goal 11 and into how it is measured. His most useful criticism is methodological: global urban indicators, applied identically to Stockholm and to Kisumu, mostly measure each city's statistical capacity, not its sustainability.