Oksana Zaporozhets, PhD, is an associate professor at the Faculty of Urban and Regional Development, a head of the Laboratory for Urban Sociology, National Research University Higher School of Economics, Moscow, Russia. Her current research projects focus on urban inequalities, new residential areas and large housing estates, neighboring in the big city. Her research interests also include street art and everyday mobility. She co-edited the book Microurbanism. City in Details (Moscow: New Literary Observer, 2014)
Anna Zhelnina holds a PhD in sociology from the City University of New York, USA. Her research interests include such topics as urban civic participation, the challenges of engaging neighbors in diverse neighborhoods, and the mechanisms that urban political players employ to promote their visions of a city’s future. Her doctoral dissertation, “Engaging Neighbors: Housing Strategies and Political Mobilization in Moscow’s Renovation,” explores the political developments triggered by a large-scale urban renewal project in Moscow, the competing visions of a “good city,” private and common good, and how proposed ways of achieving these goals clashed during the renovation controversy. Anna joined the Helsinki Institute of Urban and Regional Studies as a postdoctoral researcher in September 2020 to work on the theme “Urban utopias, citizenship, and alternatives”.
