Mara is a Lecturer in Urban Geography and Director of the MA/MSc Cities Programme at Birkbeck, University of London. She is also a visiting fellow at the LSE Latin America and Caribbean Centre. Mara is an urban geographer whose research focuses on the cross-class politics of urban space production, with an emphasis on the (re)production of socio-spatial inequality in urban Brazil. She completed a PhD in Human Geography and Urban Studies at LSE. She also holds a BSc and a MSc in Economics from the Federal University of Minas Gerais, Brazil.

Gareth Jones is Director of the Latin America and Caribbean Centre, Professor of Urban Geography in the Department of Geography and Environment at LSE and an Associate Member of the International Inequalities Institute. He has an interdisciplinary academic background, having studied economics, geography, and urban sociology, at University College London and the University of Cambridge.

Dr Aiko Ikemura Amaral is post-doctoral research officer at LSE Latin America and Caribbean Centre for the British Academy project "Engineering food: infrastructure exclusion and ‘last mile’ delivery in Brazilian favelas". She holds a PhD in Sociology from the University of Essex and is a teaching associate at the Centre of Latin American Studies, University of Cambridge.