Dr Carlos López Galviz is a Lecturer (Associate Professor) in the Theories and Methods of Social Futures at Lancaster University, United Kingdom. He has been a consultant in several planning initiatives in the UK, Europe and Colombia, and was in 2014 a visiting scholar of the Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences, with the project ‘Past Futures: 19th-century London and Paris and the future of Chinese cities’, funded by the European Commission. His research interrogates the relationship between cities and infrastructure through the lens of ‘past futures’, namely, the ways in which we can connect past experiences and events with future plans and ideas about the environments where we will live and work. Carlos has published widely on the history of cities like London and Paris, and the history of technology and infrastructure, including Going Underground: New Perspectives (2013) and Global Undergrounds: Exploring Cities Within (2016). He furthermore has substantial experience teaching Social Sciences Research Methods and supervising students’ research projects.

Carlos obtained a Bachelor of Architecture from the Universidad San Buenaventura (Cali, Colombia) in 1999, a Masters in Metropolitan Studies from the Universiteit van Amsterdam (the Netherlands) in 2005 and a PhD in Metropolitan History from the University of London (UK) in 2009, and brings a unique interdisciplinary and international perspective to the study of cities.