Ida Susser is Professor of Anthropology at Hunter College and the Graduate Center at the City University of New York. She was the founding President of the Society for the Anthropology of North America. She is the author of Norman Street: Poverty and Politics in an Urban Community (1982), co-author of Medical Anthropology and the World System (1997), and co-editor, with Thomas C. Patterson, of Cultural Diversity in the United States: A Critical Reader (Blackwell, 2000).

Manuel Castells, born in Spain in 1942, is Professor of City and Regional Planning at the University of California, Berkeley, where he was appointed in 1979. In the 1970s he directed the seminar on urban sociology at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, Paris. He has also been a visiting professor of urban planning at the Universidad Catolica de Chile, Ecole d'Architecture de l'Universite de Geneve, the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, the University of Hong Kong, and the University of Southern California. Among other awards, he has received the Silver Medal in Urbanism from the City of Madrid in 1999 and the 2001 Kevin Lynch Award in Urban Design and Planning from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In 1998 he accepted the Robert and Helen Lynd Award from the American Sociological Association for his life-long contribution to urban sociology.