Danny Dorling, Michael Edwards, Kate Macintosh, Anna Minton, Zoe Williams

There's no question that housing across the UK is in crisis. What are the solutions? Danny Dorling, author of All that is Solid - How the Great Housing Disaster Defines Our Times; Michael Edwards, author of the Foresight Future of Cities paper Prospects for Land, Rent and Housing in UK Cities; architect Kate Macintosh, designer of pioneering social housing schemes; and Anna Minton, journalist and author of Ground Control debate the crisis and what cities especially can do.

Chaired by Zoe Williams, Guardian.

Speaker biographies:

Danny Dorling is the Halford Mackinder Professor of Geography, Oxford. He appears regularly on TV and radio, and writes for the Guardian, New Statesman and other papers. He advises government and the office for national statistics. Among his books are All That Is Solid; Population 10 Billion; So You Think You Know About Britain?; Injustice; The Social Atlas of Europe and Inequality and the 1%.

Michael Edwards is a Teaching Fellow at the Bartlett School of Planning, UCL Faculty of the Built Environment. He joined the UCL staff in 1960. Research interests include the relationship between property markets and planning, mainly in the UK and Europe, and sustainable cities and regeneration. Previously, he was employed in National Lichfield and Associates, where he worked on the Milton Keynes Master Plan, other new settlements, retail schemes and cost benefit analysis. He is a founder member of the International Network for Urban Research and Action and of the Planners Network UK. He is the author of the Foresight Future of Cities paper Prospects for Land, Rent and Housing in UK Cities.

Kate Macintosh worked for two years in Scandinavia, after studying architecture in Edinburgh. On returning to UK in 1964 she worked for a short time for eminent architect Denys Lasden on the National Theatre project. In 1995 she moved to private practice in Finch Macintosh Architects, focusing on sustainable building construction. She has served on the Royal Institute of British Architects Council and was a Vice President for Public Affairs in 1996. She was the first chair person of the Women's Architect Group. She was Chair of Architects for Peace from its launch in 1981, and in 1991 became Vice-chair and later Chair of Architects and Engineers for Social Responsibility. She was Vice Chair of Scientists for Global Responsibility 2005- 2011.

Anna Minton is a writer and journalist and a Reader in Architecture at the University of East London. She spent a decade in journalism, including a stint as a corporate reporter on the Financial Times. She then began to focus on longer projects for think-tanks and policy organisations and is the author of numerous reports, including the Joseph Rowntree Foundation's Viewpoint on fear and distrust. Between 2012 and 2014 she was the 1851 Royal Commission's Fellow in the Built Environment. Ground Control: Fear and Happiness in the Twenty-First Century City was her first book.

Zoe Williams is a Guardian columnist who also writes for the New Statesman and is the restaurant reviewer for The Sunday Telegraph's Stella magazine. She was named Restaurant Reviewer of the Year in 2014's Guild of Food Writers Awards. She is also the author of Get it Together: Why We Deserve Better Politics.

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