Having worked on their obsessions in parallel worlds for several years, Matias Echanove and Rahul Srivastava joined forces through their blog airoots/eirut in 2006. They have since written extensively on urban themes and engaged in projects involving planning, pedagogy, technology and activism. They are the co-directors of the Institute of Urbanology, which has offices in Mumbai and Goa (India).

They are part of the urbz.net collective, which organized workshops in Tokyo, Istanbul, Mumbai and New Delhi.  They have presented their work in forums and seminars such as TEDx, Urban Age, Just Metropolis, J-Store, and been invited by institutions such as Columbia University, the University of Tokyo, the Royal Institute of Arts in Stockholm and the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity.

They co-teach a seminar at the School of Habitat Studies, Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai, and serve as academic advisers at the Indian Institute for Human Settlements, Bangalore. They have co-written a number of academic essays and commentaries for various publishers, magazines and newspapers including Oxford University Press, New Village Press, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Hindu, The Times of India, Time Out Mumbai, Art India and Indian Architect and Builder.

Rahul Srivastava has studied social and urban anthropology in Mumbai, Delhi and Cambridge (UK). He taught at Wilson College, Mumbai for seven years, where he initiated the Neighbourhood Project, and subsequently worked as the first Director of PUKAR, Partners for Urban Knowledge Action and Research, Mumbai, a research collective founded by anthropologist Arjun Appadurai. Since then he has done research on cities and knowledge practices in Mumbai, Delhi, Georgetown-Penang, Kolkata, Tokyo, Nara (Japan) and New York. His previous publications include an ethnography of urbanized nomads of Mumbai, a novel published by Puffin, Penguin India and essays on urban anthropology and cities. He is based in Goa.

Matias Echanove studied economics & government at the London School of Economics, urban planning at Columbia University (New York) and urban information systems at the University of Tokyo.  His interests include street-markets, the informal economy, architectural landscapes, unplanned settlements, participatory politics, and information technology. He initiated the Urban Typhoon workshops in Shimokatzawa (Tokyo), Dharavi (Mumbai) and Khirkee (New Delhi). He is based in Mumbai.