Sponsored by the American Real Estate Society (ARES), Indigenous Peoples and Real Estate Valuation addresses a wide variety of timely issues relating to property ownership, rights, and use, including: ancestral burial, historical record of occupancy, treaty implementation problems, eminent domain, the effects of large governmental change, financing projects under formal and informal title or deed document systems, exclusive ownership vs. non-exclusive use rights, public land ownership, tribal or family land claims, insurgency and war, legal systems of ownership, prior government expropriation of lands, moral obligation to indigenous peoples, colonial occupation, and common land leases. These issues can also be broadly grouped into topics, such as conflict between indigenous and western property rights, communal land ownership, land transfer by force, legacy issues related to past colonization and apartheid, and metaphysical/indigenous land value.

Robert A. Simons is a Professor and former director of the Master of Urban Planning, Design and Development program at the Levin College of Urban Affairs at Cleveland State University in Cleveland, Ohio. He is also the faculty advisor for the Certificate Program in Real Estate Development and Finance, offered in conjunction with the Nance College of Business at CSU. During Fall 2005, Dr. Simons was a Fulbright Scholar at Wits University in Johannesburg, South Africa. Dr. Simons received his Ph.D. from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in City and Regional Planning, with an emphasis in real estate. He also holds a Master of Regional Planning and a Master of Science in Economics, both from U.N.C. His undergraduate degree in anthropology was earned at Colorado State University. He has been a member of the American Institute of Certified Planners (AICP) since 1983. At the Levin College of Urban Affairs, Dr. Simons teaches courses in real estate development, market analysis and finance, public economics Ph.D. research methods and environmental finance. Dr. Simons has published over 40 articles and book chapters on real estate, urban redevelopment, environmental damages, housing policy and brownfields redevelopment. He authored a book entitled Turning Brownfields into Greenbacks, (published by Urban Land Institute), and When Bad Things Happen to Good Property, (published by Environmental Law Institute in 2006), and is the lead editor for an international research monograph on Indigenous Property and Valuation (forthcoming in 2008, ARES). Dr. Simons has an active consulting practice, and has served as an expert witness on over 45 matters related to real estate, housing markets, and environmental contamination