Please note I am on research leave in Semester 1, 2024/25.

I am Professor of Architecture and Urban Studies and lead the Urban Studies Lab at the University of Manchester, where I also act as Academic Director of the Confucius Institute. Currently, I am Editor-in-Chief of The Journal of Architecture, a Member of the Board of Trustees of the Urban Studies Foundation (having served as Chair for the maximum two terms 2020-2023), Chair of the Board of the AzuKo Foundation, and member of the RIBA President's Awards for Research Working Group. I was trained as an architect at ETH Zurich and hold a PhD in Public Policy Design from Tokyo Institute of Technology.

I am broadly interested in the dynamics between architecture, everyday life, urban transformations, and global environmental change. I employ innovative ethnographic methods alongside other relevant approaches to explore these dynamics. Geographically, my research spans diverse contexts, including China, Japan, India, Bulgaria, England, Brazil, and Sub-Saharan Africa.

Rather than insisting on theoretical purity or aligning with a particular school of thought, methodology, or otherwise defined approach, I rely on systems thinking and draw from social practice and complexity theories to study how infrastructures serve to mediate the relationship between everyday life (practices) and social, cultural, environmental, technical, and economic systems across multiple spatial and temporal scales. This requires recognising the value of and combining often radically opposed ontological perspectives.

My work has attracted over £1.3m in funding as principal investigator from a diverse set of national and international agencies, including UKRI (ESRC, NERC), the Royal Society, British Council, the Daiwa and Great Britain Sasakawa Foundations. I head the international and transdisciplinary research programme Sustainable Infrastructure (SusInfra), providing leadership on a range of projects around the themes outlined above.

Recent funded research

MICRA Seedcorn Award (£5,980) and Oxford Brookes Research Excellence Award (£7,629). Co-Principal Investigator. With Chiko Ncube (Oxford Brookes), Tanja Bastia and Nan Zhang. 'Infrastructures of care for and by older people in Sub-Saharan Africa’ (2022-2023)

ESRC Impact Accelaration Award (£16,784). Principal Investigator. 'Right to Water' (2021)

British Council Researcher Links Workshop (£24,000). Lead. UK China workshop in collaboration with Tongji in Shanghai, 'Towards Healthy China 2035:  Sustainable Urban Sanitation Infrasystems in the Yangtze River Delta' (2020)

GCRF University of Manchester QR Allocation (£50,000). Principal Investigator/Convenor. Transdisciplinary workshop 'INFRA+' (2020-2021)

Royal Society Resilient Futures Challenge-Led Grant (£499,993). International Lead and Principal Investigator. 'Towards Sustainable Sanitation in India and Brasil (TOSSIB)' (2019-2023)

NERC Towards a Sustainable Earth (£519,880). International Lead and Principal Investigator. 'A Systems Approach to Sustainable Sanitation Challenges in Urbanising China (SASSI)' (2019-2022)

Hallsworth Conference Fund (£20,000), University of Manchester. Principal Convenor. 'Urbanisation, Infrastructures and Everyday Life in East Asia' (2018-2019)

ESRC Impact Acceleration Award (£20,128). Principal Investigator. ‘Harmonica Alley, Yokohama: Tracing Urban Change between the Tokyo Olympics’ (2017)

ESRC Strategic Network (£100,799). Principal Investigator, ‘Strategic Network: Data and Cities as Complex Adaptive Systems’ (2015-2017)

Daiwa Foundation Award (£7,000). Principal Investigator, ‘Harmonica Alley, Yokohama: a visual ethnography’ (2015)

Great Britain Sasakawa Foundation (£3,000). Principal Investigator, ‘Harmonica Alley, Yokohama: a visual ethnography’ (2015)

Following several years in professional practice as an architect, my doctoral research was motivated by the desire to understand the implications of rapid urban redevelopment, displacement, and coexistence in Shanghai for the everyday lives of ordinary urban residents. Drawing from environmental psychology and theories of place identity and belonging, I used visual ethnography and insights from interviews to develop the notion of the ‘urban borderland’, troubling prevailing criticism of Asian enclave urbanism at the time.

My work on urban social coexistence and spatial contiguity continues to this day, and I am currently completing a book manuscript on urban borderlands that draws from two decades of research on the topic.

I established the ESRC Strategic Network Data and Cities as Complex Adaptive Systems, bringing together scientists and social science researchers with policy and decision makers to identify the potential of emerging big data sets, computational modelling, and complexity science frameworks to understand rapid urban transformation in the Global South and North.

Under my leadership, DACAS later developed into Sustainable Infrastructure (SusInfra), a research programme and network around urban infrastructural transitions in China, India, Brazil, and Sub-Saharan Africa.

My first monograph, Translocal Ageing in the Global East: Bulgaria’s abandoned elderly (Palgrave, 2020), is about the lifecourse and everyday lives of older people in post-socialist Bulgaria. It asks how they adapt to a state of perpetual uncertainty, abandoned by the state, and left behind by their families. Drawing on dozens of interviews with older people in Bulgaria’s cities and towns, I trace their patterns of everyday life to draw out the mechanisms through which they cope with their meagre pensions, sustain their ailing bodies, and make do in their tattered homes. My research troubles the 'ageing in place' paradigm, showing that in Bulgaria and the broader Global East, translocal ageing is the prevailing reality.

Defining the Urban: interdisciplinary and professional perspectives (Routledge, 2018) explores the elusive nature of the term 'urban,' highlighting its contested definitions and uses across academic disciplines and professional practices, including Architecture, Ecology, Governance, and Sociology. The first two parts examine how different fields conceptualize and engage with urban processes, while the third presents transdisciplinary approaches that blend theory and practice. Written by experts, the book aims to develop a shared ontology for urban research and practice, making it a vital resource for those seeking to understand and collaborate on urban challenges.

Urban Infrastructuring: reconfigurations, transformations and sustainability in the Global South (Springer, 2022) examines the critical processes linking infrastructure with social, ecological, and political systems, emphasizing its essential role in urbanisation and its entanglement with socio-spatio-ecological transformations that often lead to negative outcomes. It argues for an ethical approach to infrastructuring to enhance sustainability amid intersecting crises. Divided into three parts, it explores infrastructural entanglements, the damaging outcomes of current practices, and advocates for a shift towards just and sustainable interventions, proposing an ethico-politics of care in research and practice.

At the University of Manchester, I lead the Urban Studies Lab (USL), a research laboratory based in Architecture. Research at USL focuses on the dynamics of urban everyday life, social practices, and the cultures, natures, infrastructures, and architectures that condition the contemporary and future urban, with a special interest in the majority world. Integrating decolonial methodologies into research and teaching, we critically interrogate entrenched inequalities and power structures in the processes of urbanisation and urban transformation. By bridging theory with practical engagement, we often collaborate with diverse stakeholders to inform urban policy and create meaningful impact in diverse urban contexts.

I head SusInfra, an international and transdisciplinary research programme comprising a portfolio of interrelated projects that collectively investigate critical matters relating to urban sustainability, human well-being, and their dynamics with broader developmental objectives. These projects are designed to target specific facets of urban and environmental challenges, ranging from sanitation infrastructure or care for older persons to the integration of digital technologies. The overarching aim of SusInfra research is to foster a better understanding of interactions between human activities and the urban environment, with a particular emphasis on their ramifications for sustainable urban development.

SusInfra is home to over 40 active researchers from diverse disciplinary backgrounds, including complex systems and mathematical biology; environmental science and engineering; sustainability science; human geography; and architecture, urban design, and planning, among others. Colleagues are based around the world. They are at different stages of their career, ranging from undergraduate students to senior professors. To ensure the informed formulation of research questions and approaches as well as the timely and rapid dissemination of research findings, SusInfra maintains close links with government and industry, including non-academic stakeholders (planners, policy makers, businesses).

Please get in touch should you wish to find out more about USL or SusInfra.

My research agenda is intrinsically challenge-led and responds to urgent urban challenges, especially with respect to infrastructure in its various guises. My approach fosters scholarship that not only respects and values ideas from outside the Western context, but also seeks to understand and integrate other (non-)disciplinary knowledges. My work, therefore, is always developed and implemented in close collaboration with local stakeholders, user communities, and practitioners.

For instance, under the SusInfra umbrella, I worked closely with Purva Dewoolkar and Pani Haq Samiti, a local NGO campaigning for water connections in Mumbai’s informal settlements. We developed an app to track residents’ applications for water connections as they progress through Mumbai’s administrative system, aiming for the rapid identification and resolution to hold-ups and the speedy implementation of water connections for those most in need.

My research on the Japanese snack bar (sunakku) provided evidence of the cultural and architectural significance of a modernist entertainment building in Yokohama, Japan, threatened by redevelopment plans for the Tokyo 2020 Olympics. Through public events and exhibitions in Manchester and Yokohama, collaborating with local groups like Yokohama Heritage, and engaging with local entrepreneurs, policymakers, and academics, I contributed to the building’s transfer of ownership and eventual heritage status designation in December 2017. This preservation effort not only safeguarded a vital community space, but also set a precedent for protecting other endangered urban sites.  

I was elected and reelcted to serve two terms as Chair of the Board of Trustees of the Urban Studies Foundation, leading on the diversification of funding activities both thematically and geographically, as well as the Board itself. As Chair of the Board of Trustees at AzuKo, a charity which works against housing poverty and towards dignified living conditions for all, I support the small team in developing strategies, networking, and fundraising activities.

Please note, I am not accepting PhD students for 2025/26.

Current PhD research supervision:

Xin Li (Architecture, SEED PGR Studentship): Fair Shelter: Civic Infrastructures of Care for Bodies in Pain (Main Supervisor, with Sarah Marie Hall and Alison Browne) 

Rati Choudhari (Architecture, SEED PGR Studentship): Environmentally Sustainable Futures: the potential of modular city planning (Main Supervisor, with Joe Ravetz and Ulysses Sengupta) 

Ziqiu Ren (Architecture): Demonstrating Agencies and Assemblages of Food Markets as Socio-Urban Infrastructures in the Chinese Urban Context (Main Supervisor, with Trude Renwick, Hamid Khalili, and Huda Tayob) 

Rujin Wang (Architecture): Older Women’s Life Satisfaction, Community Engagement, and Ageing in Place in High Density Urban Environments in China (Main Supervisor, with Nan Zhang) 

Mark Shtanov (Architecture, SEED PGR Studentship): Urban Integration of Waste Management Processes (Main Supervisor, with Jaise Kuriakose) 

Dongyang Mi (Geography, President's Doctoral Scholar, Manchester/Melbourne Scholarship): Hygienic citizenship: Shifting cultures of cleanliness, hygiene and sanitation (Co-supervisor, with Alison Browne and Saska Petrova) 

Qiwei Peng (Architecture, CSC Scholarship): Elevated highways as social Infrastructures -interrogating the assemblage of diasporic pedestrian in Chongqing under-bridge space (Co-supervisor, with Stephen Walker)

Completed:

Dr Juliet (Junyan) Ye (Architecture, 2025): Urban nature re-encountered: perceptions, experiences and practices of Chinese international students in Manchester, UK (Main Supervisor, with Alison Browne and Matthew Dennis)

Dr Purva Dewoolkar (Architecture, 2024, SEED PGR Studentship): Making Sanitation: Unpacking Mumbai’s Blurred Terrains (Main Supervisor, with Alison Browne and Nate Millington)

Dr Kunzhe Kang (Architecture, 2023): A Dubious Experiment for Autonomous Architecture: a study of Chinese Experimenal Architecture between 1993 and 2010 through a Bourdieusian Lens (Main Supervisor, with Stephen Walker); now Xi'an University of Architecture and Technology.

Dr Yahya Gamal (Architecture, 2023): Incorporating procedural utility in contexts with multiple land markets: an application in Greater Cairo, Egypt (Main Supervisor, with Nuno Pinto); now University of Glasgow.

Dr Qi Liu (Geography, 2022): Beyond tourist practices: Practice-based approaches to sustainable consumption and production in tourism in China (Co-supervisor, with Alison Browne); now Chinese Academy of Social Sciences.

Dr Cecilia Alda Vidal (Geography, 2022): Urban transformation and everyday life: The politics of access to sanitation in Lilongwe, Malawi (Co-supervisor, with Alison Browne); now BC3 Basque Centre for Climate Change.

Dr Debapriya Chakrabarti (Architecture, 2020): The Practice of Idol-making in Kumartuli: Cultural Heritage, Spatial Transformation and Neoliberal Governance in Kolkata (Main Supervisor, with Graham Haughton); now MMU.

Dr Raqib Abu Salia (Architecture, 2020): Customary Land Tenure and Land Readjustment: Land Administration in Semi-Arid Ghana (Main Supervisor, with Ulysses Sengupta)

Dr Yan Yu (2018, British Council – CSC Visiting PhD Scholar, Architecture): The Revival of Chinese Traditional Villages under the Impact of Fast-Developing Urbanisation (Main Supervisor); now Macau University.

Dr Victoria Lawson (Planning, 2017): Can design deliver? A Liverpool case study of design-led city centre regeneration (Co-supervisor, with Graham Haughton); now University of Glasgow.

Dr Zhenbo Yu (Planning, 2013): Regulation of Urban Character: Style, Colour and Historic Character in a Modern Chinese City – The Case of Harbin (Co-supervisor, with Michael Hebbert)

In my pedagogy, I focus on fostering decolonial thinking, designing, and practice. My research-led teaching agenda is rooted in the positionality and partnerships that underpin my research, emphasising translocal and decolonial approaches. These approaches entail the study and critique of entrenched (colonial) structures of inequality with the aim of dismantling them through the design of interventions that respect and value labour, resources, and lives, both now and for future generations. Design, here, is then defined as research-led, intentional intervention towards sustainability. My modules seek to develop climate literacy and an ethico-political position of care in urban and architectural research and practice.

At the University of Manchester, I teach Global Urban Futures as part of the MSc Urban Studies. As part of the Master of Architecture at the Manchester School of Architecture, I contribute to Research 1 (Research Methods: Transdisciplinary Urbanism) and Research 2 (Dissertations). In studio, I work with the CPUai atelier.