I am a Lecturer in Urban Design interested in a critical understanding of cities, space and architecture. My research is at the intersection of urban design, social theory, and political philosophy. Using a range of different methods (socio-spatial mapping, participant observation, interviews, discourse analysis, etc.) I explore relationships between aesthetics and politics, history and power, and urban visions and visualisations. I investigate the political agency of architects, urban designers, and other design-related professionals in contemporary urbanisation processes. My work contributes to the fields of Radical and Urban Geography and combines empirical analyses with detailed discussions of theoretical concepts. I engage with the work of theorists who are commonly associated with the Frankfurt School including Benjamin, Adorno and Horkheimer and, more recently, with the work of Nietzsche, Foucault, Arendt, Rancière, and Deleuze and Guattari.

In my reserach monograph Ruined Skylines: Aesthetics, Politics and London's Towering Cityscape (Routledge, 2019) I discuss the skyline as a space for radical urban politics. Developing a critique of the construction of more and more speculative towers as well as a critique of the claim that these towers ruin the historic cityscape, I argue that the new London skyline needs to be ruined instead and explore ruination as a political appropriation of the commodified and financialised cityscape, making a case for reanimating urban politics as an art of the possible.

I joined the School of Geography and Planning in September 2016 and previously taught at the University of the Arts London, Central Saint Martins and in the Sociology Department at the London School of Economics (LSE). I obtained a PhD from the LSE on the topic of Formalised Vision in the City and hold a Master in Architecture from the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna. I practiced as an architect in Vienna, Barcelona and in London for Foreign Office Architects (FOA) where I was project architect and leader of the office-internal high-rise unit. I also worked on a comparative analysis of public spaces in London, Paris and Barcelona (sponsored by KPF).