Affiliate Network
We have a wide network of affiliates stretching across the world. This brings together our former colleagues, students and visitors, with current collaborators and partners. We continue to work closely with these partners, constituting a vibrant network of global urbanists.
These affiliations are also developed strategically, for instance, in consolidating partnerships with other urban research labs and institutes.
Bei Chen is a PhD student in Urban Studies and Planning. Her research programme focuses on the socio-political dimensions of China’s AI and robotic policy visions and implementation in urban contexts. Prior to her PhD study, Bei was a journalist working in China for more than a decade.
Dr Desiree Fields is Assistant Professor of Geography and Global Metropolitan Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. She studies how efforts to render immovable property into liquid capital unevenly restructure urban space and social relations, and the urban struggles for justice that arise to contest this process of financialization. Her scholarship speaks to developments that are central to the future of cities: the growing importance of finance to capitalism, the turn to increasingly market-driven approaches to housing and urbanization, and the digital revolution. Her Visiting Fellowship at the UI built on her research around the role of housing in capitalist urbanization.
Dr Claudia Fonseca Alfaro is a Project Researcher at the Institute for Urban Research, Malmö University, Sweden. She is a postcolonial and feminist urban scholar with expertise in Latin America who is interested in studying the way urbanization unfolds and how global capitalism actually happens on the ground in the inconspicuous places of the global South. She carries out this work by analyzing how space is produced at the intersection of power, discourse, and imaginaries. During her visiting fellowship at the UI, Claudia plans to focus on the project Smart cities in the Global South: Contributing to Cosmopolitan Urban Studies. This is a study of two smart city cases in Mexico – Guadalajara Ciudad Creativa Digital and Tequila Pueblo Mágico Inteligente.
Dr Xinghu Hu is a visiting fellow at Nanjing Forestry University. She works on urban spatial and green space. Her research mainly focuses on the spatial structure and distribution of urban public service facilities, especially on the application of quantitative spatial analysis methods in revealing urban spatial structure. She was a visiting fellow in the UI in 2020.
Dr Ping Huang is a Associate Professor at The Institute for International Affairs, Qianhai. His doctoral research, conducted at Harbin Engineering University (China), examined low-carbon technological innovation in China’s manufacturing industries. During his PhD, he spent one year at the Copernicus Institute of Sustainable Development, Utrecht University (the Netherlands), as a visiting scholar working on China’s solar PV innovation system. He joined the Urban Institute in June, 2019 and continues to work closely with the team since his departure in 2022.
Dr Sophie King is a founding manager of CLASS, a small community development charity which works in alliance with a network of women-led savings groups called Community Savers. She has predominantly operated within the field of participatory action research and learning moving between community practice and academia. For most of this time, my focus has been on working with communities to explore ideas, strategies and methodologies for building community, amplifying community voice, and co-producing solutions that ameliorate poverty and address intersecting inequalities. She is a visiting Practice Fellow at the Urban Institute, University of Sheffield, which supported transnational action learning between SDI and the Community Savers network under the Realising Just Cities programme 2017-2019.
Dr Andy Lockhart is a research associate at the University of Manchester Sustainable Consumption Institute. Andy is currently working on an ESRC project on Digital Platforms and the Future of Urban Mobility. His Visiting Fellowship at the UI built on his prior employment when he was employed as part of the ‘urban automation and robotics’ team. He continues to develop research on ‘new ecologies of automation’ with Simon Marvin and Aidan While.
Dr Gabriella Leal is a PhD student and her research is funded by a Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia scholarship. Gabriela's research sits at the intersection of Anthropology, Hip Hop Studies, and Urban Studies, with a sustained focus on peripheral territories, expressive practices, and knowledge production in Brazilian and Portuguese cities. Gabriela was a visiting researcher at the Urban Institute, University of Sheffield, where she contributed to comparative debates on urban knowledge regimes, presented ongoing doctoral research on rap poetics and peripheral epistemologies, and led the workshop Rebel Rebel: Exploring the Epistemic Work of Creative Methods — an inquiry into the possibilities and challenges of methodological innovation at the intersection of academic and artistic practices.
Dr Rachel Macrorie is a postdoctoral researcher in the Transforming Cities hub at Ultrecht. research investigates the governance of urban transformations toward low-carbon heating and cooling systems. Her work forms part of the collaborative European Horizon 2020 project 'Decarb City Pipes 2050 - Transition roadmaps to energy, efficient, zero-carbon urban heating and cooling'. Rachel was a postdoc researcher with the Urban Institute from its formation in 2015 to 2020. Within the Urban Automation and Robotics team, she worked on projects concerning; the role of smart technologies in urban decision making and citizenship, how digital platforms reproduce and restructure city dynamics, and the growing interest in robotic experiments and implementation in the urban context.
Professor Pauline McGuirk is Director, Australian Centre for Culture, Environment, Society and Space, University of Wollongong. Her research focus's o critical studies of urban governance, with a current focus on how ‘innovating’ is transforming the composition of governance in terms of relations, practices, technologies and geographies. Pauline was a Visiting Fellow in 2019 and continues to work closely with the UI on academic publications and research agendas.
Ana Mendez de Andes Aldama is a PhD student at The University of Sheffield. Her research is on 'Becoming-Common of the Public. Municipalist discourses, actors & strategies for commons-based governance of public spaces'. Presently, she holds a 1+3 White Rose DTP ESRC studentship to do her PhD with professors Doina Petrescu and Beth Perry as supervisors.
Dr Junia Mortimer is Assistant Professor at the Department of Urban Planning, in the School of Architecture of the Federal University of Minas Gerais (UFMG) and integrates the faculty of the Postgraduate Programme in Architecture and Urbanism at the Federal University of Bahia (PPGAU/UFBA). She seeks to investigate social-spatial practices as constitutive of urban epistemics, working with photographic archives and following a historical perspective in order to face contemporary challenges derived from extractivist modern urbanization processes. She is interested in developing sensorial methodologies in urban studies, especially visual methods, which may unravel “urban-nature futurities” through more collective ways of seeing. She was an Urban Studies Foundation International Fellow at the Urban Institute between 2025-2026.
Professor Zarina Patel is an Associate Professor of Human Geography in the Department of Environmental and Geographical Science at the University of Cape Town. Her research addresses the politics and practices of achieving just and sustainable urban transitions. The distinctive focus of her scholarship is the use of transdisciplinary approaches to navigate alternate insights and responses to complex urban issues in southern contexts, whilst foregrounding the diversity of forms of knowledge that are recognised as authoritative within these debates. She currently holds a Visiting Fellowship with the Urban Institute at the University of Sheffield.
Jenny Patient is a PhD student within the Realising Just Cities programme funded by Mistra Urban Futures, Jenny is focused on developing knowledge that can help trade unions play their full role towards an energy transition that brings both sustainability and justice, at a time when action on climate at a city level has never been so important. She previously worked in the UK rail industry and then in adult education, and for Sheffield Climate Alliance and Heeley City Farm. With Sheffield Climate Alliance, she worked as Campaigns Worker for three years, focusing especially on the employment, health and social co-benefits of climate action.
Dr Xira Ruiz-Campillo works in the Department of International Relations and Global History, Faculty of Political and Social Science, Complutense University of Madrid. She is undertaking research on the role of cities as international actors and their participation in transnational municipal networks. She was a Visiting Fellow at the UI for six months in 2020 and has continued collaboration with the UI's Climate Urbanism group.
Dr Jonathan Rutherford is a senior researcher, LATTS (Laboratoire Techniques, Territoires et Sociétés) at the Ecole des Ponts ParisTech (France). Jonathan’s research interests are around urban technology and infrastructure as a focus for interrogating the politics of urban socio-technical change. Since his Visiting Fellowship at the UI, Jonathan has worked with us on controlled environments and urban infrastructure issues and continues to publish with colleagues.
Dr Papia Sengupta is a political scientist and public policy expert who works on the intersectionality between gender, language, education, and urban living in culturally diverse societies. She teaches at the Centre for Political Studies in Jawaharlal Nehru University. Her research focuses on India's multicultural politics and turn to majoritarianism. New Delhi. Papia's work on women's rights in India can be found under the Dangerous Women Project of Institute of Advanced Studies in Humanities at Edinburgh University and her work on women and representation in India and Bangladesh. As a British Academy Visiting Fellow in the UI her project is Reclaiming through Resistance which interrogates the marginalisation of Muslim women in post-colonial India who have faced negligence from the state and their own community.
Sri Suryani is a PhD Student in the School of Geography and Planning. Her work experience ranges from urban design consultant, community-based NGO, and now lecturer in Architecture ITB. Under National Geographic Society grant and ITB research grant, she investigated the intersections between riverbank settlements and water infrastructure practices in Ciliwung River in Jakarta, and how infrastructure design mediates multiple narratives of seeing a river. Her research aims to understand the displacement process of the riverbank settlements by flood-risk mitigation policy in Jakarta, Indonesia, under ‘river normalisation’ project. In specific, it investigates the social process in the displacements, differentiated water infrastructures, and temporality of spatial politics.
Dr Fatima Tassadiq is a Post-Doctoral Research associate at the Urban Institute. Her research interests center on the political ecology of cities and infrastructures. Her doctoral research took the case of the Orange Line Metro Train in Lahore, Pakistan to examine the ways in which construction of large infrastructural projects (un)make the postcolonial city and its citizens. She joined the institute to work with Dr Jonathan Silver on his GlobalCORRIDOR project that investigates the role of infrastructure corridors in shaping the urbanisation process and inequality in a series of global regions.
Dr Simone Toji is a Newton International Fellow undertaking the project ‘Reconsidering urban narratives in Brazil: Central areas in São Paulo as problems and potentialities.’ Her work engages with the study of human mobility, identity, subjectivity, cultural heritage, global studies and urban environments by considering uncertainty and precariousness as significant components in the making of complex social and cultural worlds. For her project at the Urban Institute, Simone focuses on the central areas of São Paulo that are continually rendered as urban problems, upon which projects of revitalization and renovation have been implemented by several administrations over the decades recurrently displacing the most vulnerable.
Lindsey Sawyer is a Senior Researcher at the Technical University of Munich (TUM), where her focus expanded to comparative African urbanisation and the ecological politics of wetland territorialisation. She completed a prominent Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship at the University of Sheffield's Department of Urban Studies and Planning, focusing on a project that investigated power, land, and customary authority in the rapid urbanization of Lagos, Nigeria.