Dr Theodor M Barry Born

He currently holds a Leverhulme Trust Early Career Fellowship at the Urban Institute, where his research is focused on rooms as a key architecture, scale, unit, and site of housing for groups including renters, people who have been displaced or made homeless, and certain groups of migrants. This work engages with housing and urban policy, processes of speculation and rentierism, lived experiences of precarity including daily routines in buildings and surrounding areas, and how these dynamics are felt and implicated in the production of space.

Prior to starting this fellowship, Theo was a Research Associate at the UK Collaborative Centre for Housing Evidence, based at the University of Sheffield, where his contributions were focused on the thematic work on housing inequality, including projects on rental bidding processes and on homes at risk due to coastal erosion. Theo holds a PhD in Geography from Queen Mary University of London, completed in 2021, which explored the spaces, economies, and politics of overcrowding in the case of migrant workers and families renting in London. While completing his PhD, he was engaged in tenant union organising. He has lectured on geographical, urban, and housing issues at QMUL and the University of Sheffield, and has also taught at the London School of Economics.