Networks and Groups

CoFutures is an international group working on Global Futures with its sphere of activities scattered across various communities, research groups and networks around the world. We are active in different sectors including academic research, technology research, policy, and the arts. We also provide support for transmedial artistic work including fiction, films, and games.

CoFutures activities are or have been funded by various grants from various bodies, including the European Research Council, the European Commission, Norwegian Research Council, Sparebankstiftelsen DNB, and the Oslo Commune. CoFutures has institutional partners in 6 countries.

The word CoFutures is used without a hyphen.

ComplexSouth critically engages with North-South research and researcher dynamics in the context of decolonial scholarship in urban transformations across the Global South.

Integrating research on Southern urbanism with Complexity Theories of Cities, the consciously interdisciplinary network aims to support research into sustainable, context-sensitive societal transitions that acknowledge urban plurality and socio-political conflict in parallel with technology driven change.

By bridging digital, decolonial, and sustainability perspectives, and engaging with emerging research methodologies, ComplexSouth aims to foster collaborative research and advance a deeper understanding of the unique complexities in contemporary urban transformations through North-South research partnerships

ComplexUrban is an umbrella for three related complexity based research groups across multiple disciplines and institutions. It is home to Complexity, Planning and Urbanism (CPU) - a research laboratory at the Manchester School of Architecture. CPU uses a complexity framework to develop new digital tools, computational thinking and urban theory addressing future ICT disruptions and spatio-temporal dynamics in urban processes. The transdisciplinary research spans planning for evoultionary and emergent city systems, digital participation and inclusion, data platforms for resilient cities adn urban simulations for sustainable future scenarios.

At the University of Tokyo, Gasparatos Lab studies the interface of social and ecological systems, using methodologies from Sustainability Science and Ecological Economics. The group explores what drives change in these systems and how it affects their sustainability. The Lab conducts conceptual and empirical work in different geographical contexts of Africa, Asia and the Americas.
While ecosystem services, food security and urban sustainability are the major research areas of the lab, it works on topics as diverse as sustainability assessment, agricultural sustainability, energy policy, and green economic transitions.  The research relates to several Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), and especially SDG 1, 2, 7, 11, 12, 13, 14, and 15. 

SusInfra is affiliated with the the Manchester Urban Institute (MUI) - a global research institute exploring the complexities of urban life in a rapidly changing world. Our mission is to foster deep, interdisciplinary insights into how cities function and to drive positive transformation for people and places creating fair and just cities for everyone. 

MUI combines the strengths of multiple disciplinary perspectives drawn from across The University of Manchester’s three Faculties. It engages with a range of global, national, and local stakeholders through cutting-edge methods and participatory action-based approaches. 

Srijon Barua , coming from Bangladesh, is a student of Architecture and Urbanism. He has been part of multiple social development design projects in Japan and Bangladesh. His research and work are focused on under-flyover spatial use and area management under the term “post infrastructural adaptation”. Besides working for various NGOs and NPOs, Srijon has worked as lecturer in the University of Asia Pacific Dhaka for several years. Currently he is a MEXT , PhD candidate at Kyoto University.

Dr Bodhisattva Chattopadhyay is Associate Professor in Global Culture Studies atIKOS,University of Oslo,Norway. He leads the European Research Council funded research project CoFUTURES and its associatedi nternational network.Chattopadhyay is the recipient of numerous awards and prizes, including the World Fantasy Award (2020). His research website is www.cofutures.org

Dr Debapriya Chakrabarti is Lecturer in Architecture at the Manchester School of Architecture. She was an ESRC Postdoctoral Fellow at the department of Architecture, University of Manchester. She is the author of 'Heritage, Crafting Communities and Urban Transformation' (Routledge, 2023). Her research expertise is in informal practices, livelihoods, the human-infrastructure interface and sustainable urban transitions, focusing on marginalised communities in the Global South.

Dr Qi Liu holds a PhD in Human Geography from The University of Manchester. Her PhD project focused on how tourist practices and their interactions with hotel infrastructures escalate resource demand in a Chinese hot spring town. She is interested in applying social practice theories to understand the dynamics of sustainable consumption in tourism and everyday life in China, covering topics relating to energy and water demand, sustainable tourism, lifestyle mobility, and lived experiences of sustainability. She obtained a Mater degree from Renmin University of China (2017) and a Bachelor degree from Xiamen University (2015), both in Sociology.

Dr Subham Mukherjee is currently a Joint Berlin-Jerusalem Post-Doctoral Fellow at Freie Universität Berlin, Germany and The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel, working on comparative study of water sensitive catchment management between Israel and Germany for mitigating flood risks in the costal urban areas.

Subham pursued his PhD on Urban Water Security at the Freie University of Berlin, for which he was awarded the DAAD full scholarship. He holds three Masters of Science degrees in Ecohydrology (Christian Albrecht University of Kiel, Germany), GIS for Catchment Dynamics and Management (University of Leeds, UK) and Remote Sensing and GIS (University of Burdwan, India).