USL Team

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.

Rati Sandeep Choudhari is a SEED doctoral scholar at the University of Manchester. Her PhD research explores the role of modular and generative planning and how incorporating Artificial Intelligence in the design process can help in creating adaptable and resilient urban infrastructure. Before joining The University of Manchester, Rati was a Freelance Urban Designer and Researcher at BUSarchitektur, Vienna, where she explored the potential of parametric urban research to enhance the decision making process in Smart Urban Design in India and Europe. Rati has a Masters in Architecture and Urbanism from Manchester School of Architecture and a Bachelor of Architecture from Dr. B.N College of Architecture (Pune, India). 

Dr Njabulo Chipangura is an anthropologist and Curator of Living Cultures at Manchester Museum which is part of the University of Manchester. Njabu has interest in empirical ways by which the museum practice can be decolonised through epistemic and aesthetic disobedience benchmarked by undoing earlier ways of knowledge production particularly looking at African collections and their representations. Njabu sits on the editorial board of Museum International and is a managing editor on Museum and Society. Njabu is currently working on a co-edited volume entitled The Museologies of Africa: Rethinking African Museums, Community Inclusion, Living Cultures and Decolonisation which will be published by Routledge in 2025.  

Dr Purva Dewoolkar holds a PhD from the University of Manchester, funded by SEED. Her research is concerned with the negotiations and struggles through which sanitation infrastructure is produced in Mumbai, India. She is deeply involved in campaigns on the Right to Water and the Development Plan of Mumbai 2014-2034. 

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Deljana Iossifova is Professor of Architecture and Urban Studies at the University of Manchester, where she heads the Urban Studies Lab (USL) and serves as Academic Director of the Confucius Institute.  She is Editor-in-Chief of The Journal of Architecture, the former Chair of the Board of  the Urban Studies Foundation and current Chair of the Board of the AzuKo Foundation. 

An award-winning architect with global experience, Iossifova's research and publications reflect a strong interdisciplinary approach. She has attracted >£1.3m in research funding as PI from the ESRC, NSRC, Royal Society, and smaller agencies. She works with a global network of collaborators, SusInfra, on urban transformations, chaning urban everyday life, urban practices, urban coexistence, urban bordering, and urban infrastructuring. Her publications include Urban Infrastructuring (Springer, 2022), Defining the Urban (Routledge, 2018), and Translocal Ageing in the Global East (Palgrave, 2020). 

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Xin Li is a postgraduate researcher in architecture at the University of Manchester, funded by SEED. Her research unfolds the concept of carrying within urban infrastructures, re-envisioning infrastructures as spaces for carrying and highlighting the embodied, often unseen meanings they hold in urban life. She proposes a carrier bag approach to interpret the relationship between bodies, infrastructures, and their dynamic intersections.

She is the co-chair of the Manchester Urban Institute (MUI) PGR Network and leads the Global Scholar/PGR Network Project, funded by the Global Scholar Fund, Faculty of Humanities at UoM. She is also the co-host of Stitch Social events at SEED, which are aimed at developing well-being supports for researchers, creating feelings of connection and solidarity among the community through stitching and making together.

Dongyang Mi i is a President's Doctoral Researcher at the University of Manchester and a PhD Candidate in the joint-PhD program under the GOLDEN (Global Doctoral Research Network) Partnerships between the Universities of Manchester and Melbourne. He is a human geographer, and his main research interests lie at the intersection of Water, Sanitation, and Hygiene (WASH), sustainable practices and infrastructure, and urban governance and transformation in Chinese and other Global South cities. He is one of the initiators/Principal Investigators (PIs) of the China Water Network under the Global Scholar Funds, establishing interdisciplinary and global connections among scholars focused on Chinese water research topics. Mi is also an architect, urban designer, and academic tutor based in the UK, China, and Australia. Before joining the University of Manchester, he was a Research Assistant at Hunan University, China. Mi holds an MA degree in City Design from the RCA (Royal College of Art, UK), and a BA and BEng in Environmental Architecture from HUST (Huazhong University of Science and Technology, China). 

Qiwei Peng  is a doctoral researcher and narrative comics artist. Her PhD project is jointly supported by the China Scholarship Council and the University of Manchester. She currently focuses on urban transport infrastructure as a social construct, which captures urban dynamics (from perspectives of political economy and everyday life ethnography) and challenges a series of dual accepted notions. Peng leads the Urban Transport Infrastructure network under the Global Scholar Funds, promoting international academic cooperation among university scholars in the UK, China, Germany, Japan, Switzerland, among other contexts. Before joining the University of Manchester, she worked as an NGO researcher based in Shanghai and Qinghai, China. Peng obtained a Master’s degree from The Manchester School of Architecture (2020) and a Bachelor’s degree from Huazhong University of Science and Technology, China (2018). 

Ziqiu Ren is a doctoral researcher in Architecture at the University of Manchester. Her PhD project is supported by a Royal Geographical Society (with IBG) Postgraduate Research Award and Hong Kong Research Grant. Her current research interest is concerned with  the timespace regime of food marketplaces as infrastructural nodes in the Chinese urban-rural continuum through ethnographic filming and photographing. Before starting the PhD, Ren studied Architecture at Southeast University, China and Università Iuav Di Venezia, Italy, participating in award-winning research/design projects on infrastructure transformation and urban/rural regeneration. Her master thesis was funded by China’s National Social Science Foundation. Her research was part of the team project exhibited on Collateral Event of the 17th International Architecture Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia and other permanent exhibitions.

Ulysses Sengupta is Professor of Architecture and Urbanism at the Manchester School of Architecture (MSA). He is the founder of Complexity Planning and Urbanism (CPU), a research laboratory (CPU-Lab) and related Masters atelier (CPU&Ai) at the MSA. CPU uses a complexity framework to develop new digital tools, computational thinking and urban theory for evolutionary and emergent city systems. Sengupta is co-founder of ComplexSouth, a research network examining complexity and urbanism in the Global South, and a core member of the team of SusInfra.

Mark Shtanov's research examines the spatial, technological and material organisation of Respectful Burn – the procedure of disposing of imported anatomical specimens at the UK-based high temperature and clinical waste incinerators. He uses qualitative methods, such as walk-along interviews, participant observation and graphic anthropology. In parallel to his research he runs model-making workshops for architecture and art students at universities and schools. He has conducted workshops at the Universities of Westminster, Cambrdige, and Universidad SEK (Ecuador), and at Bradfield College. For more information, see www.nobalsa.com

As well as a researcher, Shtanov is an ARB-qualified architect with over 6 years of industry experience in cultural, hospitality, commercial, residential and student residential sectors and all RIBA stages. Shtanov completed his MPhil at the University of Cambridge. His MPhil thesis, Another Hotel in Africa, received a commendation at the RIBA President's Medals in 2018.

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Rujin Wang is a PhD researcher in Architecture at the University of Manchester, examining how outdoor environments impact the well-being and daily routines of older adults in urban China. Her mixed-methods research explores spatial practices, inequality, and marginalization in urban spaces. Before starting her PhD, Rujin studied Architecture at Pécsi Tudományegyetem in Hungary, where she contributed to several award-winning projects that advanced age- and child-friendly design strategies and promoted mental health in urban environments.

Junyan Ye is a PhD student at the University of Manchester, researching Chinese international students' experiences with urban nature in Manchester, U.K. Her work draws on urban nature studies, human geography, and urban sociology, using interviews, digital diaries, and autoethnography to examine participants' transitions from China and their interactions with local green spaces.

Since 2020, Junyan has contributed as a Graduate Teaching Assistant across multiple courses and joined the Manchester School of Architecture in 2022 as an academic tutor in the MArch Architecture and Urbanism theories unit, advocating for inclusive, interactive pedagogy.

She holds degrees in urban design and planning from XJTLU, the University of Liverpool, and the University of Manchester, with professional experience in landscape architecture in Chengdu, China.

Zhaoyilin Zhang is currently a graduate student at the Manchester School of Architecture (MSA), focusing her research on the differences in public toilet infrastructure between Suzhou (China) and Manchester (UK). Her study centres around the primary argument that public toilet infrastructure in Suzhou and Manchester embodies distinct entanglements with culture and policy, resulting in divergent approaches to accessibility and social equity. Through field research, literature review, and cross-cultural analysis, she is uncovering and examining connections between public sanitation spaces and their urban contexts. Her research interests lie primarily in the intersection of urban infrastructure and local narratives, with a particular emphasis on how sociocultural and policy factors shape the planning and experience of public facilities in different regions.

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Dr Eric Cheung is a fully qualified architect in the UK. His research covers the investigation and development of advanced digital analytical methods and tools to explore and understand urban sustainability as the spatiotemporal relationships between urban spatial structures and human actions. He was RA on SASSI, TOSSIB and R2W. 

 Dr  Yahya Gamal is Research Associate in Social Simulation at the University of Glasgow. He is interested in understanding the socio-economic human behaviours in cities following a complexity framework. His research applies Agent Based simulation methods to explore land markets and urban growth in Greater Cairo, Egypt.  He worked as an RA on INFRA+. 

Elsa Holm was a research assistant on TOSSIB. Originally from Sweden, she spent a year teaching English in Andhra Pradesh in India, before starting university, with the organisation Project Trust in 2018. She is currently studying Development Studies and Economics at the University of Manchester and is interested in the critiques of current and past global development practises, the politics of climate change mitigation, and topics and intersections of governance, sustainability and poverty alleviation. 

 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 Youcao Ren is Lecturer in Architecture at the University of Sheffield. She was a Postdoctoral Research Associate on SASSI. She holds a PhD in Landscape Architecture and an MA in Urban Design from the University of Sheffield. Youcao is an experienced urban ethnographer. 

Dr Raqib Abu Salia is a dedicated educator and expert in construction management, land use development, and urban studies, with a focus on urban land administration and planning. He currently works as a Lecturer in Construction Management at the Global Banking School’s partnership with Bath Spa University. With over a decade of experience in academia and industry, Raqib brings a wealth of knowledge and practical insights to teaching and learning in Higher Education. Salia holds a Ph.D. in Architecture from the University of Manchester and a Masters and Bachelor’s in Development Studies from the University for Development Studies (UDS) in Ghana. 

Dr Yu Yan is an Assistant Professor in Urban Planning at the City University of Macau. He is interested in spatial equity in urban and rural populations, focusing on disparities in access to resources, services, and opportunities among diverse demographic groups. His research also examines the urban spatial perceptions of multicultural communities, exploring how cultural and socio-economic factors influence their experiences and interactions within urban environments. His work integrates spatial analysis, participatory methodologies, and multimodal data approaches. 

Dr Zavos was a Postdoctoral Research Associate on SASSI. His research, interdisciplinary in nature, sits at the intersection of Architecture, Human Geography and Material Culture. Before completing his PhD in Architecture at the University of Manchester, Stelios held industry positions as Design and Project Engineer in infrastructure and residential projects.