Matthew Gandy joined the University of Cambridge in 2015, having previously worked at University College London and the University of Sussex. From 2005 till 2011 he was founder and director of the UCL Urban Laboratory and has been a visiting professor at a number of universities including the Technical University Berlin, the University of the Arts Berlin, and UCLA. His interests span biodiversity, infrastructure, landscape, urban epidemiology and visual methods.

His books include The fabric of space: water, modernity, and the urban imagination (MIT Press, 2014), Moth (Reaktion, 2016), and Natura urbana: ecological constellations in urban space (MIT Press, 2022). He has published essays in a range of journals including New Left Review and is an award-winning documentary filmmaker.

During his fellowship at HIAS he will be exploring the idea of “urban refugia” in relation to three main facets of urban biodiversity: mass invertebrate decline, including the evaluation of different forms of endangerment in urban settings; the significance of migratory pathways for urban birds and the impact of displaced temporalities and landscape change over different geographical scales; and the presence of relic floras within metropolitan areas that form part of an ecological palimpsest that can enrich public cultures of urban nature.

His collaboration partner is Jürgen Oßenbrügge, professor of urban and economic geography at the Universität Hamburg.

Matthew Gandy’s HIAS Fellowship is provided by the Free and Hanseatic City of Hamburg and the federal and state funds acquired by Universität Hamburg in the framework of its Excellence Strategy.