Biografia
Tiago Castela (Lisbon, 1974) is an architectural and urban planning historian, as well as an architect. He conducts research on peripheral urbanism and housing policies, focusing on Portugal and southern Africa during the late colonial period. He holds a PhD in Architecture from the University of California, Berkeley, with secondary areas of study in Urban Geography and Global Knowledge on Planning. He also has a Bachelor's degree in Architecture from the Technical University of Lisbon, Portugal. Currently, he is a researcher and invited assistant professor at the University of Coimbra, affiliated with the Center for Social Studies (CES) and the Department of Architecture. At CES, he contributes to the thematic line "(Semi)Capitalist Periphery: Crises and Alternatives." Additionally, he teaches postgraduate seminars at the Faculty of Economics and is a faculty member at the College of Arts. He is currently the Principal Investigator (PI) of the exploratory project "Regulating the Colonial Rural" and was the PI of the exploratory project "Urban Aspirations in Colonial/Postcolonial Mozambique," funded by the Foundation for Science and Technology (FCT). He is primarily responsible for three doctoral seminars: one on research design for the Doctorate in Architecture, another on spatial theories for the Doctorate in Cities and Urban Cultures, and a third on political spaces for the Doctorate in Postcolonialism and Global Citizenship. He currently supervises six doctoral candidates and co-supervises three others. He has co-supervised two completed doctoral dissertations and supervised two postdoctoral researchers. He has given lectures at the University of Witwatersrand (South Africa), Eduardo Mondlane University (Mozambique), as well as at several Portuguese universities, and is a member of the Advisory Board of the International Association for the Study of Traditional Environments (IASTE). His documentary "Urban Aspirations" (2016) was selected for the online collection Film Geographies.