Laurin Baumgardt is a postdoctoral researcher in the lab THEMA within the Institute of Architecture at EPFL. He is an urban anthropologist specializing in architecture and built environment research and holds a Ph.D. in Cultural Anthropology from Rice University. Funded by awards from the National Science Foundation and the Wenner-Gren Foundation, his doctoral research centered on critical infrastructure and development theory, design and building politics, and housing activism. He ethnographically investigated architectural productions within the context of Cape Town’s entrenched spatial inequality and ongoing dispossession. Last year, he received the first prize in the Graduate Student Paper Prize Competition of the Critical Urban Anthropology Association (CUAA). He has also studied and taught at the University of Florida, University of Chicago, and Stellenbosch University in South Africa.

Urban Anthropology, Environmental Humanities, Architecture and Design, Theory and History, Housing Justice, Social Movements, Critical Infrastructure and Development Studies, Materiality, Future Studies, African Urbanism, South Africa