Urban Relationalities: Transductive Infrastructures of Survivability

About the Project

Project Summary

This doctoral project investigates how infrastructures of survivability—systems of mobility, protection, sensing, and logistics whose logics intertwine with militarism—reshape contemporary urban environments. It asks how these technical systems mediate relations between people, technologies, and ecologies, and how they transform the very meaning of urban life.

The research draws from the conceptual architecture developed in the supervisor’s wider work on survivability, offering candidates a rare opportunity to contribute to an active and expanding intellectual trajectory. The project is rooted in a spatial lens, supported by transdisciplinary insights from STS, urbanisation, ecologisation, design ethnography, and new mobilities research.

Project Background and Rationale

Across the world, cities are reorganised by infrastructures designed to manage threat, risk, and uncertainty. These include mobile protection platforms, logistical corridors, crisis mobility planning tools, fortified or sensor-equipped transport systems, and other sociotechnical arrangements circulating between military, security, humanitarian, and civilian domains.

Rather than treating these technologies as isolated devices, the project explores them as part of a wider urban condition of survivability—understood not merely as a strategic doctrine but as a relational and contingent ecology that rearranges exposure, care, vulnerability, and endurance across the spaces in which people live, move, and work.

The central premise is that the urban is not a fixed form but a set of evolving relations mediated by technical systems—relations that shape who can survive, how, and under what conditions. The PhD will therefore examine survivability infrastructures as urban mediators, tracing how they reconfigure everyday practices of inhabitation and how affected communities navigate, resist, or re-appropriate them.

Research Aim and Questions

Aim: To understand the urban as a relational condition by investigating how infrastructures of survivability mediate spatial, social, and ecological relations in contemporary cities.

Why This Project Is an Exceptional Opportunity

1. Direct Extension of a Major Research Strand

This PhD is grounded in a developing conceptual architecture around survivability, technicity, mediation, and urban relations. It provides a clear intellectual foundation while giving you space to shape your own empirical direction. Your work will grow from this framework and, in turn, help expand and refine it.

2. Spatial Lens, Interdisciplinary Reach

While rooted in architecture and urbanism, the project welcomes applicants from STS, anthropology, geography, planning, mobility studies, and design research. The spatial perspective remains central: infrastructures as spatial mediators and urbanism as relational practice.

3. Feasible and Ethically Secure

The project does not require fieldwork in active conflict zones. Candidates can work with:

• post-disaster or post-conflict urban settings
• infrastructural decline or suspended reconstruction
• fortified mobility systems
• climate-risk adaptation infrastructures
• sensor-driven governance systems

4. Highly Publishable and Responsive to Global Debates

The topic intersects with contemporary concerns around:

• militarisation of civilian life
• climate emergency governance
• resilient and protected mobility
• infrastructural inequality
• environmental precarity
• socio-technical mediation

This gives the PhD strong visibility across architectural humanities, urban studies, political geography, and STS journals.

Supervisory Environment

The lead supervisor, Dr Fadi Shayya, works across architectural research, urbanism, STS, and politics. Co-supervision is possible with colleagues in the social sciences and humanities, depending on the project’s specific direction.

The project will be supervised by Dr Fadi Shayya, whose work spans architectural research, urbanism, STS, and the philosophy of technics. Co-supervision is available with colleagues across the social sciences and humanities, depending on the project’s direction.

Candidate Requirements

Strong candidates will demonstrate:

• an interest in socio-technical infrastructures
• curiosity about spatial and relational urban dynamics
• comfort with mixed or visual methods
• commitment to grounded, empirical inquiry
• independence of thought and conceptual imagination