Lehr- & Forschungspersonal

Prof. Dr. Regula Valérie Burri (Science and Technology Studies)

Regula Valérie Burri is Professor in science and technology studies (STS) at HCU Hamburg, Germany. She was a Visiting Research Fellow at Harvard University, a Feodor Lynen Research Fellow of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, and a guest professor at University of Vienna. Her research interests focus on the social, political, and cultural implications of science and technology, and involve topics like (visual) knowledge and the intersections of science and art, and cultures and the governance of science and technology. She is the founder of artLAB, an experimental research and teaching format involving art practice. She has been a co-director of a postgraduate program on artistic research in Hamburg, and the director of an art research project on visions of artificial intelligence. 

She received her PhD from Technical University Berlin (with honors). After completing her undergraduate studies at the University of Bern, and an art degree at fhnw Basel, she was a Swiss National Science Foundation research fellow at EHESS and Collège de France, Paris, at TU Berlin and at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology – MIT. She was a member of the graduate school and a postdoctoral research associate at Collegium Helveticum, ETH Zurich and in the University of Basel´s science studies program. Regula was a researcher in several projects of the Swiss Science and Innovation Council (SSIC), and of the ETH Zurich and the University of Zurich.

Prof. Dr. Hanna Göbel (Methods of Urban Practice)

Hanna Göbel is professor of „Methods of Urban Practice" (MuP) since 2025. She previously worked as an acting professor for "Urban Anthropology and Ethnographic Methods" at HafenCity University between 2022-2024. Her research focus crosses urban studies, anthropology and sociology of the body, cultural sociology and cultural studies, science & technology studies, ethnographic methods. She is a sociologist and has worked as an academic member of staff at Universität Konstanz and Universität Hamburg. Currently, she works on bodily dis/abilities and (digital) technologies, aesthetic diversity of forms in society and design (together with Sophia Prinz, ZHdK Zürich), and on a sociology of audiences at the intersection of urban spaces and digital publics.

Prof. Dr. Monika Grubbauer (History and the Theory of the City)

Monika Grubbauer is professor for History and Theory of the City at HCU Hamburg. She has a background in architecture and urban research. She teaches in the study programmes of urban planning, urban design and culture of metropolis. Her research centers on urban development and housing politics in different geographical contexts. She is spokesperson of the research training group "Urban future-making" funded by the German Research Foundation.

M.A. Anna Hentschel, Ph.D. Candidate (Urban Design)

Anna Hentschel is a spatial strategist and combines her design practice with research on experimental design methods. She co-founded the urban game design network Invisible Playground in Berlin and created cultural formats at the intersection of play and urban society for more than ten years. Recently, she co-developed the knowledge transfer project cross:play at the Game Design Department of the University of Applied Sciences Berlin (HTW), where she also taught interdisciplinary courses. Anna holds a diploma in stage design and a master’s degree in spatial strategies, was a scholarship holder at the Canadian Center for Architecture (CCA), the Goethe-Institut Villa Kamogawa Kyoto, and architect-in-residence at the Goethe-Institut Rotterdam. Since 2022, she has been a fellow at the DFG Research Training Group "Urban future-making: Professional Agency across Time and Scale" at HafenCity University Hamburg (HCU). Her PhD project focuses on the potential and evaluation of game-based methods for citizen participation in urban planning processes. 

Prof. Dipl. Bernd Kniess (Urban Design)

Bernd Kniess is an architect and urban planner. In 2008, when he was appointed to the professorship of Urban Design at the HafenCity University Hamburg, he founded the M.Sc. program of the same name. Shortly after, together with a team of colleagues, he began to take on the project University of Neighborhoods. He is interested in understanding the contemporary city as a produced assemblage, its agencies in different modes of having become-ness and becoming, its translation into forms of diagrammatic representation and its transfer into procedures of relational practice. A particular focus of Bernd Kniess is the conception, design and realization of Living Lab projects such as the University of Neighborhoods (2008-14), Building a Proposition for Future Activities (2015-18) and Zukunftsstadt Friedrichstadt (2016-22). Bernd Kniess teaches in the formats Urban Design Project: Research and Design, Theoretical-Conceptual Foundations, Methodology, Intercultural Practice, Diagrammatics and the Hamburg Open Online University teaching and learning platforms ‘WohnWissen übersetzen’ and ‘Urban Types – of Houses and People’. In 2019-20 he held the Graham Willis Professorship at Sheffield School of Architecture. He has been a member of the North Rhine-Westphalian Academy of Sciences, Humanities and the Arts since 2009.

M.A. Antonia Lembcke, Ph.D. Candidate (Urban Design)

Antonia Lembcke is part of the research and teaching team Urban Design since 2022, having graduated in architecture from UdK Berlin and TU München. She currently also develops the project „soft spots: spaces of collective relevance and urban potential“ as a research associate in Architecture, at the chair Entwerfen, Raum- und Gebäudelehre at HafenCity University Hamburg. 

Since 2025, she has been an Associated Doctoral Researcher of the RTG2725: Urban future-making. Her Ph.D. project, "Relational Architecture", explores alternative ways of understanding and practicing architecture through transformation. She is particularly interested in process-oriented architectures, in- and exclusions, and the (over)writing of stories and their actors through space.
Antonia co-founded the spätispäti collective in Berlin in 2019, which produces space by activating collective agencies, artistic practices, and performative actions. spätispäti is concerned with the un-learning of normative building practices and questions hierarchical and political structures manifested in space.

Dr. Yuca Meubrink (Urban Design) 

Yuca Meubrink is a post-doctoral researcher within the BMFTR-funded project “Mehr Wohnen – Innovative Ansätze für gemeinschaftliches Wohnen und integrierte Quartiersentwicklung “.  She also works as academic coordinator of the interdisciplinary research group “Constructing differently – to save resources and protect the climate” of Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities.

She previously worked as a research and teaching assistant in the Metropolitan Culture program at HafenCity University Hamburg, where she also earned her Ph.D. with a dissertation on “Inclusionary Housing and Urban Inequality in London and New York City“.

She has been a visiting scholar at City University of New York and at Birkbeck, University of London. She is also a member of the editorial collective sub\urban. zeitschrift für kritische stadtforschung – a peer-reviewed, open access journal. Yuca Meubrink studied North American Studies, Cultural and Social Anthropology and Journalism in Berlin, Germany.

Prof. Dr. Paolo Patelli (Environmental Design Experiments)

Paolo Patelli is DAAD Guest Professor for Environmental Design Experiments at HafenCity University Hamburg for the academic year 2026-27. He works across architecture, artistic practice, and research, with a focus on environmental data, ecological transformation, and the relationships between space, technology, and society. His teaching and research explore experimental and collaborative approaches to environmental questions through design, media, and the environmental humanities.

He was a Postdoctoral Researcher at Aarhus University (2022–2025), where he investigated the contexts of environmental data construction as part of the Design and Aesthetics for Environmental Data project led by Jussi Parikka. He has taught at Design Academy Eindhoven, Sandberg Instituut, and Sciences Po, and was Research Associate at the Research Center for Material Culture in Leiden (2020–2022). He has also held research and artistic fellowships at Akademie Schloss Solitude, Het Nieuwe Instituut, and Jan van Eyck Academie. He holds a PhD in Architecture and Urban Design from Politecnico di Milano.
His work brings together audiovisual practice, fieldwork, spatial research, and collaborative inquiry. His projects have been presented internationally, including at the Helsinki Biennial, Gudskul, and the Venice Architecture Biennale.

Prof. Dr. Anna Steigemann (Urban and Regional Sociology) 

Anna Steigemann (she/her) is an urban researcher and sociologist. Beginning October 2026, she will be working as Professor of Urban and Regional Sociology at HCU Hamburg, previously as Professor of Sociological Dimensions of Space at the Department for Interdisciplinary Multiscalar Regional Studies (DIMAS) at the University of Regensburg, and is an Associated Researcher at the Habitat Unit/Chair of International Urbanism and Design and the Collaborative Research Center (CRC) 1265 Re-Figurations of Space at TU Berlin.

Her research focuses on Neighborhood and Community Studies (with a focus on self-created infrastructures of marginalized communities), space production, gender, diversity, migration and the city, critical participation research, and qualitative collaborative research methods. Anna Steigemann studied Social Sciences, Geography, Gender Studies, and Ethnology at Humboldt University Berlin, the CUNY Graduate Center, and Columbia University from 2002–2009, and received her PhD in 2016 through the DFG Research Training Group The World in the City at TU Berlin, with research stays at the CUNY Graduate Center and the University of Toronto.

She also worked from 2011 until her first appointment at numerous architecture, planning, and sociology institutes in Germany and abroad, including Bauhaus-Universität Weimar, the ISR and IfA at TU Berlin, the Urban Planning department at TU Dortmund, the University of the Witwatersrand Johannesburg, and the Center for Urban Research at CUNY New York; from 2016 to 2022 she additionally taught in the Urban Design (UD) program at TU Berlin.