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 joined the research and teaching program of Urban Design in 2022, after graduating in architecture from UdK Berlin and TU München. As a doctoral candidate at HCU Hamburg, she is following the artistic research of her Master thesis on "dirty architecture", where she investigated multi-layered truths and ambiguous realities that manifest in the built environment. In her Ph.D. Project "Relational Architecture" she researches alternative ways of understanding and practicing architecture through transformation. She is 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 2019, that produces space through activating collective agencies, artistic practices and 1:1 building laboratories. spätispäti is concerned with the un-learning of normative building practices and questions hierarchical and political structures, as well as with the identification and mediation of participatory and inclusive space production.

Dr. Fabian Namberger (History and the Theory of the City)

Fabian Namberger joined the Urban Design Team at HafenCity University Hamburg in March 2023. He is post-doctoral researcher in the research training group ‘Urban future-making. Professional agency across time and scale’ (Prof Monika Grubbauer). In his current research, Fabian is interested in the spatially variegated processes of embedding digital platforms in urban space. Fabian’s PhD thesis ‘Uberising the Urban’ (Goldsmiths, University of London) examined how the operations of ridehail platform Uber have come up against the multi-scalar and variously uneven urban grounds of the ‘smart city’ of Toronto. During his PhD, Fabian was visiting graduate student at the Institute of Planning & Geography, University of Toronto (2018) and research fellow at the PUTSPACE project of Leibniz Institute for Regional Research Leipzig (2021).

Before his PhD, Fabian obtained a Bachelor of Arts in political science at Free University Berlin (2014) and a Master of Arts in ‘Critical and Creative Analysis’ at the Department of Sociology of Goldsmiths, University of London (2015). Both during his B.A. and M.A., Fabian was part of the research unit peace and conflict studies at Otto Suhr Institute, Free University Berlin where he published on global theories of war, postcolonial studies, critical geopolitics and cartography. Today, Fabian is member of the discussion group ‘Classes and Social Structure’ at Rosa Luxemburg Foundation and of the study group ‘Migration, Labour, Digitalisation and Racism’ at Humboldt University Berlin (Prof Manuela Bojadžijev). From 2017 to 2021, Fabian was editor at the online magazine kritisch-lesen.de to which he still contributes at (ir)regular intervals. 

Prof. Dr. Nina Schuster (Urban and Regional Sociology)

Nina Schuster is a sociologist and deputy professor for Urban and Regional Sociology at HafenCity University Hamburg. Her teaching and research focus on urban and cultural sociology, social inequality and difference, social conflicts and practices, feminist and queer theory as well as qualitative research methods. For many years, she has been working as an academic staff member at the Faculty of Spatial Planning at TU Dortmund University, where from 2018-21, she has conducted a DFG research project on conflicts and the everyday negotiation of difference in urban allotment gardens (published in the monography “Grüne Öffentlichkeiten. Soziales Miteinander in städtischen Kleingärten”, transcript 2024). Currently, she works on urban conflicts and property from a conflict theory perspective, focusing on the distribution, access and use of urban space and the specific interests depending on the social position of the actors involved (together with Philipp Kadelke, TU Dortmund, and Jenny Künkel, Universität Duisburg-Essen). In 2022 she was a visiting professor at TU Wien. She has also worked at Universität Duisburg Essen, Universität Kassel and Philipps-Universität Marburg. She is a co-founder and member of the editorial collective of sub\urban. zeitschrift für kritische stadtforschung: www.zeitschrift-suburban.de.