Dr Fadi Shayya
School of Science, Engineering & Environment
Current positions
Lecturer in Architecture & Urbanism
Biography
Dr Fadi Shayya (Arabic: فادي شيا) is a transdisciplinary scholar, educator, and design strategist who uses architectural and urban research to investigate how societies negotiate spatial and material change. His written, visual, and collaborative research examines the operational lives of infrastructures, landscapes, and technologies, asking how they shape inhabitation, vulnerability, and the making and unmaking of cities.
At the University of Salford, he is Director of the Built and Human Environments Research Centre and Lecturer in Architecture & Urbanism. He previously served as UoA13 REF Impact Co-Lead. He peer-reviews for UKRI, international conferences, and academic journals. His contributions include the UIA World Congress of Architects (2023), World Habitat Day (2024), and the British Council & THINKlab UK–BiH Fellowship Programme (2025). A Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society (FRGS), he also serves on international advisory and editorial boards and is an Affiliate of Lancaster University’s Centre for Science Studies.
Before joining academia, he worked for a decade across architecture, urban planning, and international development, including roles at Dar/Sidara, UN-ESCWA, and other UN agencies. This experience spans transnational urban and infrastructural questions linking the Middle East, the UK, and North America.
Dr Shayya is available for media interviews and analysis on cities, architecture, infrastructure, technology, conflict, and reconstruction. Selected examples: https://fadishayya.com/engagement (Public Commentary)
Areas of Research
Fadi’s research investigates the politics of survivability and the making and unmaking of cities, examining how people, technologies, and environments interact under conditions of militarisation, infrastructural pressure, and spatial uncertainty. Drawing on Science and Technology Studies (STS), pragmatist philosophy, and Actor-Network Theory, his work explores conflict, inhabitation, and the social and political lives of buildings, infrastructures, and landscapes.
His current research includes After Armour: Technicity, Militarised Space, and Survivability as a Condition of Inhabitation (monograph in preparation) and Haunting as Method for a Spatial Politics of Absence (under review). Collaborative projects examine operational landscapes of crisis; urban transformations beyond urbicide in Gaza; the spatial politics of healthcare in armed conflict; and the visual and spatial histories of political violence in Lebanon.
Alongside these projects, his developing inquiries extend into human–machine space-making and robotic cohabitation; the politics of risk, heritage, and institutional infrastructures; and the possibilities and limits of cultural, pedagogical, and artistic responses to catastrophe. These interests bring architectural inquiry into dialogue with the study of technics, memory, and collective practices of reflection and expression.
His practice-based research and consultancy with Discursive Formations, Visualizing Palestine, the Lokman Slim Foundation, and academic and community partners translate research into publications, exhibitions, visual investigations, and strategic tools for civic and cultural engagement. Across these activities, he advances a translational approach to architectural and urban inquiry, connecting design, the humanities, the social sciences, and public knowledge through collaborative, editorial, and visual methods
Selected research, writing, and visual projects: https://fadishayya.com/research
Areas of Supervision
I welcome PhD proposals from ambitious, critically engaged researchers who seek not only to understand the world but also to question and transform how it is imagined, organised, and inhabited. I encourage intellectually adventurous, interdisciplinary, and collaborative research that develops original ways of thinking, making, and acting beyond conventional disciplinary boundaries.
Architecture, Urbanism & Collective Life – Architectural Humanities; Urban Studies; Public Space; Landscape and Territorial Urbanism; Urban Imaginaries and Regeneration.
Conflict, Inhabitation & Infrastructures – Critical Military and Security Studies; War/Post-war Geographies; Ruin and Reconstruction; Infrastructural Exhaustion; Operational Landscapes; Inhabitation as a Political Practice; Militarised Urbanism; Urban Emergencies.
Methods of Inquiry – Design Ethnography; Visual, Digital, and Textual Methods; Haunting and Conflict; Counter-Cartography; Non-linear Urban Processes.
Theory, Technicity & Justice – Science and Technology Studies; Technicity and Relational Materialism; Temporality and Slow Violence; Spatial and Environmental Justice; Right to Landscape; Politics of Technology.
Fadi teaches at both postgraduate and undergraduate levels and supervises doctoral researchers. His research-led pedagogy treats the design studio as a civic rehearsal, combining walking, fieldwork, drawing, ethnographic inquiry, and speculative methods to frame design as a spatial inquiry into social and environmental justice, technological change, and the future of architectural education.
He leads Year 2 of the Master of Architecture programme and advises on MArch theses. His teaching has received the SEE Award for Innovative Teaching Methods (2025) and a nomination for the SCOSA Innovation in Architectural Education Award (2024). Student achievements include two RIBA North West Student Architecture Awards (2026) for MArch theses, and four nominations for the Women in Property Regional Student Awards (2024 and 2025).
A Fellow of Advance HE (FHEA), he has taught at the University of Manchester, the Manchester School of Architecture, Parsons School of Design, and the American University of Beirut.
Selected teaching updates: https://fadishayya.com/teaching
Qualifications
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Fellow (FHEA) Advance HE
2020 -
PhD Architecture
2016 - 2021 -
MA Theories of Urban Practice
2014 - 2016 -
Master of Urban Design
2004 - 2006 -
Bachelor of Architectural Engineering
1997 - 2002
Recognitions
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Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society
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Member, UKRI Talent Peer Review College
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Advisory Board Member
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Affiliate, Centre for Science Studies (CSS)
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Member of Scientific Committee