Dr Fadi Shayya
School of Science, Engineering & Environment
Current positions
Lecturer in Architecture & Urbanism
Biography
Dr Fadi Shayya FRGS (Arabic: فادي شيا) is a transdisciplinary scholar, educator, and civic strategist working across architecture, urbanism, and science and technology studies (STS). A Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society, his research examines how design mediates relations between technology, politics, and the lived environment — particularly in contexts marked by conflict, displacement, and precarity.
At the University of Salford, he is Lecturer in Architecture & Urbanism and REF 2029 Impact Co-Lead for UoA 13 (Architecture, Built Environment and Planning). He also serves on the UKRI Talent Peer Review College, and he contributes to institutional equity and civic engagement through the Race Equity Group and advisory roles addressing Salford’s international partnerships in conflict-affected regions.
His recent recognition includes invited contributions to the UIA World Congress of Architects (2023), World Habitat Day (2024), and the British Council & THINKlab UK–Bosnia and Herzegovina Cultural Diplomacy Programme (2025). He also serves as an Advisory Board Member in the Faculty of Architecture – Beirut Arab University and as an Affiliate of the Centre for Science Studies (CSS) at Lancaster University.
Before joining academia full-time, he practised for a decade, consulting on architectural and landscape design, urbanism, master planning, and international development with Dar, UNESCWA, and others.
Areas of Research
Trained at the University of Manchester’s Architecture Research Group—a leading Russell Group centre for architectural STS, Fadi’s research investigates how technical and human beings endure and adapt against militarisation and precarious infrastructures. It traces the relational politics of the built, proposed, and ruined, showing how designed objects and environments “script” actions and create new social ties. This grounding informs his current leadership roles in REF impact development and transdisciplinary research strategy at Salford.
His current projects include a forthcoming monograph (Politics of Survivability), collaborative research with artists, engineers, and social scientists on the technologies of inhabitation, and curatorial/editorial platforms such as Tales of the Edge Condition (2025), Visualizing Palestine (2024), and At the Edge of the City (2010). His forthcoming text, “Haunting as Method” (under review), weaves ethnographic observation, creative writing, and spatial analysis to examine how memory and loss inhabit the landscape.
Earlier, he founded and directed the Beirut-based research collective Discursive Formations (2008–13), edited At the Edge of the City: Reinhabiting Public Space Toward the Recovery of Beirut’s Horsh Al-Sanawbar (2010), and led operations strategy with Visualizing Palestine (2013–14). These initiatives combined research, design, and advocacy to re-imagine urban citizenship and have been featured internationally across multiple languages and disciplines.
His research agenda advances a translational approach to architecture, treating design as a critical method for investigating technologies, environments, and collective life, and as a site for rethinking architectural education through collaborative and editorial experimentation.
More information and selected works: fadishayya.com/research
Areas of Supervision
Current PhD Supervisees:
///Hajar Al-Janabi (with Dr Tanja Poppelreuter)
///Kevin Baker (with Prof Terrence Fernando)
Check current PhD calls at: laura.salford.ac.uk
///Architecture, Urbanism & Society – Architectural Humanities; Urban Studies; Collective and Public Space; Landscape and Territorial Urbanism.
///Politics, Conflict & Survivability – Critical Military and Security Studies; War / Post-war Geographies; Erasure, Ruin, and the Politics of Reconstruction; Infrastructural Exhaustion; Inhabitation as a Political Practice.
///Design & Methods – Design Ethnography; Visual, Digital, and Textual Methods; Haunting and Conflict; Counter-Cartography; Recursive and Non-linear Urban Processes.
///Philosophy & Theory – Science and Technology Studies (STS); Technicity, Mediation, and Relational Materialism; Temporality (suspension, emergency time, slow violence); Spatial and Environmental Justice; Right to Landscape.
Fadi teaches at the postgraduate and undergraduate levels and supervises doctoral students. He advances a research-led pedagogy that treats the design studio as a civic rehearsal. Combining ethnographic, visual, textual, and speculative experimentation, he enables students to approach design as spatial inquiry engaged with questions of social and environmental justice.
He currently leads Year 2 of the Master of Architecture programme and advises MArch Theses; he previously led Year 2 of the BSc Architecture (2022–25). His approach has been recognised through the School of Science, Engineering and Environment Award for Innovative Teaching Methods (2025), external examiner commendations, and national student successes, including RIBA Silver Medal and Women in Property Awards nominations.
A Fellow of Advance HE (FHEA), he has previously taught at the University of Manchester, Manchester School of Architecture, New York Parsons School of Design, and the American University of Beirut, championing inclusive and critically reflexive studio environments.
Teaching updates: fadishayya.com/teaching
Sample Modules:
///MArch Thesis “Tales of the Edge Condition”
///MArch Studio “Unknown Territories”
///L6 Dissertation Group “War and Other Ordinary Stuff”
///L6 Dissertation Group “Ethnography, Archives, Translations”
///L5 Design Studio “Cosmopolitical Design & Site-specific Practices”
///L5 Design Studio “Designing Environmental Future-Pasts”
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