People

Academic Staff

Dr Paola Boarin

Professor
Co-founder and Director

Research interests:

  • Sustainable design
  • Rating tools
  • Post-occupancy evaluation
  • Sustainable heritage conservation
  • Design technology

Dr Iresh Jayawardena

Lecturer
Research Area Lead

Research interests:

  • Ecologically-based planning approaches
  • Water sensitive design
  • Sustainability and climate resilient cities
  • Socio-ecological systems, urban resilience and greenfield development
  • Integrated catchment management
  • Te Mana O te Wai, cultural ecosystem values and planning obligations

Dr Mohsen Mohammadzadeh

Senior Lecturer
Research Area Lead

Research interests:
  • Critical Urban Theory
  • Globalisation and Planning in the Emerging Global Cities
  • Planning and Urban Conflicts
  • Smart City, Cybernetic Technology and Ethics of Big Data
  • Transportation and Infrastructure Planning

    Dr Alessandro Premier

    Senior Lecturer
    Research Area Lead

     Research interests:

    • Advanced façade design
    • Responsive architecture
    • Smart materials
    • Building retrofit
    • Sustainable design strategies and innovation
    • Colour and light in architecture

    Dr Manfredo Manfredini

    Associate Professor
    Research Area Lead

    Research interests:

    • Urban design history, theory and criticism
    • Architecture and spatial design history, theory and criticism
    • Affordable and social housing history, theory and practice
    • Modern European architecture history, theory and criticism
    • Sustainable development
    • Education in architecture

    Patricia Austin

    Senior Lecturer

    Research interests:

    • Planning and affordable housing
    • Sustainable housing, eco-districts and eco-towns
    • Planning for an ageing population
    • Planning for disabled access
    • Designing inclusive accessible built environments
    • Crime prevention, safer cities and communities
    • Planning and injury prevention
    • Strategies for more sustainable urban futures

    Dr Elham Bahmanteymouri

    Senior Lecturer

    Research interests:

    • Urban Economics
    • Urban Growth Management and Housing Policies
    • Planning Theories and Political Economy of Space
    • Digital and Platforms Economy

    Dr Tom Baker

    Associate Professor

    Research interests:

    • How public policies are made and implemented
    • Role of learning, communication and interpersonal networks
    • Role of local, national and inter/transnational agencies
    • Role of political value systems and frameworks of meaning
    • Role of particular places, scales and spaces

    Dr I-Ting Chuang

    Senior Lecturer

    Research interests:

    • Informed Urban Design
    • Urban and Architecture Development
    • Spatial quality of public spaces
    • Design informatics in urban geography
    • Big data analytics in urban studies

    Dr Michael Davis

    Associate Professor

    Research interests:

    • ‘Live’ projects: Implications for academy, profession and communities
    • Post-digital media practices: Critical making endeavors in architectural design
    • Fabrication technologies: Repurposing the commonplace to effect the novel
    • Indigenous New Zealand timbers: Extraction, use, reuse and tectonics
    • Design research into the future of the architectural discipline in island economies.

    Dr Priyanka Dhopade

    Senior Lecturer

    Research interests:

    • Quantification of the environmental impact of space infrastructure
    • Thermal measurement techniques for atmospheric re-entry
    • Working with iwi and hapū on renewable energy options for Māori housing
    • Application of engineering tools to assess and improve inclusive culture in engineering environments

    Dr Kim Dirks

    Professor

    Research interests:

    • Liveable cities
    • Urban air pollution exposure
    • Environmental noise exposure
    • Urban green space
    • Road transport infrastructure

    Dr Emilio Garcia

    Senior Lecturer

    Research interests:

    • Resilience, inequality and affordability
    • Resilience of compact and disperse urban landscapes
    • Adaptive change, transformative change and collapse in cities
    • Panarchy, adaptive cycles, thresholds, and multiple stability states in built environments
    • Measurement of resilience and heterogeneity of urban landscapes
    • Resilience and Inheritance.

    Dr Charmaine ‘Ilaiū Talei

    Senior Lecturer

    Research interests:

    • Built environments for Pacific peoples
    • Architectural practice-led research (or ‘action’ research)
    • Pacific community and stakeholder engagement
    • Values-led design processes
    • Applying Indigenous knowledge to solve modern architectural problems

    Prof Errol Haarhoff

    Emeritus Professor
    Co-founder

    Research interests:

    • Urban Design
    • Urban Settlement History
    • Urban Growth Management
    • Urban Intensification and housing
    • Modern Architecture History

    Dr Kai Gu

    Associate Professor

    Research interests:
    • Urban morphology and urban design
    • Methods of characterising and managing the urban landscape
    • Urban planning and design of Chinese cities

    Dr Alys Longley

    Associate Professor

    Research interests:
    • Interdisciplinary practice
    • Performance writing
    • Choreographic research
    • Practice-led research
    • Inclusive arts pedagogy
    • Art and ecology
    • Collaboration across languages and borders

    Dr Sandeeka Mannakkara

    Senior Lecturer

    Research interests:
    • Climate Change Adaptation
    • Building Back Better
    • Resilient Cities
    • Community Resilience
    • Post-disaster Reconstruction and Recovery
    • Indigenous Knowledge for Adaptation and Resilience
    • Hybrid nature-based Solutions for Adaptation and Resilience

    Dr Timothy Welch

    Senior Lecturer

    Research interests:
    • Transportation service connectivity and equity
    • Methods to incorporate big data into transportation analysis
    • Infrastructure investments and housing values
    • Planning for non-motorized and emerging transport modes

    Dr Sarosh Mulla

    Senior Lecturer

    Research interests:

    • Design research in architecture
    • Architects in the expanded field
    • Optical effects in architecture
    • Contemporary architectural practice

    Dr Ferdinand Oswald

    Senior Lecturer

    Research interests:

    • Construction Detailing and Building Technologies
    • Facade Design Strategies
    • Optimizing Natural Ventilation
    • Low -Tech architecture
    • Reuse, recycling and separability of building components

    Dr Meg Parsons

    Associate Professor

    Research interests:

    • Climate change adaptation and Indigenous peoples
    • Social and cultural dimensions of climate change adaptation in regard to communities living on small islands
    • Climate justice and gender justice
    • Decolonisation and anti-colonialism
    • Intersectionality and environmental management
    • Freshwater management and governance, including co-governance

    Dr Emilson Silva

    Professor

    Research interests:

    • Energy Economics
    • Development Economics
    • Macroeconomics
    • International Economics

    Ms Julie Stout

    Professional Teaching Fellow

    Research interests:
    • Urban form and typologies
    • Public space
    • Cultural influence on urban space
    • Effect of sea-level rise on cities

    Dr Marek Tesar

    Professor

    Research interests:

    • Public space
    • Global childhood studies
    • The role of philosophy and post-theories in education and methodology
    • Particular interest in post-structural, post-qualitative, posthuman, new materialism, new empiricism thinking
    • International and comparative education

    PhD Students

    Luis Medrano Gomez

    PhD Candidate

    Research interests:
    • Building retrofit
    • Sociotechnical Post-Occupancy Evaluations
    • Retrofit policies and regulations
    • Energy performance gap
    • Human-building interaction
    • Social practice theory

    Joemier Pontawe

    PhD Candidate

    Research interests:
    • Public transportation planning
    • Climate change mitigation in the transport sector
    • Active transportation and micromobility
    • Paratransit and other informal transport services
    • Local government / subnational level government planning and governance

    Jane Waterhouse

    PhD Candidate

    Research interests:
    • Health and environmental design
    • Housing and aging in place
    • Therapeutic environments, Person – Environment theories
    • Environmental Psychology
    • Phenomenology and embodiment
    • Place and social construction of space

    Azra Ahamed

    PhD Candidate

    Research interests:
    • A

    Baskoro Laksitoadi

    PhD Candidate

    Research interests:
    • A

    Kaining Zhang

    PhD Candidate

    Research interests:
    • Heritage conservation
    • Sustainability
    • Urban management
    • Urban regeneration

    Marjan Rafiei

    PhD Candidate

    Research interests:
    • A

    Sara Saidi

    PhD Candidate

    Research interests:
    • A

    Subin Rahman

    PhD Candidate

    Research interests:
    • H