Professor Martin Müller – Director
Martin is a human geographer and professor. He heads the research team M³ (Materialities | Multiplicities | Metropolis) at the University of Lausanne. He is interested in how rich cities attempt to become sexy cities. In other words: How do cities seek to convert economic capital into cultural capital by investing in global urban types such as mega-events and cultural flagships? He works on the Global East.
Contact: martin.muller@unil.ch
Twitter: @DrMartinMuller
Dr. David Gogishvili – Senior Researcher
David is an urban geographer interested in mega-events, megaprojects and mobilities in the Global East. His research examines the role of legal exceptions and politics in large-scale urban projects and mostly focuses on the cities of Central Asia and South Caucasus. He is working on the project Cultural Flagships: Pathways, Practices and Politics of a Global Urban Type.
Contact: david.gogishvili@unil.ch
Violante Torre – PhD Candidate, Teaching Assistant
Violante is currently developing her PhD project, investigating urban transformations and culture-led urbanism in Istanbul, Turkey. She is particularly interested in exploring how major urban redevelopment plans on culture in the city confront themselves with everyday uses and practices in space, and how the image of the city and its historical, cultural, and religious identities are shaped by this encounter.
Contact: violante.torre@unil.ch
Twitter: @TorreViolante
Clotilde Trivin – PhD Candidate
Clotilde is currently developing her PhD project around the European Solidarity Centre in Gdańsk, Poland. Her PhD focusses on the socio-material entanglements of big buildings, their affective experiences and politics. She is interested in global urbanism, architectural geographies, and more-than-human urban politics to research city-making. She is working on the project Cultural Flagships: Pathways, Practices and Politics of a Global Urban Type.
Contact: clotilde.trivin@unil.ch
Twitter: @ClotildeTrivin
Julie Grieshaber – Junior Researcher
After finishing a master in sustainability, Julie joined the M3 Team as a junior researcher. At the University of Lausanne, she will study how cultural institutions can become thought leaders and role models to inspire action for sustainability beyond their sector. She is particularly interested in putting her research into practice by understanding the barriers that the institutions can encounter and find ways to overcome them.
Contact: julie.grieshaber@unil.ch
Quentin Rihoux – PhD Candidate, Teaching Assistant
Quentin Rihoux is a researcher and PhD candidate in the Department of Geography and Sustainability at the University of Lausanne. He received Master degrees in Architecture from the Ecole Nationale d’Architecture de Versailles and in Town and Country Planning from Tongji University Shanghai. After working for some years in the field of urban design and planning, he studied Urbanism at Sciences Po Paris. Quentin Rihoux’s main research interests relate to urban “projectification” ; causes and consequences of the rise of projects as new dominant instruments for urban governance.
Contact: quentin.rihoux@unil.ch
Laura Neville – Junior Researcher
Laura is a SNSF researcher in the project Cultural Flagships: Pathways, Practices and Politics of a Global Urban type. Her research interests are centred on urban environmental change, infrastructures of disposability and social inequalities in cities in Latin America (Colombia, Chile). Drawing on ethnographic research in Cartagena, Colombia, her doctoral research examines the socio-material relations surrounding waste and how they come to matter for shaping inhabitants’ politics of place-making and urban belonging at a time of global urban environmental crises.
https://igd.unil.ch/lneville/en/presentation/
Contact: laura.neville@unil.ch
Abdallah Jreij – Visiting PhD Candidate
Abdallah is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Architecture and Urban Studies (DAStU) at the Politecnico di Milano. He is developing his Ph.D. project, investigating the relevance of the context on the environmental sustainability of projects and developments aligned with the mega-events. He is investigating previous case studies, the Winter Olympics in particular, and the outcome of his research will be applied to Milano Cortina 2026 and to future mega-events. For that, he is now spending a visiting period at the University of Lausanne, being part of the team of Prof. Martin Müller within the department of Geography and Sustainability.
Alumni-ae
Dr. Christopher Gaffney, Associate Professor at New York University. sps.nyu.edu/homepage/academics/faculty-directory/20072-christopher-t-gaffney.html
Aghata Gonsalves, PhD Candidate at the Federal University of Santa Catarina in Florianopolis. https://www.escavador.com/sobre/4202895/aghata-karoliny-ribeiro-gonsalves
Miriam Hug, PhD Candidate and Teaching assistant at University of Bern. geography.unibe.ch/about_us/staff/hug_miriam/index_eng.html#pane893341
Dr. Elisabeth Militz, Postdoc at University of Guelph. https://geg.uoguelph.ca/post-doc/militz-elisabeth
Dr. Suncana Laketa, Postdoc at University of Neuchâtel. unine.ch/geographie/en/home/collaborateurs-trices/suncana-laketa.html
Jill Pope, PhD Candidate at University of Melbourne. unimelb.academia.edu/JillPope
Dr. Julio Paulos, Associate Research Director of the Future Cities Laboratory at ETH Zurich. https://fcl.ethz.ch/people/lead/julio-paulos.html
Dr. Sven Daniel Wolfe, Senior Lecturer at University of Zurich. https://www.geo.uzh.ch/en/department/Staff/danielwolfe