Biography

Tiago Castela (Lisbon, 1974) is a historian of architecture and urbanism, and an architect. He teaches and does research on peripheral architecture and urbanism, as well as the politics of housing, focusing on Portugal and southern Africa at the end of the colonial period. His work focuses on processes of architectural and urban creation by a plurality of agents, paying attention not only to how they are influenced by architects' design practices, but also to how these processes contribute to architectural theory. In 2011, he completed a PhD in Architecture at the University of California, Berkeley, in the USA, in the area of History of Architecture and Urbanism. His main field of study was the History of Architecture and Urbanism in Europe and its colonies, 1850-2000. The 2 minor fields of study were the Theory of Global Urbanism and Urban Geography. He has a professional degree in Architecture from the Faculty of Architecture of the Technical University of Lisbon. He is a researcher and invited assistant professor at the University of Coimbra, teaching in the Department of Architecture and associated with the Center for Social Studies (CES). He also teaches doctoral seminars at the Faculty of Economics, and is a member of the faculty of the College of Arts. He coordinated the exploratory research project "Regulating the Colonial Rural", funded by the Foundation for Science and Technology (FCT), as well as the exploratory project "Urban Aspirations in Colonial / Post-Colonial Mozambique". He was also coordinator of historical research tasks or researcher in three projects in the field of housing studies. He teaches 3 doctoral seminars: on prospectus writing in the PhD in Architecture; on spatial theories in the PhD in Cities and Urban Cultures; and about political spaces in the PhD in Post-Colonialisms and Global Citizenship. He is currently the main supervisor of 8 PhD students, and co-supervisor of 7 students. He was co-supervisor of 2 completed PhD dissertations, and supervised 2 post-doctoral research projects. He has given guest lectures at the University of the Witwatersrand (South Africa), Eduardo Mondlane University (Mozambique), and Berkeley (USA), as well as at several Portuguese universities. Since 2021, he has been a member of the Advisory Board of the "International Association for the Study of Traditional Environments" (IASTE). At CES, since 2023 he has been a member of the Permanent Committee of the Scientific Council and co-coordinator of the "CES Vai à Escola" extension program. His documentary "Urban Aspirations" (2016) was selected for the "Film Geographies" collection, associated with the American Association of Geographers. He led the team that won first prize in the 2004 international architectural competition for the administrative center of the autonomous community of Extremadura, in Mérida, Spain; having also coordinated in João Luís Carrilho da Graça's studio between 2000 and 2004 the project for the Theater and Auditorium of Poitiers, France. He lives in Porto with his 7 year old daughter.