Personal

Ann Legeby

Ann Legeby is Professor of Applied Urban Design at the School of Architecture. She is specialized in urban design, including studies of urban segregation, urban inequalities, and conditions for urban life in cities.

The research addresses urban design and urban development in relation to sustainability issues, and in particular the social dimension of urban planning and urban design. A strong interest is to identify and clarify the way in which the properties of space influence how we perceive and use the city and to learn more about the effects of how we build and shape the city’s environments. The focus of my research is architecture and urban design, and more specifically studying how configurative properties of urban environments are interrelated to various social, ecological, economic and political phenomena. The research aims to develop methodologies to model, analyse, and visualize spatial configurations as defined by urban form and material boundaries. Central for the research are theories about spatial configuration including space syntax, and draws from architectural theory and sociology focusing on social processes in urban space, aiming to increase the understanding of society-space relations. Important has been to develop knowledge, methods and theories of how we can analyse and understand urban space, including land use and density aspects, and find out more about how configurative properties correspond to social processes and to affordances in urban space. Besides research and teaching, Ann has been practicing at Sweco Architects in Gothenburg since 1998.

Adrià Carbonell

Adrià Carbonell is an architect, urban designer, and lecturer at the KTH School of Architecture, where he serves as group leader (gruppchef) at the Division of Architecture, Cities, and Landscapes. He holds a PhD in Applied Urban Design, awarded for his thesis Redistribution by Urban Design: Centrality, Ecology, and Transition in Järvafältet, 1930–2030. His work bridges academic and practice-based research, with a focus on the interplay between architecture, territory, politics, and the environment. He teaches courses in architecture and urban design, with an emphasis on urban ecologies, and urban economics, mostly within the MSc programme in Sustainable Urban Planning and Design. Carbonell’s research advances a vision of urban design encompassing cities and their broader geographical contexts, seeking a fair distribution of resources in response to the climate crisis. To build sustainable cities, he calls for a territorial approach that reconnects urban and rural landscapes by linking urban form with urban metabolism and socioecological urbanism.

Lukas Ljungqvist

Lukas Ljungqvist (M.Sc. Architecture) is, since October 2022, a part‑time industrial PhD candidate in Applied Urban Design at KTH Royal Institute of Technology, School of Architecture. His doctoral work is supervised by Professor Ann Legeby (KTH), Professor Lars Marcus (Chalmers) and Erica Eneqvist (City of Stockholm). His research examines how digital technologies and the broader digital transformation of society are used, and can be used, in urban design and planning processes to support systems thinking and enable sustainable transition.

In parallel with his PhD, Lukas works as an urban planning strategist at the City Planning Administration, City of Stockholm. He has a professional background from private practice in urban planning and architecture, with a particular focus on climate, energy, and sustainability.

Within the City Planning Administration he has served as sustainability strategist, focusing on business development, Agenda 2030, innovation, and digitalisation. In this role he was responsible for coordinating the Senseable Stockholm Lab (2019–2024), a research collaboration between KTH, MIT Senseable City Lab and the Stockholm Chamber of Commerce centred on sustainable cities, IoT and AI.

Matilde Kautsky

Matilde Kautsky is an architect and PhD Candidate at the Royal Institute of Technology in Applied Urban Design, with an interest in just cities and equal living conditions. Her research investigates how societal values and norms are traceable in architecture, to understand more about how the societal ideals in urban design of different times impact contemporary living conditions. The presence and visibility of schools and schoolyards, together with their architecture are studied, as a way of capturing the changes of societal values and norms.

As a teacher in the master’s program Sustainable Urban Planning and Design (SUPD), Matilde is interested in exploring the possibilities of planning and designing for another kind of city together with the students.

Sara Sardari Sayyar

Sara Sardari Sayyar is an architect, urban designer, and a PhD Candidate at the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, partly supported by the programme Applied Urban Design. Sara has a special interest in urban diversity and its definition. She is studying the correspondence between the configuration of urban form and the emergence of urban diversity. The research focuses on finding methods to quantify functional diversity as well as trying to explore the relation or interaction that exists between urban form, in general, and functional diversity in cities.

Chen Feng, post doc

I am a Researcher in Applied Urban Design at Royal Institute of Technology (KTH). From 2021 to 2023, I was a postdoctoral fellow in Applied Urban Design at KTH, working with Prof. Ann Legeby. From 2019 to 2020, I was a postdoctoral fellow in Urban Informatics at the School of Architecture at The University of Texas at Austin. I received my PhD from Georgia Institute of Technology where I worked with Dr. John Peponis on Space Syntax and urban design. I am interested in quantitatively characterizing urban space—especially street networks—and studying the interaction between urban forms and activity patterns. My research has been published in leading peer-reviewed journals such as Environment and Planning B, Computers, Environment and Urban Systems, Journal of Urban Technology, Journal of Space Syntax.

Xiaohong Michelle Ling, guest researcher

LING, Xiaohong (Michelle) is an architect and Associate Professor at Urban and Architecture Design at South China University of Technology in Guangzhou, China. During 2024 Michelle was a visiting researcher at KTH Royal Institute of Technology. Michelle’s research scholarship lies at the intersection of urban morphology, spatial analysis, and development dynamics of cities, focusing on how urban form mediates the relationship between built environments and social, cultural, and economic processes in rapidly transforming cities. She specializes in using spatial analysis tools, such as space syntax in combination with multi-source data analysis (e.g. POIs, urban heatmap, mobile signalling data, movements and traffic flows, online behaviour data) to examine urban form and its relation to accessibility, functional use, social interaction and community vitality. More recently, Michelle has extended her scholarship to investigate the socio-spatial dynamics of contemporary cities in times of transformation.

Collaborations

Lars Marcus is an architect and professor in Urban Design and leads the research group Spatial Morphology Group (SMoG) at Chalmers Technical University in Gothenburg. His research concerns how spatial form, as defined by architecture and urban design, supports, structures and sets limits to people’s everyday life. In extension, spatial form conditions vital social, economic and ecological urban processes. Hence, spatial morphology constitutes a form of technology creating spatial structure for other urban systems. He is also founder and partner of the consultancy firm Spacescape, performing spatial analysis, design support and policy development in architectural and urban projects for architects, municipalities and real estate companies. The Arwidsson Foundation has supported his writing on Measures and Meanings of Spatial Capital (MIT Press 2025). Collaborations also include Den byggda miljöns betydelse för att minska boendesegregation och ojämna livsvillkor – en systematisk kunskapspöversikt (Delmi & Vetenskapsrådet 2025), and Den byggda formens betydelse – kunskap från forskning (Boverket 2025).