Terra Urbis is the personal web space of Nikos Katsikis
Nikos is an urbanist working at the intersection of urbanization theory, design and geospatial analysis. His research seeks, through conceptual and cartographic experimentation, to contribute to a geographical understanding of the socio-metabolic relations between agglomerations and their operational landscapes. He is currently Assistant Professor at the Urbanism Department, TU Delft and Researcher at Urban Theory Lab Chicago, and Future Cities Laboratory, ETH, Zurich. Previously he was Research Tutor at the Royal College of Arts, London, where he collaborated in the development of a new research program on Environmental Architecture; and Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Luxembourg, where he worked on the establishment and accreditation of a new Master program on Architecture, European Urbanization and Globalization.
He holds a Doctor of Design from Harvard Graduate School of Design (GSD), where he was also on the editorial board of the New Geographies journal and co-editor of New Geographies 06: Grounding Metabolism (Harvard University Press, 2014). At the GSD he has served as Instructor in Urban Planning and Design and Teaching and Research Associate. He has organized conferences on Urban Autonomy (2016), Geographical Urbanism (2015), Urban Metabolism (2014), Regionalism and the Mediterranean (2013) and the Limits of the Urban (2012). He holds a professional degree in Architecture with highest distinction (2006) and a Master of Science in Architecture and Spatial Design (2009) from the National Technical University of Athens, where he has also worked as a Teaching Fellow. He is a licensed architect in Greece and the EU (2006) and has practiced architecture and urban design as an individual, and as an associate architect (2006-2009).
His recent work includes contributions in Harvard Design Magazine, New Geographies and MONU; book chapters in Implosions / Explosions: Towards a Study of Planetary Urbanization (ed. Neil Brenner); Doing Global Urban Research (ed. Michael Hoyler); The Horizontal Metropolis (ed. Paola Vigano); the edited volume Manhattan: Grid for Ordering an Island (with Joan Busquets), and Positions on Emancipation (with Florian Hertweck); and the forthcoming book (with N. Brenner), Is the world urban? Towards a Critique of Geospatial Ideology. His research is supported by scholarships and grants from the Fulbright foundation, the A.S. Onassis foundation, the A.G. Leventis foundation, the Real Estate Academic Initiative, the Weatherhead Institute for International affairs, the Braillard Foundation, and the Graham Foundation for the Arts.
Terra Urbis (ˈtɛrə ˈɜːbɪs) – latin: the Earth of the City