Tiago Castela (Lisbon, 1974) is a historian of architecture and urbanism, as well as an architect. He holds a PhD in Architecture from the University of California, Berkeley. His outside fields of study were the anthropology of planning and urban geography. He does research on spatial peripheries, with a focus on southern Africa and Portugal in late colonialism, between 1950 and 1980. He also does research on the politics of housing, in the same period. He holds a professional degree in Architecture from the Technical University of Lisbon.
He is a researcher of the Center for Social Studies of the University of Coimbra (CES-UC), and an invited assistant professor in Architecture. At CES-UC, he is the PI of the exploratory research project “Regulating the Colonial Rural”, which focuses on wartime villagization in late colonial Angola and Guinea-Bissau, funded by the Portuguese Science and Technology Foundation (FCT). He was the PI of the exploratory project “Urban Aspirations in Colonial/Postcolonial Mozambique,” also funded by FCT.
At Coimbra, he teaches doctoral seminars for the PhD in Architecture, as well as for the PhD programs of CES-UC and Economics on Postcolonialisms and Global Citizenships, and on Cities and Urban Cultures. He is also a member of the faculty of the College of the Arts. He has given invited lectures at Wits (South Africa), University Eduardo Mondlane (Mozambique), and Berkeley, as well at various Portuguese universities. He lives in Porto, and has a 5-year-old daughter.