Dr Cristian Suau Ibanez

I am a curious and creative human being who applies innovative nature-based and climate-oriented solutions in cities. I am a senior architect, social designer, and urban ecologist with proved 30 years of advanced specialisations and international professional and university research and teaching expertise in architecture and urbanism in Europe, and overseas. I hold a PhD in Architecture along with postgraduate studies in climate design and environmental planning and postdoctoral research fellows in architecture and urban planning.  I explore frontier and non-prescriptive areas of research beyond architecture and urbanism, particularly interconnecting the fields of urban planning, landscape and ecology that include work in environmental planning, social innovation, urban revitalization, cycling networks, climate shelters, fog water collection, and phytoremediation in cities, among other universal solutions with high socio-environmental impact. I promote decolonizing initiatives by recognising epistemologies and forms of knowledge discarded by linear thoughts or dominant academic biases. My scientific experience connects design and ecology in the built environment. It demonstrates curiosity, originality, leadership, and solid academic merits. My design research develops green, water, and waste reuse solutions. I experiment with phytoremediation, gardening, and citizen science to restore and regenerate creatively vacant lands in deprived communities through NBS technologies and live experiments. I develop water technology innovation -textile, drainage, and filter systems- using innovative fog collection in waterless zones worldwide. I build remake stations to build capacity in ecology design applied to youth in academia and local communities. My pedagogic capacity empowers graduate students to ideate, play and make architecture based on the circularity of design science, particularly by deploying biocapacity, adaptation and frugality for renaturised and compact cities.