Matthew Gandy, FBA (born 1965 in London) is a geographer and urbanist. He is Professor of Cultural and Historical Geography and Fellow of King's College at the University of Cambridge, moving from University College London (UCL) in 2015, where he was also the founder and first Director of the UCL Urban Laboratory from 2005 to 2011.
His research on environmental history, urban infrastructure and visual culture has involved work in a variety of countries including France, Germany, Nigeria, India, the UK and the USA. In 2003 he was winner of the Spiro Kostof Prize of the Society of Architectural Historians for Concrete and clay: reworking nature in New York City as the book “within the last two years that has made the greatest contribution to our understanding of urbanism and its relationship with architecture”.[1] In 2005 he set up the UCL Urban Laboratory as an international and interdisciplinary centre for urban research and teaching [2] and in 2006 he was a founder of the London-wide Urban Salon.[3] In 2007 he produced and directed a documentary film, Liquid City (2007),[4] which explores the complexity of water politics in Bombay/Mumbai. In 2015 his book "The fabric of space: water, modernity, and the urban imagination" won the Meridian Book Award for Outstanding Scholarly Work in Geography and in 2016 it was awarded the International Planning History Society's prize for the "most innovative book in planning history". In 2016 he was elected as a Fellow of the British Academy.[5] In 2017 he produced, wrote, and directed the prize-winning documentary film, Natura Urbana: the Brachen of Berlin, which charts the dual histories of urban botany and geo-politics in post-war Berlin. In 2023 his book Natura Urbana: ecological constellations in urban space won a John Brinckerhoff Jackson Prize awarded by the Foundation for Landscape Studies and UVA School of Architecture and he was also elected a fellow of the Academic Europaea.
His current work explores five main themes: landscape (including depictions of nature in the visual arts), infrastructure and urban metabolism (including atmospheres and corporeal geographies), urban bio-diversity, urban epidemiology, and visual methodologies.
He is also actively involved in local issues in Hackney, east London, writes regular reviews and commentaries for his personal website at http://www.matthewgandy.org, and is an urban field ecologist, specialising in entomology and has written a book on moths.[2]
Gandy, M. 1994. Recycling and the politics of urban waste. London: Earthscan.
Gandy, Matthew (2002). Concrete and Clay: Reworking Nature in New York City. The Urban & Industrial Environment Series. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press.
Gandy, Matthew, "Urban nature and the ecological imaginary", in Heynen, Nik (ed.), In the nature of cities: urban political ecology and the politics of urban metabolism, London: Routledge, pp. 62–73, ISBN978-0415368278.
Gandy, Matthew (2006), "The cinematic void: the representation of desert space in Michelangelo Antonioni's Zabriskie Point", in Lefebvre, Martin (ed.), Landscape and film, AFI Film Readers Series, London: Routledge, pp. 315–332, ISBN9780415975551.
Gandy, Matthew (19 August 2013), "Landscape and infrastructure in the late-modern metropolis", in Bridge, Gary; Watson, Sophie (eds.), The new Blackwell companion to the city, Wiley Blackwell Companions to Geography Series, Malden, Massachusetts Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, pp. 57–65, ISBN9781118655306.
Gandy, Matthew (2011), "The texture of space: desire and displacement in Hiroshi Teshigahara's Woman of the Dunes", in Richardson, Douglas; Daniels, Stephen (eds.), Geography and the humanities, London: Routledge, pp. 198–208, ISBN978-0415589772.
Gandy, Matthew (2011), "Interstitial landscapes: reflections on a Berlin corner", in BeGandy, Matthew (ed.), Urban constellations, Berlin: jovis, pp. 149–152, ISBN9783868591187.
Gandy, Matthew (21 May 2012), "The melancholy observer: landscape, neo-romanticism and the politics of documentary film making", in Praeger, Brad (ed.), Companion to Werner Herzog, Wiley Blackwell Companions to Film Directors Series, Malden, Massachusetts Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, pp. 528–546, ISBN9781405194402.
Gandy, Matthew (2014), "Acoustic terrains", in Gandy, Matthew (ed.), The acoustic city, Berlin: jovis, pp. 7–13, ISBN9783868592719.
Gandy, Matthew (2016), "Mapping urban nature", in Beebeejaun, Yasminah (ed.), The participatory city, Berlin: jovis, pp. 162–168, ISBN9783868593754.
Gandy, Matthew (January 2008). "Landscapes of disaster: water, poverty and urban fragmentation in Mumbai". Environment and Planning A. 40 (1): 108–130. doi:10.1068/a3994. S2CID14848227.
Gandy, Matthew (August 2012). "Queer ecology: nature, sexuality and heterotopic alliances". Environment and Planning D: Society and Space. 30 (4): 727–747. doi:10.1068/d10511.
