Nikos Katsikis is an urbanist and educator working at the intersection of urbanization theory, design and geospatial analysis. He is currently Assistant Professor at the Urbanism Department, TU Delft, where he co-leads the Critical Environments group; and Affiliated Researcher at Urban Theory Lab Chicago. Beyond academia, he serves as external expert on geospatial indicators for localizing the Sustainable Development Goals to the European Commission’s Joint Research Centre (JRC), and is co-founder and co-director of Critical Earth, a Zurich-based non-profit association. Previously he was Research Tutor at the Royal College of Art, London, where he collaborated in the development of a new research program on Environmental Architecture; and Postdoctoral Researcher at the University of Luxembourg, where he worked on the establishment and accreditation of a new Master program on Architecture, European Urbanization and Globalization. In 2024–2025 he was Guest Professor at the Department of Architecture and Urban Studies (DASTU), Politecnico di Milano. He holds a professional diploma of Architecture and an MSc in Design-Space-Culture from the National Technical University of Athens (NTUA), both with highest distinction, and a Doctor of Design from Harvard Graduate School of Design (GSD). At the GSD he was also on the editorial board of the New Geographies journal and co-editor of New Geographies 06: Grounding Metabolism, and has served as Instructor in Urban Planning and Design.
Nikos’ work is invested in developing a geographical approach to urban metabolism. It seeks to uncover and address the complex social and ecological processes that shape the biogeographical interdependencies between cities and the much wider landscapes of primary production, circulation, and waste disposal that underpin them. His research combines cartographic and theoretical investigation to develop original spatial concepts and methods that can grasp the extended geographies of contemporary urbanization, across scales, across species, and beyond the boundaries of the city. In this effort to rethink the hinterland question under conditions of planetary urbanization, he has introduced concepts such as operational landscapes and hinterglobes, which interrogate the often unseen infrastructures of extraction, circulation, and waste that sustain urban life.
His work includes contributions in Planning Practice & Research, Journal of Environmental Policy & Planning, Anthropocene Review, Architectural Design (AD), Technospheres, Strelka Magazine, Harvard Design Magazine, New Geographies and MONU; book chapters in Collective Landscape Futures (ed. Ed Wall), 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 volumes Manhattan: Grid for Ordering an Island (with Joan Busquets) and Positions on Emancipation (with Florian Hertweck); and the recent books Data-spheres of Planetary Urbanization and Environments of Planetary Urbanization (with Urban Theory Lab, Jovis, 2025). He teaches and lectures internationally and his creative work has been widely exhibited in venues such as the Architekturmuseum der TUM in Munich, the Venice Biennale of Architecture, and the Shenzhen Biennale of Urbanism. His research has been supported by grants and scholarships from, among others, the Fulbright Foundation, the Braillard Foundation, the Onassis Foundation, and the Graham Foundation.
Contact: nikos@terraurbis.com