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Dr Somaiyeh Falahat is a Visiting Research Fellow from 2 January to 31 December 2025.
Somaiyeh Falahat is a researcher in urban studies with an interdisciplinary background in architecture and cultural geography, and experience in (development) planning practice. Her research has engaged with the geopolitical and formative agencies of urban cultural archives in creations of the everyday urban consciousness and its theoretical conceptions. Understanding archives as repositories of imaginations, knowledges, and affects, her research contributes to the discourses on urban epistemic pluralism and spatial justice.
Before joining UCL, she was a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Research Fellow at the Department of Geography, University of Cambridge, where she conducted research on the cinematic and literary constructions of ‘modern’ female subjectivities and the ‘modern’ city in Tehran from 1900 to the 1970s, in order to advocate a rewriting of the everyday roots of theories from diverse locations as a crucial part of co-creating globally collective understandings of the ‘urban’. As a Senior Consultant in urban development at Arup she has led a study which experiments with integrating ethnographic methods into urban projects’ life cycles.
Her monograph, Cities and Metaphors (Routledge, 2018), suggests exploring cultural formations and meanings of key spatial concepts in different locations as part of the move towards understanding urban historical differences across geographies. The book proposes to experiment with using a ‘new’ concept from a ‘new’ location – hezar-tu – in order to look at spatial relations (Raumkonzept) in Fez, Isfahan, and Tunis. Hezar-tu, which the book borrows from literature studies, literally means ‘a thousand insides’. It denotes an abstraction, or an ever-elusive core, which is hidden or resides inside insides, requiring the negotiation of multiple thresholds to reach (understanding of) it. Hezar-tu is about interstitiality, liminality, and the spatial conditions of edges, and offers an epistemic tool for laying stress on the relations between spaces and in-between spaces.
Somaiyeh has previously held other research grants, such as an Alexander von Humboldt Research Grant, a Gerda Henkel Research Fellowship, and a German Federal Ministry of Education and Research postdoctoral fellowship, in addition to lectureship positions at the University of Greenwich London and the Berlin University of Technology. She has published in various journals including Dialogues in Urban Research, Architecture and Culture, Cities, Planning Perspective, The Planning Review, and Urban History. Studies in cultural postcolonialism, cultural geography, feminist postcolonialism, literary geography, and cultural Marxism have been key inspiration points for her research so far.
Her research at the IAS explores the possibilities of bringing different forms and geographies of archives into dialogue with each other for the co-production of global urban thinking-feeling structures. She will be working on her documentary short film and monograph during her stay at the IAS.
