Emílio da Cruz Brandão

Since September 2022, he is a PhD student at KTH School of Architecture (Stockholm), within the JPI-Urban Europe project CoNECT (Collective Networks for Everyday Community Resilience and Ecological Transition), where his research focuses on “Community Pedagogies for Resilience Beyond Crisis”.

For the last 10 years he has also been a lecturer at Chalmers School of Architecture (Gothenburg). At Chalmers he was the director of the Master’s Programme Architecture and Planning Beyond Sustainability (MPDSD) between 2016-2022, where he has had the roles of examiner, supervisor and teacher of several courses, design studios and master theses.
Both his research and teaching are on topics of urban pedagogies for social sustainability and inclusion, community resilience and collaborative practices. He has expertise in design activism, co-creation, participation and design and built processes and methodologies involving multiple stakeholders. He works in contexts highly challenged by socio-economic segregation, urban poverty, diverse urban inequalities and injustices, both locally and internationally, and built on several years of experience from architectural practice, action-based pedagogy in higher education and engagement in NGOs such as Architecture Sans Frontières (both the International and the Swedish organizations). In 2021, he has received the Pedagogy Prize at Chalmers University of Technology. And in 2023 he and his team of colleagues received the UIA Award for Innovation in Architectural Education, Region 1 (Europe) for their pedagogical work within "Design Activism Beyond Sustainability – Architectural Education based on Collaborative and Radical Pedagogy".
Emilio has been previously involved in different collaborative and research projects such as the ESF-project (European Social Fund) Lärandets Torg in Hammarkullen, Gothenburg (2014-2017) and the research project Stitching the city: From micro-data to macro-views.