Fabian Namberger joined the Urban Design Team at HafenCity University Hamburg in March 2023. He is post-doctoral researcher in the research training group ‘Urban future-making. Professional agency across time and scale’ (Prof Monika Grubbauer). In his current research, Fabian is interested in the spatially variegated processes of embedding digital platforms in urban space. Fabian’s PhD thesis ‘Uberising the Urban’ (Goldsmiths, University of London) examined how the operations of ridehail platform Uber have come up against the multi-scalar and variously uneven urban grounds of the ‘smart city’ of Toronto. During his PhD, Fabian was visiting graduate student at the Institute of Planning & Geography, University of Toronto (2018) and research fellow at the PUTSPACE project of Leibniz Institute for Regional Research Leipzig (2021).

Before his PhD, Fabian obtained a Bachelor of Arts in political science at Free University Berlin (2014) and a Master of Arts in ‘Critical and Creative Analysis’ at the Department of Sociology of Goldsmiths, University of London (2015). Both during his B.A. and M.A., Fabian was part of the research unit peace and conflict studies at Otto Suhr Institute, Free University Berlin where he published on global theories of war, postcolonial studies, critical geopolitics and cartography. Today, Fabian is member of the discussion group ‘Classes and Social Structure’ at Rosa Luxemburg Foundation and of the study group ‘Migration, Labour, Digitalisation and Racism’ at Humboldt University Berlin (Prof Manuela Bojadžijev). From 2017 to 2021, Fabian was editor at the online magazine kritisch-lesen.de to which he still contributes at (ir)regular intervals.