Since August 2015 Monika Grubbauer is Professor for History and Theory of the City at HCU Hamburg. She is an architect and sociologist and was from 2009 to 2014 academic member of staff at Darmstadt University of Technology. She worked on the issue of processes of financialisation in do-it-yourself construction as a guest researcher at Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México in Mexiko City from November 2014 until July 2015.