Team

Dr. David Sichinava Principal Investigator

David is Research Director at CRRC-Georgia, Tbilisi-based research organization. He worked as Assistant Professor of Geography at Tbilisi State University and has taught at the International Black Sea University and the International School of Economics at TSU (ISET). He completed his PhD in Human Geography at Tbilisi State University in 2015. In 2016, Daivd was a Fulbright Visiting Scholar at the University of Colorado-Boulder, working alongside Professor John O’Loughlin. As an assistant professor, David has supervised graduate students, taught various graduate-level research design and methods courses, as well as taught undergraduate courses on world regional geography, the geography of Georgia, and cultural geography.

Dr. David Gogishvili Principal Investigator

David received his doctoral degree in Urban Studies and Regional Science with honours at Italy’s Gran Sasso Science Institute in 2017. Subsequently, he joined the University of Lausanne as a postdoctoral researcher where he studied the impact of megaprojects in the urban development of Kazakhstan. Currently, he is a postdoctoral scholar at the Department of Urban Studies at Malmö University where he is carrying out a research project scrutinizing the role of legal exceptions in urban planning. He is focused on the implementation of the real estate megaproject Panorama Tbilisi in Georgia and its surrounding governmental discourses. His research interests involve mega-events, mega-projects, the cities of the Global East and the geopolitics of academic knowledge production. David is a founder of Soviet Past Research Laboratory and Iare Pekhit.

Dr. Suzanne Harris-Brandts Principal Investigator

Suzanne is Assistant Professor of Architecture and Urbanism at Carleton University (Ottawa, Canada). She is also a licensed architect in Ontario and has worked at design-research practices across the globe, including in Toronto, Vancouver, London, the West Bank and Abu Dhabi. She received her PhD in Urban Studies from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and her Master of Architecture from the University of Waterloo. Her research brings together design and the social sciences to explore issues of power, equity, and collective identity in the built environment, topics she has explored in Eurasia, the Canadian North, and Occupied Palestinian Territories. Suzanne’s current book project, entitled Constructing the Capital, draws from her dissertation research uncovering the politics of urban development and image-making in capital cities.

Nino Mzhavanadze Project coordinator

Nino currently works at the Caucasus Research Resource Center (CRRC-Georgia) as a junior researcher. She holds a Masters Degree in Sociology from Tbilisi State University. Prior to CRRC, Nino participated in the 2014 National Census of Georgia as an organizer and supervisor responsible for quality data collection in Tbilisi’s selected neighborhoods.

Dr.-Ing. Carola Neugebauer Foreign Advisor

Carola is Associate Professor at RWTH Aachen University in Germany. She has a strong background studying urban transformations, planning and cultural heritage in Eurasia with a special emphasis on Central Eastern European and post-Soviet cities.