Dr. Lindsay Sawyer
Lindsay Sawyer is a Senior Researcher at the Chair of Spatial Development and Planning at the Technical University Munich (TUM). Her research explores African urbanisation in comparative perspective, focussing on Lagos, Nigeria. Her work challenges assumptions about African cities and urbanisation, particularly the role and meaning of informality and the state. She has developed the concept of tacit governance regimes and has collaboratively conceptualised a number of useful terms including plotting urbanism and bypass urbanism. Lindsay’s current work explores the urbanisation of wetlands as a process of territorialisation, challenging notions of meaningful climate mitigation.
Lindsay Sawyer holds a Doctorate in Architecture from ETH Zürich, undertaken at the Future Cities Laboratory Singapore and at the Chair of Sociology, Department of Architecture, ETH Zurich. Her thesis analyses urbanisation processes in Lago. It waspart of the research project “Patterns and Pathways of Urbanisation in Comparative Perspective”, published in the book “Vocabularies of Urbanisation”.
Lindsay Sawyer holds an MSc in The City and MA(Hons) in Architectural Design from the University of Edinburgh. She was a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at the University of Sheffield, has held an Honorary Fellowship at the Global Development Institute, the University of Manchester and has been a visiting scholar at the African Centre for Cities, the University of Cape Town. She has been an editor of City: Analysis of Urban Change, Theory, Action since 2020 where she is co-leading initiatives to open up the journal to mis- and under-represented scholars and places, challenging the unequal means of knowledge production in urban studies. She has been an Associate of the Urban Institute at the University of Sheffield since 2024. Lindsay is also a fiction writer.
Lindsay Sawyer: publications