Tiago Castela (Lisbon, 1974) is a historian of architecture and spatial planning, as well as an architect. He does research on peripheral urbanism and the politics of housing, with a focus on Portugal and southern Africa in the late colonial period. He holds a PhD in Architecture from the University of California, Berkeley. His outside fields of study were Urban Geography and Global Planning Knowledge. He also holds a professional degree in Architecture from the Technical University of Lisbon, Portugal. He is an invited assistant professor at the Department of Architecture of the University of Coimbra, Portugal, where he was previously affiliated with the interdisciplinary Center for Social Studies (CES). He also taught graduate seminars at the Faculty of Economics, and is a member of the faculty of the College of the Arts. He is currently the Principal Investigator (PI) of the research project "Rural Decolonization", and was previously the PI for the exploratory research projects "Regulating the Colonial Rural" and "Urban Aspirations in Colonial/Postcolonial Mozambique," all funded by the Portuguese state Foundation for Science and Technology (FCT). He is the instructor for 1 doctoral seminar, on research design for the PhD in Architecture, as well for an undergraduate class on "Architecture and Urban Culture". He is currently the dissertation chair for 9 PhD students, and a co-advisor for 6 other PhD students. He is the co-advisor of 2 completed PhD dissertations, and has supervised 2 postdoctoral research fellows. He has lectured at the University of Witwatersrand (South Africa), at University Eduardo Mondlane (Mozambique), as well as at various Portuguese universities; and is a member of the Advisory Board for the Internacional Association for the Study of Traditional Environments (IASTE). His documentary "Urban Aspirations" (2016) was selected for inclusion in the online Film Geographies collection. He lives in Porto, Portugal with his 7-year-old daughter.