Editorial Team

Dr. ir. Gerhard Bruyns is an associate professor at the School of Design, Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hong Kong. He serves as the Associate Dean of Academic Programs and Director of the Research Postgraduate Program (PhD). He has participated in a nine-discipline curriculum reform and pedagogical advancement for undergraduate and postgraduate programs. He possesses a PhD and MSc in urbanism from the Delft School of Design (TU Delft) and a cum laude BArch in architecture from the University of Pretoria, South Africa. He has instructed and lectured in Germany, Greece, South Africa, Chile, Colombia, and various Asian countries. In 2014, he organised the UIA international student competition "Architecture Otherwhere," which received over 300 submissions from around the world. He is a member of the executive team of the International Forum on Urbanism (IFOU), Associate Editor of Design Studies (Elsevier), and editor-in-chief of Cubic Journal – Design Social, Economies, Making. His research addresses morphological enquiries as customary results concerning spatial compression and density. Previous publications encompass “African Perspectives” (Nai010, 2012), “IASDR 2021” (Springer, 2022), “Design Commons” (Springer, 2022), and “The Routledge Handbook of Architecture, Urban Space and Politics, Volume II, Ecology, Social Participation and Marginalities” (Routledge, 2024).

Dr Darren Nel is a Research Fellow at NUS Cities, within the Department of Architecture at the National University of Singapore. He holds a PhD in Design from The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, where he explored how urban form contributes to more resilient and adaptable urban environments. He also earned his Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees in Town and Regional Planning—both with distinction—from the University of Pretoria in South Africa. Dr Nel’s research leverages complexity science and resilience theory with and urban design and policy science to support sustainable urban development and policymaking. He employs computational methods to understand the interplay between urban form and urban process and possible implications for policy and governance. In 2021, he and his co-authors received the Urban Studies Journal: Best Article Prize for their work on Urban Volumetrics. Beyond academia, Dr Nel has applied his expertise as an urban planner and spatial analyst on projects across South Africa, Kenya, India, and China.

Dr. Jiaxiu Cai is a scholar practitioner and a practice-oriented scholar working at the intersection of landscape, urbanism, and architecture. She has exerted herself to develop design methodologies and tools to enlighten, inspire and assist urban designers in the design process. Her research and teaching uncover how designers reason, how practices are changing, and how new technologies play a role in practices. These insights feed into teaching and learning in Urban and Landscape Design Education. This results in 1) generating effective design instruments for practice (both human-based and computational) and 2) providing new insights of Landscape and Urbanism. Prior to CUHK, she was an Assistant Professor of Urban Design at Harbin Institute of Technology, Shenzhen. She also taught design studios at various architecture schools, such as TU Delft, KU Leuven, Napoli Federico II, HUST, etc, and practiced in internationally renowned offices ThomsonAdsett and KCAP.