Dr Benjamin N. Vis
Dr Benjamin N. Vis is Co-I on the project Comparing Urban Morphological Transformation in Precolonial to Colonial Urban Traditions funded by the Czech National Science Foundation (GACR) with PI Dr Monika Baumanova (University of West Bohemia). He holds degrees in Archaeology (BA(Hons) & MPhil, Leiden University) and a PhD in Geography (University of Leeds), and was previously a Research Fellow in Digital Humanities & Digital Heritage for the Eastern ARC Consortium at the University of Kent and a Visiting Scholar at the Urban Studies Institute at the University of Antwerp. At Kent he invigorated a budding interdisciplinary research community on Digital Humanities using a variety of (digital) methods and interpretive concepts for mapping and analysing prehistoric through to contemporary (urban) landscapes, e.g. with doctoral training. He is a board member of ADHO's special interest group on geohumanities and serves on the editorial board of forma civitatis. He has led the research networking projects Assembly for Comparative Urbanisation and the Material Environment (ACUMEN) (ESRC/NRCM) and Pre-Columbian Tropical Urban Life (TruLife): Placing the past in designs for sustainable urban futures (AHRC) and directed the international urban design ideas competition, charrette (The Prince’s Foundation), and exhibition (Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts) called Dust to Dust: Redesigning Urban Life in Healthy Soils. His recent monograph Cities Made of Boundaries: Mapping social life in urban form (ucl press, 2018) makes a case for radical comparative urban studies and develops the GIS-based urban morphological and configurational methodology called Boundary Line Type (BLT) Mapping. He currently develops research on ancient tropical Maya urbanism, the adaptive capacity of indigenous urban form, and social-ecological & cultural urban sustainability in Mérida and Yucatán (Mexico) blending the disciplines of archaeology, human geography, Geohumanities, heritage, and urban planning & design.