Leah Meisterlin

Leah Meisterlin is an urbanist, GIS methodologist, and Assistant Professor in Urban Planning at Columbia GSAPP. Broadly, her research engages concurrent issues of spatial justice, informational ethics, and the effects of infrastructural networks on the construction of social and political space. Her current research explores the ways in which digital technologies are restructuring urban spatial politics and altering methods, both contemporary and historical, of urban research.

Meisterlin edited Comments on Foreclosed (2013) following the exhibition Foreclosed: Rehousing the American Dream (Museum of Modern Art 2012) and coauthored The Buell Hypothesis: Rehousing the American Dream (2011). Among others, her articles and essays have appeared in the Annals of the Association of American Geographers, The Avery Review, ARPA Journal, and Drug and Alcohol Dependence. Additionally, her work is featured in Contemporary Digital Architecture: Design and Techniques (Ed. Dimitri Kottas 2010) and The Infrastructural City: Networked Ecologies in Los Angeles (Ed. Kazys Varnelis 2008).

Before joining the faculty at GSAPP, Meisterlin taught at Barnard College and the New Jersey Institute of Technology’s College of Architecture and Design. She was an Adjunct Associate Research Scholar at Columbia’s Temple Hoyne Buell Center for the Study of American Architecture and a Research Scientist at New York University’s Center for Latino Adolescent and Family Health. Professionally, she has contributed to several experimental and exploratory practices in 21st-century urbanism. Among those, she cofounded Office:MG, a spatial systems consultancy; served as Director of Research at Special Project Office; and cofounded PRE-Office, a design and research studio that investigated the organizational structures behind design processes in the wake of the US foreclosure crisis.