Niraly Mangal joins SPUR as a visiting PhD

Niraly Mangal is a Ph.D. candidate at the ETH Zurich Department of Humanities, Social and Political Sciences (DGESS). Trained as an architect and an urban designer, she obtained her Master’s degree in Urban Design from the National University of Singapore. Her research involves co-design approaches to investigate public acceptance and design solutions for integrating insect-based food waste recycling systems in high density urban environments. With her background in architecture and urban design and experience with Design-Research, her doctoral project combines current knowledge in urban planning, participatory planning, and environmental psychology. She also collaborates with the Agropolitan Territories module at Future Cities Lab (FCL) Global as the research coordinator to support the development of an open-source digital planning tool called ur-scape. She works in close collaboration with organizations such as Swiss Secretariat of Economic Affairs, World Bank, Asian Development Bank, to support integrated urban development in India and Indonesia through planning support tools, associated urban data-systems and institutional capacity building to address themes of gender equality, female empowerment, pandemic resilience, heritage sensitive planning, and urban resilience. Niraly is based at Singapore-ETH Centre and is currently visiting Zürich, until June 2025. Connect with her @external page Linkedin or