Charlotte Malterre-Barthes

Charlotte Malterre-Barthes is an architect, urban designer, and Assistant Professor at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology-EPFL Lausanne, where she leads the laboratory RIOT. Malterre-Barthes’ interests relate to urgent aspects of contemporary urbanization, material extraction, climate emergency, and social justice. While Assistant Professor of Urban Design at Harvard University, she started the initiative ‘A Moratorium on New Construction,’ interrogating current development protocols, published in 2025 with Sternberg Press & MIT Press. Malterre-Barthes holds a Ph.D. from ETH Zurich on the political economy of commodities and the built environment and is a founding member of the Parity Group (Meret Oppenheim Prize 2023) and the Parity Front, activist networks dedicated to equality in architecture. She co-authored “Migrant Marseille” (2020), “Eileen Gray: A House under the Sun” (2019), “Housing Cairo: The Informal Response” (2016) and “Cairo Desert Cities” (2017), and is the editor of the “Political Economy of Space” book series with Hatje Cantz.