Carsten Hvid Nielsen

Carsten Hvid Nielsen researches urban spaces and urban space design, and how people use them. In his PhD project, Carsten examined how people experiencing homelessness feel pressured in the city by the design of urban spaces. In his postdoc project, he investigates how people with varying functional abilities can be better enabled to use public spaces and shared areas in the city.

For Carsten, universal design is not only about concrete physical solutions that make the city accessible to everyone, but also about a caring mindset and a sense of connectedness—where it’s about seeing, understanding, and acting on other people’s needs and desires.