Carsten Hvid Nielsen

“For me, studying design is also a study in people, because we use city spaces very differently and also have very different prerequisites for applying them in ways we find meaningful.”

Carsten Hvid Nielsen researches urban spaces and urban space design and how people use them. In his PhD project, Carsten investigated how people in homelessness experience being pushed around the city by urban space design, and in his postdoctoral project he investigates how people with varying functional abilities can be better placed to use the city's spaces and common areas.

For Carsten, universal design is both about concrete physical solutions that make the city accessible to everyone, but also about a caring mindset and a connectedness, where it is about seeing, understanding and acting on the needs and desires of other people.