Madlen Kobi

Madlen Kobi is a Research Professor at the Department of Social Sciences, Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Fribourg. She leads the SNSF-funded project Urban Bricolage: Mining, Designing and Constructing With Reused Building Materials (2022-2026), exploring circular economy practices in architecture across Europe. Her research intersects social anthropology and architecture, focusing on human-material relations, urban infrastructures, and climate governance in China and Europe.

Research interests include urban political ecology, architectural anthropology, thermal governance, waste economies, and cross-cultural analysis of urban sustainability. Her work emphasizes transdisciplinary approaches to ecological transitions in cities.

Publications consistently address urban materiality, infrastructure politics, and ethnographic studies of Chinese cities. Recurring themes include thermal infrastructures in Chongqing, Uyghur urbanism in Xinjiang, and socio-material practices in borderland regions. Methodologically, she combines visual anthropology, spatial analysis, and ethnographic fieldwork.

Grants include the PRIMA grant (CHF 1,149,189) from the Swiss National Science Foundation for Urban Bricolage. She collaborates internationally with architects, historians, and anthropologists to study material reuse challenges.