Michael Schwind studied urban studies in Weimar, Richmond, Amsterdam and Hong Kong (BA and MA). He then worked as a research assistant at the University of Kassel in the Department of Urban Regeneration and Planning Theory from 2017 to 2020 and completed his doctorate as part of the research training group “BangdaDyn: Rural-urban Dynamics in Bangalore” on land dispossession processes in Bangalore, south India. From 2020 to 2025, he was a research assistant at the Chair of Urban Planning at the Bauhaus University Weimar, where he taught in the field of planning and urban research. In December 2023, he defended his dissertation entitled “Inclusive Dispossession: Pooling Land, Hearts, and Minds in Rural Bangalore”. Since March 2025, he is a post-doctoral researcher at the Leibniz Institute for Research on Society and Space, where he works in the sub-project “Contestation over Property Regimes” of the DFG Collaborative Research Center 294 “Structural Change of Property”. His research interests are: Dispossession, property, land, postcolonial and materialist approaches in urban and planning research
Michael Schwind
