Sadaf Sultan Khan is a research fellow in the Cities cluster at IDS. She has previously trained and practiced as an architect in Karachi, Pakistan and completed a PhD in urban morphology and contested urbanism from UCL’s Bartlett School of Architecture.

The main streams within her work have been the socio-spatial investigation of the migrant experience and its manifestations and impacts on the urban environment, the implications of rapid urbanisation on the spatial form and processes of growth and development of developing cities, particularly informal urban settlements.

Sadaf has to-date worked on research projects based in South Asia, East Africa, Turkey and Europe. Her work uses GIS mapping tools and space syntax analysis to explore urban processes. Due to the sparsity of data in the environments in which she has worked in, she has learned to develop alternative data sources to describe the settings she was focusing on. This has involved using data drawn from newspaper reports, on-site mapping and the layering and correlating of multiple official datasets to describe the phenomena she was studying.

Sadaf supervises the PhD of Abeeha Islam.