Rupert is research associate in the cities and urban design research lab in the Lancaster Institute for the Contemporary Arts at Lancaster University. He is a cultural geographer, artist, and designer with a background in architecture and urbanism and microelectronic systems engineering.

His research and practice are concerned with the cultural imaginaries of urban nature, particularly those of artists and designers whose work can be seen to challenge or problematise binary views of nature and society. As well as considering the work of artists and designers, he develops fieldwork methods that draw from creative practice.

Rupert’s current research asks how we can make urban and human-altered landscapes meaningfully legible as more-than-human ecologies. This contributes to a recalibration of urban imaginaries—and associated design practices—away from human-centred and towards the more-than-human. He is currently developing new fieldwork methods that draw from practices of close environmental observation, such as phenology (the seasonal lifecycle events of a landscape), soundscape ecology (listening to a landscape through the soundings of organisms, non-biological processes and human activity), nature writing and geopoetics (the convergence of geography and poetics to create intimate and compelling imaginaries of earth systems and ecologies). He proposes new imaginaries that capture and communicate the diversity and multiplicity of biological, non-biological and technological rhythms through which our environments unfold over multiple time scales—from the moment-to-moment of lived experience to the diurnal, infradian, circalunar, seasonal and infraseasonal. These methods aim to augment and extend the everyday and everynight experience of urban and human-altered landscapes and inform approaches to design that are congruent with efforts to mitigate the adverse effects of anthropogenic activity on our climate and ecologies.