Joshua VARGAS (he/him) is a researcher, designer, and product manager working at the intersection of urban planning, human-computer interaction, and sociotechnical studies. He is making technology work for cities and communities.
From August 2026, he will be based in Zürich to pursue the MSc programme in Spatial Development and Infrastructure Systems programme in the Department of Civil, Environmental and Geomatic Engineering (D-BAUG) at ETH Zürich. He is a recipient of the Excellence Scholarship and Opportunity Programme (ESOP) by the ETH Foundation, awarded to the top 60 applicants globally across all of the departments at ETH.
Before leaving Singapore, he was Programme Coordinator of Future Cities Laboratory (FCL) Global, an international research collaboration between ETH Zürich, NRF Singapore, and Singapore's universities. He also leads product management, maintenance, and outreach at the team behind ur-scape (ur-scape.com), an open-source planning support tool developed with the support of the Asian Development Bank and SECO. Outside of research, he was also co-founder and previous co-president of the Young Urbanists of Southeast Asia (YUSEA).
Joshua grew up in Zamboanga City, a port town in the southwestern Mindanao region of the Philippines. As a high school student at Ateneo de Zamboanga, he volunteered with SUGPAT, an NGO supported by UNICEF and ING to support the development of youth displaced by the 2013 Zamboanga siege.
At age 16, he survived a vehicular accident when he was hit by a truck in a residential zone behind his school. He became an advocate for urban child safety and social protection. He spoke at the UNICEF Asia Pacific’s Growing Up Urban Surabaya 2018 meeting of mayors on this issue. Seeing people do difficult and interesting work around the world to create social impact, particularly meeting geospatial data scientists assessing crosswalk safety using QGIS, inspired him to study and work in social science research and data-driven policy.
Joshua was awarded a full need-based grant to pursue undergraduate training in Urban Studies and Computer Science at Yale-NUS College in Singapore. In 2023, he graduated as recipient of the Lee Kuan Yew Gold Medal, an award given to the top graduate of the Yale-NUS Bachelor of Arts (BA) programme.
He also received the NUS Outstanding Undergraduate Research Prize (OURP) in recognition of his capstone project. The project utilised ethnographic analysis, participatory mapping, and documentary filmmaking to investigate the impact of COVID-driven remote work in the business process outsourcing (BPO) sector on residential and office market patterns. The OURP included a grant to present this project at two international conferences, and an article derived from the project is now a forthcoming first-author publication in Architecture and Culture.
In 2023, Joshua joined FCL as a researcher in the team developing ur-scape, an open-source planning support tool. There, he leads product management, software development, and geospatial data analysis, and contributes to international capacity-building projects and publications. He was promoted to Programme Coordinator in early 2025.
He was also Co-Founder and Co-President of the Young Urbanists of Southeast Asia (YUSEA), a new community of young people passionate about Southeast Asian cities. As part of YUSEA, Joshua conceptualised the organisation’s brand and led the URBANovation podcast and youth engagement project. YUSEA now has over 100 members across 14 countries and continues to grow under the leadership of current Co-Presidents Nguyen Dang Dao and Nicole Ang.
Before joining FCL, he also held internship positions at government relations agency Landmark Public Affairs (now part of Edelman Global Advisory); strategic consultancy Desire Lines; and Urban Studies Lab, a leading interdisciplinary think tank in Thailand.
In 2023, Joshua was elected to the Singapore Institute of Planners as a Student Member. He was recognised as a Young Leader at the World Cities Summit (WCS) 2024 and 2026, and the International Conference on Cohesive Societies (ICCS) 2025. He has presented at multiple international conferences across geography, policy, geospatial science, and human-computer interaction, including the ISOCARP World Planning Congress, Space Syntax Symposium, and the ACM Designing Interactive Systems Conference. He has delivered guest lectures and invited talks at graduate-level courses at the National University of Singapore, the University of Vienna, and the Harvard University Graduate School of Design.
His work examines how emerging technologies reshape urbanisation – from tensions between participative decision-making and AI in local communities, to spatial transformations driven by platform economies. Through pilot testing and capacity-building projects, he further explores how co-design methods can enable stakeholders to participate in building their community’s data infrastructure.
Ongoing projects include maintaining and developing the ur-scape 2.0 project, which rearchitects ur-scape into an extensible, modular open geospatial platform; finishing a user research study on participatory design tools in Singapore; and conducting experiments on harnesses and context engineering for agentic geospatial AI. His collaborators include design and policy researchers, computer scientists and AI ethicists, community leaders, and practitioners.
Joshua’s hobbies include photography, filmmaking, music production, video games, and running. He has been a Vocaloid producer since age 13. His projects in Cities: Skylines 2 have been featured on the game’s official social media channels as well as in top posts on Reddit, with a focus on public space design, transit-oriented development, and the representation of colonial and postcolonial geographies through the use of mods. He is a novice old-way voguer and DJ. He was previously a freelance wedding video editor, record producer, graphic designer, and web developer.
code + design + sound © 2026 joshua vargas