His research on environmental history, urban infrastructure and visual culture has involved work in a variety of countries including France, Germany, Nigeria, India, the UK and the USA.
In 2003 he was winner of the Spiro Kostof Prize of the Society of Architectural Historians for Concrete and clay: reworking nature in New York City as the book “within the last two years that has made the greatest contribution to our understanding of urbanism and its relationship with architecture”.
[3] In 2007 he produced and directed a documentary film, Liquid City (2007),[4] which explores the complexity of water politics in Bombay/Mumbai.
In 2023 his book Natura Urbana: ecological constellations in urban space won a John Brinckerhoff Jackson Prize awarded by the Foundation for Landscape Studies and UVA School of Architecture and he was also elected a fellow of the Academic Europaea.
He is also actively involved in local issues in Hackney, east London, writes regular reviews and commentaries for his personal website at http://www.matthewgandy.org, and is an urban field ecologist, specialising in entomology and has written a book on moths.