Associate Professor Dr. Peter Aning Tedong joined the Department of Urban and Regional Planning at the University of Malaya in December 2014. He is currently the Head of Department of Urban and Regional Planning and was formerly the Head of the Centre for Malaysian Indigenous Studies. As an urban studies and housing scholar, Dr. Peter Aning’s broad areas of interest cover housing policy and governance, the political economy of urban planning, and neighborhood sustainability and planning.

He has received numerous research grants from both the public and private sectors and has led several high-impact national and international projects. Notably, he served as Project Leader for the Family Wellbeing Index funded by the National Population and Family Development Board (LPPKN), with findings published in the 13th Malaysia Plan (RMK13). He is also the Project Leader for a study on poverty alleviation funded by the Economic Planning Unit (EPU) Sarawak, and the Principal Investigator of a comparative study on informal housing in Makassar (Indonesia) and Sabah (Malaysia) funded by the Association of Asian Social Science Research Councils (AASSREC).

His recently completed projects explored socio-spatial planning in the context of Malaysia’s urban future and the dynamics of poverty among Indigenous communities in rural areas. He has also conducted extensive work on the role of governance in addressing the needs of vulnerable communities—including refugees, stateless persons, and foreign workers—while examining broader issues of housing and migration in Malaysian cities.

His latest research interests center on multi-layered governance of affordable housing, the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) in relation to neighborhood and community planning, and the impacts of migration on regional and urban development. While his empirical focus is on Southeast Asia, Dr. Peter Aning has also conducted fieldwork in Europe, the Borneo Islands, North America, and Oceania.