Dr Pablo Sendra’s main areas of research are social housing, community activism, co-design and collaborative planning process, social infrastructure, public spaces and the impact that regeneration processes have on people and their social relationships. He carries out action-research projects in collaboration with activists and communities. His work with communities can be accessed in the Community-Led Regeneration platform. 

He is co-author, with Richard Sennett, of Designing Disorder (Verso, 2020). This book combines architecture, politics, urban planning and activism to explore how to design places that encourage unplanned activities, social interaction, which can continuously adapt, and which experiment with forms of collective governance. The book has been translated into seven languages. It was included in The Observer's (The Guardian) list of Best Books of 2020.

He is also co-author, with Daniel Fitzpatrick, of Community-Led Regeneration (UCL Press, 2020), which explores through seven case studies the tools and strategies that residents and activists use to contest the demolition of social housing and propose alternative community-led schemes. The book is the result of the research project "Community-led social housing regeneration: between the formal and the informal", funded by a British Academy/Leverhulme Small Grant, of which Pablo Sendra was Principal Investigator. The research was developed in collaboration with the network of community groups Just Space.

After publishing Community-Led Regeneration, Pablo Sendra has worked on applying this knowledge to collaborating with community groups contesting the demolition of their homes. He has been granted the Higher Education Innovation Fund (Research England) on two occasions to co-produce evidence-based community-led proposals for the regeneration of two social housing estates. 

In addition to this, he has also worked with community groups on defending their community assets and social infrastructure. He explores the importance of community spaces on people and on creating relationships of care. When working with communities, Pablo Sendra uses Participatory Action Research methods to co-produce knowledge with communities.

Other works on collaborative urbanism include the book Civic Practices, co-edited with Maria Joao Pita and CivicWise in 2017, which brings together nearly a hundred citizen-led initiatives, and the research platform  “Laboratorio Q for Creative Urban Places” developed at the Universidad de Sevilla in Spain in 2012, which resulted on various publications on how citizen-led initiatives responded to austerity politics.