Academic Research Projects

• 2022-2023 / European Commission, JRC Competence Centre on Participatory and Deliberative Democracy, Expert. Research project “Public spaces as spaces for citizen engagement”.
  
• 2019-21 / KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Centre for the Future of Places (Sweden), Guest Researcher.
• 2018 / Queensland University of Technology, School of Design (Australia), Endeavour Executive Fellow. Research project: “Public Space, Social Entrepreneurship and Smart Communities”.
• 2016-2019 / Queensland University of Technology, School of Design (Australia), Adjunct Associate Professor. Research project: “Past Present and Future of Public Space” in collaboration with City Space Architecture.
• 2013 / Queensland University of Technology, School of Design (Australia), Visiting Fellow. Research project: “Looking for the mall. Public life in the city of dispersal.”
• 2012 / University of California Berkeley (USA), Institute of Urban and Regional Development (IURD), College of Environmental Design. Visiting Scholar. Research project: “Public spaces in the land of suburbia: theories and projects of New Urbanism, Everyday Urbanism and Post Urbanism, from North America to Europe”.
• 2009-2014 / Postdoctoral Research Fellow, awarded by the University of Bologna, Department of Architecture (Italy), on a competitive basis. Research projects: “Public space mapping. Integrated models for the knowledge of urban complexity” / “Public spaces in the contemporary landscape of the historic city: structure and language of the urban network”.
• 2008 / Research Fellow, awarded by the Italian Ministry of Education, University and Research and hosted at the University of Bologna, Department of Architecture (Italy). Research project: “Digital information modeling for the analysis and the representation of the urban landscape”.

The Safe and Sound Cities Programme (S²Cities Programme) aims to improve young people’s safety and wellbeing in urban environments.
Focusing on young people between the ages of 15 and 24, the programme engages local governments, institutions, the private sector, community actors, and young people, to create platforms for meaningful youth engagement in ideating and implementing solutions to safety and inclusivity challenges.
The Safe and Sound Cities Programme is an initiative led by the Global Infrastructure Basel Foundation, in partnership with ICLEI, hosted by Swiss Philanthropy Foundation with the support of Fondation Botnar.

I am serving as Academic Coordinator for the research units based in Cuenca (Ecuador), Envigado (Colombia) and Bandung (Indonesia), working in collaboration with Universidad del Azuay, the University of Auckland and Um-Welt.

The radical question is: who does public space really belong to? who is public space designed for? One of the main problems of cities is that they are often designed by and for a single subject: man. Women have rarely been taken into consideration as active subjects in the design and use of the city and its public spaces.
In order to build more inclusive and sustainable cities it is important to spark a crucial debate about public space analysed from a gender perspective, giving space to world-wide projects that stress the urgency of re-thinking the city and its public spaces with and for women, addressing also accessibility and inclusiveness of public spaces.

This project came out after working several years on the development of the advocacy project “Empowering Women, Public Space and Climate Change“, initiated by BIDs Belgium in 2021, with a series of talks and participation at major global events such as the Innovate4Cities Conference co-organized by the Global Covenant for Mayors for Climate Change and UN Habitat with sponsors of the IPCC – The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (2021).

In 2023 I promoted and co-curated with two young feminist researchers the exhibition “Imagining Public Space with/for Her”, hosted at Museo Spazio Pubblico in Bologna. Visit the virtual exhibition here. The exhibition included interviews with scholars and activists and a publication of the special issue of The Journal of Public Space developed with UN-Habitat’s Her City initiative titled “Let Her Guide You“, co-edited with Anna Barker (University of Leeds, United Kingdom) and launched at the 12World Urban Forum in Cairo (2024) during an event at the Urban Library.

This project explored and investigated the question: how can design interventions in public space for the 1.5-meter society also contribute to strengthening social and ecological resilience? The research project developed insights and tools for designers, policymakers and other professionals to contribute to more resilient cities and neighborhoods. Point of departure was public space as a site for intervention, whether in response to the COVID-19 pandemic or in anticipation of future shocks and stressors.

I was responsible to coordinate the research unit based at City Space Architecture in Bologna, as a partner of the project. Other partners were (research partners) Harvard University, The Bartlett at UCL, Sydney University and (project partners) UNStudio, Pakhuis de Zwijger, The Beach, Arcam, PBL Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency.

The purpose of A-Place was to design and implement art-centred place making activities that cut across disciplinary, cultural and geographic boundaries. Over four years, a series of actions (i.e. performances, installations, debates, and video and photography productions) were carried out in six European cities: Barcelona, Bologna, Brussels, Lisbon, Ljubljana, and Nicosia. This site-specific research examined the role of artistic practices as a catalyst for connecting and strengthening communities. A-PLACE was dedicated to strengthening the bonds between people and places.

A-Place partnership included nine organizations from six European countries, three schools of architecture – School of Architecture La Salle, Barcelona (Spain); Faculty of Architecture, University of Ljubljana (Slovenia); KU Leuven, Faculty of Architecture (Belgium); one Faculty of Social and Human Sciences, Universidade Nova de Lisboa (Portugal), three multidisciplinary groups focusing on arts and community engaged urban interventions – Alive Architecture (Belgium), prostoRož (Slovenia), and Urban Gorillas (Cyprus); and two cultural agencies specialised in film and video art – Screen Projects (Spain), and City Space Architecture (Italy).

I was responsible to coordinate and implement activities at City Space Architecture’s research unit in Bologna, as a partner of the project. I designed and implemented the first-ever parklet in Bologna, a neighborhood biodiversity garden, and curated three editions of the Film Festival Urban Visions. Beyond the Ideal City.