Daniela Zupan (Dr.-Ing. Mag. phil.) is an interdisciplinary urban researcher. Since 2019 she is Associate Professor of European Cities and Urban Heritage at the Institute for European Urban Studies, Faculty of Architecture and Urbanism, Bauhaus-Universität Weimar.
Daniela holds a diploma in Architecture from Graz University of Technology, a master's degree in Slavic Studies from the University of Graz, and a doctoral degree from University of Stuttgart. Her doctoral research, which was part of the DFG-funded research project InnoPlan, investigated role models in urban planning and design. From 2016-2018 Daniela was involved in a research project at RWTH Aachen on urban conflicts in Germany, Russia and Ukraine, funded by the Volkswagen Foundation. Before joining Bauhaus-Universität Weimar, she was a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Higher School of Economics, Moscow, where she started to explore contemporary forms of authoritarian urbanism.
Starting from built or planned interventions in urban space, Daniela's work seeks to decipher the political and economic drivers behind urban developments. She is particularly interested in the logics and rationalities of urban space production in different contexts. Geographically, her research focuses on developments in Germany, Austria, and the postsocialist context, particularly Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, Hungary and Bosnia and Herzegovina. Her work has been published in German, English and Russian in journals such as Antipode, Area, Housing Studies, Environment and Planning C: Politics and Space, Informationen zur Raumentwicklung, sub\urban, Forum Stadt or Городские исследования и практики.
Her research foci include housing studies, urban planning and design in the 20th and 21st centuries, innovations in spatial planning, postsocialist urban developments, international urban studies, discourse analysis and knowledge production. Daniela is currently working on a book project on the complex interrelationships between authoritarianism and urbanism in contemporary societies.
Daniela Zupan is director of the Institute for European Urban Studies, member of the director's board of the International Heritage Centre, and member of the doctoral candidate admission board of the Faculty of Architecture and Urbanism at Bauhaus-Universität Weimar. She is co-editing the series Interdisciplinary Housing Research at transcript.