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Luisa Bravo

Bologna (Italy)

Luisa Bravo is a global academic scholar and educator, cultural entrepreneur and public space activist. She holds a MSc five-year degree in Architectural Engineering (2001) and a PhD in Building and Territorial Engineering (2008), both from the University of Bologna, Italy. She has more than 20-years experience in the professional field as urban planner and designer with a specific focus on public space. Her expertise is grounded in extensive academic postdoctoral research and teaching in Italy and Europe, the United States, Middle East, Asia and Australia. Throughout her academic career she has been the recipient of prestigious grants and awards, such as the Australia Endeavour Executive Award fully funded by the Australian Government, and she held different academic positions, in Italy and abroad, such as (most relevant) Postdoctoral research associate at the Department of Architecture, University of Bologna (Italy, 2009-2014), Visiting Scholar at IURD - Institute of Urban and Regional Development, University of California Berkeley (USA, 2012), Visiting Assistant Professor at the Lebanese American University (Lebanon, 2015), Adjunct Associate Professor at the Queensland University of Technology (Australia, 2016-2019), Guest Researcher and Instructor for the 'Advanced Urbanism Studio. Urban Spaces of the City' at KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Centre for the Future of Places (2019-2021). She is currently Adjunct Professor in Urban Design at the University of Florence, School of Humanities and Education.

 

Luisa collaborates with the UN-Habitat's Global Public Space Programme and she is an international renowned speaker at major UN-Habitat global summits, such as Habitat III, the UN conference on Sustainable Urban Development, held in Quito (2016), and at the World Urban Forum (Kuala Lumpur, 2018; Abu Dhabi, 2020; Katowice, 2022), where she organized and curated exhibitions and events in cooperation with global stakeholders. She was also selected and invited to attend two High-level Meetings promoted by the United Nations General Assembly in New York (2017, 2022) on the implementation of the New Urban Agenda. Her lecture "Stand up for Public Space!" has been included in UN-Habitat's Global Urban Lectures series (2017).

 

Luisa is the Founder of City Space Architecture, a non-profit cultural association based in Bologna with a mission to promote public space culture, and she is the Founder and Editor in Chief of The Journal of Public Space, the first, international, interdisciplinary, academic, open access journal entirely dedicated to public space, that she established through City Space Architecture in partnership with UN-Habitat. She is the Founder and Director of the Public Space Academy, the first, free, interdisciplinary educational program aimed at establishing a new approach to urban complexity built around public space, developed by City Space Architecture in cooperation with the Ove Arup Foundation.
Luisa is the Founder and Curator of the Public Space Museum, a transdisciplinary, inclusive and plural practice that experiments methodologies at the intersection of art, architecture and technology with the aim to investigate the complexity of public space culture. It hosts research and training activities, artistic initiatives, workshops, public dialogues and residency programs for artists and researchers, in partnership with Universities, civil society organizations, creative industries, public and private institutions.

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