Dalia Milián Bernal

I am a doctoral researcher, project manager, and teacher in the School of Architecture at the Faculty of the Built Environment. My research and teaching activities lie at the intersection of architecture, urban planning, and critical urban studies. Through research, I aim to understand the production of space from below and investigate how these, often radical, spatial practices can help illuminate alternative ways to address the multiple but interrelated social, environmental, and climate crises. As a teacher, I aim to position these practices within the curricula of sustainable architecture and planning to offer a more critical, comprehensive, and inclusive understanding of the built environment and to elucidate alternative paths for future architects and planners to engage with in practice for the construction of more just and sustainable living future. 

Currently, I am the project manager and a researcher of T-winning Spaces 2035 (WP2) undertaken within the ASUTUT - Sustainable Housing Design research group. Our work package aims to understand how individuals adapt and arrange their home environments to accommodate their work in order to reimagine and propose more sustainable and just home-working environments for the future. 

I am also a doctoral researcher in the group of urban planning, within the chair of urban planning theory. My doctoral research critically investigates appropriations of abandoned urban spaces in different Latin American cities. I am particularly interested in understanding the grassroots and the motivations behind their actions, the new materialities and meanings they introduce into cities, and the processes involved in order to transform these otherwise derelict spaces into vibrant sites where different activities unfold. In my view, these appropriations and spatial practices represent a legitimate source of knowledge for the construction of more just and sustainable urban futures. 

In addition to doing research, I am currently teaching the courses of Urban Planning and Design Theory 2 and Sustainable Architecture. 

Recently, I co-edit the book REPOSITORY: 49 Methods and Assignments for Writing Urban Places. The book gathered a set of methods and assignments from diverse fields of knowledge to engage with the material and immaterial dimensions of urban places via narratives. 

I received the Tampere University 2021 Honourable Mention for Good Teaching and Teaching Development for the Sustainable Architecture course with Sofie Pelsmakers.

• Socio-spatial aspects of sustainable architecture
• Critical urban theory 
• Urban planning theory
• Spatial justice
• Urban activism 
• Grassroots, radical, and insurgent spatial and planning practices
• Narrative and visual methods
• Critical theory, (eco)feminist theory, and decolonial theory
• Home geography
• Home-city geographies
• The home as a space of work
• The home as site of spatial (in)justice

Architecture, urban planning, and critical urban studies.