My research lies at the intersection of architecture, urban planning, and critical urban studies. I am interested in grassroots, radical, and insurgent spatial and planning practices, the spatialization of resistance, and the processes in place to produce, what Henri Lefebvre terms, ‘differential spaces’. To make sense of these practices and spaces, I employ diverse approaches from narrative inquiry and engage with Marxist, feminist, postcolonial, and decolonial theory. Recently, I have joined ASUTUT, the Sustainable Housing Design research group at Tampere University led by professor Sofie Pelsmakers, where I will be the Project Manager and main researcher of the project T-Winning Spaces 2035 funded by the Academy of Finland.
T-Winning Spaces 2035
Due to digitalisation, more people are working at home, in public and semi-public spaces. The characteristics of workspaces (including e.g. space size, layout and location) affect employee performance and wellbeing, and remote work can influence how we use spaces,commute, consume and spend leisure time, with environmental and health consequences. There is an urgent need to maximize the potential from digital remote working for the green transition.
We aim at increasing understanding of the sustainability challenges of future digital remote working and how those could be tackled with optimal spatial solutions and practices for households and employers. The study brings together a unique team and methods from spatial planning, housing design, architecture and land use planning, facility management, urban physics, environmental impact analysis and policies, real estate and futures studies from Aalto University, Tampere University, and Turku University.
The project is coordinated by Aalto University and led by Saija Toivonen, Sofie Pelsmakers, Juha Kaskinen, and Jonathon Taylor.
“Building the Void” – A critical narrative inquiry into the appropriation of abandoned urban spaces in Latin America.
My doctoral research delves into online arenas, follows several cases, and applies different methods of narrative inquiry to unearth and visualize multiple small-scale appropriations of abandoned urban spaces in Latin America to explore, investigate, and understand the ways in which they are challenging neoliberal urbanization and building more sustainable and democratic urban futures.
dalia milián bernal 