Deljana Iossifova
Deljana Iossifova is Senior Lecturer in Urban Studies at the University of Manchester. She is Director of the Confucius Institute at the University of Manchester, a Member of the Board of the Urban Studies Foundation and Visiting Scholar at the Urban Studies Institute, University of Antwerp. She trained as an architect at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH Zurich) and has a PhD in Public Policy Design from the Tokyo Institute of Technology.
Iossifova’s scholarship focuses on the triggers, processes and consequences of urban transformations globally, including in China, Japan, Bulgaria, and the UK. Her research has generated new insights on people-place relationships and the activators and lived experience of sociospatial change. She is an expert on urban transformation in China, where she has worked, lived and conducted research over more than a decade. This includes studies of urban borderlands and the formation, negotiation, and maintenance of multiple individual and group identities under coexistence; and inquiries into the role of urban sanitation as physical infrastructure and everyday practices in processes of sociospatial differentiation under rapid urban transformation.
Iossifova’s studies are focused on the concrete versions of urban transformation in a range of very different situations. Her current work examines urban ageing in the context of post-socialist Bulgaria. She leads a project on urban transitions in Japan between the Tokyo Olympics of 1964 and 2020. She led the ESRC Strategic Network Data and Cities as Complex Adaptive Systems (2016-2017) with partners in the UK, China, Brazil and Japan. She is lead editor of ‘Defining the Urban’ (Routledge, 2017).
Before joining the University of Manchester, Iossifova was a research fellow on the international collaborative project ‘Scarcity and Creativity in the Built Environment’ (SCIBE) at the University of Westminster. She was an Our Common Future Fellow (Volkswagen Foundation) and PhD Fellow on the Sustainable Urban Futures programme at the United Nations University, Institute of Advanced Studies (now the Institute for the Advanced Study of Sustainability). She has many years of experience as a practicing architect and led on a number of award-winning master planning and architectural projects, including ‘Beijing Daxing New Media City’ and ‘DressCode Flagship Store’ in Tokyo.
Iossifova contributes to the research-based atelier ‘Complexity, Planning and Urbanism’ at the Manchester School of Architecture. Collaborations include joint teaching and research with ‘Emergent Technologies and Design‘ at the Architectural Association.
People | October 22, 2016 8:34 pm
