Short CV
Daniela Zupan has been a Junior Professor of European Cities and Urban Heritage at the Bauhaus-Universität Weimar since 2019 and has been Director of the Institute for European Urban Studies since 2022.
Previously, she was a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Higher School of Economics in Moscow and worked on a Volkswagen Foundation-funded project on urban conflicts in Germany, Russia, and Ukraine at RWTH Aachen. She earned her doctorate at the University of Stuttgart within the DFG-funded project „InnoPlan“ on urban planning and design paradigm shifts. Daniela Zupan studied Architecture at Graz University of Technology and Slavic Studies at the University of Graz, with study periods in Perm, Sarajevo, and A Coruña.
Research focus
Daniela Zupan’s work emphasizes interdisciplinary research into urban development processes in European societies. Her studies investigate the political and economic drivers and rationalities shaping urban production, focusing on Germany, Austria, and (Southeastern) Europe, particularly Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, Hungary, and Bosnia and Herzegovina.
Her areas of expertise include housing research, urban design and planning in the 20th and 21st centuries, innovations in spatial planning, post-socialist urban development, and international urban studies. Currently, she is working on a book that examines the manifestations and mechanisms of authoritarian urbanism from a global perspective.
Recent projects
Authoritarian Urban Development in the 21st Century: Progressive Urban Design and Participatory Planning in Hungary and Serbia (DFG, starting in 2025)
This project investigates urban development initiatives in Hungary and Serbia to develop hypotheses on the interplay between urbanization and autocratization in contemporary societies. It aims to uncover and explain the diverse manifestations of authoritarian urbanism, analyzing their socio-political implications and identifying patterns across different contexts.