Our President

Luisa Bravo is a public space scholar, passionate activist, cultural entrepreneur, and academic. She has more than 20 years of professional experience as an urban planner and designer, with a specific focus on public space. Her expertise is grounded in extensive academic postdoctoral research and teaching in Italy, Europe, the United States, the Middle East, Asia, and Australia.

Adjunct Professor in Urban Design at the University of Florence (since 2013), Luisa has developed post-doctoral research and teaching in many prestigious universities, including  University of California Berkeley, IURD – Institute of Urban and Regional Development (USA), Queensland University of Technology, Faculty of Creative Industries (Australia), KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Centre for the Future of Places (Sweden), Lebanese American University, School of Architecture and Design (Lebanon); she has been the recipient of prestigious grants and awards, including the Marco Polo scholarship awarded by the University of Bologna and the Australia Endeavour Executive Award, fully funded by the Australian Government, Department of Education and Training. She has published extensively in Italian, English, Spanish, Portuguese and Chinese and has supervised and mentored Masters and PhD students from various universities on an international level.
She has served as keynote speaker at international conferences in more than 30 countries and she has actively participated in key UN summits, including Habitat III, the United Nations Conference on Housing and Sustainable Development in Quito (2016), several World Urban Forum  (Kuala Lumpur, 2018; Abu Dhabi, 2020; Katowice, 2022: Cairo, 2024), where she curated exhibitions and organized networking and training events; she was invited and accredited to attend the first UN-Habitat Assembly (Nairobi, 2019) and two High Level Meetings on the implementation of the New Urban Agenda at the UN headquarters in New York (2017, 2022).
Luisa’s lecture ‘Stand up for Public Space!’ has been included in the UN-Habitat Global Urban Lectures series (2017), an initiative gathering expertise from renowned international scholars and professionals who excel in their fields.

In 2005 Luisa founded the engineering and architectural firm BRAVO DESIGN in Bologna, where she currently works.

In 2013 she founded City Space Architecture, a non-profit cultural organization based in Bologna whose mission is to promote public space culture, through projects of international cooperation. Under her leadership, City Space Architecture became a partner of UN-Habitat, the United Nations Human Settlements Programme, and was included in the United Nations General Assembly of Partners (GAP), Research and Academia Partner Constituent Group. As President of City Space Architecture, Luisa initiated and is currently leading several public space projects, such as: The Journal of Public Space, the first, interdisciplinary, academic, open access journal entirely dedicated to public space, developed in partnership with UN-Habitat; Public Space Academy, the first, free, interdisciplinary educational program on public space, developed in partnership with Ove Arup Foundation; Museo Spazio Pubblico[Public Space Museum] a collaborative and transdisciplinary practice, merging art, architecture and technology into a complex new discipline, hosted in a renovated neighborhood supermarket in the suburb of Bologna; the web-magazine Mastering Public Space, an online and free resource with a curated collection of news on public space from influential sources. With UN-Habitat she has also developed Mapping Resilient Communities, a mapping research initiative on practices of social resilience related to public space, in regard to the Agenda 2030 and the Sustainable Development Goals.

She is the initiator and curator of the Film Festival URBAN VISIONS. Beyond the Ideal City, which takes place in Bologna, and of its twin in the United Arab Emirates, URBAN VISIONS. Architecture and the Future of Cities.

In 2019 she founded Genius Saeculi, a for-profit company operating in the field of Digital Humanities, headquartered in Bologna.

Luisa is a member of ISOCARP (International Society of City and Regional Planners), a member of AESOP (Association of European Schools of Planning) Thematic group Public Spaces and Urban Cultures, Board Member of Ecocity Builders (USA), Member of the Board of Experts for the European Prize for Urban Public Space promoted by the Centre for Contemporary Culture of Barcelona (CCCB), Project Leader of 'A-Place. Linking places through networked artistic practices', co-funded by the Creative Europe program of the European Union (2019-2023), and Member of the Scientific Committee of the Biennial of Public Space in Rome.

She is also a consultant to the UN-Habitat Global Public Space Program, she has participated in several Expert Group Meetings and has collaborated on UN thematic reports on public space. In 2022, she was appointed as an external expert to the European Commission for the research project 'Public Spaces as Spaces for Citizen Engagement', promoted by the JRC Competence Centre on Participatory and Deliberative Democracy. She is also an expert evaluator for the European Commission for Horizon Europe, for the European COST project and the Fulbright Commission (USA), and a peer reviewer for several international scientific journals. In 2022 she was a consultant for the Global Platform for the Right to the City for which she wrote the thematic paper Cities and Human Settlements with Quality Public Spaces. Since 2023 she has been the academic coordinator of the research project Safe and Sound Cities developed in Ecuador, Colombia and Indonesia, funded by Swiss Philanthropy Foundation.

Her works have been exhibited at the International Architecture Exhibition, Venice Biennale (Italy, 2021), at the Seoul Biennale of Architecture and Urbanism (South Corea, 2019) and at the Biennale dello Stretto (Italy, 2024), where she curated the section on “Public Space / Relations”.

Read more on Luisa Bravo's work on her website: https://www.luisabravo.world/