Lost & Found Urbanities

Birgit Hausleitner

Being educated as an urbanist and architect, I emphasize working through the scales, from the city region to the building. My research focuses on the design and transformation of spatial structures in urban and peri-urban environments. Central in this work is the investigation of how spatial structures foster diversity, provide spaces for public life, and create space for ‘the other’; how, embedded in local culture and global dynamics, they shape and are shaped by economic activities and economic lives; and how they accommodate change over time. My expertise includes spatial design for micro-economic activities and manufacturing ecosystems. I adopt a cross-scale, systemic and spatial-morphological approach to study the relationships between space, society and economy. By combining fieldwork, micro-stories, space syntax analyses, and pattern languages, I work to uncover and interpret the underlying spatial logics.

Systems thinking forms the foundation of all the projects I supervise, enabling us to tackle the complexity of (peri-)urban environments. Preparing adaptable urban conditions is crucial to accommodate emerging and unforeseen life, programme and processes, often driven by dynamic economic shifts, technology innovations and changing demographics.

Exemplary graduation projects I supervised, related to the themes of the cluster:

Ioana Ionescu. (2016) Towards a territorial city. https://resolver.tudelft.nl/uuid:90b5b5e8-a47e-439a-a6cd-02bc08bf26b3; Mentors: Birgit Hausleitner, Saline Verhoeven

Chelsea Vermeulen. (2026) Mediating country. https://resolver.tudelft.nl/uuid:10eb0b3e-6a25-49d9-88dd-4f02dc9d9440 Mentors: Birgit Hausleitner, Caroline Newton, Carol Go-Sam

Aleksandra Kurkierewicz. (2025) In-Between. Imagining the Future of the Silesian Metropolitan Area. https://resolver.tudelft.nl/uuid:105f8792-eff3-4b72-856f-6a2a57b818f8; Mentors: Birgit Hausleitner, Verena Balz

Wiebke Stadtlander. (2025) Carescapes. Toward a Careful Imagination for the Liveability of Young Fluidly Housed Adults in Brussels https://resolver.tudelft.nl/uuid:228f7f4f-c448-4bb7-b75c-22ebf78feb6f Mentors: Birgit Hausleitner, Caroline Newton

Pablo Muñoz Unceta (2019). Looking for alternatives in the city of the slopes. Housing as a process to reduce socio-spatial segregation in Lima, Peru. https://resolver.tudelft.nl/uuid:ac166564-2a6c-4003-b63f-f2a32ce9c0ff Mentors: Birgit Hausleitner, Marcin Dabrowski

Darcey Bil. (2024). Recognising the informal. Urban design for environmental justice in Manshiet Nasser, Cairo https://repository.tudelft.nl/record/uuid:a59c79e0-63b0-42e2-9e6a-77786958dcda Mentors: Caroline Newton, Birgit Hausleitner

Rebecca Smink. (2020) London’s Paradox: Global Inclusion and Local Exclusion: The conflicts between social and economic space within contemporary London Mentors: Birgit Hausleitner, Qu Lei

Willemijn Hoogland (2024). The right to urban space. Reaching just environments through the embracement of diversity and disorder in the urban realm. https://repository.tudelft.nl/record/uuid:8560883d-b45d-486b-bc3c-0295949ae5e2 Mentors: Birgit Hausleitner, Caroline Newton

Jakob Pesendorfer (2025) Rethinking Steelscapes. A cross systematic Urban Design approach towards a Sustainable Circular Society for the Metropolitan Region of Linz https://resolver.tudelft.nl/uuid:853e1732-2490-40fa-8481-88614a612d4c Mentors: Birgit Hausleitner, Arjan van Timmeren

Please, take a look at my profile at https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Birgit-Hausleitner) to get an overview of my research publications.