Daniela Zupan is head of the chair European Cities and Urban Heritage at the Institute for European Urban Studies, Faculty of Architecture and Urbanism, Bauhaus-Universität Weimar since 2025. From 2019-2025, she held the junior professorship of European Cities and Urban Heritage.
Daniela holds a diploma in Architecture from Graz University of Technology, a master's degree in Slavic Studies from the University of Graz, and a doctoral degree from University of Stuttgart. Her doctoral research, which was part of the DFG-funded research project InnoPlan, investigated role models in urban planning and design. From 2016-2018 Daniela was involved in a research project at RWTH Aachen on urban conflicts in Germany, Russia and Ukraine, funded by the Volkswagen Foundation. Before joining Bauhaus-Universität Weimar, she was a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Higher School of Economics, Moscow, where she started to explore contemporary forms of authoritarian urbanism.
Starting from built or planned interventions in urban space, Daniela's work seeks to decipher the political and economic drivers behind urban developments. As an interdisciplinary urban scholar she is particularly interested in the logics and rationalities of urban space production in different contexts. Geographically, her research focuses on developments in Germany, Austria, and the postsocialist context, particularly Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, Hungary and Bosnia and Herzegovina. Her work has been published in German, English and Russian in journals such as Antipode, Area, Housing Studies, Environment and Planning C: Politics and Space, Informationen zur Raumentwicklung, sub\urban, Forum Stadt or Городские исследования и практики.
Her research foci include housing studies, urban planning and design in the 20th and 21st centuries, innovations in spatial planning, postsocialist urban developments, international urban studies, discourse analysis and knowledge production. Daniela is currently working on a book project on the complex interrelationships between authoritarianism and urbanism in contemporary societies.
Daniela Zupan is director of the Institute for European Urban Studies and member of the director's board of the International Heritage Centre at Bauhaus-Universität Weimar. She ist currently part of the academic board of the DFG-funded research training group Gewohnter Wandel and was part of the academic board of the DFG-funded research training group Identität & Erbe from 2019-2025. She is also co-editor of the series Interdisciplinary Housing Research at transcript.