SASSI: A Systems Approach to Sustainable Sanitation Challenges in China
Research Project (2019 – 2022)
More detailsDeljana Iossifova is Professor of Architecture and Urban Studies at the University of Manchester. She leads the Urban Studies Lab and is Academic Director of the University’s Confucius Institute. She is Editor-in-Chief of The Journal of Architecture (RIBA), a Trustee and former Chair of the Urban Studies Foundation, and Chair of the Board of the AzuKo Foundation.
Her work focuses on urban transformation, infrastructuring and socio-eco-technical relations across China, Japan, India, Brazil, Bulgaria and the United Kingdom. Trained as an architect at ETH Zurich and holding a PhD from the Tokyo Institute of Technology, she practised internationally before developing a research portfolio that links ethnography, systems thinking and social practice theory to place-based design and governance. Publications include the monograph Translocal Ageing in the Global East (Palgrave, 2020) and the edited volumes Defining the Urban (Routledge, 2018) and Urban Infrastructuring (Springer, 2022).
As principal investigator she has secured over £1.3 million in competitive funding from agencies including UKRI and the Royal Society. Named awards include the ESRC Strategic Network ‘Data and Cities as Complex Adaptive Systems’ (2015–2017), NERC ‘A Systems Approach to Sustainable Sanitation Challenges in Urbanising China’ (2019–2022) and the Royal Society ‘Towards Sustainable Sanitation in India and Brazil’ (2019–2023). Sustainable Infrastructure (SusInfra), an international programme under her leadership, brings together a growing network of researchers and partners across Europe, Asia and Latin America and collaborates with municipalities and civil society; examples include work with Pani Haq Samiti in Mumbai on digital tools that support residents’ applications for municipal water connections.
Iossifova supervises doctoral researchers on infrastructures, urban health and socio-ecological change and serves on international advisory and assessment panels, including the RIBA President’s Awards for Research working group.
