Kaija-Luisa is an urbanist, project manager and a researcher currently serving as an Adviser in the Better Places Partnership, a service based at Historic England, where she advises UK local authorities on integrating culture, heritage, and placemaking into regeneration projects. She is also an Associate Professor in the Urban Studies programme at the Estonian Academy of Arts, where she teaches a range of urban studies and planning subjects. Since 2019, she has been a tutor in the Architecture and Urbanism programme at the Manchester School of Architecture.
Kaija-Luisa’s research focuses on post-socialist and post-industrial landscapes, heritage and regeneration, and urban temporalities. She completed her PhD at the Manchester School of Architecture in 2022, under the supervision of Eamonn Canniffe and Dr Richard Brook, with a dissertation titled “The Value of Uncertainty: Temporality, Indeterminacy, and the Post-Socialist Condition in Tallinn, Estonia,” exploring the impact of the transition from a socialist to a market economy based on mapping long-term transitions of key coastal sites in the city.