Ing. Diana Salahieh

2025

In contemporary urban design and planning discourse, walkability has emerged as a central concept for capturing, analyzing and enhancing the built environment's capacity to facilitate and promote walking. Despite its broad applicability, existing methodologies often reduce walkability to mobility-centered technical metrics, neglecting the embodied, sensory, and cultural dimensions of urban walking. This project aims to explore walkability through an embodied, human-centered lens and utilize a design-driven research approach that incorporates the diverse lived experiences and urban imaginaries. Grounded in developing theoretical frameworks of corporeity and place, this research adopts an interdisciplinary methodology to examine walkability as a dynamic and performative process shaped by the interactions between bodies, memories, and cultural narratives within built environments. The project will leverage an extensive literature review, empirical fieldwork, and methods development to advance both the theoretical discourse and practical applications of walkability analysis with human-centered insights for more inclusive and vibrant urban environments.

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2023-2024

Urban resilience is becoming an essential assessment criterion for cities' vulnerability to socioeconomic changes and their capacity for adaptation during and after shocks and stresses. Within the Czech context, urban resilience has been slowly receiving attention from the planning and sustainable development departments of Prague's municipalities yet most efforts do not elaborate on any clear indicators of measurement to assess an urban environment's resilience capacity and improvements. The goal of this project is to explore the scope of resilience in Prague by adopting a comprehensive approach that reflects on the past, present, and future of an urban neighborhood. Specifically, the project will be assessing the urban resilience of the inner-city neighborhood of Smichov, a distinct area of Prague due to its location and history of urban revitalization efforts in the 1990s that transformed it from a working-class industrial neighborhood into a modern inner-city commercial hub. The significance of this project's exploration is a stepping stone to the future development of an essential implementable localized resilience strategy pivotal for the sustainable growth of the city of Prague.

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