Dr. Ina Valkanova

Ina Val­ka­no­va is a rese­ar­cher, urba­nist, and acti­vist. She holds a Dipl.-Ing. from RWTH Aachen and a PhD from the Insti­tu­te of Land­scape and Urban Stu­dies at ETH Zürich. Her dis­ser­ta­ti­on (2024), super­vi­sed by Freek Per­syn and Chris­ti­an Schmid, explo­res the rela­ti­onship bet­ween glo­bal pro­duc­tion net­works and local envi­ron­ment, with a focus on a spe­cial eco­no­mic zone on the peri­phery of Plov­div, Bul­ga­ria.

Ina Val­ka­no­va is a co-foun­der of Gra­do­scope, a Sofia-based coll­ec­ti­ve working on urban and land­scape pro­cess design within com­plex urban initia­ti­ves and area rede­ve­lo­p­ments. She has taught at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Archi­tec­tu­re in Sofia and ETH Zürich, and has lec­tu­red at various venues across Euro­pe, inclu­ding Copen­ha­gen Archi­tec­tu­re Week, Bel­gra­de Inter­na­tio­nal Archi­tec­tu­re Week, Karls­ru­he Insti­tu­te of Tech­no­lo­gy, and KU Leu­ven. From 2017 to 2019, she ser­ved as coor­di­na­tor for invest­ment and inno­va­ti­on in Sofia’s long-term urban deve­lo­p­ment stra­tegy, “Visi­on for Sofia 2050”. Pri­or to that, she was direc­tor of the inter­na­tio­nal archi­tec­tu­re fes­ti­val “One Archi­tec­tu­re Week” in Plov­div.

Her work has been published in E‑flux, Dimen­si­ons Jour­nal, Bau­welt, Steel Cities: The Archi­tec­tu­re of Logi­stics in Cen­tral and Eas­tern Euro­pe, among others. She was a jury mem­ber for the 2025 New Euro­pean Bau­haus Awards.Most recent­ly, she co-cura­ted the exhi­bi­ti­on “It Was All Fields Once”, which explo­res con­tem­po­ra­ry coun­try­si­de trans­for­ma­ti­on through rese­arch and artis­tic prac­ti­ces, pre­sen­ted at CIVA and Track Brussels.