Oya Duman

Do you ever find yourself thinking about how to mobilise various stakeholders to achieve fair, sustainable, and joyful cities of the future? Oya sure does! She seamlessly integrates her professional background in architecture with a keen research focus on collaborative urban planning processes. Thanks to this, she really knows her way around how to approach the collaborative challenges of sustainability transformations, regardless of whether we are talking about a large metropolitan region or an individual building. At Demos Helsinki, Oya is all about cultivating meaningful collaborations across diverse stakeholders, sectoral expertise, governance levels and local contexts.

Prior to joining Demos Helsinki, Oya worked at the Spatial Planning and Transportation Engineering Research Group at Aalto University, where she completed both her master’s and doctoral degrees. In her doctoral research, Oya examined the MAL (land use, housing and transport) agreement and planning scheme in the largest Finnish city-regions, and broadened our understanding of the complexities of such multi-stakeholder, multi-sectoral and multi-scalar processes.

After work, you can find Oya in her kitchen planning the next dinner party and experimenting with new recipes. Lately, she has been striving to expand her dinner hostess portfolio with cocktails and master the old-fashioned.

Oya’s academic research: ORCID