Lidia is an urban researcher, a sociologist who pretends to be a geographer, and a karateka (空手家) from Milan, Italy.

Lidia KC Manzo, is an urban researcher, a writer, and a social filmmaker whose work examines how the everyday co-productions of space and identity support or inhibit social, spatial, and economic justice. Lidia has been recently awarded with the EU Marie Sklodowska Curie Individual Fellowship (2020-2022) to develop the project CITY-OF-CARE at the Department of Social and Political Sciences of the Milan University to investigate the financialization of social housing in European cities across different socio-political context. She has recently completed the research project “Love at the time of Globalization: affective relationships as practices of everyday multiculturalism” under the “Migration and Migrants” Alsos Foundation Fellowship (2018-2020) at the same Department (advisor Enzo Colombo). Prior to this, she has been awarded with an Irish Research Council Postdoctoral grant to work at the Department of Geography, Maynooth University on a ethnographic, community-based project on post-crash gentrification in Dublin from the perspective of existing working class residents (supervisor: Sinead Kelly).

In 2013-2016 she has been partner member and lead-researcher in Milan for the ERC funded ‘HOUWEL‘ project at the University of Amsterdam, being affiliated also with the Politecnico di Milano University as a Contract Professor for the MSc in Urban Planning and Policy Design, course on “Contemporary City: social change and policies”.

She has a Ph.D. in Sociology and Social Research from the University of Trento (Italy) defended in April 2014. Her doctoral dissertation was focused on institutions, housing and lifestyles in the Super-gentrification process of Brooklyn’s Park Slope, whereby she has held a twenty-months long affiliation as Visiting Doctoral Researcher at The City University of New York (USA). She holds a MA in Political and Social Communication, and a BA in Intercultural Communication from the University of Milan where she performed ethnographic research and a documentary film on Milan’s Chinatown. Her interests in urban studies are presently concerned with processes of urban regeneration and welfare state transformations, by looking at how housing, community, and lifestyle practices interact with different contextual dynamics.

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