Damiano is an urbanist, researcher, and educator. He cofounded SPIN Unit, an urban research and innovation practice, and UrbanistAI, a participatory design platform reimagining cities' futures. His work centres on urban research and policy design, with particular emphasis on transformative governance. He teaches and collaborates with various academic institutions in Finland and internationally.
Meaningful urban design generates value for the whole, providing opportunities for biological and synthetic agents to express their agency.
Consultant - Demos Helsinki Consultant - Akkadian Chief Urban Transformation - Zeamly Principal Researcher - TERREFOM UR Expert, part-time - Tallinn Technical University
Visiting Researcher - Chalmers University Visiting Professor - Beijing University of Technology Visiting Researcher - Nokia Bell Labs Visiting Researcher - Sapienza University of Rome
Associate - Spatial Ethnography Lab Associate - Postopia
OTHER COMMITMENTS Advisor & Contributor - UrbanAI Advisory board - City Destination Alliance Jury member - European Capital of Innovation prize Fellow - LINA (European Architecture Platform) Academic Reviewer - Routledge | Swiss National Science Foundation | Territorio
I see our ecologies as the dynamic interplay of networked agents that have past the hybridisation of biological-synthetic intelligence and have already become a new hole - contributing to the shaping of space and time in ways that transcend traditional human values.
The interpretation of collective intelligences - including biological and synthetic forms of storage or computation - set the foundation for an urban planning discipline that is defined and infinite as the number of agents we are willing to understand and provide values for.
Our practice is evolving from a linear, mechanistic exercise - soon to be replaces by artificial intelligence programs - into a multidimensional exploration of the interwoven experiences that define the urban landscape - establishing new design strategies that retain a meaningful human participation
Planning as an iterative process of dialogue and negotiation with computational tools, enabling us to engage with and shape the city as a complex, living system.