Ugo Baldini prize awarded to Ifigeneia Dimitrakou

In the second edition of the Prize, the best among the doctoral theses dealing with issues related to the territory and its governance, discussed in the three-year period 2017 – 2019, was selected

The Osvaldo Piacentini Archive has announced the winner of the second edition of the Ugo Baldini prize for PhD theses in urban studies, planning, and territorial policies.
The PhD thesis ‘Ambiguous Absences: Exploring the production of vacant housing in Athens’ by Ifigeneia Dimitrakou was awarded with the first prize, amongst twenty-three thesis defended between 2017-2019 in ten different doctoral schools throughout Italy.

The jury, composed of Angela Barbanente – Professor of Urban and Regional Planning, Politecnico di Bari, Claudio Greppi – Professor of Geography, University of Siena, and Dr. Flaviano Zandonai – sociologist, stated:
“The jury particularly appreciated the way in which the thesis problematizes the topic of housing vacancy, by critically reviewing the prevailing approaches in the literature and revealing their a-historical and a-political grounds, and by empirically illustrating how the ambiguity of the concept of ‘vacancy’ is rooted in its political function. The exploration of the practices shaping the production of housing vacancy allows Dr. Ifigeneia Dimitrakou to demonstrate how these processes are not a ‘natural’ product of the market, but the material trace of specific relations of production and social reproduction in the context of investigation”.

Ifigeneia Dimitrakou is an alumna of the PhD Program Urban Planning, Design and Policies (31^st cycle). She received her PhD with honors in December 2019.