Olivia Theocharides-Feldman
Olivia is passionate about creating juster spatial worlds and believes that meaningful and attentive engagement with local communities is necessary towards achieving this goal. With her background in anthropology and sociology, she brings a unique expertise to understand how cities and spaces shape and are shaped by people's daily experiences.
My Background
Olivia Theocharides-Feldman is a Founding Associate at Social Place (formerly JK&A), where she uses anthropological and sociological methods to research and devise tools and processes to enable diverse voices to be heard within built environment processes. Through her engagement work with local communities, she seeks to contribute to an evidence base on spatial – particularly marginalised and gendered – experiences of public space; and to enable these voices to contribute to design and planning decision-making. Olivia also researches and writes literature reviews and reports for institutions and organisations seeking to make contributions towards youth or gender-inclusive planning and design.
Prior to joining Social Place, she was a researcher at the London School of Economics’ urban research center, LSE Cities, where she worked on projects such as the ‘Young Researcher-in-Residence’ and the ‘Making Space for Girls’ research projects. Her work focused on developing creative engagement methodologies in peer research and understanding how experiences of public space are impacted by age and gender.
Olivia holds a BSc in Anthropology from the University College London (UCL) and an MSc in City Design and Social Sciences from the London School of Economics (LSE). Her background has focused on gender, queer studies, critical disability/ crip studies, migration, space and cities.
Olivia has written multiple peer reviewed journals (forthcoming) and reports on the topic of gender and public space; has been a speaker on the topic at multiple events including at the London Assembly, the ‘She is Summit’ Brent and the ‘This must be the place’ event with Cement Fields. Her work with young people has also been shortlisted for a planning award.