Beata Sirowy (PhD 2010) is Senior Research Fellow at the Department of Urban and Regional Planning and a participant of the NMBU Talent Program. Her educational background consists of philosophy (MA) combined with architecture and urban planning (MSc), and her research interests lie at the intersection of these domains. She is particularly interested in phenomenology and hermenutics and their implications for architecture and spatial planning, and in broadly understood ethical aspects of urban development. Her PhD dissertation (AHO 2010) proposes a phenomenology-based framework for a user-oriented architectural practice. In her postdoc period she was engaged in a RCN-funded research projects on goal conflicts in a compact city development, where her focus was on exclusion and inclusion mechanisms in urban public spaces. She currently co-leads a project examining the democratic dimension of urban public space in the perspectives of deliberative democracy and the capability approach (DEMOSSPACE) and is the leader of the project Cultivating Public Spaces: Urban agriculture as a basis for human flourishing and sustainability transition in Norwegian cities. Both projects are funded by the Research Council of Norway. Since 2016 she has been a section editor of the Nordic Research Journal Formakademisk. She is currently a visiting scholar at UC Berkeley, Institute of Urban and Regional Development (2019-2020).