Dorina Pojani

Dorina Pojani writes about how the built environment shapes everyday life, with a focus on the intersection of urban design, mobility, and housing. Her coverage looks beyond individual projects or policies to examine how planning decisions affect affordability, access, and equity in cities.

Urban design, mobility and housing

Pojani’s work at The Conversation centres on what she describes as the built environment triad: urban design, mobility, and housing. She connects these fields rather than treating them as separate beats, showing how transport networks, public spaces, and housing markets interact. In her coverage of “forever renting” in places like New York, California and Europe, she links tenure patterns and rental cultures to planning, infrastructure and long-term urban policy choices, rather than approaching them only as a financial or consumer issue. Her pieces tend to draw on academic research and comparative examples to explain why certain urban forms and planning decisions produce persistent problems in affordability and access.

Across her housing and mobility writing, she treats cities as systems. She looks at how planning frameworks and investment priorities channel people toward particular ways of living and moving, and what that means for those locked into long commutes or insecure housing. She often situates current debates about renting, car dependence or new developments in the broader context of how cities have been planned over decades, making structural factors legible to non-specialist readers.

Transport choices and car dependence

Transport and mobility are a recurring focus in Pojani’s broader public work. She engages with questions of public transport quality, active transport options and the possibility of living without a car, including research on car-free living and the limits imposed by gaps in public transport networks. In these discussions, she examines the trade-offs between private car use and other modes, highlighting how infrastructure decisions and service provision make certain choices more or less feasible.

Her transport coverage often brings vulnerable groups into the frame, looking at mobility and accessibility for people who do not have easy access to private vehicles. She is interested in how transport policy affects daily routines and opportunities, rather than treating mobility purely as a technical or engineering problem. This perspective runs through her commentary on COVID-19 and transport, where she has explored how disruptions reshape commuting patterns and the viability of alternatives to car-centric travel.

Gender, power and planning

Pojani frequently examines how gender and power relations are embedded in urban planning. She has discussed sexism in the city and how planning has failed women, as well as broader questions about who benefits from particular urban forms. In these pieces and talks, she argues that the design and governance of cities reflect social hierarchies, and that planning can either reinforce or challenge those hierarchies.

Her work on feminist perspectives in urban planning extends to capital cities and large-scale urban projects, where she analyses how symbolic and “trophy” developments relate to everyday life for different groups. She looks not only at physical layouts but also at narratives and aspirations that drive planning decisions, connecting high-level urban visions to lived experience. This strand of her coverage gives communications professionals a clear sense that she is interested in stories where gender, representation and the politics of space intersect with infrastructure and housing.

Academic lens, public audience

Pojani writes for The Conversation alongside an academic career in urban planning, and she presents research findings in accessible language for a general readership. Her articles often translate complex planning debates into clear explanations of how policies and designs affect renters, commuters and residents. She is comfortable moving between case studies in different regions, using comparative examples to illustrate common challenges in housing, transport and urban form.

Her public work extends beyond written articles into interviews, podcasts and commentary on topics such as AI in city planning and the future of transport. Across formats, she maintains the same focus: how planning decisions shape mobility, housing and gendered experiences of the city. Stories that speak to those intersections—especially those grounded in evidence and with clear implications for how people live and move—align closely with the themes she consistently covers.