My interest in Urban and Regional development began during my undergraduate studies when I spent a summer in New York City. At that time, Saskia Sassen's canonical book, The Global City, influenced my understanding of interurban competition and power in global urban networks. It was then that I realized that some places in a city are more affected by competition than others, so I decided to look in depth at the political economic analysis of a dynamically transforming waterfront in my hometown of Bratislava. In particular, I was interested in the dynamics between the structural logics transforming urban waterfronts and the decision-making processes of individual actors behind large-scale waterfront developments in the Slovak capital.

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This decision subsequently led me through a wide range of academic experiences, which I was able to fully embrace during my Ph.D. at Charles University in Prague and eventually during my postdoc at HafenCity University in Hamburg. I have steadily developed my political economic approach, which allows me to better understand the varieties of economic development through its cultural and economic embeddedness in space. I am particularly inspired by debates at the intersection of urban and economic geography, such as urban entrepreneurialism; economic imaginaries and narratives; governance; and land economy. 

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More recently, as a policy advisor to Eurocities, Ministry of Investment, Regional Development, and Informatization of the Slovak Republic; and The Metropolitan Institute of Bratislava, I have advocated for the importance of experimental governance and land value capture. Both policy approaches aspire to address the urgency of public institutions to act, innovate and develop resilient public infrastructure that can cope with current megatrends. However, these experiences allowed me to recognize the gap between academic and urban policy debates, the challenges related to institutional capacity and culture that influence rigorous policy interpretation and implementation, or the disjunction between urban policy discourse and its spatial embeddedness. 

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Being back in my hometown, I realized the necessity of evidence-based, theory-informed decisions embedded in public policy. Today, urban future-making is shaped by short-term, individual interests that fail to take into account the complexity of the real world and the uncertainty of plural futures that municipal governors must face. The ongoing property-led development, driven by the extraction of land value, has been shaping the urban environment according to its own logic, privatizing all windfall gains. 

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The CTD mission is to create evidence through trusted analysis and peer-reviewed research aims to address these challenges. We build bridges between institutions and advocate for urban and regional future-making independent of powerful interests by transforming knowledge into innovative policy solutions and advice that integrates economic, institutional, and spatial factors equally and fosters fair territorial development. The CTD fosters a non-partisan approach, and values transparency, expertise, and diversity that drive our ambitions and work ethic.

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​Research & Advisory

• Policy Advisor | Eurocities, Brussels; Ministry of Investment, Regional Development, and Informatization of the Slovak Republic; and The Metropolitan Institute of Bratislava

• Postdoc at HafenCity University, Hamburg

• Ph.D. in Human Geography and Regional Development, STARS scholarship, Charles University, Prague

• Exchange Program: Department of Human Geography, University of Hamburg, Germany

• Research Visit: Department of Geography, Dartmouth College, Hanover, New Hampshire, USA

• The London School of Economics and Political Science & Peking University Summer Institute: The Political Economy of Urbanization in China and Asia: Globalization and Uneven Development, Beijing, China

• AESOP Ph.D. workshop: Association of European Schools of Planning Delft University of Technology and Utrecht University, Holland

• European Summer School in Local Government Institute of Political Science, University of Münster, Germany

Research projects

• Metropolisation and Polycentric Development in Central Europe: evidence-based strategic options; ESPON

• New Socio-Spatial Formations: segregation in the context of post-communist transformations and globalization; Czech Science Foundation

  
  

• Waterfront Regeneration: learning from European best practices for a sustainable urban life Grundtvig Programme – European Commission

• Whose waterfront regeneration? Grant Agency of Charles University

Conferences

• Regional Studies Association annual conference, Trinity College Dublin, Ireland

• Royal Geographical Society annual conference, Cardiff University, United Kingdom

• The Role of Real Estate Developers in Urban Development: an interdisciplinary inquiry into the political economy of cities around the world, University Lausanne, Switzerland

• Cities After Transition Conference, University of Belgrade, Serbia

• Slovak & Czech Geographical Society – united congress, Comenius University, Slovakia