Anna Karla is a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Department of Urbanism at TU Delft and a Swiss National Science Foundation Postdoc.Mobility Fellow.
Anna Karla focuses her research on the historical legacy of companies in shaping and designing the territory, with particular attention to company towns and industrial sites. Drawing on interdisciplinary methods, including archival research, microhistory, and spatial analysis, her research engages with questions at the intersection of urban history and theory, philosophy, biopolitics, and industrial heritage studies, informing contemporary debates on how productive sites are a major topic towards a just socio-ecological transition.
Her current research, Flaring Oil in Paradise: Colonial Legacies of Company Towns in the Dutch Caribbean, extends this line of inquiry to oil refinery company towns in Aruba and Curaçao, examining how petroleum-driven urbanization shaped urban form, labor relations, and governance, and how colonial power structures were reconfigured rather than dismantled during the twentieth century. The research uncovers practices of conformity and resistance embedded in company town spatial narratives, and assesses the socio-ecological scars left by resource-dependent industries in the Caribbean through a post-extractive and decolonial perspective. The long-term orientation of the research adopts a post-extractive and decolonial approach to examine how corporate power produces enduring material, social, and socio-ecological structures, and how these legacies continue to shape urban territories and collective life over time.
Anna Karla is a trained architect and urban designer at UEMA, Brazil (2015). She holds a Master’s Degree in Historical Sciences on Techniques, Heritage, Territories of Industry from Université Panthéon-Sorbonne (2018), and a PhD in Architecture and the Sciences of the City from EPFL (2024). Her PhD thesis “Dalmine lives. A biopolitical history of an Italian company town” was recognized with the EPFL Thesis Distinction of 2024.
Since 2025, Anna Karla has been a member of ICOMOS Switzerland working group “A Future for whose Past?”, concerned with research into the architectural heritage of minorities, marginalized groups and people without a lobby. Prior to joining TU Delft, she was a postdoctoral researcher at EPFL at the Laboratory of Urbanism with Professor Paola Viganò, and in the College of Humanities at the Heritage, Anthropology and Technology research group led by Professor Florence Graezer Bideau. From 2020 to 2025, she served as Executive Board member of the Habitat Research Center, coordinating the Productive Habitats research field, fostering international debates on the impact of industrialization on the past, present, and future of our cities.
Anna Karla’s recent work includes contributions, among others, as co-editor (with Marcello Modica) at the Journal or Alpine Research of the special issue “Mountain Productive Landscapes in the Socio-ecological Transition” (2026), and book chapters at “Unveiling hidden heritage: narratives, politics, and agency” (2025), “Unearthing Traces. Dismantling imperialist entanglements of archives, landscapes, and the built environment” (2023), and the “Modern design. Social commitment and quality of life. Proceedings of the 17th International Docomomo Conference” (2022).