Anna Karla de Almeida Milani
Anna Karla de Almeida Milani is a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Department of Urbanism at TU Delft, and a Guest Lecturer at the Heritage, Anthropology and Technologies at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne (EPFL), Switzerland. She is a trained architect and urban designer at UEMA, Brazil (2015), 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). Dr. Milani 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 at TU Delft, "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 is supported by the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF) under the grant number 235164.