ARF (Antonia) Weiss

Antonia Weiss (1987) is a postdoctoral researcher at Wageningen’s Rural Sociology Group in which capacity she also acts as a Research Fellow at the AMS Institute. Her multidisplinary work draws on the fields of design, history, and social research. In her work, she focuses on issues of social and urban environmental justice and on building connections between the past and future of cities.

Antonia studied Architecture at Cambridge (BA Hons First Class, 2008) and Princeton (M.Arch, 2013). She pursued her doctoral degree in History at the University of Amsterdam (expected defense in Autumn 2024). In her thesis, entitled The City of Nature: Women and the Making of Green Space in Eighteenth-Century Amsterdam and Berlin, she shows how the changing green worlds of modernizing Europe produced hierarchies of gender and class and analyzes the role of green space in facilitating female agency. The project was funded by NWO’s  ‘PhD in the Humanities program.’

In her current resereach project, entitled Deep Foodscapes, Antonia explores the intersections between past, present, and future food environments and studies how these temporal layers of the foodscape have been shaped and continue to be shaped by successive generations of (post)migrants living in the city.  She is interested in uncovering and documenting residents’ horticultural and culinary heritage as it also already manifests itself in grassroots urban agriculture initiatives in the city. Combining historical with participatory research and design methods, the project aims to build upon the existing expertise and lifestories of “Amsterdammers” to co-create a blueprint for a healthier, greener, and more inclusive city with them.

Next to her academic work, Antonia is also a maker and designer. She has worked for leading architectural firms in the Netherlands, Switzerland, and the UK and as a strategic designer for Philips, where her work focused on technology in the urban environment. She is also a seamstress in training and an amateur gardener.