
Dr Catalina Pollak
Senior Lecturer
Architecture and Urban Design
Department of Architecture & Visual Arts
Dr Catalina Pollak Williamson is an architect, urban researcher, and practice-based scholar working across participatory urbanism, civic pedagogy, and socially engaged spatial practice. She holds a PhD in Development Planning from UCL (2025) and has extensive experience teaching architecture design and theory at undergraduate and postgraduate levels.
Qualifications
- PhD
- M.Arch
- MA
- Dip.Arch
Areas Of Interest
- Participatory Urbanism
- Urban Design
- Spatial Justice
- Situated Pedagogies
- Creative Methods
- Radical Play
Overview
Catalina's research advances a critical understanding of the relationship between play, participation, and urban democracy through design-led methodologies grounded in collective experimentation and socio-spatial justice. Rather than treating participation as a procedural instrument, she interrogates its political ontology, framing it as a civic pedagogy through which situated knowledge, political subjectivities, and urban imaginaries are co-produced and (per)formed. Within this framework, she develops Radical Play as a conceptual and methodological approach in which play becomes politically and pedagogically operative: by suspending the norms that structure everyday life, it opens space to collectively explore new forms of socio-spatial (re)production.
Her current research extends this work into socio-ecological urban practice and community-led development, ranging from grassroots interventions to civic tech platforms designed to reposition communities as active agents in shaping urban environments. In doing so, she continues to explore how creative and performative methods support civic learning and democratic experimentation, enabling more just, ethical and resilient urban futures.
Visit her website: Public Interventions
Publications
Visit the UEL research repository to view a full list of publications.
Publications
Browse past publications by year.
Full publications list
Visit the research repository to view a full list of publications


