Mara Haas is an urban planner from Vienna, Austria working in the fields of strategic action planning, urban design, placemaking and participatory planning, from metropolitan to neighborhood scale. She studied urban and regional planning at the Vienna University of Technology, Austria and the University of Groningen, the Netherlands. One of her main interests is the influence of self-organization of citizens on the transformation of neighborhoods and what it needs to empower “local heroes” and to go from temporality to permanence. During her work at superwien urbanism, Mara has developed and tested several dialogue-oriented planning tools with focus on the concept of placemaking in different local contexts, such as Kanina, Albania and Belgrade, Serbia. She also was involved in activation processes of ground floor areas in urban development projects and the elaboration of the Thematic Concept “Polycentric Vienna” (Department of Urban Development and Planning, City of Vienna) with focus on center development in city extension areas.

Within the PlaceCity project, Mara is researching about the understanding and impact of placemaking in Vienna, and is working on the co-creation concept and the placemaking concept for the local case in Floridsdorf.