Dr Anna Pagani is a Senior Lecturer in Engineering in the Department of Engineering at King’s College London.

Her research interests lie at the intersection of systems thinking, housing studies, and degrowth. In her work, she mobilises systems- and transdisciplinary approaches to co-design interventions aimed at providing housing for all within planetary boundaries.

Prior to joining King’s, Anna worked at the UCL Institute for Environmental Design and Engineering (Bartlett School of Environment, Energy and Resources), where she is currently an Honorary Associate Professor. During her time at UCL, she led a research project funded by a fellowship of the Swiss National Science Foundation. The project engaged with key players in the English social housing sector to map the systemic issues of social housing provision, collect perspectives on what constitutes healthy, sustainable, and just housing, and discuss possible ways to transform the current system towards that goal (see main findings).

Anna holds a BSc and a double MSc degree in Architecture and Building Engineering with honours (Politecnico di Torino, Politecnico di Milano, Alta Scuola Politecnica). She earned her PhD with distinction from the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL). At EPFL, she has worked as a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Laboratory on Human-Environment Relations in Urban Systems (HERUS), and at the Habitat Research Centre (HRC), where she served as a member of the Executive Board of the research field ‘Healthy Habitats’.

Her work has been acknowledged through various awards. Her doctoral dissertation was honoured with the EPFL Architecture and Sciences of the City Doctoral Programme Thesis Distinction (top 8% of theses). She was the speaker for the 2024 Athena Lecture Series at ETH Zurich, following in the footsteps of internationally recognised women in the field. In 2024, her work was chosen for the Plenary Session of the International System Dynamics Conference (top 2% of submissions).

Her teaching experience spans systems thinking, housing health and sustainability, sustainability assessment, and participatory approaches. At King’s, she leads the module ‘Applied Systems Thinking’ (Level 7). Previously, she co-led the module 'Systems Thinking in the Age of Transition' in the MAS ETH EPFL in Urban and Territorial Design, as well as the EPFL MSc module 'Sustainability Assessment of Urban Systems'. Anna regularly delivers guest lectures nationally and internationally to students from a broad range of disciplines, including urban design, planning, economics, environmental design and engineering, architecture, and health and wellbeing. She currently supervises transdisciplinary PhD projects addressing some of the most pressing challenges facing the housing sector, such as maintenance and repair, and the drivers of empty homes.

Anna is a member of the Postgrowth Cities Coalition and the Post-Growth Planning Cluster at the UCL Bartlett School of Planning. She is actively involved in a range of networks and organisations focused on housing, systems thinking, and degrowth, including the multidisciplinary built environment think tank The Edge and the European Federation for Living (EFL). In 2026, she joined the Board of Trustees of the European Community Land Trust Network (ECLTN). As Engineering’s representative on the Net Zero Centre Steering Committee, she also established and coordinates the Degrowth Seminar Series.

More broadly, she engages with a network of researchers, practitioners, policy-makers, artists, and residents in London and internationally. In this context, she is open to collaborations that place particular emphasis on working at intersections, to challenge and redesign systems towards justice.

 

Research Interests

• Systems thinking (System Dynamics, Critical Systems Heuristics)
• Transdisciplinarity
• Participatory approaches
• Housing justice (health, sustainability)
• Degrowth and post-growth

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Research profile

Google Scholar profile