Antonia Weiss

With a dual background in architectural design and historical research, Antonia’s work focuses on synergies between urban futures and urban pasts. Her particular interest concerns green infrastructures and questions of social equity. At the AMS, Antonia conducts postdoctoral research on Amsterdam’s  “Deep Foodscapes”—the intersections between past, present, and future food environments—and studies how these have been shaped and continue to be shaped by culturally diverse communities living in the city. She is interested in uncovering and documenting residents’ horticultural and culinary heritage as it also manifests itself in grassroots urban agriculture and foodsharing initiatives in the city. Combining historical with participatory research and design methods, Antonia’s work builds upon the existing expertise and lifestories of “Amsterdammers” to co-create a blueprint for a healthier, greener, and more inclusive city with them.

Antonia’s work at the AMS draws upon her multidisciplinary training. Antonia studied Architecture at Cambridge University (BA Hons, 2008) and at 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 April 2024, Antonia joined Wageningen’s Rural Sociology Group as a Postdoctoral Researcher to work on a project entitled Towards a Deep Foodscape: Cultivating Plants, Cuisines, and Histories.

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.