Léonore Stangherlin is a passionate changemaker, aiming at creating better cities for people and climate. She broadly defines “better” in terms of cities enabling humans to thrive and live a “good life” together, within planetary boundaries and the respect for the web of life.

Léonore is a value-oriented person and a multi-disciplinary mind, enabling her to understand issues in their multidimensional perspective and intersectional aspects. She has lived abroad for years before coming back to her hometown Geneva. She lived first in Leipzig where she studied political science and was politically active in refugees rights movements, then in London, where she studied economics and social psychology at the London School of Economics (LSE). It is during her masters at LSE that she fell in love with urban planning through her participation in LSE Cities courses. Her research included topics such as participatory budgeting, sustainable mobility and Barcelona’s Superblock model. 

Cities are collective entities where a diversity of actors constantly negotiate space and practices. For Leonore, it is what participative and inclusive approach to urban planning is about: defining ambitious collective visions about how these actors want to live - together and with nature - and implementing them in a pragmatic way. She believes in the value of transitory interventions as a prefigurative tool for wishable futures. 

She’s very interested in…

• housing : models of co-living, cooperative habitat, multigenerational settings
• public spaces : community-empowering, gender-sensitive design, risky playgrounds
• ecology : nature-food-water nexus in urban setting, ecology and public health, urban plantations and collective gardens.  
• economy : strengthening circular and local economies  
• mobility : sustainable/active mobility, modal transfer, rural-urban relationship
• culture : strategies for urban nightlife, the economics of cultural spaces

Beyond work, Léonore is also crazy about swing, an african-american social dance based on jazz music from the 30s and 40s. Jazz always reminds her about the values of constraints, which enable greater creativity and innovation within.