Maria Chiara is Associate Professor of Urbanism at Università Iuav di Venezia, where she also serves as an active member of the faculty board of the PhD school. She is broadly interested in how welfare state policies affect both the physical and the socio-economic aspects of urban environments. Specifically, her research is mainly –but not only- focused on the dispersion of settlements in the Veneto region. She has been part of numerous Italian and international research projects on the study of the evolution of urban settlements. She has extensively lectured and published on public space; her recent books include Welfare Spaces. On the Role of Welfare State Policies in the Construction of the Contemporary City, and Toward an Atlas of European Delta Landscape. She is in charge of the relationship among Iuav and various international institutions, and she was Visiting Researcher at the College of Environmental Design at UC Berkeley. Maria Chiara received a PhD in Urbanism from Sapienza University of Rome, and a Master’s in Urban Planning with honors from Università Iuav di Venezia.