Sonia Irani

Sonia Irani is an urban planner and EU funding expert who has been based in Istanbul for over a decade. She studied Urban Planning in Isfahan and completed her master’s in Urban Design in Tehran, where she explored third places and the use of public space, and pursued doctoral research at Istanbul Technical University on the everyday value of public spaces.

She works at YTU Yildiz Technopark as an International Projects Expert, supporting researchers and innovators in developing EU-funded projects. Her work spans the New European Bauhaus, climate, energy and mobility, Cities Mission, green transition, cultural heritage, Erasmus+, and the EIT community. She is the Executive Coordinator of ECHO, which builds regional excellence hubs around energy communities; the partner lead in Excel4Pro, which fosters cross-border innovation in novel foods and plant-based proteins; and SHORE, which empowers primary and secondary school students as change agents for ocean literacy.

Alongside her work at YTU, Sonia contributes to Kentsel Strateji, a pioneering platform in Türkiye known for place-based strategies and multi-actor collaboration. She has taken part in initiatives such as Pancar Deposu (a culture–learning–production hub), TAK Kartal (a design–research–participation platform), and HayotLab Tashkent (a city lab for collaborative strategies), and contributed to regional projects including the Gastronomy Tourism Strategy Plan, and Fırat 2023 Vision and Action Plan.

Her work focuses on improving living environments by bringing diverse actors together to co-think and co-create, guided by the New European Bauhaus principles of participatory process, multi-level engagement, and transdisciplinary collaboration.