Milena Ivković is currently in charge of the Urban Planning Advisory Teams of the ISOCARP (International Society of Regional and City Planners) and has Master of Architecture and Planning Degree obtained at the University of Belgrade, Serbia. Milena is a researcher and designer with more then ten years of both academic and practical experience in the field of urban planning. After spending several years as the assistant at the Faculty of Architecture, University of Belgrade, Milena continued her career in Rotterdam, the Netherlands. She immediately started working at the design and planning department of the Municipality of Rotterdam, and later moved to the renowned Rotterdam-based office Kuiper Compagnons. In the ensuing period Milena focused on International Consultancy Projects of the office, advising on the issues of sustainability, mobility and public space design for the cities of Wuhan, Suqian and Hangzhou in China, as well as for the various municipalities in the Netherlands.
Between 2013 and 2015 she was mainly working internationally as a researcher together with Yellow Design Foundation (YDF) in Brussels, Belgium. The Foundation actively collaborated with UN HABITAT, UITP (International Association of Public Transport) and UIC (International Railway Union) on the issues of safety and design for multimodal public spaces. The research covered design recommendations for diverse urban contexts, from Europe, India and East Africa, to South Korea and China. Within her own practice Blok74 (Rotterdam, NL) Milena is busy with developing new urban planning tools, based on gamification and collaborative design. Her practice focuses on improving the dialogue between the citizens, design professionals and planning authorities using various digital and analogue immersive instruments. For it’s work in the field of expanding urbanism towards citizens’ involvement, the office was supported by ECF (European Cultural Foundation) in 2014. Milena also writes and publishes on the topic of participative urbanism and tools for citizens’ engagement, as well as on the issues of the new urban challenges and the ever-changing role of planners.
