About me
Andreina Seijas J. is a Venezuelan researcher and international consultant with 12+ years of experience in urban development and policy in Latin America, Europe and the United States. Through her doctoral studies at the Harvard Graduate School of Design (2017-2020) she specialized in night-time governance and planning and launched Night Tank, an international consulting firm that focuses on this novel field of research and practice.
Andreina currently works as Associate at Gehl and heads Urban Governance research at IAAC’s Urban Sciences Lab. Previously, she was a Senior Consultant at IdenCity, in Barcelona, Spain; worked as a consultant for the Housing and Urban Development Division at the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) in Washington DC; as Policy Associate at the Council of the Americas in New York City and Editorial Associate for policy journal Americas Quarterly; and as Information Manager for the municipality of Chacao in Caracas, Venezuela.
Andreina has a Communications degree from Universidad Catolica Andres Bello, an MSc in Social Policy and Development from the London School of Economics, a Master in Public Administration and Non-Profit management from New York University, and a Doctor of Design (DDes) degree from the Harvard Graduate School of Design. She is also the recipient of several awards, including the Chevening and Fulbright Scholarships, the P.E.O. International Peace Scholarship and the Lawrence H. and Marla G. Curtis Fellowship Fund.
My Research
Andreina studies night-time governance, in other words, how cities can become safer, more inclusive and productive by creating quality spaces for work and leisure after dark. Her research looks at how policy and planning can accommodate more elastic and efficient uses of urban spaces throughout the day and analyzes the relevance of new forms of urban governance—such as the emerging role of ‘night mayors’—as mechanisms to facilitate conflict resolution at night. As part of her research, in 2017 she published a guide with Sound Diplomacy that gathers 11 case studies from cities that are innovating in the way they plan and manage their night scenes. In 2018, she co-curated Nocturnal Cities, the first Latin American Conference on Managing the Urban Night that took place in Bogota, Colombia. In 2020, she co-authored a paper wit Mirik Milan that analyzes the emerging role of “night mayors” around the world.
Her doctoral dissertation is titled "Governing the Urban Night: Understanding the shifting dynamics of night-time governance in three global cities." By tracing the history of night-time regulations in three cities—Amsterdam, London and New York—from the 1990s until today, this dissertation provided new knowledge about the variations of night-time governance and analyzed how managing the urban night relates to other forms of governance during the day. It is available for download here.
Andreina has presented lectures and papers in seminars and international conferences organized by Harvard University, McGill University, Leiden University, United Cities and Local Governments (UCLG), the Responsible Hospitality Institute (RHI), the Office of the Mayor of New York City, the Urban Design Forum, and the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB). Her work was also featured at the XX Architecture and Urbanism Biennial in Valparaíso, a city that she helped design a strategy to leverage its nightlife as a platform to showcase its cultural heritage.
Contact her at aseijas@night-tank.org