About Me
Manila De Iuliis

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Founder & Method

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I am an urban planner and researcher with over twenty years of experience working across urban planning, sustainability, and systemic approaches to complexity.

My background combines professional practice and academic research. I trained as an architect and urban planner and later completed a PhD in Construction and Property Management at the University of Salford (UK), where my research focused on time, systemic change, and sustainable development. My doctoral work explored how urban environments can be understood as dynamic systems evolving through interdependent temporal and spatial relations, rather than as static or sector-based entities.

​Throughout my career, I have worked in different roles and contexts: as a municipal urban planner, academic researcher, teacher, and project leader. This experience has allowed me to engage directly with the practical challenges of planning, policy-making, and governance, while maintaining a strong theoretical and methodological foundation.

I have collaborated with municipalities, universities, and international organisations, including UNESCO and Spiral Labs, operating at the interface between policy, practice, and research.

A recurring theme in my work has been the recognition that urban challenges are rarely isolated. Climate adaptation, circular economy, spatial development, social dynamics, governance, and cultural values are deeply intertwined and unfold over time. Fragmented approaches often fail to grasp these interdependencies, leading to short-term solutions and unintended consequences.

It was from this awareness that the Modal Matrix Process Approach (MMPA) emerged. The MMPA was developed as a way to structure and explore complexity without reducing it, by focusing on relations, contexts, and temporal dynamics. Rooted in long-term academic research, the method provides a framework to read urban environments through multiple interconnected dimensions, supporting understanding, strategic reflection, and action.

The MMPA is not a prescriptive tool. It does not offer ready-made solutions. Instead, it creates the conditions for better questions, shared understanding, and more coherent decision-making, particularly in contexts characterised by uncertainty, multiple actors, and long-term impacts.

In 2023, I founded Systemica Urban Impact as a space where this method could be applied, tested, and further developed in practice. Through Systemica, I work with institutions, professionals, and communities to make complexity intelligible, support responsible choices, and align actions with long-term trajectories.

Alongside professional practice, I remain actively involved in research and education, contributing to interdisciplinary projects on circular development and sustainability transitions, and supporting learning processes that strengthen systemic awareness and capacity for action.