ABOUT

Ana Pereira Roders is a researcher, writer, and practitioner working at the intersection of buildings, cities, heritage, and law.

 

Her work is driven by a simple but unsettling question: if values explain why buildings matter, why do they so often fail to protect them? Over time, this question has led her from value-based approaches to heritage and sustainability toward a deeper engagement with rights — and, more recently, to the development of the concept of Rights of Buildings.

 

Trained as an architect and urban researcher, Ana has spent much of her academic career studying how societies assign values and later cultural significance - values and attributes - to buildings and urban environments. She has worked extensively on urban heritage, conservation, and sustainability, including the monitoring of heritage values and their role in planning, policy, and decision-making.

 

Gradually, however, a structural contradiction became impossible to ignore: buildings can be widely valued and still be demolished. Heritage listings, by definition, remain selective, protecting a minority, while the vast majority of the built environment remains without protection.

This insight marked a turning point in her work. Rather than asking only why buildings matter, she now asks what it would take for them to last.

 

Ana’s current research develops and advances the concept of Rights of Buildings, examining how legal systems could recognise buildings as rights-bearing entities rather than objects whose fate depends solely on human interests and shifting values. This work builds on emerging legal developments, such as the Rights of Nature, while remaining grounded in long-standing debates on heritage, responsibility, and care for the built environment.

 

Alongside her research, Ana regularly works with a wide range of stakeholders to bridge theory and practice, fostering shared understanding of fundamental concepts and how these can be interpreted and operationalised differently across contexts. The work of her team combines global studies, in-depth case studies, and comparative analysis, alongside methodological exploration informed by advances across disciplines.

 

Ana also writes fiction as a way of bringing complex questions beyond academia. Her novel SOZA explores themes of buildings, law, memory, and responsibility, using narrative to engage audiences with ideas that cannot always be fully expressed through scholarly language alone.

 

She continues to teach, lecture, and publish internationally, working across disciplines and audiences. Ana believes that lasting change requires not only new knowledge, but new ways of thinking, speaking, and imagining our relationship with the built world.