Giovanna Astolfo
Co-Investigator (The Bartlett’s Development Planning Unit, UCL)
Biography
Giovanna Astolfo is an urban researcher with an architectural theory and practice background. As an Associate Professor at The Bartlett Development Planning Unit (DPU), she combines funded research, research-based teaching, consultancy, project management and action learning from several contested and ungovernable urban geographies in Southeast Asia, the Amazon region, West Africa, Southern, Eastern Europe and UK, with a focus on non-conventional urbanisms, continuous displacement and migration, spatial violence and housing justice. Further non funded research interests are related to the ethics of design, the role of architecture and urbanism within the current socioecological devastation, that informs the pedagogical dimension of my taught programme. Prior to focusing entirely on teaching and research, she worked as an architect in between studies, in architectural offices in Venice, São Paulo and London, on situated participatory projects for the re-imagination of vacant buildings and de-militarisation of border zones.
Research interests
Giovanna Astolfo’s research focuses on four interrelated themes. The first research stream has developed since her PhD in the late 2000s around issues of urban development, land consumption, processes of extraction and exhaustion of territory, and related environmental impacts. It involves a discussion on the disciplinary relevance, role and implications of architecture and urbanism vis a vis current socio-ecological devastation. The second research stream has developed around 2015 during the so called refugee crisis in Europe and has been simultaneously a source of academic engagement – at the intersection of forced migration, human geography, border and camp study, as well as a call for action. The third research stream is a spin off the second one, with a more explicit focus on how governments, NGOs and civil society are challenged by myths of migrants and refugees as subjects and spaces of bare life and bio-politics. Finally, the largest and more ambitious research stream is centred around Non-conventional, contested and displacement urbanisms with particular focus on postcolonial and post-conflict contexts.
Selected publications
Astolfo, G., & Allsopp, H. (2024). The colonial face of ‘housing’ refugees: the construction of the racialised subject within a necropolitical infrastructure. Housing Studies, 1–24. https://doi.org/10.1080/02673037.2024.2373992
Astolfo, G., Boano, C., Desmaison, B. (2024). Displacement as Precarious Inhabiting: Care and Repair at the Urban Margins. In: Nuno Martins, A., Mendoza-Arroyo, C., Hobeica, L., León, J., Hobeica, A. (eds) Beyond Houses. The Urban Book Series. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-61403-3_10
Boano, C., Astolfo, G., & Desmaison, B. (2024). ‘When the house burns down’: displacement, precariousness and inhabitation. Journal of Urbanism: International Research on Placemaking and Urban Sustainability, 1–18. https://doi.org/10.1080/17549175.2024.2327599
Astolfo, G., Boano, C., Desmaison, B., (2024) Abitare precario tra i margini: limiti, scarti e rotture nel fare territorio. Tracce Urbane, 15 pp. 386-410. 10.13133/2532-6562/18658
Astolfo, G., & Allsopp, H. (2024). The colonial face of ‘housing’ refugees: the construction of the racialised subject within a necropolitical infrastructure. Housing Studies, 1–24. https://doi.org/10.1080/02673037.2024.2373992
Astolfo, G., Boano, C., Desmaison, B. (2024). Displacement as Precarious Inhabiting: Care and Repair at the Urban Margins. In: Nuno Martins, A., Mendoza-Arroyo, C., Hobeica, L., León, J., Hobeica, A. (eds) Beyond Houses. The Urban Book Series. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-61403-3_10
Boano, C., Astolfo, G., & Desmaison, B. (2024). ‘When the house burns down’: displacement, precariousness and inhabitation. Journal of Urbanism: International Research on Placemaking and Urban Sustainability, 1–18. https://doi.org/10.1080/17549175.2024.2327599
Astolfo, G., Boano, C., Desmaison, B., (2024) Abitare precario tra i margini: limiti, scarti e rotture nel fare territorio. Tracce Urbane, 15 pp. 386-410. 10.13133/2532-6562/18658
Contacts: giovanna.astolfo.13@ucl.ac.uk
TEAM
Giovanna Astolfo
Co-Investigator
Camillo Boano
Co-Investigator
Edoardo Ciuffreda
Research Assistant
Antonio Di Campli
Research Assistant
Alessandra Faccini
Research Assistant
Manuel Grimaldi
Research Assistant
Stefano Mastromarino
Research Assistant
Richard Lee Peragine
Research Assistant
Antonio Stopani
Co-Investigator
Inappropriable is a research, a collective investigation and a condition of possibility which sets out to interrogate practices of inhabitation, infrastructures of life, of marronage and fugitive worldling, focusing on labour ecologies in territories of migration: frontiers where bodies, spaces and labour are reconfigured through extractive and plantation-like capitalist processes of accumulation, dispossession and exclusion.