Trained in architecture, urban planning, and social theory between the UK, the US, Colombia, and Italy, Giulia is an interdisciplinary researcher working at the intersection of power, space, and postcolonial thought. Her work explores how infrastructures—physical, social, and digital—mediate urban life, rights, and futures. She is particularly interested in how these infrastructures reproduce or resist the spatial dynamics of racialised inequality, and in the alternative, speculative futures they might enable.

Giulia is currently Principal Investigator on a British Academy-funded project examining infrastructures of migration, labour, and bordering across the Mediterranean. So far her work has critically explored the technopolitics and political economy of urban governance in cities marked by diversity and inequality, including Bogotá, Palermo, and New York City. Her current work extends into the digital, with a growing focus on how platforms, data, and immersive technologies mediate exclusion, control, solidarity, and collective imagination within contemporary urban environments.

Giulia joined the Department of Geography in 2023, following a Junior Research Fellowship in Urban Studies at the University of Cambridge, where she also earned her PhD. She speaks fluent English, Spanish, and Italian, gets by in French, and is on a meandering journey with Japanese that currently involves more enthusiasm than grammar.

Research

• Urban infrastructures, politics, and governance
• City imaginaries: poetics, policy, and power
• Migration, borders, and territorial rights
• The political economy of racialised urban space
• Postcolonial and Southern urban epistemologies

Giulia's current work centres around three interconnected research strands:

1. Inhabiting displacement and global mobility: Giulia is the Principal Investigator on a project, funded by the British Academy (2022-25), that explores the connection between global displacements, migrant settlements, and agro-industrial labour in Europe's Southern periphery (Mediterranean/Sicily). Early outputs from this project have featured in the South Atlantic Quarterly, the Urban Political Podcast, and Dialogues in Human Geography. The main outputs, stemming from the ethnographic research and the main theoretical framework, are in the process of being published during 2025/26.
2. Race, ethnicity, and multicultural urban governance in Latin American cities: Giulia has explored how long-standing racial inequalities materialise, and are resisted, in Colombia's urban spaces and planning structures, within and beyond socio-economic segregation. For this project, she conducted a multi-scalar and multi-sited ethnography in Bogotá, on the unattended connections between city-making, race-making (mestizaje), identity, and citizenship. This project intervened in debates on the materialisation of global inequalities in cities, urban and national identities, and how Latin American metropolises like Bogotá are changing between new legal frameworks of inclusion and participation, on the one hand, and the reproduction of old racial-colonial practices of exclusion and violence, on the other hand. Academic outputs from this project include articles on Identities, RACE.ED, the Journal of Latin American Studies, and Social and Cultural Geography, alongside the creation of an international academic network (In War’s Wake) and two public art exhibitions in Bogotá.
3. Finally, Giulia has explored questions of the Right to the City amidst new digital tech infrastructures in New York City, with a particular focus on AI & digital surveillance. Within this focus, she contributed to Amnesty International's "Decode Surveillance" project to produce reports, interactive maps, and an international campaign (covered by Forbes, The Guardian, MIT Tech Review, ABC News) on how facial recognition technologies disproportionately affect marginalised urban communities.

Teaching

Undergraduate

• 4SSG1014 Geographical Foundations
• 4SSG1016 Geography in Action
• 4SSG1008 Fieldtrip
• 5SSG2063 BA Geography Research Tutorials
• 6SSG3072 Right to the City

Undergraduate/Postgraduate

• 6SSG3076/7SSGN212 Critical Geopolitics

PhD Supervision

Giulia welcomes PhD applications on any topic related to the research interests listed above. When applying, please send your CV, project proposal, and a brief statement detailing the project fit.

Expertise and public engagement

Giulia has collaborated with Amnesty International (see the Decode Surveillance project) and other civil society organisations on mapping and documenting territorial rights —particularly for historically marginalised social groups— in cities such as Bogotá and New York.

Prior to moving to KCL, she was a Fellow of the Cambridge Centre for Science and Policy (CSaP), where she participated in a number of invited exchanges with visiting Policy Fellows across the UK Government, with a focus on civic participation and urban (digital) infrastructure.

Giulia is currently developing a comics series to creatively disseminate findings from her research on Mediterranean border infrastructures. She always welcomes new opportunities for collaboration and exchanges across academia, the arts, urban practice and government.

Further details

See Giulia's research profile