Dr Giulia Torino

Giulia Torino is an urbanist working at the intersections of global displacement, racialisation, and urbanisation. Her research explores cities and extended urban margins not just as spaces of unsettlement, extraction, and bordering but also as laboratories of collective care, imagination, and relational world-making. Trained as an architect, urban designer, and social scientist, she brings interdisciplinary perspectives to the study of cities, urbanisation, and infrastructures, with a particular interest in Southern urbanisms. Before joining LSE, she was Assistant Professor of Urban Geography at King’s College London (2023-25), Junior Research Fellow in Urban Studies at the University of Cambridge (2021-23), Visiting Researcher at the Pontificia Universidad Javeriana (2017-19) and Universidad de Los Andes in Bogotá (2014), and worked for institutions like the New York City Department of City Planning and Amnesty International. She holds a PhD (2021) from the University of Cambridge.

Key expertise: Urbanisation, Migration, Inequality, Social justice, Ethnography

Giulia’s research straddles sociology, human geography, ethnography, urban design and governance. She is interested in the contested spatial politics of inhabiting and producing the urban, especially in connection to human mobility, urban inequality, spatial agency, and urban infrastructures and governance.

She is Principal Investigator of a British Academy project (2022–25) on global displacement, racialisation, informal migrant settlements, and agro-industrial labour in Europe’s South. The project bridges theories of racial capitalism, the Black Mediterranean, and extended rural-urban worlds, with an empirical focus on Southern Italy and the Central Mediterranean. Early findings have appeared in the South Atlantic Quarterly, the Urban Political Podcast, and Dialogues in Human Geography, with further articles and a comics under review.

A second stream explores spatial inequality in Bogotá, Colombia. Based on ethnographic research, and qualitative spatial and policy analysis, this work critiques colourblind approaches to inequality in Latin American cities and highlights how racial capitalism and coloniality reframe spatial injustice, in both urban governance and discourse. The research also foregrounds social infrastructures, grassroots care, and relational city-making as spatial resistance against extraction and displacement. Outputs from this stream include articles in Identities, the Journal of Latin American Studies, and Social and Cultural Geography, op-eds in English and Spanish, the international network In War’s Wake, and public art exhibitions in Bogotá curated with grassroots collectives and internally displaced residents. She is currently extending this project into developing a critical urban theory of racial capitalism from Latin American perspectives, also in dialogue with scholars and activists in Colombia, Mexico, and Brazil.

Her work on migration, racialisation, and urbanisation extends to the digital. As part of Amnesty International’s “Decode Surveillance” research enquiry, she co-produced interactive counter-maps (covered by Forbes, The Guardian, MIT Tech Review, and ABC News, among others) of racialised digital surveillance in New York City.

Her research has received grants and awards by institutions like the British Academy, the Arts & Humanities Research Council, Kettle’s Yard, and the Society of Latin American Studies, as well as Peterhouse and King’s College at the University of Cambridge.

Giulia is part of the Urban Sociology cluster.

Giulia teaches on the MSc City Design and Social Science programme, including Cities by Design, Independent Project and City Design: Research Studio. She welcomes PhD applicants interested in any of the topics above—especially projects involving ethnographic research and creative mixed methods (e.g. audio, visual, embodied, graphic), and relational and/or Southern epistemologies.

Public scholarship & media

2024. “El racismo que se esconde en el diseño de nuestras ciudades”, La Silla Vacía. 30 Oct 2024.

2024. “Hidden in plain sight: How racism shapes Latin American cities,” King’s College London, 23 October 2024.

2023. With Gururani, S., Schmid, C., Lukas, M., Markaki, M., & Mari, F. “On peripheralisation”, Urban Political Podcast. 09 Feb 2023.

2022. With Mahmoudi, M. “Ban the Scan: Inside the NYPD’s surveillance machine”, Amnesty International.

2022. “Governing ‘ethnic diversity’ through urban planning in Bogotá”, RACE.ED. 11 Mar 2022.