Having trained as architect, urban designer, and social scientist, I have a long-standing interest in urban life and how this connects to the spatial politics of migration, global inequalities, displacement, agency, and (claims for) rights.

Dr Giulia Torino is a Lecturer (Assistant Professor) in Human Geography. She joined KCL in September 2023, having previously held a Junior Research Fellowship (JRF) in Urban Studies at the University of Cambridge (2021-23), where she completed her PhD (no corrections) in 2021. She has also held positions at the Pontificia Universidad Javeriana in Bogotá and at the Centre for Latin American Studies at the University of Cambridge. Prior to academia, she worked as urban designer at the New York City Department of City Planning and for an architecture NGO in West Africa. 

Giulia's interdisciplinary research is positioned at the intersection of cultural geography, urban studies, and sociology, drawing on a diverse range of qualitative, visual, and interpretative methods, as well as postcolonial and critical social theories.

It has been funded by grants from the British Academy, the Arts and Humanities Research Council (UKRI), Peterhouse and King's College (University of Cambridge), the Society for Latin American Studies, and the Kettle Yard's Arts Fund, and it has appeared on Social and Cultural Geography, Dialogues in Human Geography, Identities, the South Atlantic Quarterly, and the Journal of Latin American Studies, as well as news outlets for wider public reach.

Through her research work, Giulia has collaborated with a variety of urban stakeholders, from international organisations to grassroots collectives, on projects related to displacement, structural inequalities, surveillance, and human rights.

Research projects

My current work centres around three interconnected research strands:

1) Inhabiting displacement and global mobility: I am 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: I have 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, I 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, I have 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, I 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.