Member Profiles

I am University Academic Fellow in Critical Urban Transformations at the School of Geography of the University of Leeds, UK.

My research focuses on:
(i) Comparative approaches to gentrification, displacement and dispossession in the contemporary city,
(ii) Social exclusion, financialisation of housing markets and urban contestation,
(iii) Migration, citizenship and the transformation of local politics in post-crisis scenarios.

My regional expertise comprises Latin American and Southern European cities. For more than 15 years I have been developing extensive research in Latin America, especially in Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Costa Rica, Ecuador and Mexico. I am the scientific coordinator of the interdisciplinary Contested Cities network.

After graduating in Geography from the Humboldt-University in Berlin, I was awarded my PhD in Philosophy from the Goethe-University in Frankfurt, followed by a postdoctoral Marie-Curie Fellowship at the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC) in Madrid. From 2011 to 2016, I was holding a Ramón y Cajal research professorship at the Department of Political Science and International Relations of the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid. Since 2015, I am working as honorary professor at the Department of Public Affairs of the Faculty of Latin American Social Sciences (FLACSO) in Quito, Ecuador.