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Elia Apostolopoulou

Senior Researcher and Ramón y Cajal Fellow

Elia is a human geographer and a political ecologist and she is a Senior Ramon y Cajal Fellow based at ICTA-UAB. Her research explores (i) how mega-infrastructure projects, investments in the built environment and neoliberal urbanism transform urban places, socionatures and livelihoods, (ii) in what ways communities are disproportionately affected by these processes along lines of class, gender, and ethnicity, & (iii) the potential of community struggles and grassroots activism to open pathways to environmental and social justice and sustainability. Elia has been based for almost a decade in the UK where she held postdoctoral and lectureship positions in the Universities of Cambridge and Oxford. In 2015, she was a visiting academic in the Center for Place, Culture and Politics in City University of New York, and in 2017, a Carson Fellow in Ludwig-Maximillians-Universitat in Munich.

She has published more than 60 peer-reviewed papers and book chapters, one edited volume and two monographs, and has won a significant number of internationally competitive fellowships and grants, including an individual Marie Skłodowska-Curie and a Carson Fellowship and grants from British Academy, Cambridge Arts Humanities & Social Sciences, and Royal Geographical Society. She is also a Senior Associate at the University of Cambridge and an editor of Dialogues in Human Geography. (Languages: Eng, Spa, Greek)

Research lines: 

Infrastructures and social mobilizations for just urban societies
Housing inequalities & climate change

Full CV  Google Scholar  Twitter

Keywords

  • Urban and human geography
  • Urban political ecology
  • Social, environmental and spatial justice
  • Infrastructure-led development
  • Urbanization
  • Postcolonial geographies
  • Comparative urbanism
  • Neoliberal natures

Associated Projects

 

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Selected Publications

  • Apostolopoulou, E., Cheng, H., Silver, J., Wiig, A., 2023. Cities on the new silk road: The global urban geographies of China’s belt and road initiative. Urban Geography, https://doi.org/10.1080/02723638.2023.2247283.
  • Cheng, H. and Apostolopoulou, E., 2023. Locating the Belt and Road Initiative’s spatial trilectics. Geography Compass, p.e12683.
  • Apostolopoulou, E., Pant, H., 2022. “Silk Road here we come”: Infrastructural myths, post-disaster politics, and the shifting urban geographies of Nepal. Political Geography, 98, p.102704.
  • Apostolopoulou, E., Kotsila, P., 2022. Community gardening in Hellinikon as a resistance struggle against neoliberal urbanism: spatial autogestion and the right to the city in post-crisis Athens, Greece. Urban Geography, 43(2), pp.293-319.
  • Apostolopoulou, E., Bormpoudakis, D., Chatzipavlidis, A., Cortés Vázquez, J.J., Florea, I., Gearey, M., Levy, J., Loginova, J., Ordner, J., Partridge, T. and Pizarro Choy, A., 2022. Radical social innovations and the spatialities of grassroots activism: navigating pathways for tackling inequality and reinventing the commons. Journal of political ecology 29, 143-188.
  • Apostolopoulou, E., 2021. Tracing the links between infrastructure‐led development, urban transformation, and inequality in China’s Belt and Road Initiative. Antipode, 53(3), pp.831-858.
  • Apostolopoulou, E., Chatzimentor, A., Maestre-Andrés, S., Requena-i-Mora, M., Pizarro, A., Bormpoudakis, D., 2021. Reviewing 15 years of research on neoliberal conservation: Towards a decolonial, interdisciplinary, intersectional and community-engaged research agenda. Geoforum, 124, pp.236-256.
  • Apostolopoulou, E., 2021. A novel geographical research agenda on Silk Road urbanisation. The Geographical Journal, 187(4), pp.386-393.
  • Apostolopoulou, E. and Liodaki, D., 2021. The right to public space during the COVID-19 pandemic: A tale of rising inequality and authoritarianism in Athens, Greece. City, 25(5-6), pp.764-784.
  • Rose-Redwood, R., Kitchin, R., Apostolopoulou, E., Rickards, L., Blackman, T., Crampton, J., Rossi, U. and Buckley, M., 2020. Geographies of the COVID-19 pandemic. Dialogues in Human Geography, 10(2), pp.97-106.
  • Apostolopoulou, E., 2020. Nature swapped and nature lost: Biodiversity Offsetting, urbanization and social justice. Springer Nature.
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