Adriana Allen
Adriana Allen is a Senior Lecturer at the Development Planning Unit, UCL, where she directs DPU’s MSc in Environment and Sustainable Development and leads the DPU Research Cluster on Environmental Justice, Urbanisation and Resilience (EJUR).
Originally trained as an architect and urban planner in Argentina, my native country, I specialised over the years in the fields of urban environmental planning and political ecology. I have over 25 years international experience in research and consultancy undertakings in 16 countries in Latin America, Africa, Asia and less extend the Middle East. Both as an academic and practitioner, my work focuses on the interface between development and environmental concerns in the urban context of the global south, and more specifically on establishing transformative links between environmental justice and urban sustainability and resilience.
Over the years, I have worked for several national and international organisations, including the International Development Research Centre (IDRC), UN-Habitat, WaterAid, Department for International Development (DFID/UK), Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO), International Water and Sanitation Centre (IRC), Plan Construction et Architecture du Ministere de l'Equipement (France), IberoAmerican Cooperation Institute (ICI / Spain), The European Commission (EC) and Directorate General for International Cooperation (DGIC, Belgium). In-country research, training and advisory assignments include: Argentina, Bangladesh, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Ecuador, Egypt, Ghana, India, Kenya, Mexico, South Africa, Tanzania, Uruguay and Venezuela. Within Europe, she has undertaken research assignments in Spain, The Netherlands and the UK.
I am a Visiting Professor at various universities in Latin America and acted a beacon member for the 2006 IV World Water Forum cross-cutting perspective dealing with institutional development and political processes in water provision. I am also co-editor of the International Journal of Sustainable Urban Development and a regular reviewer for Urban Studies, Cities, Local Environment, Human Ecology and Natural Resources Forum, among other international academic journals.
Within UCL, I currently support a number a university-wide initiatives in the realm of urban sustainability, which include my role as the Environment Institute Co-Director for Sustainable Cities; and formerly Urban Laboratory Co-director in ‘Social cohesion, urban infrastructure and the public realm’. In addition, I am a member of the UCL-The Lancet Commission on Managing the Health Effects of Climate Change and of the UCL Grand Challenges of Sustainable Cities (GCSC) Executive Group.
Research interests
My research interests span across the following areas of intellectual enquiry:
Production, reproduction and transformation of urban environmental (in)justices
Through the articulation of an urban political ecology and regulation theory perspective, my work looks at the interface between insurgent practices and planned interventions and their capacity to generate transformative spaces, places and social relations.
Citizenship and the governance of service provision
Current gaps in service provision for the urban poor require more than technical solutions, my work in this area looks in particular at questions of hydric justice and the scope of service co-production to deliver not just improved access to basic services such as water and sanitation but above all to forge mechanisms for inclusive citizenship.
Resilience, vulnerability and adaptation to climate change
Calls for and actual responses to climate variability in the urban global south are prompting new debates on the way in which concomitant challenges are socially constructed by scientists, governments and citizens, who should respond to them and how and who is worst affected and why. Part of my current work examines these questions by focusing on the current gaps and potential synergy between grassroots and planning local responses that situate climate variability in the context of fast urbanisation and informality.
Rural-urban linkages for reciprocal urbanisation
The so-called ‘urban transitions’ faced by the global south today are underlined by emerging geographies of capitalist accumulation through unequal peri-urbanisation and truncated rural-urban linkages. My work in this area explores how and why such geographies are increasingly being shaped under conditions of ‘differential sustainability’ or, in other words, by adjusting thresholds to meet the needs and wants of certain privileged social groups and territories at the expense of others.
Phone: (+44 20) 7679 5805 (Direct)
Address: 34 Tavistock Square
London WC1H 9EZ
United Kingdom
Originally trained as an architect and urban planner in Argentina, my native country, I specialised over the years in the fields of urban environmental planning and political ecology. I have over 25 years international experience in research and consultancy undertakings in 16 countries in Latin America, Africa, Asia and less extend the Middle East. Both as an academic and practitioner, my work focuses on the interface between development and environmental concerns in the urban context of the global south, and more specifically on establishing transformative links between environmental justice and urban sustainability and resilience.
Over the years, I have worked for several national and international organisations, including the International Development Research Centre (IDRC), UN-Habitat, WaterAid, Department for International Development (DFID/UK), Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO), International Water and Sanitation Centre (IRC), Plan Construction et Architecture du Ministere de l'Equipement (France), IberoAmerican Cooperation Institute (ICI / Spain), The European Commission (EC) and Directorate General for International Cooperation (DGIC, Belgium). In-country research, training and advisory assignments include: Argentina, Bangladesh, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Ecuador, Egypt, Ghana, India, Kenya, Mexico, South Africa, Tanzania, Uruguay and Venezuela. Within Europe, she has undertaken research assignments in Spain, The Netherlands and the UK.
I am a Visiting Professor at various universities in Latin America and acted a beacon member for the 2006 IV World Water Forum cross-cutting perspective dealing with institutional development and political processes in water provision. I am also co-editor of the International Journal of Sustainable Urban Development and a regular reviewer for Urban Studies, Cities, Local Environment, Human Ecology and Natural Resources Forum, among other international academic journals.
Within UCL, I currently support a number a university-wide initiatives in the realm of urban sustainability, which include my role as the Environment Institute Co-Director for Sustainable Cities; and formerly Urban Laboratory Co-director in ‘Social cohesion, urban infrastructure and the public realm’. In addition, I am a member of the UCL-The Lancet Commission on Managing the Health Effects of Climate Change and of the UCL Grand Challenges of Sustainable Cities (GCSC) Executive Group.
Research interests
My research interests span across the following areas of intellectual enquiry:
Production, reproduction and transformation of urban environmental (in)justices
Through the articulation of an urban political ecology and regulation theory perspective, my work looks at the interface between insurgent practices and planned interventions and their capacity to generate transformative spaces, places and social relations.
Citizenship and the governance of service provision
Current gaps in service provision for the urban poor require more than technical solutions, my work in this area looks in particular at questions of hydric justice and the scope of service co-production to deliver not just improved access to basic services such as water and sanitation but above all to forge mechanisms for inclusive citizenship.
Resilience, vulnerability and adaptation to climate change
Calls for and actual responses to climate variability in the urban global south are prompting new debates on the way in which concomitant challenges are socially constructed by scientists, governments and citizens, who should respond to them and how and who is worst affected and why. Part of my current work examines these questions by focusing on the current gaps and potential synergy between grassroots and planning local responses that situate climate variability in the context of fast urbanisation and informality.
Rural-urban linkages for reciprocal urbanisation
The so-called ‘urban transitions’ faced by the global south today are underlined by emerging geographies of capitalist accumulation through unequal peri-urbanisation and truncated rural-urban linkages. My work in this area explores how and why such geographies are increasingly being shaped under conditions of ‘differential sustainability’ or, in other words, by adjusting thresholds to meet the needs and wants of certain privileged social groups and territories at the expense of others.
Phone: (+44 20) 7679 5805 (Direct)
Address: 34 Tavistock Square
London WC1H 9EZ
United Kingdom
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Urbanisation aims to publish comparative as well as collaborative interdisciplinary scholarship that will illuminate the global urban condition beginning with a firm footprint in the Global South. A platform that brings together inter-disciplinary scholarship on the urban, it is equally interested in critical and reflexive discussions on diverse forms and sectors of urban practice. It seeks to do so not only to inform urban theory, policy and practice but also to enable the construction of diverse forms of knowledge and knowledge production needed to enable us to understand contemporary urban life.
Urbanisation is a response to a particular moment of 21st century global urbanisation within an increasingly re-arranged world. The drivers and locations of contemporary urbanisation are after a long historical gap, in the ‘Global South’ i.e. the countries of Asia, Africa and South America. This moment poses challenges for which we possess neither effective knowledge nor adequate practice. Urbanisation emerges out of three interconnected responses to this moment.
The first is to provide a platform to understand contemporary global urbanisation with a firm footprint in the South. In doing so, we see the ‘Global South’ not as a physical location but as a representative of a particular set of challenges and opportunities that determine the central questions of our age and demand critical analysis and effective intervention.
The second is to build on this new knowledge to re-think the epistemological canon of urbanisation and its associated systems and processes. This ‘canon’ built on a 19th and 20th century imagination and practice has proved to be particular rather than universal. The journal stands firmly with the ‘southern turn’ in urban theory, building new knowledge from the experiences of cities and regions of the Global South to speak with all cities and settlements and re-think the foundations of current urban theory.
The third is to reflexively engage with and theorise practice. Urban questions refuse simple boundaries of sector or domain in addition to discipline or the assumed ‘theory-practice’ divide. The ‘wicked problems’ of cities, city-regions and hybrid rural-urban settlements are sites that defy most canonical knowledge, techniques, methods, categories and terms. Yet there remain few platforms within which to document, reflect upon, critique and analyse practice, let alone imagine new forms and techniques of practice. Some of this is because of the continuing persistence of hierarchies between forms of knowledge and its production – an artificial separation that this journal explicitly seeks to address.