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Elia Apostolopoulou

Senior Researcher

Elia is a Senior Lecturer at the Centre for Environmental Policy at Imperial College London. She is a human geographer and political ecologist whose research focuses on three core themes: first, the transformative impact of infrastructure projects, investments in the built environment, and neoliberal urbanism on spaces, socionatures, and livelihoods; second, the disproportionate effects of these processes on communities based on class, gender, and ethnicity; and third, the potential of grassroots activism and community struggles to promote social-environmental sustainability and justice. Between 2012 and 2022, Elia held postdoctoral and lectureship positions primarily at the Department of Geography at the University of Cambridge, and at the School of Geography and the Environment at the University of Oxford (2016-2017). She was also a visiting academic at the Center for Place, Culture, and Politics at City University of New York and a Carson Fellow at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität in Munich. From 2022 to 2024, she was a Senior Researcher at ICTA-UAB, where she co-led a new research line on planetary urban infrastructures at BCNUEJ.

Elia has won several prestigious international fellowships and grants, including a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellowship, a Carson Fellowship, a Ramon y Cajal Fellowship, and funding from the EU, British Academy, Cambridge Arts Humanities & Social Sciences, and the Royal Geographical Society. She is also a Senior Associate at the Cambridge Institute for Sustainability Leadership, at the University of Cambridge and serves as an editor for Dialogues in Human Geography since 2020. (Languages: Eng, Spa, Greek)

Research lines: 

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

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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

 

Nothing here yet.

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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