IUR’s Simone Vegliò is a Research Affiliate with the Urban Theory Lab as of April 2026.
From the Urban Theory Lab website:
The Urban Theory Lab (UTL) seeks to develop new ways of conceptualizing capitalist urbanization and its increasingly planetary environmental impacts. Our work combines explorations of urban theory with diverse forms of research on urbanization in historical-geographical, political-economic, and biospheric perspective, generally in close conjunction with the development of new approaches to geographic visualization that advance—and often transform—our inquiries. We are equally interested in strategies and struggles to create “alter-urbanizations”—alternative forms of urbanization, social reproduction, and ecological repair.
The UTL was founded by Neil Brenner in 2012 at the Graduate School of Design (GSD), Harvard University, and is now based in the Committee on Environment, Geography and Urbanization (CEGU) at the University of Chicago. Our work reflects a broad range of scholarly and pedagogical activities undertaken at these institutions, and builds upon a vibrant network of collaborations with colleagues in North America, South America, Western Europe, and beyond. Our research network includes scholars at all stages—from Ph.D. students and early-career academics to more seasoned researchers, writers, cartographers, and designers. Our work takes many forms, including research, publication, teaching, exhibitions, and various forms of public communication.
While all UTL researchers are interested in urban questions, broadly construed, and approach them from a range of disciplinary perspectives, we also build upon transdisciplinary knowledge drawn from, among other fields, environmental social science, geographical political economy, global political ecology, agrarian studies, energy history and geography, environmental and public humanities, infrastructure studies, waste and discard studies, sustainability science, critical/forensic cartography, philosophy and political theory, climate justice law, Black geographies and ecologies, Chicago studies, media and sound studies, urban planning, architecture, landscape architecture, and territorial design.
Much of our current work focuses on a range of questions related to planetary urbanization, fossil energy metabolism, the remaking of non-city territories and environments, and proliferating climate and nature emergencies. In pursuing such explorations, we seek to investigate the patterns and pathways–both historical and emergent–of urban transformation across the Earth while developing–and stress-testing–new conceptual frameworks for understanding them. Our research is equally focused on concrete forms of urban/environmental restructuring and on the critical interrogation of the evolving knowledge-formations through which such processes are studied, shaped, and contested.
Through these initiatives, the UTL seeks to contribute to the collective project of imagining new spaces of solidarity and emancipatory forms of urbanization for the flourishing of human and non-human life on Earth.