Dr Marilu Melo is a Lecturer in Environmental Humanities at the School of Humanities and Languages. Her recent research has spanned different key areas of geographical scholarship – including the politics of social housing relocation projects, peri-urban disaster management, water governance and volumetric urbanism – and has been featured in esteemed academic journals and presented at a number of international conferences.
Marilu’s current research interest is focused on subterranean spaces, expanding geographical scholarship into a volume ontology, by excavating past, present and future material transformations and geosocial agencies of the underground. It was her PhD research on the conflicts between types of land-tenure and the legal status of underground spaces in Yucatan Peninsula in Mexico that initially inspired Marilu’s interest in the urban’s subterranean dimensions.