Camillo Boano
Biographic Data
| ID | 937879 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Camillo Boano |
| GIVEN NAMES | Camillo |
| FAMILY NAME | Boano |
| SIGNATURE | BOANO C |
| AFFILIATIONS | University College London |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-1076-869X |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 26 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 59 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 25 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2009 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 4 |
The design politics of migrant farmworker ghettos of Borgo Mezzanone, Puglia
This paper critically examines the socio-technical assistance practices and design politics involved in the eradication of migrant farmworker ghettos in Capitanata, southern Italy, with particular attention to the Pista of Borgo Mezzanone. In a context shaped by migratory regimes of control and agricultural labour exploitation, government-led interventions are sustaining projects aimed at the ‘overcoming of informal settlements’ in the area. Draw…
The Vertical Refuge. A critical exploration of the vertical dimension in Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon
This paper explores what we called ‘Vertical Refuge ’ in Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon, challenging the traditional view of camps as flat, horizontal spaces. It introduces a poly-dimensional framework that examines verticality not only in terms of height and depth but also in relation to territorial politics, sovereignty, and other spatial dimensions. By uncovering the complex power dynamics between Palestinian refugees, Palestinian factio…
Towards a Global Urban Geopolitics
This introduction to the special section explores geopolitical dimensions of conflict and violence in cities, pointing at the need to continue learning from marginal urban settings. It broadens the scope across differentiated approaches, such as the francophone and anglophone urban geopolitical traditions. By opening up a wider perspective, the emphasis is not on cities as part of a matrix of global hierarchies of geographical power but on the mu…
Checkpoint urbanism
As Popitz (2017) argues, violence is one component of the great economy of world history, an option permanently open to human activity. In Ciudad Juárez, right at the border between the United States and Mexico, this notion explains the fundamental incongruity that characterises the region: a booming industrial productive model operating in parallel with an international crime and violence hotspot that is also a coveted criminal passageway. This …
Urbanism of exception
Writing on camps is dangerous as they are never constrained to the architectural scale and form, we might firstly perceive them. If examined as singular objects, even in their multiple diverse morphological aspects and their contested historiography, they seem incapable of mobilizing architectural and spatial reflection beside an aesthetic of precarity, the makeshift of resistance or the violent power of control, surveillance, exclusion, and deat…
Forms of (Collective) Life
Is there space for an ontological urban design? Or better still, following the words of Elisabeth Grosz, is there space for an “ontoethics” of the urban? While contributing to the reflection on the role of ethics as a relational practice, this paper is digging back into the notion of forms-of-life in Giorgio Agamben’s political reflections, aiming to foreground a possible ethics of the city. This aims to highlight the implications that ontology a…
‘Unintended Cities’ and Inoperative Violence. Housing Resistance in Yangon
Urban development and city expansion in Yangon, Myanmar happened through the forced resettlement of people from the city toward the periphery. Forced resettlement has become the main mode of urban production since the British colonisation, and is sustained by laws, orders and policies. Building on Benjamin’s and Agamben’s essays on violence, we claim that it is possible to interrupt the endless cycle of law and violence by locating violence outsi…
Notes around Hospitality as Inhabitation
Hospitality has become a dominant notion in relation to asylum and immigration. Not only is it often used in public and state discourses, it is also prevalent in social analysis, in its ambivalent relationship with hostility and the control and management of population. Grounded in the Derridean suggestion of hospitality as “giving place” (2000: 25), we offer a reflection on hospitality centered around the notion of inhabitation. Framing hospital…
The big bang of neoliberal urbanism
This study presents a spatial history of the origins of Santiago’s neoliberalisation, unveiling its urban history from the critical point of view of land at the centre of social classes’ dispute over city life. It situates the contestation and struggle over land in a genealogical progression from the origins of the disciplinary field of urbanism (1932) to the transformation of its regulatory framework, making it an exclusively profit-oriented pra…
Thinking with Quarantine Urbanism
A short reflection on Quarantine Urbanism. Reflecting on the urban discourse which is apparently coalescing around the coronavirus and its effects on the city, are a series of arguments and hypotheses, bound by an epidemiological vision of space, in which attention is placed on the system of relationships that define our practices of dwelling and space production rather than on the inhabitant or society as a whole
Exploring the Contradiction in the Ethos of Urban Practitioners under Neoliberalism
This article problematizes the relationship between the ethos of urban practitioners and the ideology of neoliberalism to show how neoliberalism has transformed urban design to make it an efficient mechanism for capital accumulation. The method used in the article is based on archival research and statistical analysis in addition to a comparative housing sample in Chile from the Servicio de Evaluación Ambiental (Environmental Assessment System). …
El derecho a la ciudad financierizada
Este artículo presenta un conjunto de antecedentes para producir el concepto de derecho a la ciudad financierizada: la aplicación de la agenda emancipadora del derecho a la ciudad sobre los procesos de producción de ciudad en la era de la financierización, con especial énfasis en la vivienda y tomando como referencia el caso de Chile. A modo de ensayo crítico, se recoge evidencia empírica que expone cómo ocurre la financierización de la vivienda,…
From Exclusion to Inhabitation
Spaces of refuge represent the paradoxical encounters between a series of governmental forces, disciplinary knowledge, aesthetic regimes and spatial conditions that tend to arrest, fix in time and space forms of lives. Considering the fact that camps are meant to be the materialisation of a temporal status, spatial and political, the proposition posed by Benjamin Gray’s Citizenship as Barrier and Opportunity for Ancient Greek and Modern Refugees,…
Refugees Hosting Other Refugees
This article examines the socio-spatial mechanisms that emerge when refugees host other refugees. It argues that there is an underlying social infrastructure of care that impacts the refugees’ choice of destinations and modes of survival. When refugees host other refugees from close networks of relatives and neighbours, they create their own spatial clusters. In the process, the social infrastructure of care offers one mode of security to vulnera…
Infrastructures of reception
Pathways Towards the Resilient City
This chapter aims to contribute to the reflections on the complex interplay between environmental justice and resilience suggesting a political egalitarian perspective and putting forward a radical demand for socio-ecological transformation. It does so offering a series of reflections about the relationship between aesthetics and politics discussing a case of Baan Mankong housing and community upgrading practice and its regional widely developed …
Neoliberalism and Urban Development in Latin America
Inoperative design
This paper presents a renewed critical reflection of the position and role of architecture in the current social turn of the practice. By thinking through a ‘resistant’ lens, taken from Giorgio Agamben’s spatial political aesthetics, this paper proposes that architectural design practice can reclaim its social agency. These reflections are grounded in the practice of community architecture as it has recently emerged out of the intensifying experi…
The Ethics of a Potential Urbanism
Bajo escasez ¿Media casa basta? Reflexiones sobre el Pritzker de Alejandro Aravena
El artículo construye una agenda política de transgresión disciplinar contra el capitalismo a partir de las razones que valieron para Alejandro Aravena un Premio Pritzker y la curatoría de la Bienal de Venecia 2016. En ambos casos, las instituciones patrocinantes han informado que se reconoce el rol de Aravena como arquitecto social con una agenda orientada a ayudar a las personas de escasos recursos. A lo largo del artículo se expone la naturale…
Jerusalem as a paradigm
Can Jerusalem be considered a paradigm in urban studies and urban theory? Widening the debate over the ‘contested’ and the ‘ordinary’, this paper tries to address such questions whilst engaging with Giorgio Agamben’s powerful concept of paradigms. Considering Jerusalem a super, hyper-exceptional case trapped in the tension between particularism and exceptionalism, the paper reflects on Agamben’s approach to examples—or paradigms—which deeply enga…
Potential, freedom and space
A special kind of infrastructure has emerged around the West Bank, which lays bare Israel's capacity to spatialise its colonial power and to constantly solidify its presence. Reading these spatial devices through Agamben's work, this paper proposes a reflective attempt to read this site of contemporary occupation through a “resistant” lens as a novel take on Agamben's spatial topology and political aesthetics. The paper offers preliminary remarks…
Agamben’s urbanism of exception
Lost in translation? The challenges of an equitable post-disaster reconstruction process
Built environment experts, steeped in their default modes of operation, have been critiqued in post-disaster scenarios as silent perpetrators of unsustainable solutions that focus solely on physical deliverables, rendering them as ‘useless’. This paper, grounding the analysis in the recent post-earthquake landscape of Chile and its reconstruction plan in Constitución, adopts a theoretical framework of post-colonial discourse to elucidate the sign…
The Frontlines of Contested Urbanism Mega-projects and Mega-resistances in Dharavil
Currently, there appears to be an unhealthy disjunction between grand expectations and acknowledged reality in the face of urban transformations underway throughout the world. Drawing on the “right to the city” discourses, adopting a Lefebvrian approach to the production of space, and a critical regionalist approach to housing and the built environment, the article explores the conceptual analytical neologism of contested urbanism, where the stru…
Housing anxiety and multiple geographies in post-tsunami Sri Lanka
Tsunami intervention has been an extraordinary and unprecedented relief and recovery operation. This article underlines the complexities posed by shelter and housing intervention in post-tsunami Sri Lanka, revealing a pragmatic, reductionist approach to shelter and housing reconstruction in a contested and fragmented environment. Competition, housing anxiety and buffer zone implementation have resulted in compulsory villagisation inland, stirring…
Agamben’s urbanism of exception
Checkpoint urbanism
As Popitz (2017) argues, violence is one component of the great economy of world history, an option permanently open to human activity. In Ciudad Juárez, right at the border between the United States and Mexico, this notion explains the fundamental incongruity that characterises the region: a booming industrial productive model operating in parallel with an international crime and violence hotspot that is also a coveted criminal passageway. This …
Exploring the Contradiction in the Ethos of Urban Practitioners under Neoliberalism
This article problematizes the relationship between the ethos of urban practitioners and the ideology of neoliberalism to show how neoliberalism has transformed urban design to make it an efficient mechanism for capital accumulation. The method used in the article is based on archival research and statistical analysis in addition to a comparative housing sample in Chile from the Servicio de Evaluación Ambiental (Environmental Assessment System). …
The Frontlines of Contested Urbanism Mega-projects and Mega-resistances in Dharavil
Currently, there appears to be an unhealthy disjunction between grand expectations and acknowledged reality in the face of urban transformations underway throughout the world. Drawing on the “right to the city” discourses, adopting a Lefebvrian approach to the production of space, and a critical regionalist approach to housing and the built environment, the article explores the conceptual analytical neologism of contested urbanism, where the stru…
Towards a Global Urban Geopolitics
This introduction to the special section explores geopolitical dimensions of conflict and violence in cities, pointing at the need to continue learning from marginal urban settings. It broadens the scope across differentiated approaches, such as the francophone and anglophone urban geopolitical traditions. By opening up a wider perspective, the emphasis is not on cities as part of a matrix of global hierarchies of geographical power but on the mu…
Infrastructures of reception
Inoperative design
This paper presents a renewed critical reflection of the position and role of architecture in the current social turn of the practice. By thinking through a ‘resistant’ lens, taken from Giorgio Agamben’s spatial political aesthetics, this paper proposes that architectural design practice can reclaim its social agency. These reflections are grounded in the practice of community architecture as it has recently emerged out of the intensifying experi…
Jerusalem as a paradigm
Can Jerusalem be considered a paradigm in urban studies and urban theory? Widening the debate over the ‘contested’ and the ‘ordinary’, this paper tries to address such questions whilst engaging with Giorgio Agamben’s powerful concept of paradigms. Considering Jerusalem a super, hyper-exceptional case trapped in the tension between particularism and exceptionalism, the paper reflects on Agamben’s approach to examples—or paradigms—which deeply enga…
The big bang of neoliberal urbanism
This study presents a spatial history of the origins of Santiago’s neoliberalisation, unveiling its urban history from the critical point of view of land at the centre of social classes’ dispute over city life. It situates the contestation and struggle over land in a genealogical progression from the origins of the disciplinary field of urbanism (1932) to the transformation of its regulatory framework, making it an exclusively profit-oriented pra…
Thinking with Quarantine Urbanism
A short reflection on Quarantine Urbanism. Reflecting on the urban discourse which is apparently coalescing around the coronavirus and its effects on the city, are a series of arguments and hypotheses, bound by an epidemiological vision of space, in which attention is placed on the system of relationships that define our practices of dwelling and space production rather than on the inhabitant or society as a whole
Refugees Hosting Other Refugees
This article examines the socio-spatial mechanisms that emerge when refugees host other refugees. It argues that there is an underlying social infrastructure of care that impacts the refugees’ choice of destinations and modes of survival. When refugees host other refugees from close networks of relatives and neighbours, they create their own spatial clusters. In the process, the social infrastructure of care offers one mode of security to vulnera…
Potential, freedom and space
A special kind of infrastructure has emerged around the West Bank, which lays bare Israel's capacity to spatialise its colonial power and to constantly solidify its presence. Reading these spatial devices through Agamben's work, this paper proposes a reflective attempt to read this site of contemporary occupation through a “resistant” lens as a novel take on Agamben's spatial topology and political aesthetics. The paper offers preliminary remarks…
The Vertical Refuge. A critical exploration of the vertical dimension in Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon
This paper explores what we called ‘Vertical Refuge ’ in Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon, challenging the traditional view of camps as flat, horizontal spaces. It introduces a poly-dimensional framework that examines verticality not only in terms of height and depth but also in relation to territorial politics, sovereignty, and other spatial dimensions. By uncovering the complex power dynamics between Palestinian refugees, Palestinian factio…
Lost in translation? The challenges of an equitable post-disaster reconstruction process
Built environment experts, steeped in their default modes of operation, have been critiqued in post-disaster scenarios as silent perpetrators of unsustainable solutions that focus solely on physical deliverables, rendering them as ‘useless’. This paper, grounding the analysis in the recent post-earthquake landscape of Chile and its reconstruction plan in Constitución, adopts a theoretical framework of post-colonial discourse to elucidate the sign…
Housing anxiety and multiple geographies in post-tsunami Sri Lanka
Tsunami intervention has been an extraordinary and unprecedented relief and recovery operation. This article underlines the complexities posed by shelter and housing intervention in post-tsunami Sri Lanka, revealing a pragmatic, reductionist approach to shelter and housing reconstruction in a contested and fragmented environment. Competition, housing anxiety and buffer zone implementation have resulted in compulsory villagisation inland, stirring…
Lost in translation? The challenges of an equitable post-disaster reconstruction process
Built environment experts, steeped in their default modes of operation, have been critiqued in post-disaster scenarios as silent perpetrators of unsustainable solutions that focus solely on physical deliverables, rendering them as ‘useless’. This paper, grounding the analysis in the recent post-earthquake landscape of Chile and its reconstruction plan in Constitución, adopts a theoretical framework of post-colonial discourse to elucidate the sign…
The Frontlines of Contested Urbanism Mega-projects and Mega-resistances in Dharavil
Currently, there appears to be an unhealthy disjunction between grand expectations and acknowledged reality in the face of urban transformations underway throughout the world. Drawing on the “right to the city” discourses, adopting a Lefebvrian approach to the production of space, and a critical regionalist approach to housing and the built environment, the article explores the conceptual analytical neologism of contested urbanism, where the stru…
Agamben’s urbanism of exception
Potential, freedom and space
A special kind of infrastructure has emerged around the West Bank, which lays bare Israel's capacity to spatialise its colonial power and to constantly solidify its presence. Reading these spatial devices through Agamben's work, this paper proposes a reflective attempt to read this site of contemporary occupation through a “resistant” lens as a novel take on Agamben's spatial topology and political aesthetics. The paper offers preliminary remarks…
The Ethics of a Potential Urbanism
Bajo escasez ¿Media casa basta? Reflexiones sobre el Pritzker de Alejandro Aravena
El artículo construye una agenda política de transgresión disciplinar contra el capitalismo a partir de las razones que valieron para Alejandro Aravena un Premio Pritzker y la curatoría de la Bienal de Venecia 2016. En ambos casos, las instituciones patrocinantes han informado que se reconoce el rol de Aravena como arquitecto social con una agenda orientada a ayudar a las personas de escasos recursos. A lo largo del artículo se expone la naturale…
Jerusalem as a paradigm
Can Jerusalem be considered a paradigm in urban studies and urban theory? Widening the debate over the ‘contested’ and the ‘ordinary’, this paper tries to address such questions whilst engaging with Giorgio Agamben’s powerful concept of paradigms. Considering Jerusalem a super, hyper-exceptional case trapped in the tension between particularism and exceptionalism, the paper reflects on Agamben’s approach to examples—or paradigms—which deeply enga…
Pathways Towards the Resilient City
This chapter aims to contribute to the reflections on the complex interplay between environmental justice and resilience suggesting a political egalitarian perspective and putting forward a radical demand for socio-ecological transformation. It does so offering a series of reflections about the relationship between aesthetics and politics discussing a case of Baan Mankong housing and community upgrading practice and its regional widely developed …
Neoliberalism and Urban Development in Latin America
Inoperative design
This paper presents a renewed critical reflection of the position and role of architecture in the current social turn of the practice. By thinking through a ‘resistant’ lens, taken from Giorgio Agamben’s spatial political aesthetics, this paper proposes that architectural design practice can reclaim its social agency. These reflections are grounded in the practice of community architecture as it has recently emerged out of the intensifying experi…
From Exclusion to Inhabitation
Spaces of refuge represent the paradoxical encounters between a series of governmental forces, disciplinary knowledge, aesthetic regimes and spatial conditions that tend to arrest, fix in time and space forms of lives. Considering the fact that camps are meant to be the materialisation of a temporal status, spatial and political, the proposition posed by Benjamin Gray’s Citizenship as Barrier and Opportunity for Ancient Greek and Modern Refugees,…
Refugees Hosting Other Refugees
This article examines the socio-spatial mechanisms that emerge when refugees host other refugees. It argues that there is an underlying social infrastructure of care that impacts the refugees’ choice of destinations and modes of survival. When refugees host other refugees from close networks of relatives and neighbours, they create their own spatial clusters. In the process, the social infrastructure of care offers one mode of security to vulnera…
Infrastructures of reception
Forms of (Collective) Life
Is there space for an ontological urban design? Or better still, following the words of Elisabeth Grosz, is there space for an “ontoethics” of the urban? While contributing to the reflection on the role of ethics as a relational practice, this paper is digging back into the notion of forms-of-life in Giorgio Agamben’s political reflections, aiming to foreground a possible ethics of the city. This aims to highlight the implications that ontology a…
‘Unintended Cities’ and Inoperative Violence. Housing Resistance in Yangon
Urban development and city expansion in Yangon, Myanmar happened through the forced resettlement of people from the city toward the periphery. Forced resettlement has become the main mode of urban production since the British colonisation, and is sustained by laws, orders and policies. Building on Benjamin’s and Agamben’s essays on violence, we claim that it is possible to interrupt the endless cycle of law and violence by locating violence outsi…
Notes around Hospitality as Inhabitation
Hospitality has become a dominant notion in relation to asylum and immigration. Not only is it often used in public and state discourses, it is also prevalent in social analysis, in its ambivalent relationship with hostility and the control and management of population. Grounded in the Derridean suggestion of hospitality as “giving place” (2000: 25), we offer a reflection on hospitality centered around the notion of inhabitation. Framing hospital…
The big bang of neoliberal urbanism
This study presents a spatial history of the origins of Santiago’s neoliberalisation, unveiling its urban history from the critical point of view of land at the centre of social classes’ dispute over city life. It situates the contestation and struggle over land in a genealogical progression from the origins of the disciplinary field of urbanism (1932) to the transformation of its regulatory framework, making it an exclusively profit-oriented pra…
Thinking with Quarantine Urbanism
A short reflection on Quarantine Urbanism. Reflecting on the urban discourse which is apparently coalescing around the coronavirus and its effects on the city, are a series of arguments and hypotheses, bound by an epidemiological vision of space, in which attention is placed on the system of relationships that define our practices of dwelling and space production rather than on the inhabitant or society as a whole
Exploring the Contradiction in the Ethos of Urban Practitioners under Neoliberalism
This article problematizes the relationship between the ethos of urban practitioners and the ideology of neoliberalism to show how neoliberalism has transformed urban design to make it an efficient mechanism for capital accumulation. The method used in the article is based on archival research and statistical analysis in addition to a comparative housing sample in Chile from the Servicio de Evaluación Ambiental (Environmental Assessment System). …
El derecho a la ciudad financierizada
Este artículo presenta un conjunto de antecedentes para producir el concepto de derecho a la ciudad financierizada: la aplicación de la agenda emancipadora del derecho a la ciudad sobre los procesos de producción de ciudad en la era de la financierización, con especial énfasis en la vivienda y tomando como referencia el caso de Chile. A modo de ensayo crítico, se recoge evidencia empírica que expone cómo ocurre la financierización de la vivienda,…
Urbanism of exception
Writing on camps is dangerous as they are never constrained to the architectural scale and form, we might firstly perceive them. If examined as singular objects, even in their multiple diverse morphological aspects and their contested historiography, they seem incapable of mobilizing architectural and spatial reflection beside an aesthetic of precarity, the makeshift of resistance or the violent power of control, surveillance, exclusion, and deat…
Checkpoint urbanism
As Popitz (2017) argues, violence is one component of the great economy of world history, an option permanently open to human activity. In Ciudad Juárez, right at the border between the United States and Mexico, this notion explains the fundamental incongruity that characterises the region: a booming industrial productive model operating in parallel with an international crime and violence hotspot that is also a coveted criminal passageway. This …
Towards a Global Urban Geopolitics
This introduction to the special section explores geopolitical dimensions of conflict and violence in cities, pointing at the need to continue learning from marginal urban settings. It broadens the scope across differentiated approaches, such as the francophone and anglophone urban geopolitical traditions. By opening up a wider perspective, the emphasis is not on cities as part of a matrix of global hierarchies of geographical power but on the mu…
The design politics of migrant farmworker ghettos of Borgo Mezzanone, Puglia
This paper critically examines the socio-technical assistance practices and design politics involved in the eradication of migrant farmworker ghettos in Capitanata, southern Italy, with particular attention to the Pista of Borgo Mezzanone. In a context shaped by migratory regimes of control and agricultural labour exploitation, government-led interventions are sustaining projects aimed at the ‘overcoming of informal settlements’ in the area. Draw…
Political science (22 works) · Sociology (19 works) · Law (18 works) · Politics (12 works) · Philosophy (10 works) · Geography (8 works) · Law (8 works) · Aesthetics (7 works) · Epistemology (7 works) · Urban Planning and Governance (7 works)